JontySewell.net

I've just realised that I suck at all things related to the internet in the last ten years. I don't use my twitter, I'm bored stiff of facebook, if I want to check any blogs/news sites I look manually all the time, I never put anything on flickr/youtube/last.fm/xfire... the list goes on! It seems I'm still stuck in the internet of the 1990s. I don't even blog!

At work I've been writing a program (and learning to code at the same time, incidentally) that will loop through all the many many paintings we have in our digital library and spit out HTML pages for each one. How old-fashioned does that sound?! It'd make a lot more sense to upload the data to a MySQL database and use PHP to dynamically generate the pages and indexes, along with some magic to give it nice URLs.

I say I never blog anymore, and I say that I never have the time, or I never have anything interesting to blog about. Well, anyone that knows me knows that they are both blatant lies! I actually have lots of ideas on things to blog about, but usually I either can't be bothered to write about them or realise that nobody on the internet would care in the slightest about what I was going to write. I also realised today that I have an incredibly boring life that involves getting up in the morning, going to school/work, coming home in the evening and watching TV/sitting in front of the computer/reading something mildly interesting. No wonder I get tired a lot, I should go parachuting or white water rafting more often! I also intend to do a lot of things, or have the ambition of doing a lot of things, but rarely do any of them, mainly because I'm such a shy person.

Well there, that's a new post written - perhaps to get myself to write more (side note, when I write myself I keep ending up writing mysql automatically D:) I should write down what topics I want to blog on the subject of. So far the list contains AI and human-computer interaction, inspired by the hubbub Milo caused the other week, and Spotify, which really doesn't need explaining. There just needs to be a law passed to say that everyone should get it.

Candelebration!, originally uploaded by Jonty Sewell.

This is mostly a post to test the new post-to-blog feature of flickr. That said, I had an awesome time at Disneyland Paris over the last few days. A group of 33 of us from school went over Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, which meant that while the rest of my physics class were doing their ISA coursework I was zooming around on rollercoasters and generally having lots of fun. It really is a magical place, even though it all tends to look a little plastic. The people who designed the scenery paid attention to every tiny little detail!

Also, I'm generally a bit of a wus and I've not been on many rollercoasters in my life, but I had no hesitation at going on Space Mountain, and it was the best ride I've ever been on in my life! I've been reading about it since I came back and apparently it's one of the roughest rollercoasters I'm likely to visit for a while, which means I seem to have jumped in right at the deep end. I just thought it was epic, perhaps more because of the technology involved in the whole thing than the ride itself! But then again, I'm sad like that.

I'm sitting in bed with practically no voice left and I'm very tired - but I feel fantastic. I've just got back from the Trent Vineyard, a brand spanking new church-in-a-warehouse on an industrial estate in Nottingham. It literally opened just a few weeks ago I believe, and it's a really great space for people to gather with God. Me and six other people from my youth group went to the Soul Survivor Tour there - a bite-sized chunk of the indescribably brilliant summer festivals.

I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive before I went. To me the whole appeal of Soul Survivor festivals is pretty much that I'm stuck there for a week, and I can really get into the swing of things and really enjoy myself. I thought that trying to fit that whole feeling into a few hours would end up being a bit damp and wouldn't work very well. I was wrong! With Ben Cantelon leading worship for well over an hour and Andy Hawthorne giving a great talk I was transfixed the entire evening. It would have been nice if it'd been a bit longer and then I'd have really got into it and enjoyed myself a lot. As is it was still really awesome though. The final song was unexpectedly my favourite! The old classic hymn "O Lord My God" which to most people is right at home in some cathedral mass with old people, but played beautifully by the band in a really modern and, well, just awesome way.

It all makes me happy to be who I am.

It doesn't seem to happen all the time, but it's certainly happening a lot. At the moment, the javascript feed that shows my recent tweets over on the left is coming up blank (or, rather, the JSON feed). Twitter itself loads fine and I can tweet all I like, so I can only assume it's something wrong with my internets.
At the same time, my last.fm artist chart thing down below my profile icons has all sorts of problems. Sometimes it says I need to update Flash player, sometimes it says I haven't played anything recently when I have, and other times such as now it shows what I've been playing, but says "undefined times". Gah!

OK, so perhaps it's not that emotional. Not as emotional as the current episodes of Battlestar Galactica anyway. (There, shameless plug inserted. Best show ever!) I've certainly changed my feelings towards it more than a few times though.

To start with I thought it would be nice and fun, because when I have something to aim for I genuinely enjoy writing code and learning new languages. My desire to write a script that framed pictures virtually for work led to me learning a lot of PHP and producing quite a nice script! Similarly my desire for a nice website, while long and arduous, has eventually come to be. I really like the website as it is now, with the Twitter panel and links to all my social networking profiles. That said, I still have a bunch of things I need to fix since I upgraded to Drupal 6. Perhaps something to do after I finish writing this.

After a while my computing got a bit boring, mostly because I vehemently loathe the Systems Life Cycle that you first get lumbered with in GCSE ICT and continue to enjoy hate for the rest of your life as a computer developer. I much prefer the concept of RAD, (Rapid Application Development, presumably. I'll look it up on Wikipedia later.) where you get the smallest amount of information possible from the customer and then make a simple program that evolves over time. I just dislike reports though.

I then went through a time of hating the whole affair because the school computers are so slow you wonder if it'll be faster to write your Visual Basic.Net project in BASIC on a Commodore 64. I mean, really, it's silly. The other day it took the computer literally half an hour to log on to my roaming profile (which isn't very large; they have a profile size limit of 30MB that doesn't include documents) and load up my solution in VB.NET 2008. I mean, the computers have gigabit ethernet connections, and they're at least AMD64 3400+! This isn't 1989!

Shortly after that I got very disgruntled at the way .NET and OLE handles databases. It still seems rather silly to load the database into memory, then populate a dataset with the data, then bind stuff to the dataset, then use a bindingsource to manipulate the recordset, etc etc etc. I'm getting the hang of it now, though, and I can see some of the reasoning behind doing it that way.

Now I just have to finish off my program with unreasonable amounts of error checking and write all the documentation, testing, evaluation, analysis and design that goes with it.
Yes, I know I should have done the first two parts already.

Apologies to those who know nothing about programming, this was probably an incestuously boring blog post to read. Even the spellcheck doesn't recognise half the words. Then again, it doesn't recognise 'recognise' either. Damn American dictionaries.