I haven’t been. I’ve let my novel slip horribly due to all the stupid but necessary wrangles that have been going on in my life.

But things are calming down a little now. An excerpt of the first chapter was read out last night, and chapter nine is underway. Just need to keep the pace up….

Edit It’s amazing how much easier it is to write an angsty novel when you’re effectively living in one. Now that things are calmer, I’m finding it very difficult to keep the tone of the novel dark. Hopefully, there won’t be a cost to my soul in doing so.

Sleeping so soundly

Softly smiling, holding tight

Your arms around me.

“Gardez l’eau!” the leathery little man bellowed, and promptly ejected the unpleasant contents of a small blue bucket from the first floor window.

Standing, as I was, directly underneath, I was shocked, stunned, and not a little bemused to find myself suddenley decorated in what had, until very recently, been the contents of a complete stranger’s colon. I am by no means xenophobic, but if I must find myself lathered in excrement at eleven o’ clock in the morning, I would much rather it was, at the very least, the excrement of someone I knew and preferably that of a close personal friend.

“I say,” I said, with a furrowing of my brow (which, incidentally, caused some rather nasty trickles to make their way around the sides of my face), “may I perhaps suggest a little consideration for passers-by when lobbing your unmentionables from your window, my good Sir?”

“No you may not,” snapped the little man. “I shouted the customary warning. Anyone hearing those words should consider themselves fairly warned. Your personal hygiene is not my responsibility.”

I squinted up at him, mopping ineffectually at my face with the morning newspaper. “It is also customary,” I began through gritted teeth, “to allow a little time to elapse between calling the warning and letting fly with the bucket of effluence.”

The little man’s leathery visage set hard, looking for all the world like a gorilla’s palm. “I allowed more than sufficient time for a plan of evasion to be produced and executed,” he stated.

“You did nothing of the kind, I cried, shaking my fist. “The two events were as near simultaneous as makes no odds! You need to leave a margin of at least a few seconds to allow the individual occupying your intended strike-point to take himself out of harms way – otherwise you end up in a heated debate with an enraged and excrement-soaked stranger.”

He leaned out from the window and studied me intently. He did at least appear to be giving the suggestion a reasonable amount of thought.

“So you’re saying,” he began slowly, “that I should call ‘Gardez l’eau’… and then wait?”

“Yes,” I said. “You should wai…”

The second flood of noxious semi-solids struck me full on the face, and the bucket followed less than a second later.

I danced from foot to foot in a furious little jig and shrieked incoherent outrage up into the annoying little man’s face. “Why?” I bellowed. “Why would you do that?”

“By means of demonstration,” he cried, offended. “As you are being so good as to assist me in improving this essential life-skill, I felt it only fair that I should take the opportunity to demonstrate that I had assimilated your information correctly!”

“But you didn’t have to actually throw it! And you certainly didn’t have to lob the bucket down afterwards!”

“Ah yes, I do apologise for that – I’m afraid I became a little over-enthusiastic in my learnings. In my defence, however, I should point out that you had adequate time to prepare yourself but chose instead to stand chatting.”

“What?” I gasped. “Because I didn’t realise you were going to throw another bucket of foul water on me!”

His eyes fairly bulged from his shoe-like face. “I cried the customary warning!”

“In demonstration!” I shrieked, recommencing my little hopping dance of fury. “In conversation!”

“When someone says ‘gardez l’eau’”, the little man said carefully, “It should be perfectly evident that something unpleasant is likely to follow. Whether in conversation or not.”

Before I could gather my rapidly spinning thoughts, the third deluge of filth sluiced down from above with the sound of an overinflated snail.

“Gaaaaaah!” I cried, and was suddenley cut short as a large galvanised steel bucket wedged itself firmly over my shocked head.

I staggered to and fro for a moment before grasping the bucket with slippery filth-soaked hands and pulled it from my head.

“That was deliberate!” I wailed.

