Oh god. Five-and-a-quarter hour train journeys and me don’t mix. For the record, the Virgin Pendolino trains from London to Edinburgh, while giving you a fantastic view of the Lake District and full of tilty goodness, is not the most comfortable if you’re a pleb in standard class. They pack as many people in as possible in ‘airline’ seats and only the (very few) table seats have plugs for your laptop or mobile to charge on.

Having said that, the tickets on offer are dirt-cheap, which makes up for it. And the five hours gave me some valuable time to sit and read and hack about with things, so my brain is happy though my back and legs are not.

I’ve just got back home after a 10-day break in London, to an email inbox overflowing (174 messages) and I don’t want to even look at my RSS reader. Most of my internet use was business rather than pleasure while I was down there so I didn’t blog much and only linklogged occasionally. Sorry. This will change. I am now back in Edinburgh, refreshed (ish) and without the burden of essays or any other nags, so this should mean plenty of spare time to waste spend blogging to all and sundry.

In the meantime, enjoy one small piece of interweb goodness I caught - Dabblers and Blowhards (via ntk) is an excellent debunking of a crappy analogy that tries to hang hacking and coding on the coat-tails of painting (oil, rather than house - though I’m sure you could come up with some analogies to the latter as well if you thought hard enough). There is always the paradoxical situation of people pushing information technologies as new and revolutionary, while at the same time trying to portray them as the equivalent of some other art form (in the UK, this could be called the Swiss Toni method of explanation). The truth probably lies somewhere in between, in a subtle and complex manner, but that’s not as easy or as much fun as going “You see Paul, hacking in Lisp is much like making love to a beautiful woman…”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 23:55:25 and is filed under General.