Stuart Herbert

As part of the process of recovering from my knee injury, I decided that it would be a lot safer for my knee if I tried to strenghthen it by learning to swim.

I never learned to swim as a child. I hated being in the pool, and even today cannot approve of what passed for swimming practice at the time. Making someone float face down in a pool of water that they don’t want to be in in he first place is a sure-fire way to make them panic. Badly.

Swimming twice a week has strangely become something that I really look forward to every day. In the water, I can move around without the knee hurting, because it isn’t bearing any weight. I get more relief from pain in the pool than even in bed at home.

I swim with my wife whenever possible, and being physically more active has lifted both of our moods considerably. I’m now managing around eight hours a week of activity, and once the knee has recovered enough for me to return to martial arts once more, that’ll go up by another five hours – and further still if I’m able to add a third Tai Chi class to my teaching schedule.

Every time I’m in the pool, I still feels very strange, very alien. I still swim like a brick, but I’m just pleased to be taking positive steps to coping wih the injury.

Now all I need is for the medical professionals involved to finally agree and execute the next course of treatment!

I’m sure anyone reading my various blogs has probably forgotten about this particular one, as it has been almost two years since I posted anything much here about my personal life. So I thought that. It was time for a quick update on things just in case there’s anyone left reading this

You might not have noticed, but I’ve dropped my old Gentoo blog completely. It’s been over three years since I left the project, and although I had great fun working on the seed concept, it simply wasn’t worth the effort to continue. Thanks to the phenominal popularity of Ubuntu, Debian has comprehensively won the server wars. I think that is a shame, but it’s reality. People want to read about web development on a platform that they are actually going to use.

As anyone who knows me well would tell you, my life continues to be dominated by what I do. My role as Head of Engineering at Gradwell continues to challenge me and make me grow (although I am very homesick for my days as a developer), and my responsibility teaching Tai Chi ensures I’m seldom home until late every evening. My students think I’m quite mad travelling to Bath every day and then coming all the way back to teach the classes, but it’s worth it.

The photography has had to take a back seat for the last eight months, thanks to a serious car accident last summer which has left me with a long-term knee injury. (I like to remind myself that it is only permanent if you’re still injured when you die).

But in the last few weeks both my wife and I have started to get our energy levels back towards something approaching normal. Let’s see if it lasts

Just a quick test to see if I can post using the latest Opera beta. If you can see this, the answer must be ‘yes’

The new job continues to go extremely well.

Work News

I’m still wrestling with the problem of taming the department’s TODO list, and so far I haven’t decided whether or not MS Project Server is a help or a hinderance. It’s fair to say that some of us have had trouble believing that it’s a product someone would actually want to charge money for.

But it is nice being able to sit down and put together a comprehensive technical plan. It’s no secret that I’ve no time either for the vast majority of online project management tools (of which Basecamp is the poster child) nor the people that these tools are aimed at. Project management is, by necessity, a rich and detailed skill. It can be simplified to stop it becoming the Ministry for Administrative Affairs, but it can’t be glossed over. I was horrified when certain folks I’ve worked with in the past used to laugh about being unable to create project plans. I’m a great believer that if you don’t want to do the job properly (whatever your job is), get out the way and let someone else do it right instead.

And what I love about my new job is that my boss is on my back all the time to get the job done right. That’s how it should be. We’re building something special at Gradwell, and you can’t do that if things aren’t done right.

Tech News

Rather than buy a 3G iPhone, I decided to get a HTC TyTn II instead. Unlike the iPhone, it has a removable battery, and it can be used as a 3G modem by my MacBook Pro – extending the battery life of my laptop by a good 45 mins. It also has a very usable slide-out keyboard, making it very easy to use as a way to get at my email when I’m out and about.

The downside is that it runs Windows Mobile. You think Vista is bad? Windows Mobile is worse. It crashes daily, comes with the second worst browser around (Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile), and doesn’t seem to have an equivalent to Apple’s App Store. The email client is quite good – except that this week it has decided to freeze when syncing email with work’s IMAP server. Tomorrow’s job is to snag someone else’s TyTn II at work and do some testing to see whether it’s my device, or the IMAP server.

