Its been an unorthodox last couple of months. I recently came down with a cold or a flu (I don’t know what the difference is but apparently there is) and therefore my usual routine has been a bit out of whack. I was ill for about 1 week and then I took another week off after that just to make sure we’ll all healthy before I get back into the swing of things. Well let me tell you – my body was in total exercise denial all this week. I’m still feeling the effect of Monday today. To add insult to injury I also ran into the office and came out with two wonderfully fully formed blisters on my forefeet. So I think I started too hard. When will I learn? I always do this!

Well, this time I though perhaps waiting that extra week would help. It probably helped me recover from the cold/flu but it didn’t help my muscle memory from remembering how we used to do this thing!

My theory is that because I was hobbling(and still am) prior to my run(due to the start at the gym on Monday), the motion and movement of this hobbling action contributed to the formation of the blister as my body tried to adapt to the unusual what my legs were moving while running.

Lesson? Well, basically don’t run when your legs are sore because your feet will become sore. Also, too much time off doesn’t help if you go back hell for leather on the first day back– so the first day back should be at least half of everything (distance/effort/time). Then ramp it up after that. I knew this but I’m impatient. Never mind.

Its been quite hard actually reviving the morning routine especially now that its cold coupled with the lack of need recently while ill to get up early. But once you overcome it, its totally worth it every time. I think I fear the regret of knowing that I didn’t workout than the extra sleep but its initially quite hard. So I’ve been back at my usual morning routine for a week and its been fine. Everything hurts though like I said – not withstanding my run’s blisters. Actually while I’m here, here is that run and you’ll notice I got a award. See too much too quickly out the starting blocks:

I’m not actually sure why I got sick, but I think it might be down the the change in weather. I’m hoping I’ve caught whatever strain of whatever it was and that my body is kind of resistant to that strain – built up its antibodies of ninja warriors.

In other life news, I’m still working at porting my Financial Tracker from Java Spring MVC to C# ASP.NET MVC and everything else that’s involved in such a seemingly dramatic technology transition.

Very interesting how easy that was, In fact I think its easier to do this in C# than it was in Java. Ok. I’m not as proficient in Java as C# and I had to spend a lot longer with Java to get it to the stage where it was but the guys from Microsoft have done a fantastic job with ASP.NET MVC 5. I swapped out WebFlow for a custom mechanism in C# that I designed to handle a wizard-like workflow when adding a new investment details through different stages of defining that investment. I also had to switch fom Neo4J to EntityFramework 6 using MSSQL and that wasn’t too bad. I’m currently working on porting the d3 charts which is quite interesting because I’m reading up on d3 using Manning D3.js In Action which covers v3 not v4 but that’s OK. I don’t need v4 because there is a wealth of docs on v3 and v3 does a pretty awesome job.

Also, I’m currently interviewing for new engineering roles as our R&D office here in Buckinghamshire is closing down. So that's been pretty different/unorthodox . I love actually seeing how others use technology outside of my office and visiting new development/engineering offices is quite cool. I think I like talking about technology as much as I like using. Anyway, also gives me a change to get excited about what I do and how I can do it in different capacities.

So this had also contributed to by irregular routine – some days I have to into the City.

On that note, I had one in the City where it took over 5-weeks of screening which has been quite something. I thought maybe 1 week, max 2 with say a telephone interview and then a onsite interview to flesh out the details and competencies but 1 telephone interview later,  followed by 5 onsite interviews? Woa! Some people might find that painful because of commitments/deadlines and other scheduling issues but its been OK because I’ve finished my feature work and have been given time to go out and meet people and become interested in what people are doing with my technology toolkit. If I don’t find a role in the short term that’s interesting and different then I’ll work on my projects mainly over the Christmas period, ramp up my training sessions(Need to lift heavier!) and then try again in the new year.

Though I kinda want to start something new so I can establish my new routine (like running routes, scheduling and other strategies).  One day I wont have these problems… but until then, I like having them.

Learning about data visualization and analysis in Python at the moment. I’m also learning about how Sports works in Britain – how its managed and broken down at the management and funding aspects.

I was speaking to a ex-collegue of mine on the weekend and he told me how they are loading so much data into a javascript component to provide a tree-like structure of data. He was saying how slow it was because of the amount of data involved and the problem of trying to be responsive and provide functionality.

This is my issue with javascript on the client side being told to do so much stuff with so much data and then worse, hiding all that behind a 3rd party component which does magic on it. I tell you, hopefully in the next couple of years this wont be a problem. And perhaps technologies like asynchronous WebSocket and chunking of data will be mainstream(SignalR?).  I’m thinking that we’ll find a way/technology that will decrease reliance on the client side browser javascript engine and browser CPU for functionality.

Problem though, when you’re up against a wall in terms of time/deadlines, a 3rd party component like this seems like such a ‘win’ but it comes down to the age old problem: If you don’t understand how something is doing what its doing, its difficult to understand how to change it doing that, especially if you dont want it to do that anymore. Not even that, you don’t have an opportunity to use something like a custom implementation of say WebSockets to fetch data or get notification of new data as a means to free up the effort of trying to do something on all of the data – which is just a doomed approach. But deadlines seem to make peoples brains explode.

Actually one of the interviews I’m involved in was talking how they use ZeroMQ to manage the communication on their backend warehouse and I’ve not used that before so I had a look at it and its remarkably simple to set up a two way communication pipe between components. Its not surprisingly similar to how I wrote my broker.

That made me smile.