Redis Weekly and other things

First new thing of the year, then. Redis Weekly is a free email newsletter that will be delivered to your inbox every Wednesday featuring all the news you could possibly want about Redis. Of course, for most of you reading this, your Redis needs are probably close to zero, but I thought I’d mention that it’s now available. Just stick your email in that textbox and get lots of NoSQL news! No? Well, stay tuned, because hopefully I’ll be announcing something in the next couple of weeks that has an even tinier audience! You might even say that it was Little

I'm Older Than My Years

I was planning on doing a fancy retrospective for this year, pulling out tweets from 2012 and plotting them on a map using D3.js to show where I’ve been this year. But it seems that tweets downloaded from Twitter’s archiving option are stripped of their geotags. Or at least mine are. So, here’s your list of where I’ve been this year:

  • California
  • North Carolina
  • Illinois
  • Virginia
  • London
  • Oxford
  • Bicester

There you go. Not as fancy, but you get the same information. Edward Tufte would be proud. Maybe.

Another year down, my first full year living in the US. Still can’t drive. But back in Durham. Strangely missing Santa Monica every now and then, but that gets put back in its box pretty quickly when I remember the long hours of the Crunch and living in a hotel room for many months. Or the time early this year when I wandered around in the rain trying to find an Urgent Care facility that would take my insurance.

I suppose I could do an infographic of my donations to the Obama campaign, but that would scare me as much as it scares you. Likewise my Amazon purchases for 2012. All I’ll say on that front is that I started with four bookcases and will probably get my fifth shortly, as well as undertaking an experiment to see just how much Target’s basic bookcases can hold on a single shelf (they can bow quite impressively!).

What to look out for in the New Year? More Fallout Durham, hopefully, as well as a few other new things here and there. Another visit back to the UK, hopefully. And, of course, more bookcases…

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas, everybody! Hope you have a great day…

On The Road

This post is coming live from the I-40 on the way to Asheville! Fancy, I know. The previous post was a test of my new workflow, which involves Dropbox, a private VPS instance, and the ever-handy RSync. It’s been a but harder writing updates on the go since I switched from Movable Type to Jekyll, but I now have enough things patched together with sticky-back plastic and string that it should work. And then next year, I’ll be moving this site away from Dreamhost, which will allow me to simplify things a bit again.

Anyway, almost Christmas! I’m off to see gingerbread houses in Asheville, after spending the week delivering chocolates and caramels for Fallout Durham. We had a fair few orders! Thanks to everybody who ordered something - we hope to be ramping up production in the new year, now that we have the amazing tempering machine of awesomeness. It takes all the misery out of making chocolate!

Okay, thirty miles to Asheville. Gingerbread updates tomorrow. Maybe with Flickr embeds. Old school is the new school

Don’t mind me. Just testing something…

Now I Have A Tempering Machine

I hope everybody reading this is aware that Fallout Durham is currently accepting orders for Christmas, right? (Terms and conditions apply: you need to be able to get to the environs of Durham, and orders will close midnight Friday - the 14th of December. Offer void where prohibited)

If you remember from earlier in the year, one of the things I kept on mentioning, aside from how lonely I was in California (and boy, didn’t I go on about that, eh? Sorry for the attack of the emo), was that Stacie and I had a Kickstarter ready to go and that it would be running Real Soon Now. Well, the bulk of the money that we would have raised from that would have gone towards a beast of a tempering machine, the Chocovision X3210. With the right extras, it can temper up to 8kg in under an hour.

It arrived on Thursday, courtesy of an unexpected bonus from work. It is glorious. I have been making chocolates for over four years, but it was never, never as easy as it was yesterday when I threw together some kirsch ganache molded chocolates on a whim and turned them out with almost perfect thin shells. It’s pretty amazing. Though I guess it was good to learn tempering the hard way. But even better to be able to temper huge quantities and not have to babysit it for an entire afternoon.

To sum up: look out, Durham - 2013 is going to be a great year to have a sweet tooth. Our Kickstarter is on hold for the moment, but we may reactivate it later to finance a few other bits and pieces. But we’ll see.

Also: I don’t have diabetes. Although I’m still having to adjust to the whole paying to see a doctor affair, I can’t deny it was quick! (To be fair, my doctor back home did offer to do a blood test, but it would have involved fasting and I was on holiday, so I decided not to do it there and then)

It’s been a while since I’ve made an entry here, so what else is new? The TV downstairs is playing something that has Supergrass’s Alright in the background, which is triggering all sorts of nostalgia flashbacks. Weather is stupidly hot; ten years ago, I suffered through a scary and freezing ice storm which lead to eating nothing but Jersey Mike’s for two days straight and trying not to shiver to death. This week, it’s been 23°C. It’s just wrong, I tell you. I have a new desk, my bookcases are sagging under the weight of my books, I still have to buy Christmas presents for far too many people, and I’m going to look at gingerbread houses in a couple of weeks.

I miss the Radio Times.

The Largest Lingerie Section In Ireland

It’s funny, really, just how easy it is to fall back into the old routine. It’s been over a year since I was in Britain for any length of time, but after a day or so, it was like I had never left. Sitting at the top of the table, laptop out (it’s a MacBook Air now instead of the old Pro, but no real difference), Bonnie and the family watching The Mentalist or Castle. It could have been any time since 2000 or so. Except I’m only here for a week this time, and just as I have got settled, it’s time to leave.

And I have stolen time from where I can, deciding to skip going into London so I can watch more Christmas films with Bonnie, poking holes into burning candles whilst wearing slippers that light up when I walk. This time, though, scaring the cats that have moved in during my absence. Scared cats that often flee at the sight of me - “who is this interloper?" they scowl at me before heading to the doors. My bedroom is now devoid of most of the things that made it mine; no books, no bookcases, no comics, no random bits of gadgets and paper on the floor. But still unmistakably mine, and still the place where I sleep the easiest.

