Once upon a Maundy Thursday
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-04-05 17:33:41 - Graham EllisMaundy Thursday - and I may have been expecting a quiet day in the run up to the Bank Holiday ... which I didn't get. In fact here I am now, late afternoon, sitting down to write a piece about coding standards with a bias towards Lua; it's a task I had hoped to get onto at first light. Do you ever ask "Where has all my time gone?"
When you're in the Hotel business, you meet a wide variety of people, and I'm delighted to do so. And variety means some interestong characters - including the couple who had a "domestic" this morning. The first we knew of the problem was a phone call "my partner's on the way back to the hotel - don't let [him/her] into the room as [he/she] has been ..." and from there it progressed. A very eventful time followed, which disgression forbids me from expanding upon - let's just say it was rather hard to get back into work mode when the guests had left - each in their separate direction - and we were quiet again. And, to be fair, those of us who had been on duty talked through the learning experience for us too; handled (spot on) by Sarah, but still worth while considering if we had done the right thing, and doing a risk assessment of the various elements while it was fresh in our minds.
Yes, I was expecting a quiet day. So I was slighly surprised, but still delighted, to be asked if I was still available to give a course at the end of next week. Yes indeed - actually only one of two 2-day green openings in my diary before the start of June. A flurry of activity getting that one into place. A further booking for the Lua course at the start of May, followed a short while later by a booking request for a private course that same week - it's wonderful to be popular, but disappointing to have to let the private course requester know that we can't offer the requested date. An alternative offered, but that may be too late as we're pretty busy with courses coming up - private Lua, Python, C, C++, and Python again - a possible Ruby pencilled in too.
<advert>We do still have places on public courses over the next 3 months: [course listing / link to each course]
• Learning to Program in Perl (from 16th April) - just 1 residential place (+2 for day delegates)
• Our C and C++ week (from 23rd April - vacancies for day delegates only as hotel rooms all full)
• Learning to program in Lua (from 8th May) and Lua Programming (from 9th) - good availability
• PHP courses from Sunday 27th May to Friday 1st June - good availability
• Python courses from 11th June
• Ruby courses from 17th June
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) deployment from 25th June </advert>
Hotel bookings are looking pretty busy too over the next few weeks - but bearing in mind we advertise primarily to businesses that means we're full during the week and often have good late availability at the weekend.
<advert> If you fancy a weekend away in Wiltshire, we've got rooms available at all the public holidays and most of the weekends in between too. Remember if you're a past delegate, you can stay at the delegate rate and we would love to welcome back old friends </advert> [hotel web site].
On Bank Holiday Monday, I'm travelling to East Anglia. A simple phone call booked my hotel. And a very complicated procedure indeed has left me confused as to the best way to get there by train. It seems that the trains aren't running to a Sunday timetable, they're not running to a Monday timetable - they're doing something else which you can only discover online by prodding the web sites and guessing when there might be one. For the record - Melksham has one 08:55 to Swindon and a 10:31 to Westbury; the following train is at 19:11. The First ticket desk isn't much the wiser, unable to offer me a through fare on the 10:31 and suggesting I buy multiple tickets for each leg of the journey. When I asked if there was an easier (and cheaper) split, as the fare offered was £90 this way versus the £60 I had paid to the same destination the other week, my advisor suggested I pop down to the station and ask the staff there. Problem - Melksham station is unstaffed. Think I might drive!
The "Digital Champions, Wiltshire" scheme seems to be coming much more on line today (see [here]), with a walk in and a phone call today looking to use our public access computers next week for the purpose. Yes, that's excellent, and another couple of activities to show that Maundy Thursday's not the quiet day we might have expected.
I had better post this - meal to cook, and Independent Trader's Meeting at 19:00. Perhaps Good Friday will be a good, quiet day to write about programming standards in Lua.