Long time, no blog

It's been a very long time since I last wrote anything here, almost a month really, and there's been a lot I wanted to write about. Of course since my attention span is so short, the idea with this blog was to make lots of little posts before I forgot what it was I wanted to write about. This hasn't happened yet, instead I seem to put out relatively long posts and I still feel like there was something I forgot to write. Well things haven't changed yet so strap yourselves in, this could take a while.

When we left you the last time, I was about to go on my inaugural ski trip. I was very excited to be able to go skiing outside of an artificial slope (which I hadn't done anyway) but was a little nervous going with a large group of people that I didn't know but would be stuck with for a week. Despite my fears, the trip was a big success. Not only did I learn how to snowboard, I also managed to enjoy myself, me, actually enjoy myself. Yes you heard it here first. I was faced with a tough decision over which to learn; snowboarding or skiing. The vast majority of people on the trip were skiers, and the two people who did snowboard were very experienced. Still, delusions of learning to snowboard being easier and visions of SSX flashing before my eyes I took the more treacherous road of snowboarding. Shaking off thoughts of just learning how to snowboard myself (it seemed really easy at the time, so why would you need lessons?) I forked over the money for a weeks worth of lessons. This would become basically all I did on the slopes all week since the course was 5 days of back-to-back double lessons. This was quite demanding, giving me a mid-week day off and only the mid afternoon to myself. I thought that I'd be able to catch up with other people in the group in the afternoons if not on my day off. How wrong I was. The first two days were quite tiring and my afternoons were spent back at the chalet recovering. My day off was spoiled by a quite spectacular crash on my second day; going straight on a flat, long, gradual slope I managed to have the worst wipeout of the week, tumbling about 10 metres and doing 2 flips! I later found that I sprained my elbow as well, but it didn't really hurt until the next day where I couldn't fully extend my arm or put much weight on it. This ruled out any boarding on my day off, so I had to reluctantly retire to the chalet again after doing a couple of blue runs with some workmates. By the last day I did actually get together with the rest of the group and skied around the peaks for a while before heading back to return the hire gear and have our last meal.

The actual resort and slopes were stunning. We were at Meribel in Les Trois Vallees, proclaimed (self proclaimed I think) to be the best skiing location in Europe. Something like the most runs per square kilometre or something. They might well be right, it's 3 valleys right next to each other with interconnecting lifts/busses/etc. You can get a single valley ski lift pass if you want, but for not much more you can have an all access pass which lets you use any lift in the 3 valleys. There's actually 4 valleys now, but the new one is a little pokey thing with about 4 runs on it, and I think the company that runs all the lifts is actually called Les 3 Vallees so I don't think they'll be calling it Les 4 Vallee anytime soon. As a beginner I spent most of my time on the Meribel slopes. They're very beginner friendly, but there's a catch for snowboarders. To make sure you have complete control of your board at all times, the bindings for your feet on a snowboard have to be very secure. Most bindings are the ratchet style, like the laceless roller-blades or ice skate boots have, but on the outside (snowboarding boots are actually more comfortable than ski boots, almost like regular shoes). They have a quick release but are difficult to do up, especially without sitting down. This means that if there's no slope, snowboarders have little option than to undo one or both of their bindings and walk (or skate with one foot) until there is a slope. Skiers of course can use their poles or doing an ice-skating type motion, I even saw some skiers not use poles at all. This starts out ok for snowboarders, but becomes downright annoying. It also puts you in a little bit of a quandary; you're skill level is about right for green runs, but they're not steep enough. So you try some blues, but you end up falling over a lot since it's a little beyond your ability. I tended to take the blue option, until the last day when I was completely knackered while going around with a friend and took what turned out to be a very long green. In this situation, a skier is a boarder's best friend (other than this they are mortal enemies). My friend actually towed me along so I could gather some speed and make long sections of the run without walking, until I fell down.

Ah, enough about my trip to the Alps (and enough with my name dropping ... when I went to the Alps, when I was skiing, blah blah blah), I've got some photos still on Paul's camera and I'll try to upload them soon. I arrived back in London just in time to have lots of work to do. A pre-Alpha delivery was required for the project I'm on, and it was to be feature complete and subject to a full Alpha testing cycle. Sounds like an early alpha milestone to me, but anyway it meant getting all the things finished for the online features (that's my job). If I haven't told you before, I don't like developing on Symbian. I'm a big Nokia fan, but their decision to use the Symbian OS for their phones seems like a mistake. Maybe it's just the Series 60 phones that suck, but the Symbian I'm working with just looks like a mess. It claims to be C++, but really it's a butchered half implementation that's no where near the standard. This means non-portable code and it's a nightmare to debug. Speaking of debugging, most of that must be accomplished on an emulator. The problem is that the compilation is actually different for the emulator compared to the actual phone (otherwise known as "on device"). This was the cause of my latest headache, after weeks of testing on the emulator, safe in the misguided knowledge that it's an easy task to get it on device, I came across errors that caused everything to fail. One of the other people on the group eventually found that it was a compiler bug, using a typedef'd anonymous struct generated a name collision so the wrong constructor was called, which caused me no end of stress. Anyway, with that sorted out it was quick to get the rest of it up to scratch and I'm back on track now. I still hate Symbian with a passion though, take a look at some source code of a symbian program and I'm sure you will agree.

I've finally got myself a kettlebell. It's 25kg (my one in Australia is 16kg so I thought I may as well work with a heavier one) and I can really feel the difference, at least in the presses. I'm really hoping it can build up some muscle around my left shoulder and stop it from clicking all the time, but slowly does it. I haven't got back to Polonia about getting some court time, but I guess I should also turn up to trainings with them before that. Hopefully I haven't missed out on all of those prison matches yet. And I've got myself a new time sink, World of Warcraft. It finally came out so we're playing on the official servers now. I've switched from Alliance to the Horde for now, an Orc Warrior called Drandar (I always suck at making up fantasy character names, but can't change it now). WoW customers can't bridge the continental divide yet, but if you're at all interested I'm playing on the Deathwing server. Sometime Blizzard are planning to let Europe customers play on the US servers and vice versa, so hopefully I'll be able to play with some friends from Oz (I only know two people there that are playing it though).

I'm going to stop this post now and post another one immediately to give the impression that I'm doing regular updates again.