Living near Europe

One of the main reasons for coming over to the UK was to be close enough to Europe to facilitate visiting places that are prohibitively expensive to get to from New Zealand, and we’ve finally booked our first wee jaunt. Thanks to Kate and William getting married, there’s now a Christmas scale bunch of public holidays towards the end of April, and with a dramatic amount of forethought I have booked the three days in the middle of them as leave, giving me an uninterrupted block of 10 days off.

So, where are we going for our first trip?

FRANCE!

We’re heading to Paris, which is going to be extremely exciting, neither of us having ever set foot on French soil (although we did go over it in the Eurostar on our way to England from Belgium). In an almost unprecedented degree of preparation, we have already booked both our flights (on Air France, from Birmingham International) and our accommodation (in a random little hotel that cost as little as we could find on Expedia).

We are not in general very well prepared tourists – our plan for Brussels being a perfect example. We had a great time, but in general didn’t know what we were going to do from day to day until it actually happened. With that said, I think we cannot possibly be less prepared than the British SAS were when they landed in Libya in the past week. We can categorically make this statement provided:

1. We don’t get immediately captured by French farmers.
2. We don’t carry our usernames and passwords in our pockets.
3. We don’t also carry expensive equipment with the ability to log-on to confidential and otherwise secure systems run by the British government.

None of these things are on our to-do lists, which tend more towards the following:

1. See famous landmarks.
2. See famous artworks.
3. Drink nice coffee.
4. Eat really good bread.

Fran has recently been providing much in the way of high quality visual entertainment to go with our blog posts. As I am not much good with a tablet, here is a bit of code that I have recently written in my spare time, turned into an image:

This is the Enqueue method from my implementation of Herb Sutter’s low lock generalised multi-producer, multi-consumer, queue. You will notice that my implementation isn’t much different to his, but it helps to actually do these things and test them out for yourself, to cement the ideas presented!

In other news, I’ve been following the Cricket over here, and feeling pretty good about where we are so far. True, we’ve only played 2 really good teams and we lost to one of them, but we’ve not wobbled against our weaker opponents (something that not everyone in this tournament can claim!). The English are on the edge of calling for blood in the papers, saying that their team needs to be much more consistent (they probably do), and everyone’s in doubt about who will win. My office has representatives from India, Australia, England, South Africa, and of course myself from NZ, which spices things up a little. I can only hope that things remain as exciting as they have been so far!