Bifurcated Weekend

The weekend was one of two halves, one half LRP and the other half drinking bubbly in gardens.

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 :-)