I’m weird in that I’ve lived in one place for almost all of my life, yet I guess in the past year, I’ve lived on two different sides of the US in addition to my original home; making up for lost time, perhaps. Spending so long in one place gets you attached to it, I imagine, especially if you enjoyed the time you were there. The bike rides with friends now spread to the winds. The epic stories of action figures in the study that spanned weeks, months, and eventually years of continuity, and the use of blu-tack to fix the broken Transformers as they fell. The Christmases spent with my sister going through the Radio Times working out what to watch and eating as many mince pies as humanly possible. Spending Sunday afternoons at my grandmother’s, listening to Bruno Brookes countdown the Top 40 and learning music through my aunt’s copies of Smash Hits.

This will be my first Christmas without my family. Ever. It’s going to be hard. But I’m so happy that I got to watch Die Hard again with Bonnie this week.

Polls Polls Polls

As most of my time at the moment is spend reloading political blogs trying to see the latest poll information, don’t expect to see a lot here until after the first week in November…

All The Fun of The Fair

I’ve been coming to North Carolina since 2002, yet this week was the first time I had ever made it to the State Fair. There were reasons - back in 2002, I had work to do and couldn’t quite make it, while the other years tended to be at a time when I wasn’t in the country. Last year, it seemed like it was obviously going to happen, but at the last moment I was whisked away to California for fun and adventures. So ten years after initially hearing about it from a professor at UNC, I finally made it.

At this point, I’d like to take a moment for Scotland. Yes, it seems like the date of the referendum has been set, and that the SNP has got their way on the question and whether under-16s can vote (seriously, it looks as if they got everything they wanted - well done on that tough negotiation, Mr. Cameron!), but I’m afraid that their long-held crown of DEEP-FRYING ALL THE THINGS must be passed on. Yes, the State Fair does all that deep-fried Mars Bar, Snickers, and pizza. Then it goes a few steps further. Girl Scout cookies? Battered and fried. Cheesecake? In the fryer it goes. Cupcakes? Of course. Cinnamon rolls?. Sure, plus the fair will sprinkle bacon all around it to make it just a touch more hipster. It’s…something. Even I had to give up on the cinnamon roll, and the Girl Scout cookies weren’t quite as good as we imagined. However, the deep fried cupcake was pretty amazing. Definitely need to do a deep-frying party sometime…

As for the rest of the fair, it was an interesting mix of a typical, large travelling fair that you’d get back home, along with prize animals and vegetables. I have to say that the latter left me a bit confused; at one point we entered a building full of teenage girls showing off their goats almost like an odd regional cotillion. I was informed afterwards it was just a competition, not a coming-of-age affair. Still, it did look quite odd.

One slight problem with going to the fair - I don’t like rides. Hate roller-coasted, too afraid of heights to go on Ferris wheels, terrified of those things that shoot you up high and turn you upside down. So I did a lot of watching, but did go on the bumper cars plus a ride that looked rather sedate, but turned out to be a bit more involved once we actually got on there. It was still fairly sedate, just tilting and whirling, but I had difficulty walking straight for a bit afterwards.

So, if I suck at rides, maybe I’m better at the games? Hahaha. No. I managed to score 30 at Whack-A-Mole, but I did come third! Which would have been more impressive if there was more than three of us playing. Some in our group did have much more success in winning goldfish, though.

We stayed until the big fireworks display at the end of the night, and took the last bus back home to Durham and watched YouTube videos of people eating live squid. Terrifying. Oh, and receiving Twitter updates of Biden laying the smack down on Paul Ryan. A very good way to end a first visit to the fair…

Things I Learnt In Chicago

In no particular order.

  • Art studios are fine, but really, I need a door on the bathroom, not a curtain.

  • That said, anybody who owns the original 12” of Ceremony can be given some leeway.

  • Pie Flights are to be encouraged. I’d say look out for similar from Fallout Durham, but when you apply it to chocolates, you just end up with selection boxes, which we’re obviously intending on doing…

  • If I had been sent to Chicago instead of Santa Monica a year ago, I would have spent many a Saturday morning in Fox and Obel. I also have a feeling I would have taken to Chicago a bit more readily than the less dense LA landscape.

  • Chicago-style pizza defeated me after two slices, but the leftovers were great after a long night of walking.

  • It’s true: the best view from the John Hancock Tower in Chicago is from the women’s toilets. (This was, of course, verified by Stacie, not me)

  • I should have brought warmer clothes.

  • You really have an art exhibition which involves video of people stacking themselves in odd ways.

  • Take Patrick anywhere and the odds of him knowing somebody in the most unlikely of places are even.

  • You might, if you squint, notice the word ‘Britain’ about three times in the German U-boat exhibit in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Jingoism aside though, the museum is pretty fantastic. Wind chambers! Fab labs! Arcade machines set on free play! A random Spitfire!

  • Threadless has a shop. I was very good. Besides, my drawers are having difficulty opening at the moment anyhow.

  • Chicago takes its hot dogs very seriously.

  • The Secret Agent Store is a pale shadow of Brooklyn’s Super Hero Store.

  • Soooo many hipsters.

  • Even the kebab shop had artisan light bulbs. And it was opposite a custom hat shop.

  • I liked the ‘L’, but was a bit concerned about how the wooden platforms would shake as the trains pulled in. Especially since we were almost inevitably above a very busy road.

  • Alinea is a very different story and requires a separate post. Do look out for it sometime…