“Of course it was deliberate,” said the little man. “That’s why I said ‘gard’…”

“Shut up! Shut up!” I roared, incandescent with smelly rage. I raced across to the other side of the street as the little man disappeared back inside the building. As I stood panting and leaning against the wall, he reappeared bearing what looked like a firehose.

I gaped in horror. “What do you have there, Sir?” I whispered.

He thought about it for a moment and then smiled.

“Pressure,” he said. “And range.”

Dear Nelefans,

Please forgive the brief interruption to service. Apache disappeared up its own arse and took the server with it.

Love,

John

…there appears to be a conspicuous absense of Orange Stupid in the office today. It’s like we’ve been granted a temporary reprieve or a stay of execution. I guess it’s only a matter of time before it returns. However, let’s take a minute to have a little look around.

I went for a nap at lunchtime yesterday. The sun was out and there was a lovely mid-June warmth in the air. That, coupled with a fresh sea breeze from the harbour, made it eminently nappable. So, not wanting to lie on the grass exposed to the various bitey-stingy-clawy beasts, I opted for the car approach. I at least had the foresight to set the alarm so I wouldn’t over snooze, but as it was the birdsong, breeze and murmers of traffic soon lulled me into a full-on one-leg-out-the-window, arms akimbo snorefest. Which was nice.

It looks like I’m going to be in London for part of next week, so I’m debating whether or not to apply the same technique to my usual on-the-plane snooze.

I’m posting from Flock. It’s a firefox / mozilla derivative browser with all kinds of weird and wonderful social networky stuff built in. And it’s not bad.

So, set the way-back machine to June 1996. A hairy, bearded, UNIX nerd sits in the back office of Cyberia Cafe on Hanover Street in Edinburgh. He’s been writing these games and, as he hosts web sites for a living, he reckons he should actually have somewhere to distribute them from.

So he sits and ponders. A year or so previously, he’d been absorbed into the Yoyo Collective Consciousness – that mystical circle of ill-repute which attracts the lonely, lost, broken and damned sysadmins of the world and rolls them into a single glittering gestalt. So, web space was there, all that was needed was a domain to point at it.

Hence ‘nelefa.org’ was chosen, and to this day people struggle to pronounce it. It’s “nelly-fah”. It’s how someone who can’t say “Elephant” might pronounce it if they were being cute.

At the time, Nominet (can’t quite remember if they were actually called Nominet at the time – I think that came later) were charging £100 + VAT for an org.uk domain, so I went straight to InterNIC (while they were still selling domains on their own) and got the .org for a third of the cost and a fraction of the paperwork.

And so nelefa.org was born. It was originally hosted on the first incarnation of the Yoyo hardware then moved onto my own Sun ELC (which went by the name of Little Nelly) – a beautiful little machine consisting of a 33MHz sparc v7 on a single board with 16Mb of system RAM and an external SCSI drive. The O/S used was NetBSD as it was tiny and fast and didn’t object to having bugger all memory.

Nowadays, nelefa.org lives on a virtual machine hosted by Xeriom Networks, who I am happy to unashamedly pimp as they provide an awesome service, but the links to yoyo still run deep – the only reason it’s been moved to its own machine is because I don’t want to hog the yoyo bandwidth with the ridiculous amount of traffic I get.

So, over the years there’s been many iterations of the site and a lot of the earliest content has been lost in the mists of time. For the past few years it’s been running wordpress and there is content from as far back as 1998, so please feel free to join in the birthday celebrations and have a dig through the post archive just for the lols

The Grand Weekend of Migration went according to plan and there were no issues. But that’s not very interesting.

I’m getting the hang of living (mostly) alone but still don’t seem to have very much time on my hands. But that’s not very interesting.

The weather has been very hot of late – good for barbeques, walks in the woods, and lazing around. Not so good for driving to work. But that’s not very interesting.

There’s a hedgehog living in my back garden. I feed it apples and catfood and it’s becoming less shy with every passing day. But that’s not very interesting.

