Marking Time

I’ve started messing around with del.icio.us. My del.icio.us page is here. I hope to use it as a bookmark holder from now on. It’s simple to use and has a nice feature for categorizing links. I’m also interested in the broader applications of the tool for information gathering by groups.

I’m currently reading The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond. I’d recommend it to any programmer (not just Unix programmers) who is looking for insights a little higher than code level but not so abstract as to be meaningless platitudes.

I especially liked his critique of Object Oriented Languages. For example he says:

OO languages make abstraction easy — perhaps too easy. They encourage architectures with thick glue and elaborate layers. This can be good when the problem domain is truly complex and demands a lot of abstraction, but it can backfire badly if coders end up doing simple things in complex ways just because they can.

It’s something I’ve come across many times. Using OO techniques when they are not really necessary can create more problems than they solve. The buzzword value of OO makes this a very common occurrence.

You can read the book online but it’s worth buying the print version.

There’ll be no losers in our house this Sunday with both Mayo and Kerry credentials firmly established. My heart is with Mayo though, so often the nearly men, they’ve lost three heartbreaking all-Ireland finals since 1989. They bring great flair and excitement to the final with their flashy hairstyles and boots, and their open, honest football.

There’s the usual hunt for tickets around the county with rumours and innuendo flying about regarding their whereabouts and methods of distrbution. Usually, it all works out in the end despite (or maybe because of) the GAA’s arcane distribution method. If you want a ticket badly enough you’ll get one.

Tickets have been secured in our house but none for me. I could have probably got one if I pushed it but this year I’ve chosen to watch the match from the comfort of my own home. I’ve been at many finals in my time including a few of the Kerry four-in-a-row back in the seventies (where I was lifted over the ticket-stile by my father, that doesn’t happen today), the Mayo failures of 1996 (including the replay) and 1997, and the Galway victory of 1998, which brought the Sam Maguire cup west across the Shannon for the first time since 1966.

The atmosphere is great at the final but the game tends to pass you by as you’re swept along in the emotion. When your team wins it’s a great buzz but when they lose it’s devastating. You can physically feel the weight of the supporters’ disappointment upon you. Of the games I have seen live, I have only vague memories of the actual play and those are probably from watching highlights on the TV rather than being at the games.

This year I’ll be taking it all in from the edge of my sitting room couch. It should be a great spectacle. I can’t wait.

When we lived in Madrid there was refuse collection every day. The apartment block we were living in shared 2 wheelie bins - one for plastics and one for organics - and they were collected and emptied every night. Normally this is an adequate level of service but when you’re moving house and leaving the country, and have to dispose of the accumulated clutter of two years, the bin capacity quickly comes under serious pressure.

It’s not a big deal though. There are certain unofficially designated dumping points around the town where you can drop off anything from a wardrobe to a colour TV to an entire home heating system, and the binmen will take it away without a fuss. At least, we don’t hear the fuss. It’s long past our bedtime when the rubbish is collected. For all we know it’s the tooth fairy taking it away. Next morning it’s like it was never there.

It was at one of these dumping points that I dropped off a large bag of clothes that weren’t worth carrying home to Ireland. And although nobody really cares about these things, I was self-concious enough to drop the bag off in the dead of afternoon - siesta time - when there wasn’t a soul around to see me.

Or so I thought.

I passed the spot again a half-hour later and saw that my bag of clothes had been opened, neatly sorted through, and scavenged of anything deemed useful. A little while later, I noticed a little old South American woman sorting through the remains. But to no avail. Anything worth taking was gone.

At first it was disconcerting to see people rummaging through my cast-offs in the middle of the street - maybe I should have cleaned the clothes before I threw them out - but as the scavengers rummaged and discarded, and rummaged and discarded some more, my attitude changed to one of wounded pride.

“How dare you discard those perfectly good jeans? OK, there’s an ink stain in the left pocket but they’re perfectly wearable!”

“What’s wrong with the shoes? I know the sole’s split but I’ve been wearing them like that for the last month!”

I felt like going over and making a case for the quality of my poor discarded cast-offs.

So it appears that beggars can be choosers especially when it comes to choosing from my wardrobe. I think I have to raise my standards a little now that I’m back in the ‘real’ world.

Back in Ireland since last Thursday and so far enjoying it. I thought I would be weighed down by a cloud of negativity after the Spanish experience but it hasn’t happened yet.

Slowly starting the job search, I probably won’t get started properly until after the all-Ireland football final on Sunday.

Here’s a photo of Old Head Beach with the pilgrims’ mountain, Croagh Patrick in the background.