It's been a fairly busy few weeks. Not really an excuse for the amount of time it's been since my last post, but a reason.

Elisse got back from Canada about three weeks ago and we went straight from the airport - where I arrived horribly late - to Edd and Sandra's going away picnic in Hyde park. Had a great time, although left a bit early since Elisse was tired from her flight home and so was I from having read the 7th Harry Potter book the day before - finishing at about 3am.

I had a hernia operation the following Wednesday, which all went well - although the anesthetic effected me more than it has before and I was pretty nauseous after I woke up.

Two weeks later and I had finished work in England and Elisse and I have moved to Barcelona. I had a great send off from everyone at work - I won't be on site any more, but I'll continue working for Titan three days a week remotely, well very remotely. I even got given a Wii as a send off gift, which was awesome.

Yesterday was our first full day here and by th end of it - having got a bank account, a mobile phone, had a big lunch and watched Los Simpson, la películar (in Spanish of course) - I felt like my head was going to explode. Now I'm off to finish reading an interesting article on an American comic book author in El Pais.

We went to get ice-cream in Wimbledon and I heard the customer in front of me mumble thank you and goodbye in Spanish, so I asked the guy what language I should order my ice-cream in. He laughed and said Spanish so I ordered mango and chocolate sorbet in a cup in Spanish and he was really taken aback. He smiled and asked (in Spanish) where I was from, seeming confused at my answer of Australia. Anyway he gave me an enormous pile of ice-cream for my Spanish speaking efforts.

And I needed it because I'm teaching lots of little kiddlins this week and it's either that or the gin and tonics to get me through!

We saw a beautiful elk with 11 antler ends (apparently that's a lot). That was on the way to Lake Moraine and Lake Louise (I returned there - couldn't help myself) of which there's plenty of photos of me in my new sunnies.
In summary; I played mozart 4tet for Wibb with three fabulous string players, the flutes went out for Thai and it was so spicy no one could finish their curry (I had a BLACK curry!!), I went to one of Ian Swensen's masterclasses (violin) and was completely inspired, saw some great final concerts including an 'orchestra' of cellos (it was gorgeous in the Rolston hall) and chamber groups that played Schoenberg pieces twice each, went to the Bison (10th best restaurant in Canada) and had a LAVENDER SMORE dessert with mojitos (thank you Tara.. ) and stayed up all night partying in the recording studio. And here I am! Back in the land of the miserable where it's been raining for 36 hours. It's meant to flood in South London tonight.........

Oh well, think I'll learn some Piazzola.

We've spent the last two days on one page of the Prokofiev Sonata with Wibb. I don't think you could get anything so different from the Lessons we had with Tara! Wibb is using the Prokof (we all have to play bits of it in class..) to get down and dirty about the fundamentals of flute playing. It's interesting stuff, but hard to digest on the spot. I think I'll take it home and mull it over.
The longer I spend here, the more in love with the whole thing I become. I can't belive how fortunate we are to end up with such a fab group of flute players. EVERY ONE of them are funny, interesting and caring people, and we have become very close. It's the opposite of College where you know that you're being judged by every one else, and daily life is one big competition. Everyone supports each other here and we have taken to doing things together. Tonight we all went to see the dance performance (a modern take on Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons') and tomorrow we will all go on a trip up the Gondola and to the Banff Springs Hotel for afternoon tea (Kaili's romantic idea). That's after we've heard Gloria pump it out with those horns, of course.

I've put up some pictures of last weekend's hike to Lake Louise. It was incredible - we were up by the glaciers and hiking through "bear country" to gorgeous glacial lakes and forests. When I came home I couldn't find anyone about, so being a Sunday night I dressed up, went in to town and bought myself dinner for one, a bottle of Canadian white and a hunk of fudge (TURTLE flavour) and indugled in front of "My Best Friend's Wedding". This is the life, baby!!

Yesterday I finally worked out what the deal with Perl 6 is. Basically it works like this. Perl 6 is the language. Anything that fits the standard can be a perl 6 interpreter. Perl 6 runs in a virtual machine, which is called parrot. The only - as far as I can tell - available perl 6 interpreter at the moments is pugs.

