john.layt.net

I haven't posted for a while, mainly because I've barely been home and rather busy for someone supposedly unemployed.  Just after my last post one of my sisters arrived from back home in NZ to stay for a month, so I spent a week hanging out with her around London, before I went on an archaeological dig for 2 weeks.  Archaeology is another passion of mine, I go digging several times a year and study part-time at uni with some thought of merging my digger side with my geek side as a career. 

This dig was on an octagonal-shaped Roman bath house in Kent, complete with plunge pool, hypocaust, drains and lead piping (cue plenty of Life of Brian quotes...).  It's only the third of it's kind found in the UK, there being only 70 or 80 examples across the rest of Europe.  Not as exciting as the cemetary earlier in the year, but it was a real puzzle trying to sort out the different phases.  Lots of hard physical labour shifting piles of dirt in the blazing sun, some delicate trowel work, and way too much drinking in the evening made for a great break from the usual geek lifestyle.  3G reception was non-existant so the net addiction abated for a while :-)  Below is an aerial shot of the site using a boom mounted camera.

After the dig I took off to join my sister on her holiday in Croatia and Greece, with a couple of quick detours through Bosnia and Italy along the way.  The weather was fantastic, sunny and 26-30 degree, and Croatia is a great country to visit.  I only got to see Split and Dubrovnik and the coast in-between, places I've dreamt of since reading about them in a Hardy Boys adventure as a kid, so it's somewhere to definately go back to later.

In Greece we only really went to Athens, somewhere I've been to before, but at least this time I got to see the Antikythera Mechanism, the oldest known mechanical calculator dating from around 100BC.  I'm sure I've heard about a javascript simulation, I wonder if we could get a plasmoid of it?

All through this time I was trying to keeping up a training schedule for my first ever half marathon, which I ran last Sunday.  Unfortunately things didn't go well and I finished about 30 minutes slower than my training times suggested, which means I'm going to have to figure out what went wrong and try it again in a few months time.

So, life is finally returning to semi-normal and I can get back into the important things, like deciding what I can hack on for KDE before the feature freeze kicks in, and I guess I should do something about finding a job.  Thanks to a couple of fellow KDE hackers, I have talked to a couple of FOSS/Qt companies but unfortunately the opportunities didn't really fit. The contract market is still very dead, especially in the financial / mainframe sector I know best and it could be a while before something suitable comes along, so I'm starting to look at other options.

Next posts, I'll fill you all in on the status of printing, and what I've been doing with Calendar Systems and the Plasma Calendar.

A Merry Christmas to one and all from a chilly but sunny Prague where I'm spending Christmas with my sister on a week-long escape from the grey of London.  We may have missed out on it being a white Christmas, but it's a beautiful corner of Europe to be spending time in, especially as it's my sisters first truely 'foreign' country (Australia, the UK and USA don't really count, as strange as they may be :-)  In-between chilling out and stuffing my face, I may even find time to post some photos...