I was walking through the park on my way to work this morning when I saw a woman waving her arms about and a body lying on the ground. Of course I ran over to see what had happened and it turned out that seconds earlier the man on the ground, who was previously out jogging, had launched himself into the fence then commenced an epileptic fit. I helped the lady and another man who was nearby to hold him down, he was convulsing extremely violently, bashing his head on the ground and choking. After the initial shock faded I vaguely recalled things about rolling the victim on their side, protecting the head and getting the tongue out of the way - fuzzy recollections from probably 5 minutes worth of teaching at school. We called the paramedics, who turned up fairly quickly, and by then he had calmed down (but was still non-responsive).
A sobering start to the morning, what really angered me was that the woman mentioned that when the episode started, there was a jogger right next to them that she was screaming out to help for who didn't even stop. And when the three of us were tending to him, thanks to the British peoples' stoicism for keeping their noses out of other people's business, many walked or jogged by feigning indifference until they were virtually upon us, when some meekly offered "if they could help". What is wrong with these people! What if it had been them? I was running towards the scene before the other woman even saw me, and that was on auto-pilot, before I had the slightest clue what was going on.

It does look like I'm falling behind a little in posting at the moment. I figured that Elisse has probably posted a fair few more articles than me. So I checked the database.

+--------+---------------+
| author | count(author) |
+--------+---------------+
| elisse |            35 |
|  hayden|            33 |
+--------+---------------+

Looks like we're not that far apart after all - remember, I hadn't written this article when I checked, so we're now only one off.

On the subject of databases, last week it was decided at work that we didn't actually need a second, linux based, web server. What we really needed was a fully redundant web cluster. This involves two load balanced web servers, which I've not got too much to do with.

However that means having a redundant database. So I've now researched and put together my first MySQL cluster, which I'm pretty happy with. It's six machines, which includes two data nodes, two SQL nodes and redundant load balancers - one of which doubles as a management node. Fortunately for me Stewart now works for MySQL AB on their cluster project and pointed me in the right direction.

Now I've just got to wrangle the load balancers into load balancing two web servers as well and we'll be off. It's proving slightly more difficult than the rest of it though. Then I can get down to the nitty gritty of optimising the cluster.

Something else that's cool is that Vim 7.0 is out, and it highlights matching brackets, bracers etc. which is great.

That's probably about enough geeky stuff, go to drag Elisse away from her flute practice so we can go and organise some dinner - or I'll do it myself.

HAHAHA

I seem to have finally found my feet churning through Javier Maria's translation of a novel, Your Face Tomorrow. Initially rendered irascible by the ornate and convoluted linguistic epithet, I now not only find vehement pleasure in consulting the dictionary once every other page, but have embarked on my very own journey of self-instruction. Commencing with a reference to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia of which I began reading an online transcription, I migrated to the History of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) which brought me to rectify my puerile ignorance of the involved regimes: Socialism, Communism, Fascism and onto Marxism, Trotskyism et al. Thanks to Wikipedia and the internet in general, I'm expecting to glean from this novel a resulting slightly more sophistocated and educated update of myself than can be expected from your average yarn.

Bah humbug!

Tomfoolery aside, we went to the Brick Lane festival yesterday which is a big mess of curry stands (mm), live music and strange people. I took Haydento see my latest interest - Acoustic Ladyland who performed a great set. In the audience was none other than Julian Barratt, legend of the Mighty Boosh. Which means we've been out thrice in a weekend! Stupendous!

Been busy. At least that's my excuse for not having posted for the last three weeks or so. It's not so much that lots of stuff has been happening as, well, lots of stuff has been happening.

Geeky stuff first, I got a MacPro at work, yay! I'm endevouring to keep it clear of all the crap I normally install on my work computer to test, and using a Mac Mini as a junk machine instead, that way I can wipe it when it's getting too slow. It took me about a day to install all the stuff I needed on the MacPro, and I just can't do that once a month. To be honest I haven't really had a chance to thrash out the processor, and due to Kensington not making the RAM properly for the MacPro yet, I'm only sitting on one GB at the moment. By gods it compiles fast though, XCode flies.

Cat has come and gone, she's Spain now and Andy should be making his way in that general direction fairly soon too. It was great to see her, now I just need Greta, Chloe & Beth to come over here and Elisse and I will have put everyone up for at least one night.

