On the train back up to Edinburgh at the moment, drinking a red wine, watching the sunset, and also connected to the internet. That last bit is still flipping me out. As my friend Fenris said when I told him about this:
you could only get more futuristic than that if the train was travelling around a Culture orbital.
Trains are so damn cool.
Last week Moose and I were in Birmingham for EuroPython 2009. The conference was cool and the food was really good and we met some nice folks over a few beers. The talks I enjoyed the most were Christian Tismer's talk on Psyco, and the keynotes. I am super excited that Psyco is getting the attention it deserves and some very nice looking hardcore under-the-hood architecture improvements. Cory Doctorow did his enjoyable copyfight rant, and Sir Tony Hoare did a wonderful talk about science versus engineering. The science versus engineering aspect of software development has been on my mind a bit recently since I finished reading Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation (John McCarthy, 1960), the original LISP paper. That paper has really helped me finally understand how formal mathematics can be really effectively applied to computer programming, and different isomorphic ways of expressing the same program. Because software engineering moves at such a break-neck speed I think we sometimes forget to look back at the science in Computer Science and all of the awesome theoretical work which has been done since the 1960s. You can never have too much science.
After leaving Birmingham we headed out west into the Welsh countryside in a hire car. Wales absolutely blew us away. Our mission was to drive through both national parks and visit a few castles on the way, most of which were built in the 1200s. We stopped at Castell Dinas Bram first, which is a small ruin perched on top of a hill amongst a rolling green landscape punctuated with white housed villages. We had to make a zig zagging walk up a steep hill for 20 minutes, but the climb was definately worth it. What an amazing place. Later on during day one we drove through Snowdonia National Park. Betws-y-coed looked like a nice little town that we'd love to come back and visit some time. Around the region of Llyn Gwynant, the craggy mountains with dark lakes at the bottom of valleys were breathtaking. In the afternoon we arrived at Castell y Bere which was in the middle of nowhere and slightly less ruined than Castell Dinas Bram. On a low hill and surrounded by a ring of high mountains, this place felt very Lord of the Rings-y. Much of Wales did actually, and I guess this is where Tolkien received some of his inspiration.
On the second day we explored the southern part of Wales around Brecon Beacons National Park. We visited Carreg Cennen Castle and Dryslwyn Castle in Llanarthney. Carreg Cennen was the most commercial (there was a shop and you had to pay to see it) but was also the least ruined construction we saw, so it was fun to get a good idea of the types of rooms and the size of the walls of these castles. There was a nice spooky cave at the top of the hill, under the castle, which was the first place I've been which managed to combine a fear of heights with claustrophobia. We were in a tiny dark confined space under ground, but could still look out of the stone windows at an enormous drop over a cliff. Dryslwyn was different again and quite multi-layered as it had been built and re-built throughout the ages. At Dryslwyn I tried to climb a wall and managed to trip over in the process. My excuse is that I have been wearing shoes that are slightly too big for me and it was infact the very end of the toe of my left shoe that caught, which wouldn't have happened if I had been smarter and worn shoes that fit me better. As I reached the top of the wall I managed to get stuck somehow like that, and teetered forward towards the grass, which was a foot below the other side of the wall. Unfortunately I had a camera in one hand, so I couldn't use that hand to stop myself from receiving the full impact of the fall on my face. I don't know what the other hand was doing, but it certainly wasn't there to help me when I needed it most. My knee came to the rescue later, too late, and was completely smeared in mud and grass. Luckily there was a large and well positioned pile of sheep shit to cushion my face from serious injury.
My biggest problem with writing in this news page is a lack of time. So here is a light-speed update about our visit to Brussels:
Moose and I spent the last two weeks in Brussels getting a visa stamped in her passport so that she is allowed back into the UK. The UK are breaking EU law by forcing her to have this stamp, but we're not the ones who are going to sue the UK government. Instead we comply with this ridiculous bureaucracy at great expense to ourselves.
This is our joint third visit to Belgium, and probably my own fourth or fifth.
I was working, but we got to hang out with my Dad a lot in the evenings and on the weekends. He has lived in and out of Brussels on-and-off over the last few years and took us to some awesome places and to see some awesome things. There's no better way to see a city than with someone with insider knowledge of it. It was really cool to see him again and discuss politics etc.