I finally paid my outstanding invoices to Xeriom (sorry, Craig!). But that’s not very interesting. Except to Craig.

So, as you can see, very little of any interest is happening in my life. But that, in itself, is quite interesting.

So, it’s Monday morning on the week of The Grand Architecture Migration. Frankly, I’m shitting myself about it. We’ve covered everything as comprehensively as possible, but there’s always that little niggle of doubt.

Thing is, we have a limited time window in which to operate – a matter of a couple of days. If the migration fails to happen in this time, we have to roll back an continue with the old, unreliable, risky platform.

Back up a couple of paces. Basically, we’re taking a HUGE oracle web app and porting it from knackered old Sun boxes in London to shiny little Linux boxes in Edinburgh. So there’s endian issues to begin with. There’s also the problem of having to run an older version of Oracle as the whole webapp relies on mod_plsql. There’s a 40 Gb database which needs to be exported, compressed, scp’d over the net, uncompressed and imported. This all takes a lot of time and has us hard against our time limits. (By the way – thanks, Oracle – we didn’t actually NEED an incremental export facility (girr!)).

So, in theory, because it’s been tested to destruction, scripted to the eyeballs, and then tested again, it should all go according to plan.

Enter Orange Stupid. Unless we have someone running interference during the migration, his interference is almost guaranteed to cause delays. Which will result in us having to abort the whole exercise or risk going bust.

Like I said: shitting bricks.

And the waves lap gently at the sand, pushing it up and pulling it back, undecided on whether they should stay or go but nevertheless forced into constant motion by the irresistible pull of the moon.

Chrissy sits and waits on the shoreline for the dashing young man who must surely happen by soon. But the waves lap, and the sand stirs, and Chrissy’s shadow lengthens across the hard packed rippled surface and still he does not appear.

Her crown sits askew on her golden head and her eyes gaze vacantly down at her feet. She wriggles her toes into the sand and watches as the saturated ground gives up its water in tiny pools around her feet.

The sun dips lower in the sky, resting its head sadly on the horizon, and sends glowing amber beams of sympathy to soothe the young girl’s pain. She smiles back sadly, and looks once more along the empty beach.

She folds her arms over her knees and rests her chin on them. She sings softly to herself. It may be “Some day my Prince will come,” but we can’t quite hear. A light breeze creeps cautiously from the ocean surface and sidles up the beach. It lifts a few strands of soft, fine, hair and strokes them gently. “There, there. Everything will work out fine.”

She rises and stands before the ocean with her arms held out. The breeze grows a little more excited, flicking at her white linen dress, and whispering in her ear. She spins slowly on the spot, a careful pirouette, pointing with her right foot and inscribing a perfect circle for her Prince to cross. She raises her arms in a graceful arch above her head and pivots forwards, raising one leg in an elegant Arabesque.

The lapping waves give a gurgling chuckle at the dancing girl while their parents roar approval from further afield. The wind cheers and whistles as it flows alongside her, constantly caressing, touching, guiding and leading. She dances up the beach, her shadow flickering and waving and the sun turns the water to fire as it clings to the last scrap of the sea. As she dances across the demarcation line between the ocean’s domain and the land’s, the dry sand leaps excitedly in the air around her feet, kicked into glittering tornados by the energy of her passing. From over the border, the brine-soaked ocean sand looks on with envy.

And then he is there, clad in white, tall, lean, his face indistinct with the sun at his back. She dances around him, laughing and crying, desperate for a glimpse of his long awaited face. She spins towards him and the last ray of the dying sun burns fiercely in her heart before vanishing, leaving her alone and silent on the empty beach once more. Her arms fall to her sides and her gaze turns down to the eternal sand. She sinks to her knees with her arms outstretched. The beach takes her hands and the ocean strokes her arms.

And the waves lap gently at the sand and the wind sighs its pity. Chrissy sits and Chrissy waits for another glimpse on another day, while the weeping sun rolls its moment of magical twilight around the world.