Work has been hectic, as per usual. We had stocktake at the London Forbidden Planet store this Tuesday, which went really quickly. I got sent home early - bit after eleven - and came back in to work for nine. Problem with FileMaker - as great as it is - and scanners is that most USB scanners can't be configured to send a Return character (ETX) after a barcode - as opposed to an Enter (CR). So when you scan a barcode you have to hit the return key. Obviously I'm not big on that idea, and got sick of it. More so this stocktake then previously, so I've written an application for OS X that looks for something that might be a barcode - more than eight digits in a row inputted quicker than you can type follow by no input for a slightly longer fraction of a second - and then follows it with an ETX. It sits in the background and should work with whatever program is currently active. If anyone thinks this is useful, email me.

Anyway, off to our first Titan book club meeting tonight, although I haven't yet finished reading The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, it's a great book though. I'll post sooner next time, promise.

Since I was all alone this evening ((Haydenwas at work, stocktaking) and quickly getting bored of myself, I decided to go out. Yes, all on my own.

I resolved to finally get me down to an indie music night since I've been meaning to for the last, hrm... three years. I started off with dinner for one at the Hummus bar in Soho - a groovy little place where you can get a plate of the stuff with yummy toppings and hot pitta bread for about 3 squids. Anyway, Madame JoJo's is small and red and, well, like a former strip club. The main act who I came to see, Acoustic Ladyland were outrageous. Modern jazz meets death metal, that you can dance to! They were such characters too - the drummer was this white boy with the most enormous home-grown afro I've ever seen, expression cool as a cucumber whilst smashing away, the keyboardist could have been mistaken for a composer walking around my college with a briefcase, bass player kitted in your indie-rock suit+tie+loud glasses and the frontman looked like a tall 1920s villain, dressed plainly but bobbing up and down with his saxophone like a maniac possessed. The music was very funny, in a good way. I really enjoyed it.

And then I saw Blair from Australian Big Brother / Neighbours. But that's not terribly exciting.

Saw Lang Lang playing Chopin piano concerto 1 at the RAH last night, as part of the Proms. Aah the convenience of being at College. I was able to spend the afternoon practicing whilst languidly keeping one eye on the 'arena' queue, which I decided to join at around 5pm. Inside, I managed to stand behind only 2 rows of people, so I could literally see the sweat on Lang Lang's face. It was fantastic.

Having said that I was prepared to queue all day to see Lang Lang. He was absolutely phenomenal. Such a compelling performance (I completely forgot my legs were sore from standing all day) and amazing to see him so close! His encore was out of this world and nearly made me burst into tears (in a good way). The Albert Hall was packed and it was all so wonderful...

...And all that for 5 pounds?! Go the Proms!


[Edit:] Bruckner 7 is now my all-time favourite after hearing the Berlin Phil thrash it out last night.. Whoa, the energy!

We attempted our first paella the other night which turned out a roaring success. So much so that Haydenand I almost ate the whole lot, and you can see it's not small. We also had a dabble at Kahlua creme brulee when Melanie came around on the weekend, which was great too but so rich we were all rolling around with stomach aches.

Yesterday Mel and I saw Ant and Dec (yes, together), went to a lunchtime prom, had chocolate at my favourite shop, ate chunky chips and tried on uber expensive dresses at Karen Millen. We looked so out of place there and when the dress I tried on started beeping, we did a runner!

Cat arrives from Australia on thursday. Just in time for the snow, probably.

As an elderly lady poignantly pointed out to me yesterday,
Winter is upon us!

Part of unpacking is organising all the mess you've been putting off for years. Just filtered through all our memorabilia - old cards, letters and photos. It's scary how much I've changed since 2003.

We moved house today, from Greenwich to Wimbledon. Elisse and I are now in a (small) place of our own. Neil helped us move in this morning with a van from work, which was a great help and made our lives so much easier. We're in the process of unpacking now, about half way through I think.

Of course the first thing I did when we arrived was look for wireless networks to log on to. There was one, but I didn't have any luck with it. Kismac came to the rescue however and now I'm on the internet. A lesson to the unwary, WEP security is no security at all, especially if you have a Linksys, D-Link, Belkin or Netgear router, which all apparently generate very poor keys, personally I'm convinced. Secondly, for the gods sake, change the password on your router!