Andy McKay's blog

Emily and Samantha had a great time as sunset over Criccieth castle.

Dear Plone,

I'm sorry what I said about you today and I wanted to write a note to apologise. Perhaps it's just me, in fact I know it's me. It's not you, I'm just not good enough for you.

I know recently I've been flirting a bit with Rails, but that's over now, we won't be seeing each other again. Yes you've found out I've been seeing Django and I have to admit, it will always have a special place for me. I like to think that we are big enough to able to allow others into our relationship and from this we can grow.

You've taken me many places. When it's good, it's good. It's like a dance, we fly together across the dance floor in harmony, creating beautiful things whilst other frameworks look on with envy from the sides.

But then today, we had a bad day and it's my fault. I had no idea that fiddling with setup was so fragile. Sometimes I wish you would complain and let me know what the problem was, a relationship thrives on communication. If you don't tell me the problem, how can I help? And when do you complain, can you make it a little clearer? What's with this bizarre error about getActionObject of DynamicViewTypeInformation being marked as private and why can't I put .cpt's in browser views and why is my Zope 3 style content type about 20x the size of my old one and why when I pdb into eggs do I get sent into /home/steve which doesn't exist and...

I'm sorry, I'm off again.

I hope you can forgive me for the neglect I've given you over the last year or so. It's been a while since we've done anything new and exciting together. I'll try to be a better person and get things right more often. We can save this relationship if we both work at it and I'll keep trying.

Hugs and see you in the morning.

Update: the next day was a good one.

Just got back from a week in Wales, camping. Anyone who's tried camping in Wales can pretty much predict that they will get rained on, a lot. And we did. We went to one of my former "favourite places in the world" - St David's. The rain came horizontally with high winds. We moved up north and ended up at Shrewsbury Folk Festival where it gave us big downpours, but only as we tried to put up the tent.

Despite lots of hassle (going to the toilet at 2am in the rain with 2 kids isn't that fun) and a commitment to buy a motor home when we get back to Canada, we had fun.

Other positive things: for one whole week my fingers didn't hurt, I got to buy and read the new Iain M Banks novel Matter, which was excellent.

A mad two months which involved lots of the family from Canada coming over and a whopping: 4 out of 8 weeks on holiday (I only did 3 of those weeks), 8 trips to different airports, holidays in 5 countries (if you count Wales as separate :) and a depleted bank account - it's back to normal.

There's a great blog going on here "Month without plastic". Which is not as simple as it seems. For example, tried brushing your teeth without a plastic toothbrush and where do you get toothpaste?

Curiously enough on the 3rd she went to the Garstang show, just down the road.

On a related note the Plone 2009 conference call for bids went online today and includes this wonderful point:

Conferences consume a great deal of energy and generate a lot of waste; we encourage you to consider how you can "green" your conference by: providing recycling; avoiding disposables; using recycled materials; minimizing or eliminating paper handouts; avoiding low-quality mass-produced "swag"; serving locally-produced, organic food, etc.

The only thing I disliked about the wonderfully run 2007 conference, was turning up and getting crap like mouse mats. If it was me (and its not) I wouldn't even give people an agenda, never mind printing out people's slides onto paper. Go Plone for a greener conference.

I got a nice few emails from people regarding my RSI and typing problems a while back. One of the most prescient ones was: "Don't ignore it, it will come back".

The doctor gave me some pills to take down the inflamation and we've been on a couple of holidays. Things calmed down. I came back from holidays no problem for a few days. But a few weeks into the current contract and my producitivity is plummeting and the pain has increased worse than before.

I tried to order a Kinesis keyboard (pictured) but got caught by them trying to ship it to my credit card address (Canada). The pain I had yesterday, which by the end of the day was bloody awful, caused me to suck it up and blow $400 dollars on a keyboard. We'll see how that goes.

Went to the coolest cinema ever last night. It's the Palace in Longridge. It has one screen, its not too loud, it shows one movie a week, has charming staff, the seats are large and comfy. It costs 4.50. They even play the God Save the Queen before the movie.

But best of all. No expensive overpriced sugar drinks. Want a drink? You get a cup of tea. In a mug. None of this polystrene disposable crap. How cool is that?

Compared to the super mega hyper multi plex cinemas it's a blessed relief and worth going to again.