Just a quick note to say that the Techmeetup group, which is well established in Edinburgh already, are meeting in Glasgow tonight and I think Kevin and I will be doing out Greenmap talk. I think this could be the first meeting in Glasgow too. About 70 folk turn up for the Edinburgh one so it should be good.
7pm in Room M329, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow.
I will be speaking at Scotland on Rails in late March. My talk with Kevin McDonagh will be about how to create a community based open source project with an active community. I’d say go buy tickets but it’s sold out already!
After my talk is over I’ll put it up online. But for now I’ve put up a page about the project for those interested in what I’ve been doing with 1.5 years of Thursday.
In a hectic December I managed to go along to Devoxx in Antwerp, Belgium. Devoxx (Voxx is Latin for ‘voice’) used to be called Javapolis and is a Java and other JVM languages conference. This was the first time I’d been to an industry conference and it is certainly something I intend to continue.
On the way over to Antwerp from Glasgow I was amused by an old lady who when told she couldn’t have pie and beans on the plane promptly asked for a stick of rock and a cheese sandwich instead. I’m with her on the unhealthy plane meals revolution! I later arrived at Antwerp train station which is probably the most impressive train station I’ve ever seen. While still in UK mode I then hailed a taxi and tried to get into the passengers side for UK cars (which is the drivers seat in Europe). After convincing the driver that I didn’t want to steal his vehicle I then told him where I needed to go. He struck me with a confused look, asked if I was sure, then pointed to my hotel straight across the road. Kudos to him for not driving me around town then dropping me off at the same spot.
I chose the flights and the hotel myself (on JPMs dime) so I only have myself to blame for the hotel I chose. After quickly figuring out that the locals in Antwerp do not speak French or English and that I’ve never wanted to learn Dutch in my life, I realised this was going to get complicated. I arrived to my room after walking over a patch of dried blood. Luckily enough the tv had UK channels so I was able to watch the news and football in my room. It was around this time that the incessant knocking began. I had somehow booked a hotel which was also a Leprechaun retirement home. Every pipe in the building seemed to have a steady knocking sound like someone was hitting it with a hammer.
When I go abroad I use the same suitcase which was a corkscrew, a photocopy of my passport and some coins. I have now figured out that there is another thing I’m missing….a power converter. I wasted a lot of time going round stores in Antwerp unsuccessfully looking for a UK->Euro converter. My hotel unsurprisingly didn’t have one so I resorted to asking randoms if I can charge my iPhone off their USB ports (not cool).
The conference itself was a 3 day affair for me. It was hosted at a purpose built cinema/exhibition hall at the North of Antwerp which was easily accessible from the brilliant and cheap Tram system. All the big players in the Java space were there (including MS touting their Silverlight tech) and offering assorted goodies to get you to visit their stalls. The badge you got had an optional RFID tag which you could use at vendor booths to give your details over. It was also used to show you how full each room was and with what nationality. There were over 3000 attendees but only 100 were from the UK. Holland and Belgium by far had the largest mindshare, though everyone was speaking English (go old empire!)
Each day there were 6 timeslots for talks and you had a choice of different talks to attend. At the end of each day there would be free beer and games like fussball/wii. I really enjoyed going to Devoxx but I can’t say that I’d like to go to a conference alone again. I’d talk to someone who was sitting next to me at the start but you were always going to a different talk after and you’d never see them again! This was more difficult in the evenings as I had to go to restaurants alone (something I’ve never done before). Since I didn’t have any command of Dutch, I frequented Italian restaurants as I could still remember my tourist Italian from our Honeymoon to Florence.
One close call I had was when I got into the rhythm of asking the person next to me if they had been to a Java conference before and what talks they were excited about. I was about to do this during Brian Goetz’s concurrency talk but the talk started just as I was about to ask the same line of questions to the middle aged bloke sitting next to me. During the Q&A part of Brian’s talk the bloke next to me and put up his hand. Brian Goetz then said “Ah, I see Joshua Bloch has a question”. That’s right, I was about to ask the Chief Java Architect at Google if he had been to a conference before. Apart from writing large parts of the Java language, the guy was doing the keynote speech the next day!
A nice touch at the conference was the Whiteboards spread around the entrance. They had questions asking for your opinion on upcoming Java features and what people are working with today. I couldn’t resist helping start a TopGear-esque Cool Wall. The results are available online now from the devoxx site.
If you work in an Industry where you need to get training every now and again which usually costs around a grand. Ask your boss if instead of going on the exorbitantly priced training course, you would like to use around 3/4 of the same cash to go to a foreign country and have a great time (while learning!). It worked for me anyway.
Well it’s been over a year since I last blogged and a lot has happened. In May last year Alison was elected to serve as a councilor in Glasgow. This prompted us to move from the West End to live in Dennistoun near her ward.
I’ve always previously rented accommodation and it made sense for us to buy our first flat as we were moving out. This was just before house prices dropped by over 10%! I’m slowly getting used to living in the East End and within a month of my moving here a Dominos has opened to try and recoup some of their lost profits since I moved.
The huge news that I have is that in August this year Alison and I got married in the Trades Hall in Glasgow. We had an awesome day that wethoroughly enjoyed. We went to Florence for our honeymoon and drank many espressos.
Now I’ve updated my blog and gave it a shiny new skin I’m planning to update it more often again (this is the 10 millionth time this has been said on a blog).
It’s good to be back!
