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I’d like to thank all of you, my loyal readers, for sticking around throughout the last year. It looks like 2009 may prove to be even more interesting than this year… but probably not in a good way.
Expect to see a more tightly focused Tech Teapot in the new year. Also, a move over to a new home and a spring clean of the design too.
PowerTime, a time series database written specifically for .NET and PowerShell, has also recently taken some significant baby steps to production quality. I had a mental block for the last couple of months on how to do the database locking. Things have worked out well and I’m pleased with the result. I’ve created an ever faithful unit test to keep me on the straight and narrow. Expect more news in the first quarter of 2009 as the project moves towards its first beta.
My favourite post over the last year was What to do if you’re newly qualified and can’t get your first job, if only because it touches on a topic that is going to be all too real for a lot of recent grads. I feel for you guys & gals and wish you the best for 2009.
[Put on your best Comic Book Guy voice when you read this] Worst Post Ever was, rightly outed by Peter, TWiki begets Foswiki. A testament to what happens when you don’t proof read your post properly. I’ve bought myself a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and you may rest assured that I will be studying it hard over the Christmas holiday. I’ve already studied the punctuation chapter and feel that my commas have never been so deftly positioned. Not that that’s saying very much. I am steadfast about semi-colons though, I’m with Vonnegut in this regard, I’d prefer you to rip out all of my teeth with naught but a pair of pliers than sully a post with one.
My Christmas books for 2008 are Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (I’ve read it before but it is such a pleasure to read it again) and the second book in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun trilogy. If the second book is as good as the first then I am in for some darn fine reading…
That’s me signing off for 2008, hope to see you in 2009. Jack x
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Hey Dude,
It’s been a fun year doing the blog-banter thing. I love your site and i am expecting great stuff in 2009 from the Teapot. Elements of Style and Slaughterhouse 5 seem like the perfect prescription for my holiday reading list as well. However, spinning near 50yrs I think it might be a little late for me to ever get those commas right.
Have a great holiday.
Botchagalupe
Thanks John. If I’m (bluntly) honest I’m not happy with the Tech Teapot at the moment. It feels a bit wishy washy to me and I write the darn thing. I need to make my focus with absolute laser precision. That will be open source network & systems management maybe with some of the lower end commercial tools as well. I think your blog in the cloud space is in a good place right now and that’s where I want the Tech Teapot to be. I saw a comment somewhere about your blog saying that it was the “go to” place for the cloud and that’s where you have to be. You couldn’t identify this blog at the moment as being the “go to” place for anything in particular.
As an aside, I got Denis to proof read my signoff post (now I’ve been royally burnt on that one) and he just casually mentioned that he’d met Kurt Vonnegut when he came to Leeds to do a book reading. God I hate it when people do that. I’d love to have met Vonnegut, he’s probably my biggest hero. His books are pretty variable in quality but when they’re good they are really good. He’s best when he just puts himself into his books like in Slaughter House 5 and his Kilgore Trout character. Timequake, his last book, is pretty much unreadable. I did read the whole lot out of respect but I wouldn’t have if it had been anybody else writing it.
If you can get hold of the Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun too you’ll will be richly rewarded for your trouble. The best sci-fi masquerades as fantasy. I won’t spoil it for you by explaining what I mean.
Have a great Christmas, see you on the other side. I’m nipping off to my parents now for the Christmas meal with around 11 of my family. Should be lovely. I’ve even got a table top war game to take on my nephews (or nieces I guess, wouldn’t want to be sexist about it). Try to get them off their XBox for a while. My littlest nephew played *16* straight hours on Halo this year. He is unbelievably good at it. Wouldn’t surprise me if he went pro at some point.
Jack