Aquarionics

Coding, Not going postal, and Going Postal

So, today I took time out of my busy schedule to go buy tea.

Actually, I wasn’t getting any work done, really. I’m having a small concentration problem since we entered testing, in that the stuff I’m currently working on is Deep System stuff that is interdependant on almost everything else. This means it takes about fifteen to twenty minutes to swap all the various memory pages into place before I’m producing much new code of any real worth. Each time someone in our open plan office asks me a question, it shatters this delicate balance as I have to swap in other processes like the HTML/CSS structure. The first couple of times this happens I could possibly be refered to as “ratty” at the shattering. After five, I feel the urge to hit things. Not that the office have any real way of telling that I’m currently juggling – to switch metaphors – a couple of dozen balls at the moment, and would like to be left alone.

Net result is that I had a minor argument with someone else that is, in fact, solvable by inserting quote marks, something I realised when I had time to actually think about the problem, rather than desperatly trying not to lose my place in what I was doing to answer the question.

So I went to buy tea.

Since I’m abandoning London for the forseeable, and had run out of English Breakfast (Leaving me with only four types of black tea, five of green (which I don’t drink, but LC does), one of white and three types of Infusions) I decided to go visit Drury in Covent Garden. Naturally I got lost, so I navigated to Covent Garden Market (Specifically, the big square where the bloke who walks on his hands does his show. I’ve never been to Covent Garden without him performing there) and navigated from there. I replaced my Breakfast Tea, got some Ceylon Orange Pekoe and two packets of “Fruit Flavoured” tea – One Apricot, One Mango – and considered that I’d got off lightly.

Then I passed Waterstones.

Or rather, I didn’t. Actually, I went in. I resisted buying a number of books before I found Going Postal. Going Postal is the new Discworld book, It’s good, and it doesn’t come out until the 7^th October. You could tell it wasn’t out yet, because there was a noticable lack of large displays with it on or any of the other paraphernalia I usually expect with a new DW release. Specifically, the store only had five copies.

Obviously, it now has four.

It’s good. It’s a ‘standalone’ book in the same way ‘The Truth’ was. Being that it takes place in Ankh Morpork there’s going to be background people you’ve seen before, but the only central person who is a major character is Vetinari, who starts of in a scene that is incredibly similar to one from the Colour of Magic and goes on from there.

It’s good. It also leads neatly on to the next book in the series, which is about Thud. You should go buy Going Postal