In the meantime we’ve both been getting into the swing of the work schedule. Luckily I managed to get ahead on my TODO list having done the ground work before I left to get married. There is still an impossibly long list of things that need doing, but it’s more about whats required for the current approaching deadline. As a result I accepted an invite from the company to represent them at some engineering awards in London. Although advertised as 14 courses it was more a 5 course gala meal with 14 individual types of food. It was very nice with the good selection of Champagne and free flowing wine. I felt kind of guilty as out of the 7 of us there I was the only engineer, the others in my team all being to busy too go.

This weekend is being treated with a little more measured respect. I went to a mini-beer festival in town on Friday while Fliss attended the local LRP clubs interactive. I joined her on site the next day to monster her first linear adventure. Given her only experience of LARP so far has been fest systems it was interesting to watch her reaction to the adventure format. She was playing with a group of new recruits to the club and the way they came off the dungeon all so enthused made me very nostalgic for those first adventures all those years ago. The next day aches are also very familiar.

I didn’t get much of a feel for the other roles although the priests were by far the most visible playing a part in the preamble to each battle. They also had the unenviable job of keeping the capricious and cruel Gods in check.

I didn’t get a chance to do one of the many linear adventures but heard generally good things about them. Certainly the game provides a great change of pace to the relative civilisation of the Maelstrom setting (which I still enjoy BTW). I shall be trying to persuade some of my more sword jockeying friends to join us next year when we hopefully return for the whole event.

We were at Maelstrom this weekend. We splashed out for a van so we could take our proper IC tent to the event which we also slept in. Although our normal sleeping tent is quite spacious the IC tent is a lot more so and benefits from not broiling you in your sleeping bag when the sun rises.

I tried Google’s Navigation mode on my software pimped up Hero. I can see why the shares in TomTom and Garmin shares fell so sharply on it’s announcement. I particularly liked the street view picture that’s presented at the end of the journey for extra confirmation. I predict the era of the dedicated GPS road navigation unit is coming to an end – to be replaced by multi-functional smart phone type data pads.

I awoke this morning to the latest Wikileaks data dump as reported by the Guardian. I can understand why the armed forces are upset about this but it’s really an OpSec fail on their part that someone can extract that much data from their systems. Going after Wikileaks will ultimately be a futile exercise. Also baring a live twitter feed of current manoeuvres I’m not sure there should be an expectation of secrecy for historical military data. Transparency is coming to government which I think is a good thing, why not the military? At the same time we need to take some steps to educate the public on the limits of data. If people consider an entry in a database as equating to actual truth on the ground they are going to find themselves disappointed.

We watched the latest Grand Moff/Gatiss collaboration on TV last night. Although the final third had us shouting at the TV for the slowness of the protagonists to put two and two together overall we liked it. The text overlays were fun and the writing has done a good job of bringing the characters forward into the 21st century. We shall be watching the rest of the series.

We arrived on site pretty much without incident and as per usual we opened the car windows as we handed over our tickets. After finding somewhere to park (having car next to OOC tent is a great idea BTW) and erecting the tent I went to lock up the car. On trying to close the driver side electric window it managed about half the full travel before something twanged and the whole window shot down into the hidden guts of the door, never to return. I was able to patch up the window with some black bin bags before the distant storms arrived but it was an inauspicious start to the day.

As we were camping Fliss gave me some of my birthday presents early. These included a fantastic stow-able sleeping bag with a rather funky silk lining and a “self-inflating” camp mat which will be a lot more portable for our trip up Kilimanjaro next year. The mat itself works better than any other I’ve used at insulating the body from the coldness of the ground. However it seems I’m not really designed for the relative solidness of the floor. By Sunday morning my back had decided to throw it’s metaphorical arms up in disgust as I struggled for about 5-10 minutes to move from all fours to some sort of erect posture. I’m not ready to dismiss the mat completely as my situation may not have been helped by a relatively sedentary event.

All this sudden invalidity meant Fliss became responsible for all the packing of the car and the eventual drive home. On the drive home it very quickly became apparent the jury rigged replacement of black bin bags with cling-film wasn’t going to hold up to motorway speeds. The final result was Fliss having to endure an open window while driving the car home while I was almost permanently apologetic for having put her through the ordeal.

Once we got home a long bath did ease my back a bit but it put the kibosh on cycling to work today. Every day I miss of work is a day I don’t get paid. However we are still off to our wedding venue this afternoon to do some planning type activities. Tomorrow I drop the car off to get the windows fixed and we are off to another wedding next weekend. Hopefully we have exhausted the current run of bad luck although we are still waiting for the bank to get back to us about the mortgage.

Still no news from the bank as far as the mortgage is concerned. We should have found out yesterday but Friday was mooted as a possibility. Hoping that no news is good news for the time being.

I worked late on Thursday to get everything I needed out of the door for our “alpha” release so I could take Friday off. This included a crash course in Java Server Pages so I could make some changes to OpenNMS‘s web pages to link to our own graphs and data. I can see why JSP is popular in the enterprise. The ability to tightly bind with your Java model and create web-apps can be pretty useful. However the development cycle is very slow. I have to edit the “installed” files while hitting re-load to develop the feature and then copy and paste the code across to the “repository” version, re-build and make sure I didn’t screw up. There has to be a better way of doing this that doesn’t involve custom build scripts to hack links about. Perhaps it will make more sense once I’ve read up a little bit more on the technology.

We spent the first half of Friday unpacking the rest of the boxes from the move. This mainly involved a vast quantity of LRP kit. While sorting through we created about 3 bags of Freecycle LRP kit (of which about 1/3rd turned out to be Bacony’s) which we hauled over to Maelstrom to find new homes. By the time we left on Saturday afternoon it seemed most of it had gone to a better place.

The rest of Friday and Saturday day was spent actually playing which in my case proved to be quite fulfilling. Kita managed to get herself poisoned (again) so having a resident Alchemist around proved to be useful. I’m even spreading out my skills into a bit of surgery just so I’m not 100% potions.

Saturday evening we headed over to a friend of Fliss’ for her 30th birthday bash (and engagement celebration). Despite some issues with navigation we made it to the house in one piece. Much bubbly was consumed and we even played a game or two of Croquet which is actually quite a vicious game when played tactically. I didn’t stay up that late still being tired from the inevitable early start on Saturday morning that camping entails.

Sunday was a more relaxed newspapers and lunch affair where I got to improve my knowledge of Fliss’ social network by remembering more names and faces and the inter-relationships of people. I was firmly in the HABs category of people there which was no bad thing in itself. We also met a few people based in Cambridge so we can increase the social network at home now