Beastie Boys

Over celebration

The Biggest Hypocrite In England

City populations

Must have been bored today.
Started looking at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe then got to....

Different ways of counting city population....:


Largest_urban_areas_of_the_European_Union: Manchester is 7th largest area with 3.8 mill people.

Largest_European_metropolitan_areas: Manchester is 11th with 4.2 mill people. However in the Manchester City itself is only 440,000 (but that does not include Salford, Oldham, Trafford, Sale, etc).

Larger_Urban_Zones_(LUZ)_in_the_European_Union: Manchester is 14th with 2.8 mill people. The scousers keep interfering in the others, but this is perhaps the proper size of Manchester.


Ps. Looking at it differently

www.top500.de/cities/ranks/page000.php: Oslo is Europe's fifth largest city!

JavaZone

Another JavaZone finished. Two full days of geektime, but fun. Stressfull, as there were too many simultaneous presentations. But it is well planned, with a lot of renowned presentors.

Best presentations was:

* Tijs Rademakers and Jos Dirksen showing how to use Mule in a easy to follow style.

* James Coplien debunking some agile myths.

* Matt Raible comparing web frameworks.



My hands have been itching for a chance to test some the new tech and methods. A vaccine jab at the doctor today killed all that though!

ClubZone, the evening entertainment, while looked good on paper and probably a lot of effort to plan, was a disaster. The problem was the Norway-Greece footy match. Fitting 2500 people (okay probably some were not into football ) into the only place that showed the match was never going to work. So my group all went home to catch the second half. No free beer for us.

Now how can I introduce Mule into our stack, without a special need for it....

facebookerized

Ok. so Ive joined facebook a few months ago, and it now seems most of the people I know are members. Suppose the media attention of how dangerous it is, attracts more...

Can be a bit adictive at the start, and really nice to see what happened to old friends. But novelity will probably go down after a while. However if my core friends are on by then it is a nice tool to stay in touch and plan stuff.

Will knee spoil summer?

Was looking forward to the summer...

Had started cycling to work after the winter and planning long bike trips, prepared the golf clubs for finally some real usage and both football with mates and work was moving from indoor astroturf to real grass, then I go and blow up my knee!

So now Im hobbling like a muppet, with a knee which the doc recon may be jumpers knee combined with inflamed joint fat pads. Nice. However I hope that is the only problem as it is treatable.

Its not only sport thats affected, but also weekend trips and every tasks are restricted, so its not fun for Chloe either. But that may be mostly due to my winging.

Its been a month since I injured it and the kne had started to get better. We travelled to Gothenburg at the weekend, and it was no problem.

But yesterday I stupidly decided to walk home from work. Walk was fine, and I was starting to get optimistic about playing footy soon again. Then as popped into a shop it "clicked" and I was in total agony again. Depressing.

Missing Old Trafford

Moved away from Manchester last summer, and have not been at Old Trafford at all this season. And Im starting to really miss it.



Having attended 100+ matches over the last 15 years, being at OT was a normal part of my life. Week in week out, with 60,000+ others, cheering on United, shouting abuse at scouse, city, cockney opposition and when we got good tickets, which was quite often, this was all within a few yards of the players.



Now watching on TV, is okay. But as the season is hotting up it feels so remote. Not going to loose my voice watching it on TV, last time I did that was after the CL final in 99.



Over here they use long weekends to go over for a game, spend loads of money on flights and hotels and get crap seats. While before Id get a pair of 5th row tickets for £26 each, have quick pint in the Quadrant before kick off, and afterwards be home in half an hour.

Oh well, suppose its not much else I do miss from Manchester, (perhaps Didsbury pubs), and I can use my weekends to get into skiing and sailing again....

Spring

Held recently a presentation on Spring at TietoEnator and NetCom. It was a brief introduction to the Spring Framework and the IOC, MVC, JDBC, Hibernate, Acegi modules.

It was the same presentation , but the first one dragged on for 1.5 hours. At which point the audience was getting quite bored. The second wizzed past in 30 minutes. This time the audience probably did not catch a lot of what I said.

It is definetly not easy. Both times the projectors played up and caused a lot of grief. The first presentation included way too many examples. The second not enough.

If curious, the presentation is here, and all the examples are here.