I don’t seem to be very good at using up all my alloted holiday days so I was left with 5 days leave from last year to use by the end of the month. A plan was needed, I wanted to have 5 days that I will remember for being the best week I could have this year.
I needed this to be great, so I invited my brother to come up and stay for a week as it’s sod all use having a great time on your own, Alison was at work this week. Now we just needed events.
Monday
Ok fine, Monday was not that great but we did get to go see Hot Fuzz at the cinema. Hot Fuzz is of course the new movie by Simon Pegg, Nick Frost et al. You can’t help but review it without mentioning the previous movie created by the cast, the sublime Sean of the Dead. Hot Fuzz is an action/comedy, which sets it apart from Sean of the Dead by genre so it’s quite suprising to see a lot of stunts performed. The film has a good plot and good laughs on the way. Pretty much does what it says on the tin and I hope the crew keep bringing out a movie of the same calibre every 2 years.
Tuesday
My Brother had never seen the Scottish Parliament building before so on Tuesday we went through to Edinburgh. During the afternoon we had a guided tour (by Alison) around the parliament building and the parliamentary offices. After that we went to a cocktail bar so I could figure out the recipe for the best apple/vodka cocktail I’ve ever had (thanks Jordan/Steve for showing me that place). This led up to the main event of the day which was seeing Bloc Party and the Corn Exchange.
Bloc Party have just released their new album A Weekend In the City. It’s a slight change of style from the previous album, a bit more of an epic sound like U2, Radiohead etc. It’s got some good songs on it but the lead singer does have a tendency to lyrically kneecap them in some way.
The gig itself was pretty good, the band looked quite scared as at the previous 2 gigs they had performed in Scotland the crowd started a mass brawl (Glasgow) and threw a coin at the lead singer (Aberdeen). They started their second song by jokingly asking “Does everyone in Scotland hate us?”. Eventually they got into their stride and had the crowd going after slagging Aberdeen crowds, that always goes down well. The Corn Exchange is an alright venue which reminds me of Glasgow’s awesome sweat inducing venue to end all venues the Barrowlands Ballroom. One thing that annoyed me about the Corn Exchange was that there was no cash machine inside and they didn’t take cards so I only had £10 during the whole gig.
After the gig we went to some more pubs around Edinburgh city centre including one which was a series of interconnected small rooms, it was very strange like being in someones living room and the girl doing the table service was quite obviously high on something.
Wednesday
Some days go down in your personal history as a great achievement that you will never forget. This was one of those days. Some of you will know that Glasgow has an underground train system that goes all round the centre of the city. I happen to live above one of the stops. Some more of you may know that there is a drinking challenge to go to every pub on the underground and have a drink at each stop. This my friends in known as a Subcrawl, and on this day we managed to complete the 15 station challenge in 7 hours 15 minutes. Right in time to watch Liverpool give Barcelona a stuffing on their home turf.
We started out the day by getting 12″ subs from Subway (the takeaway), this would be the only food we would have till the end. So at 1pm we embarked on our wonderful journey. We did the south side first as you don’t really want to be around there when the locals were around. Some highlights on the south side leg of the journey were going into some Rangers pubs to see the Rangers wallpaper and pictures of all the former Rangers captains. One pub even had ties with a Vietnamese branch of the Rangers fan club.
We decided that vodkas were the best option to get round quickly on the south side. Once we hit the north side of the underground (the nice part) we quickly switched to pints. We got quite lucky as we didn’t really hit the drunk state till about 13 pubs round, so despite nearly getting thrown off the subway at Hillhead by a member of staff, we did manage to make it all the way.
Special mention has to go the the Honours Three pub off Shields Road, it was really hard to pull ourselves away from it’s medieval weaponry, £1 pints of Stella and great Glaswegian banter.
Thursday
For some reason I always think exercise is a great idea while hungover. Somehow it exonerates you from what you did the previous day. This meant that we went and played 5 a sides at Kelvinhall. The game was pretty good but I wouldn’t recommend it after a huge drinking session the previous day. We used the rest of this day to catch up with our regular TV programmes (24, lost) and watched shed loads of Curb your Enthusiasm.
Friday
By Friday we were pretty shattered mentally and physically from all the events we’d been attending. So on Friday I taught my brother bass (basically how to use a shoulder strap and hit strings, bass ain’t that complex). We then merrily worked our way through Pixies, Weezer and Nirvana’s back catalogue of easy sing along songs. A bottle of Jack Daniels accompanied us later in the night.
Alison arrived home with a bunch of friends later on and we had a guess the song I’m playing game and managed to get rid of some of the nastier vodka that we have accumulated over the years.
By Saturday my brother was off home and I entered a period of mourning for what my body had been subjected to from a week of alcohol, sport and music. But it surely was a week to remember, and I definitely recommend every one else tries to have 5 days like this sometime this year. You won’t forget it.
I’m one of many Joe Wright’s and I currently dwell in Glasgow, Scotland. I work as a software developer for JPMorgan and previously the Scottish Qualifications Authority. I mainly use Ruby, Java, Bash and any automation tools I can get my hands on.
As well as this blog I now have a technical blog: Joejag Tech
I used to be heavily into Gentoo Linux but since finishing my Bachelors and Masters in Computing at the University of Aberdeen I haven't found the time. I can usually be found hacking on side projects, writing songs on guitar or enjoying a fine Islay single malt. I'm happy to say this fascination has now manifested as a Single Malt Guide
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