Week Notes 39 & 40

Blogging

Another fortnight of limited blogging. The sum total is two classic album posts and a rant about woo-mongers.

Wasted Inches came to an end about a week ago. I’ve now republished all of the stories that I originally published back in 2002.

Health

Still not running. Still losing weight rather slower than I’d like.

Through a sequence of events that I’m still not really clear about, at 10am this morning I was at Balham Leisure Centre being given a tour of the facilities. I came away with a free one-week pass and a list of classes. I’ve even booked a gym induction session for next Friday. I should probably, at least, get back into the habit of swimming there. I used to enjoy that. Not sure why I stopped.

Training and Speaking

Yesterday was the second Perl School class. It was a repeat of the first one – Modern Perl for Non-Perl Programmers. I sold a reasonable number of tickets and I think the attendees all found it useful (perhaps even enjoyable).

The next Perl School is in two months time. That’s going to be on Moose. The one after that (which isn’t scheduled yet) will probably be on database programming using DBIx::Class.

I’ve also finalised the details of next year’s public training courses that I’m running in association with Floss UK and O’Reilly. There will be two two-day courses. One on intermediate Perl and one on advanced Perl. More details and a booking form are on the Floss UK web site.

Other Programming

I’ve spent some time over the last couple of weeks revisiting a couple of long-term projects. I should really try to get at least one of them finished.

Films

I saw Looper. I enjoyed it. It’s one of those films that you shouldn’t think about too hard. I’m sure the plot has lots of holes in it.

Gigs

On Thursday I saw John Cooper Clarke at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I’ve been a fan since Disguise in Love was released in 1978 but I haven’t seen him live for over thirty years. I’m afraid it was a bit of a disappointment. He’s very disorganised. He spent far too much time rifling through piles of paper looking for the poem he wanted to read. He also spent too long telling jokes rather than reading poems. And I was surprised that he didn’t do more of his older, well-known stuff. The only “greatest hit” that he read was Beasley Street.

On the plus side though, his book Ten Years in An Open Necked Shirt has finally been republished. I’ve been trying to get hold of a copy for twenty-five years. The occasional copy the comes up on eBay sells for silly amounts. I bought a copy from the merchandise stall for £8. It’s highly recommended.

Other Stuff

On Thursday I became a great-uncle for the first time. I’ve always considered myself a pretty good uncle – but this seems to be some kind of promotion.