London Life: Borough Market

Living in London do has it's benefits. Sure there are a lot of things you can pick at but overall, I think if you can find the neat things to do, it ain't all that bad.

Borough Market is London's oldest food market. This morning Lucy and I took a stroll over to have a nose around. After a walk around for a bit, we purchased some amazing vegetables and I ended up picking up a nice jar of dill pickles and sushi grade tuna. That to me is very very cool and the variety and quality of products is much much better then the Sainsbury's local!

-sd

here piggy piggy, the big digit and other housekeeping

swine flu you say?  H1N1?  will it trigger a global crisis?  Lord of the Flies?  here piggy piggy...

at first thought i think of oinking, The League of Gentlemen and rolling around in feces.  global epidemic that will create a special town for special folk.  

then it clicks in.  this is for real.  now that we're living in London and I'm working in the City, i need to take the tube daily and it's not uncommon to shake armpits with fellow travellers, let alone pick up flu germs from poles and other hard surfaces. 

so i put on my visionary hat and here is what i have come up with:

Visionary point #1:

My ice hockey gear has anti-bacterial gel all over so that it doesn't stink.  that's the benefit and what sold me on it.  why not coat the entire tube and other surfaces with this anti-bacterial gel?  it's long lasting and then maybe the tube would smell better?

After living through SARS in Toronto I have my anti-bacterial hand gel with me all the time.  Not taking chances. 

30 is just around the corner.  May 31 

Now as you can see from Wikipedia, I'm not cool enough to warrant any mention, yet.  Brings me to my next thought.  Who determines who should be and who shouldn't be on Wikipedia?  Everyone has a story and everyone contributes to history.  

His-Story ... this is the only real fact that has stuck with me since high school.  Whoever lived, whoever won the war, whoever was allowed to write his story, defines history.  In the time and present that is now ... shouldn't wikipedia be a bit more savvy and not exclude people from history?  

Visionary point #2:

Wikipedia is great but needs to evolve into something much more organic fusing historical facts relating to everything and everyone.  Everything records our daily behaviour on the internet now, why can't we start recording our daily life and define our history?  Blogs are a great way to do it, but they don't quite slot everything together properly.  

They will.  That's my prediction.  Give it a few years, you'll see history and blogs blend together more...

Finally, the wedding.  July 1, 2009.  Small and quaint here in London.  Will be a bit odd.  Some mixed emotions, although they are all good.  Afterwards we will make our way down to Trafalgar Square to Celebrate Canada Day.

Visionary point #3:  

Get married on a national holiday in a foreign country.  When you move back 'home' you'll have your anniversary as a satutory holiday every year.  

-sasha

more hadoop

well, in the end i had to hurt myself to understand that i have to keep things simple. in the end, hadoop gives you the ability to have a single file system that appears to your java program as a FileSystem. Once i understood this things started to fly and i'm back on track to understanding how all of this new fancy shmancy stuff works...

continued education

in an effort to keep ahead, or at least, on top of the curve, i have been making attempts to get up to speed on technologies: Hadoop, HBase, Lucene, etc. I tell you, nothing I have come across so far bends my brain as much. maybe i over complicate, maybe i'm not complicated enough. reminds me of when i was trying to 'figure out' java. took a long time for some of the concepts to snap.

been reading lots and lots of posts out there. i like how some suggest that if you have a background with RDBMS then you need to unlearn. no one says how exactly ; )

oh well. bank holiday monday here in the uk. quiet, overcast ... just like i remember they used to be.

-sasha

New Job, New City, New Pandemic

Been a while. It's been a little hectic, up and down, etc. That and well, didn't really have much to write about.

New Job: Working for Thomson Reuters now on a short contract. Large company. As large as Nestle in some respects. Just like Nestle, never knew how big it is until I showed up...!

New City: Living in London now for the next little while (short term for the moment) a few blocks south of Tower Bridge. Nice area to be in and not as expensive as I would have thought. I'll get some photos of the flat and put them online at some point.

New Pandemic: This is all a little familiar. SARS anyone? If people wash their hands ... can't we stop a lot of illness? Although, having said that, normal flu kills lots of people every year.

So what's up now? Well, 30 is just around the corner. Lucy and I have also set a wedding date. More information about that at a later point in time...

-sd