Snapshot

Seeing that it’s my birthday and this blog hasn’t been updated in a while,
I thought I’d do a “snapshot” of my life. Probably of no interest to anyone
else, but might be interesting for me to look back on next year.
So, in no particular order, I…

…am about to become a father for the second time. Debs is more than 3 months pregnant and the due date is around 7th October. We’re very excited again, and are looking forward to our first scan on the 22nd May as we’re going to ask to know the sex of the baby this time. Fingers crossed that everything is OK.
…have a major project deadline looming for the end of May, so am rushing around fixing bugs, maintaining the project plan, putting together test scripts, etc, etc. Basically all that frenetic coffee driven stuff you have to do as a release date looms.
…have just had my fourth tutorial published on developerWorks: Code Generation with XSLT. I actually finished it more than six weeks ago, but these things take time to percolate through. I’m quite pleased with the tutorial, which introduces a framework of Ant/Jalopy/XSLT generating Java code, as well as documenting how to write meta-stylesheets.
…am currently re-reading The Dice Man as well as dipping into Faster. Ironically I’m not finding a great deal of time to look at the latter, and this is my second abortive attempt to read it!
…am about 80% of the way through a standalone Trackback implementation in Java. It’s written as a Java Servlet (and soon to be Servlet Filter) based framework which’ll allow me to vary things like the storage mechanism (I plan to allow storage as RDF using Jena) and the templating (I plan to allow Javascript, RDF and other “flavours” making the data easy to integrate). I’m also going to make it OpenURL compliant just for laughs.
…am feeling guilty about having let eclectic become stale once more. But then there are only so many hours in the day.
…have taken up gardening in a big way. It was either consign the whole thing to become a jungle, or get stuck in. I finally chose the latter option, although turning 150 foot of garden which is a mixture of out of control shrubs, ugly concrete, dying grass, and disused vegetable patches into something pleasant is proving to be a lot of (enjoyable) work. So far I’ve tamed the raspberries and planted tayberries and blackberries, put in new border edging and plants, made several lightning attacks on garden centres in the vicinity to find more nice plants, started my yearly battle with some creeper thing that wants to eat my lawn, and decided to order a tonne of gravel to landscape the middle section.
…enjoy daily the sight of Ethan running down the hallway shouting “daddy, daddy”. He’s a lot of fun at the moment. 18 months is a cool age.
…am going on holiday next week to Weymouth. Lets hope the weather sorts itself out.
…wrote up some notes on Community Topic Building on a train journey to Oxford recently as a possible way to allow XML-DEV “permathreads” and other mailing list archive tidbits to be synthesized into useful material. Turns out that what I wrote up is very simple to
Ridiculously Easy Group Forming. So, nothing original, but at least I’m not mad. Hence the Trackback implementation, throw in Blojsom and JSPWiki and, voila!
…am relieved that it doesn’t look like my father has cancer, but will feel happier when they finish all the tests and we can work out why part of his lung has collapsed. In a bizarre twist it turned out his doctor was an old school friend of mine. My mother found this oddly reassuring, and they both trusted him implicitly, proving that medicine shouldn’t be faceless. (I’ve since made contact with him as we’d not seen each other more than twice in the last 10 years).
…am mostly listening to Wagon Christ — Musipal, and Bent — The Everlasting Blink.
…drank a bottle of red last night was wondering whether being 31 is a good thing or a bad thing, but decided in the end to not worry and just enjoy Father Ted.