Brussels is the unsung hero of European travel destinations. All of the Belgian stereotypes are true: you can have waffles, awesome chocolates, and lot of different types of great beers. The people are nice, the food is wonderful, the monuments are grander and more subtle than other places, there is an abundance of live jazz, and there are way less tourists than other destinations.
Here is a list of things you could do/see if you ever go to Brussels:
Go and see the 'Africa centre' which is a Belgian guilt-trip about plundering the congo. Most European ex-collonialist states can't boast such a magnificent guilt trip. Walk the grounds and hopefully the nearby forest too.
One evening visit L'Archduc which is a small pub near St. Catherine. Have a drink and strike up some conversations. Always cool people here. Miles Davis played Jazz there in the 1930's and the decor is an amazing collision of Art Deco and 21st Century lighting. The wait staff are sufficiently surly.
Go to a comic shop.
Go to a giant Carrefour like the one near Herman Debroux station, and have a look at the hard-back comics section.
Eat a cheap waffle from a subway station (you should pay less than 2 euro)
See some live jazz. There is a ridiculous amount of live jazz playing on most nights in this city (also in Antwerp, actually). Unlike London, where jazz is played in expensive venues, here it's the real stuff in dodgy little crowded, smoky clubs. You can find out what and where on the internet.
Walk past the king's house and the park across the road. Note the refreshing lack of security of any kind.
Visit the Law Courts of Brussels. This incredible and heavy building always makes me think of the mega-architecture in the Iain M. Banks novel Feersum Endjinn. They made such a huge and magnificent building, but they're still dead. Make sure you admire the view over Brussels nearby and think about their souls drifting on the wind, or maybe your own soul one day embedded in a techno crypt-matrix.
We didn't do it this time, but the Atomium is worth a look. You can also see it in the distance from the the Law Courts of Brussels though, which just about as good as seeing it up close.
Eat as many and varied chocolates as you can. Your desire for variety in chocolates will not be satiated. Don't buy the expensive chocolates from the specialist shops, buy the cheap ones at the supermarket.
Go to the Sablon and walk down, then up the hill. Let your mouth water at the expensive chocolates. Look in the Mercedes centre. Soon there won't be any cars, and we should admire their doomed beauty them while we still can.
Go to the Grote Markt and look at the nice buildings and around the corner the Manneken Pis, but don't buy anything there.
Catch the 44 tram out into the midst of the forest and then walk south west through the forest towards the Rouge Cloitre. Have a coffee there, and some lunch if you feel like it. Don't walk out the other side as the illusion of a lovely place in the middle of the woods will be ruined. Go back the way you came.
If you're coming from London, catch the train, don't fly. The train is really nice. Flying is a big hassle.
Wow, that was nowhere near c enough.
Moose and I are just chilling in London, enjoying a quiet christmas dinner, movies, mince pies, and mulled wine. We went to see "It's a wonderful life" on the big screen in Angel last night, which was really sweet. Capra is a genius, still moving audiences to tears 60 odd years later.
Things have become quite busy here in London with the RjDj project going full pelt. We are madly working away on some really cool new network enabled features in the app and on the website. I'm really excited about what we're doing and can't wait to get these features shipped in the new year. Working with a team of really great people on a really great project; you can't ask for more than that.
A couple of weeks ago I spent an exciting, busy, sleep deprived weekend in Berlin with the rest of the RjDj people and a small community of great Pd patchers who were busily patching away in the offices of MoviePilot, a German internet startup. It was lots of fun to meet a bunch of the Pd guys in real life.
I only managed to see a small piece of Berlin in the surburb called Kreuzberg where we were staying. The small part of Berlin I saw really lived up to its reputation as a city that never sleeps, with bars staying open well past my bedtime. The bars we went to smelled the way that we all remember bars used to; a tangible wall of nicotine floods into every pore and lung cavity the moment you step inside. It was quite refreshing in a nostalic kind of way. Next time I go back there hopefully Moose and I can absorb a lot more of the history of that amazing place, rather than just drinking in bars and hacking with nerds like I did this time.
In my spare time I'm still hacking away on games and game prototypes, and trying to write music when the urge takes me. I recently finished 'Memorizer', which is a pure-javascript implementation of the memory game.
This year has been pretty insane and wonderful at the same time. Moose and I have had a lot of fun starting new jobs, getting married, travelling, and making even more plans than we had before. Here's to 2009; hope you and all of us have one as excellent and packed as 2008.