Confusion aside, I've started looking at perl 6 stuff, there's some really cool new syntax, like chained comparisons. In most programming langauges (like perl 5), you check if a number is in a range - let's say 101 to 305 inclusive - like this: But in perl 6 you can now say: Just like real maths. I'm sure there are other languages that do this - but I've never used any. You can also chain together multiple variables and numbers - which I'm sure could produce something nice and readable like this: But the first thing I tried to do was make it more unreadable, much more fun. Of course this breaks the syntax file for vim I have, so I suppose I'll have to look into that.

Edit: There's this bloody cat that keeps walking into the kitchen, so I've got to keep the door closed now. Which is irritating.

I just finished reading The Cryptographer by Tobias Hill, which was lent to me by our old next-door neighbours from Greenwich. It's a fantastic book and far far more captivating than anyone I've told it's about a tax inspector is willing to believe.

Since Elisse is away I've had to find different things to watch, so as well as the rest of this years Doctor Who, I've grabbed the remainder of the first season of Heroes. When I first started watching Heroes I couldn't stand it, I got through the first episode and then gave up. One of the guys at work, Dom, is a huge fan - so I tried it again, and really started enjoying it. There are moments in Heroes that just crack me up, at one point Hiro goes back in time and phones his friend at work, the him from the past answers and after hurredly putting the phone down he exclaims, "gerate sucotu" (that's great scott). I've spelled it out in Katakana below



Oh, and today is 777 (that's right full permissions for all users).

So here I am at last - in Banff.
It's hard to know where to begin. I went to Edmonton for a couple of days, and visited some friends I'd never met before. They were wonderfully hospitable, and in my time there I saw Canada's largest Mall (it deserves a capital M) complete with a sea-world-style seal show, ice skating rink, a glass box of LIVE flamingoes, trampolines and an indoor beach.. and that's just the tiny section that I saw! It was intriguing and terrifying in equal measures. In Edmonton, I also saw a traditional Indian music and dance performance (amazing!), walked through the perfectly manicured suburbs at midnight and could STILL see some light in the sky, and went on a lovely river boat cruise with my hosts. Oh, and we went to Tim Hortons (like a coffee / bagel chain) about 12 times a day.
If you're wondering about the toilet cubicle photo, that's GIR from Invader Zim (cartoon). I am a big fan of Gir and found it quite funny to see the drawing in the loos, as I didn't think it was that well known. Oh, and I also saw some real life Amish people. That was scary.

So anyway, I'm here in Banff now and it's so, like, TOTALLY AWESOME. It's breathtakingly beautiful, full of animals (I keep running in to deer around campus), peaceful, clean, positive and exactly what I needed. It gives me time to focus on myself and my flute playing. On Sunday we're going on a hike to Lake Louise - the place where all the Banff promo photos are taken. Until then, the pool beckons, so I bid thee farewell.

[P.S.] Keep an eye on the photos, because I'll be adding them as I go along.

[P.P.S.] Air Canada is shit

I got a new MacBook last week. It's for work when we move to Spain, so I'm setting it up with all the software I'll need, which is taking time, especially since I don't want to take out the full day it takes to install everything I need all at once.

She's called Lovelace after Ada Byron, who was Countess of Lovelace after her husband William King became 1st Earl of Lovelace.

However there are some interesting things you can do with two Macs with built-in iSights.

I just paid my first visit to the new Whole Foods "market" on High Street Kensington. I've been holding out for many months to see the new affair - hoping for somewhere to find some varied and interesting lunch food (ie. not from a chain) and pick up a treat for dinner every blue moon.
It is a literally an entire department store for shiny, beautiful food. I must have spent an hour walking through three aisle-long salad bars, a cheese "room", piles and piles of glistening fruit and vegies and herbs packed to the roof, 2483 different types of jams and god knows how many olive oils, soya chips and wheat-free gluten-free muffins, a meat section where an entire cabinet contained only sausages - singly laid out in rows of every conceivable (and inconceivable) flavour, the equivalent of a food court upstairs where you can chose between a smoothies, oysters, sushi or steak tartare, and a huge snake queue with hundreds of flashing tills on the way out.

The experience was so overwhelming that in the end (at 3pm) I ran away and bought a sandwich from M&S.

The more people Elisse finds on Facebook that I know, the more determined I am to avoid it. Seriously though, I barely update my own little patch of internet turf with random information about myself, I just can't see myself keeping up with it.

Besides, I'm more than happy to leave some acquaintances back at school. All the same, I might just crack, it would be kinda nice to know how Shelly's going in Thailand or if Glenn is still in the Air Force. Oh well, I guess I'll never know.