Dan McNeil's Blog

Sofie Seliger was born in 1927 in a the small town of Leopoldsdorf on the outskirts of Vienna, in Austria to parents Heinrich and Bertha.  A nominally Jewish family, they farmed pigs, amongst other things.  Sofie had three brothers – Walter, Kurt and Robert.  They used to play in the fields around their home, and generally cause all sorts of trouble.  As the only girl, Sofie used to stick up for herself, and her brother Walter would later describe her as “a bossy sister”. They were part of a large family in and around Vienna.  Sofie was named after her Danish grandmother, who died before Sofie was born.  Sofie’s grandfather ran a watch-making shop in central Vienna and Sofie used to go in and help him wind up all the clocks. Life was calm and gentle. A  happy family in the middle of Europe. However, things were to change forever in the 1930s.  The advance of the Nazis into Austria saw the Seliger family lose their home and be forced ...

There, I did it.  A crap joke about the fact that I'm in Seattle and awake at a stupid time in the morning.  I arrived here on Saturday, and applied my usual technique of "staying awake until a normal time on the first night, then going to bed really tired".  It's a technique which has always worked in the past for snapping me into the new timezone. However, this room has a real flame fire.  It's rather nice.  A little switch by the bed puts the fire on for a timed hour, meaning that you can fall asleep by the light of a roaring fire, and then it'll turn itself off afterwards.  The problem is, though, that a roaring fire makes the room warm.  And a warm room makes for a sleepy room.  And so yesterday afternoon, when I put the fire on to stave off the rain pouring outside, I found myself waking up quite a few hours later thinking "oh, bugger!".  And true enough, despite getting to bed at a sensible time last night, I woke up at 5.30am today....

I've not written in here for over a month.  Mostly because I've been busy watching the Paralympics and visiting Edinburgh, amongst other things.  So, to fill the gap - here are a few things which I've learned in the past month. 1. George Michael isn't above plugging his new single at the Olympics Closing Ceremony 2. The National Trust have a strange lack of properties in and around Cheshire 3. Some motorways are really short and can be driven end-to-end in an hour 4. Tim Minchin makes a really good Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar 5. Fireworks can be synchronised to music 6. The absolute nadir of television has been reached with "Sing Date" 7. Southend Pier is indeed very long 8. Chester Cathedral isn't as big as I remember it being 9. Lady Gaga is really quite good live 10. Boron burns with a lovely colour

Far too often I write in here about things I don't like - so in an attempt to redress that balance I'm going to write the positive.  London has been a genuinely great place to be the past two weeks and so I present - in no particular order - my 10 favourite things about the Olympic games. One Before the games, it wasn't uncommon to hear people talk about how they were escaping London for the games.  Transport would be terrible and they had no interest in sport.  Since the games have started, I've not met a single person who's said that they wish they'd left town.  So, the first thing on my list is the fantastic atmosphere that's been in London for the past couple of weeks. All around town, people are wandering around wearing their huge Olympic ID badges.  I chatted to some officials from The Bahamas whilst queuing for coffee at Waterloo in the first week.  Even gold medal winners have been getting on the tube. The atmosphere in London has been tang...

So, I’m going to review the Olympic Opening Ceremony.  We were lucky enough to get tickets to the technical rehearsal last night, and so we got to see the show from the opening through to the point where the athletes will walk in on Friday night. The big theme of the night was #savethesurprise – we were all asked to not give away the surprises of the evening, so that it would still be a spectacular for everyone watching on Friday night.  This isn’t a case of The Olympic Brand ™ being protected, this is simply a case of not wanting to spoil the surprise of what is actually a specatular show. So, how can I review the show without giving away the surprise.  I’ll give it a go… So, we’ve all seen the publicity photos of the village green with people playing cricket.  That bit isn’t secret.  But then, loads of people come on and start ****** the ***** so that it changes into an ********** ***** with a big ***** which ***** out ***** with fireworks and tu...

I've spent the past few days at the SPA2012 conference at the BCS in London.  It's the first time I've been, and so I wasn't really sure what to expect.  It was certainly an interesting few days, and I learned a few things and disagreed with a few things - but it was all the more interesting for it. I'm not a developer.  I used to be, but I left full-time development behind quite a few years ago.  I still remember the rudiments, and still read code from time to time, but it's been a couple of years since I wrote code for fun, and even longer since I wrote it professionally.  When I was a full-time developer, C++ was the language of choice.  OO was the buzzword and Java was a newcomer.  Most of what was being written was being written in C++ and legacy code was in C.  I then moved onto Symbian, an unashamed C++ shop.  So C++ is where I spent the majority of my coding days. These days, the code at work is Java and Python.  There's a bi...

I'm writing this sitting in Starbucks. I've turned into one of those people.  You know - the ones who write things in Starbucks.  On a laptop. There was only a short queue this morning, away from the serving bit, along the counter.  There were three of us standing in the queue, and then one woman - who was American but that's not revelant - who stood in the middle of the floor vaguely near the till.  When someone in the queue pointed out that there was a queue she said "Yes, I know, and I'm in it".  She thus placed a moral obligation on those of us in the queue to remember her virtual place in the queue and cede our turn to be served when it came to the right moment.  Indidivually it's quite a hard task to remember her place in the queue, but we only needed to collectively achieve that effect - so individually we didn't need to remember her place in the queue, but simply remember whether she was in front of us or behind us.  Though not even that. ...