Avaragado's blog

Avaragado’s mild peril: Contains frequent snide comments.

Much more interesting than writing a CV is, well, almost
everything. But there’s a whole class of activities that you can, if
you wave your hands in a certain way, justifiably consider part of
writing your CV, even though you’re not actually writing your
CV. You could call this writing your meta-CV, if you were some kind of
loon.

Obvious example: deciding how you want the CV to look. Classic
meta-CV writing, lots of scope for experimenting. Mmm,
fonts.

But you know me. I need to take it just that little bit
further.

Two things stood out straight away: I wanted the CV under version
control, and I didn’t want to write it in Word (I’d rather have a PDF
version). The first was easy: I’ve got a Subversion setup for version
control, which I use for my web site. New repository for CV and other
non-web site creations: five minutes.

PDF? Well, OpenOffice.org
exports to PDF natively in version 1.1. But its standard file format
is zipped XML files, which annoyed me. How would I do diffs? For
version control zipped XML is as bad as any other binary
format. Explode, commit, implode? Too complicated.

Bah, I thought, and naturally decided to roll my own XML. Easy
version control. Easy editing (xemacs, of course!). And when writing
I would concentrate on the content, and not constantly fiddle with
layout. I already had a good idea of the structure I wanted to use
for the content, so the schema would be pretty easy.

How to get from XML to PDF? Through the strategic application of
more acronyms. Take one XML document. Whisk with XSLT to produce XSL-FO. Bake using Apache FOP. And hey poncho:
PDF. And while I’m at it, I could use a similar XSLT transform to give
me HTML sprinkled with CSS, no baking required.

And that’s where I am today: an XML CV, built to HTML and PDF
(with layouts more or less identical). All the content is tagged so I
can build targeted CVs by keyword – so much easier than
maintaining multiple documents in parallel.

Now bow down before my meta-CV mastery!

(No you can’t see it… yet.)

Received a letter today from the health insurance company. “It would appear from our records,” they say, “that your membership … was cancelled with effect from 1 November 2003.” Bless them for noticing. They carry on by regretting that they’ll be unable to pay the £150 charged by my surgeon for the fifteen-minute how-you-doing session three weeks ago (mmm, £10 a minute…).

“We trust that all is in order and return a copy of the account herewith.” How nice. Oh well, I’ll have to pay it myself I guess, with one of those old-fangled cheques.

So much for the promise to get in touch with me when Tarantella cancelled my membership so that I could be given the option of joining in a personal capacity.

Still, I got my money’s worth: they paid over £6000 for the scans, surgery and hospital stay. This was one (the only?) Tarantella benefit that did actually work out…

I’ve got my ticket for Return of the King. December 17th, 8pm, Warner Village. Book early to avoid disappointment.

Being dole scum I could saunter along to see it at 10am, but the place will be full of kids at that time of day. At 8pm it’ll only be full of people wearing “Tolkien is Hobbit-forming” t-shirts etc. [Note to self: don’t wear nerdy t-shirt that night.]

It seems people are hanging on my every word here. Or Chris is, at
least. Time for an update then.

The spine thing: I’m sure I’m getting better, but some days
it doesn’t feel like it. On the bad days it hurts when I do this, for
various values of this, and I have to watch every step I take: an
uneven paving slab or all-elbows pensioner can surprise a range of
muscles in painful ways. On the good days I have to be careful: no
running across roads (the little green beeping man is my friend), no
fast moves, an avoidance of comfy chairs. I haven’t gone back to the
physio yet, but I will do soon.

The job thing: Had my first regular sign-on session on
Monday. Painless. I’m working on my CV and looking for jobs. No, I
am, honest! I don’t know the meaning of procrastination, me. Hang on,
I’ll look it up. And maybe dip into the interweb for examples. Wander
down to Borders to see what a newer dictionary says. That sort of
thing.

Will it be Summer soon?

To London last night with Chris and Melanie, to see Radiohead at Earl’s Court.

Pizza Hut first, where we sat opposite a George Lucas looky-likey (“but with a chin” according to Chris). We got to Earl’s Court in what we thought was plenty of time, but (along with several thousand others) were surprised to find that the support (Asian Dub Foundation) had scarpered already and the boys were on. We missed hardly anything though.

All the usual tunes, yer standard singalongs. (Americans and pseudo-Americans! You might be able to listen to it too.)

Unlike last time, we didn’t get wet. But I think I stood next to the Chairman and General Secretary of the Chain Smokers Association.

Two encores later, we started to head home when it was clear they’d gone off for good. But the toilets and the T-shirt stand beckoned, and by the time we left the building we were several thousand back in the race for the tube. The West Brompton tube was similarly chokka.

So we took a cab back to King’s Cross. “You see so much more than on the tube,” said Chris (he’d been drinking).

Sadly we had to take the 00:06 back to Cambridge, which stops at every opportunity. Still, I could have a lie in…

Those of you with little to do will rejoice at the news of more photos in Avaragado’s gallery (pages 7 and 8), going back to 1995 in fact. So what’s in this selection?

Christmas (“Taxi for Heckford”) party. Punt (“I am cold”) race. Model (“Give it to Bob”) cars. Alton (“You said five minutes!”) Towers. Sarah and Ades’s (“I do”) wedding. Tim’s (“Look for the big X”) birthday. Christmas (“Simply the best!”) party. Wild (“I thought they couldn’t turn over?”) tracks. CID managers (“People-smuggling”) offsite. SCO development (“Stop micromanaging”/”No”) kickoff. Punt (“Weil’s disease”) race. Christmas (“Darth Vader’s breastplate”) party. Alton (“Philip’s leaving do”) Towers. Alpe (“I couldn’t stop”) D’Huez. Christmas (“False limb”) party.

Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians:

Doctors and experts are baffled by an Indian hermit who claims not to have eaten or drunk anything for several decades – but is still in perfect health.

Can a new Shazzie diet’n’book combo be far behind? The videos will be simpler, that’s for sure.

Squiddies and exsquiddies of some vintage will remember Mark Phillips, one-time product manager, occasionally known as The Captain.

He was in charge of things when we were adding arrays to the product for scalability. We originally called the array member in charge the “master”, and the subordinate servers the “slaves”. These terms were used in command-line tools, documentation, etc.

The Captain objected to “master” and “slave”, since they might possibly offend. We countered that master/slave was well-established terminology in the computer industry, but he wouldn’t budge. We eventually settled on “primary” and “secondary”, and cursed The Captain whenever we spotted another mention of “master” or “slave” that needed to change. (Some of us were still doing this five years later, as engineers occasionally wrote log messages using the original terminology, preserved in places deep within the code.)

What a waste of time, we thought. But it looks like The Captain was right all along. Los Angeles County recently announced that “based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, [master/slave] is not an acceptable identification label“.