The march to Towton
Work pressures and logistical problems meant that I did not get to do the inaugural (well, second, technically) march from York to Towton in 2014. This year we did make it, and on reflection it feels like after many years my kit – our kit – is almost complete and correct.
Finally got to spend some time in the shed – interspersed with dealing with the dog , and a bunch of running around. We got the roof rack on the Panda early Saturday morning, went Wickes (which is the English equivalent of the Australian Bunnings) and loaded up the roof rack with ½” ply and a dozen 2″x4″x8′. The timber calculations were… rough… so I was not sure that I would get two benches out of what I had or not. So I spent about 10 hours over two days turning the pile of bits into the first of two putting-stuff-on-top-of benches. At the end, I found I had estimated correctly, and I have exactly enough timber left to make a second one, which I will begin next week. This week has to be about preparations for the Towton walk.
Since I did have HomeBrew installed, I went ahead with this set of instructions, with some variation. Note that at the time I did this HomeBrew installed Hadoop 2.6.0, not 2.4.x as described at this site:
https://www.getblueshift.com/setting-up-hadoop-2-4-and-pig-0-12-on-osx-locally/
Except it’s Monday. So today I am working from home in order to bootstrap my brain quickly up into a better understanding of Pig. First order of business being to install it locally. A quick Google and I find a number of resources talking about how to install Hadoop and Pig, two of the top three involving using HomeBrew:
I’ve finally – thanks to Delia seeing something on Facebook – gotten a lease on a space that I can use as a workshop. It’s a few minutes bike ride up the Thames, in a converted shipping container (or rather two, joined together). The rent is reasonable, and the space is probably more than I really need. It’s pretty rudimentary and will probably be freezing in winter, but it’s definitely A Shed. I’ve moved all my tools in, and started settling.
One day I will be happy, because I will have found the perfect bag to carry everything in. Meanwhile, I remain miserable, making do with a mixture of bags.
So we have installed Rocki units in three rooms in the flat – the lounge, the bedroom, and the library. I just started playing a Clannad album from my laptop to the speakers in the lounge. Much to my bewilderment, a moment later a different album started playing in the bedroom.
I thought it may have been coming from my phone, so shut that down. Kept going. From my iPad? Shut that down. From my partner’s phone? Shut that down. Something bizarrely broken with AirFoil on my laptop? Shut down the laptop. Has someone managed to hack our network and is pranking us for lulz? Is it the NSA? MI5?
Nope. One of the cats had sat on the stereo remote control in the bedroom and started playing a CD.
I need a simpler life.
I wrote this some years ago, mainly aimed at our java devs, but I think it comes close to my personal manifesto for coding in general.
I’ve been meaning to write up some of the routes I take through London. Or Mordor, as a cycling acquaintance calls it, which adds some frisson of terror to the whole exercise. One does not simply ride into London. I will try to pepper this with relevant Google street view pictures, but won’t be attempting to embed maps. I find that their tools for doing that are decidedly unfriendly, and seem to assume you are working on a 24″ screen with a tablet rather than a 15″ laptop with a trackpad.
I’ve been quite ill, again, recently, and am still not fully recovered. Certainly not recovered enough for the walk from The Tower up to City Road to be a quick one, and not recovered enough to risk that ride. So for the past couple of days I’ve been pushing my scooter through The City. Haven’t died yet, but…