Turns out that the TyTn II is also surprisingly affordable. If you try and buy an unlocked one, the cheapest I’ve seen was over 450 pounds. Nowhere seems to stock one either, so I’m not sure how easy they are to get hold of that way. Instead, I signed up for a 12 month contract with Vodafone. For 30 pounds a month, I get the TyTn II and a 5GB data allowance. At the end of the 12 months, I can cancel the contract, I get to keep the TyTn II, and I’ve saved a hundred pounds. Bargain.

Sad News

Last Friday was Rob’s funeral. The service was held in St Mary’s Church in Butetown, and it was standing room only. I thought it was a lovely service, and a great send-off for him. He was buried in Thornhill Cemetery, where we watched as mourners grabbed shovels and buried the coffin there and then. After that, a lot of folks headed down to the Wharf, but I couldn’t face it. I came home and locked myself away for the rest of the day. I just wanted to be alone with my own grief.

I think Corina said it best when she described Rob’s passing as a bad dream that we all wish we could wake up from. After the wife, and being at work, I probably spent more time with Rob than with anyone else the nine years that I knew him.

Teaching News

I had the all-important bit of paper through from Barry College. I’m now formally qualified to teach adults in Lifelong Learning programmes. I passed the teaching assessment with a grade ‘A’ too, which gives me a bit more confidence as I try to turn the Tai Chi class into a more structured two year programme. The whole point of the changes is to build on what Rob figured out about learning Tai Chi, to put it into a format that’s more accessible yet again and also into a plan that’s well paced for the students.

I’m also hard at work with the camcorder, experimenting with the best way to record Tai Chi lessons. This is something I must work harder on

It’s the end of the fourth week in the new job, and after an overnight stay in Bath and trips to London, Somerset, Sheffield and London again, it’s good to have a bank holiday weekend to look forward to. And then next week it’s off up to the North East to meet another colleague for the first time and do some coaching.

The time has flown by – I must be having a lot of fun

It’s a shame that this First Great Western train I’m on atm (the 19:15 from Paddington to Swansea) isn’t going as quick. For once, it’s not the fault of First Great Western or their (in my experience, all too often unprofessional) staff, but after two hours we’re just pulling into Didcot Parkway, and not Cardiff where we should be. Hopefully we’re past the latest problem to plague this service, and it’ll be a much quicker second half of the journey!

This job is full of pleasures both big and small. One of the small ones today was to introduce one of my colleagues to the joy that is the Foyles bookshop in London. If you’ve never been to Foyles, it’s difficult to explain why this wonderful shop is different to all the other bookshops in central London (and, I believe, in the UK as a whole), but every time I get to show someone this mecca of books, the reaction is always a good one.

I managed to escape with just three books: one of the Wu style of Tai Chi, a replacement for my loaned-and-never-to-be-returned copy of the Principles of Effortless Power (another martial arts book), and the new book from Packt on OpenSER. That last one is going to live in the office, me thinks.

I also managed to escape the Apple store without a new Macbook Pro, but only because they didn’t have a 4GB RAM model to hand for me to take with me there and then (they normally do the upgrade in the shop on demand, but I didn’t have the time to wait the three hours they quoted for it). As much as I love my current Macbook Pro, I’m finding the short battery life (<2 hours on average) to be a bit tight on the longer journeys I’m now doing. The later generations can manage double that, which I’d find much more convenient. Ah well, maybe later in the year as a Christmas treat to myself.

The worst thing I’ve done so far was totally self-inflicted. I managed to brick my Nokia N82. As wonderful as Parallels is for running Windows on the Mac, never ever try running a Nokia firmware upgrade using it. I tried; the whole virtual machine died partway through the firmware upgrade, and the N82 was toast. (Wouldn’t it be great if Nokia had A/B firmware slots like digital cameras do? They could release firmware upgrades much more regularly and not be worried about silly folks like me bricking their phones). It had to be sent back to Nokia, and I’m missing it greatly. I hope it comes back soon! Then I can start loading Ordnance Survey raster data onto it

Oh, we’ve just made it to Swindon. Maybe I’ll make it home today instead of tomorrow after all …