SteveStreeting.com

Well, yesterday was an absolutely glorious day here in Guernsey, I don’t think we saw a cloud all day and there was just the lightest of sea breezes. We’d already booked to watch some outdoor theatre up at the castle so we made a day of it, echewing the car and taking a stroll down to our picturesque seafront town, grabbing a spot of lunch at a terrace restaurant and generally kicking back.

The theatre in question was Shakespeare‘s A Comedy of Errors, which I’d never seen performed before but is believed to be one of his first. It was pretty good – the players in question were the irreverent Oddsocks who never take it particularly seriously so it’s always good for a laugh. My personal favourites to see are still Much Ado About Nothing (simply because of the inspired banter between Benedick and Beatrice, which has to include some of the most finely crafted insults ever written – and Kenneth Branagh / Emma Thomson’s version is superb), and The Merchant of Venice, but it’s all good. I used to hate Shakespeare when we were forced to read it at school, but I found it absolutely transformed when performed well – which is after all how it was supposed to be experienced anyway, not studied in stuffy school rooms.

The only downside was that the play was performed in a sun-trap of a section of the castle, where none of the sea breezes reached and away from the shade so we were basically grilled for the two and an half hours (not counting intermission). I now have the typical shorts-and-T-shirt-masked tan just from that. My wife can never believe how fast I tan, she’s expecting me to change nationality by the time we come back from Thailand later in the year.

So, a good day anyway. I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on today and if I’m lucky might have some time to continue to experiment with scripting the build of an OSX SDK, since once I’ve done that I want to get OGRE 1.4.4 out the door.

We had a very good night out last night – this week has been the very first Guernsey Festival of Comedy, and being regular watchers of shows like the Comedy Store and Live at Jongleurs we snapped up the opportunity to see a number of live acts locally for a change.

As expected, given the talent on show, it was a superb evening. The major headliner for us was Mitch Benn, who is consistently hilarious with his blend of musical comedy and fast-paced, often ranting satire, and he didn’t disappoint. Ronnie Edwards we’d also seen before and was very good, but in many ways it was the middle act, Lloyd Langford, who stole the show. We’d never seen (or heard of) him before but his set was really, really good – kind of laid back (difficult to be anything else with a Welsh accent I suppose) and disarming but with a really sharp wit and sense of timing underneath it. Great stuff.

The festival seems to have been well supported, with tickets quite hard to come by (hence why we went on a Thursday and not Friday or Saturday night, which sold out first), and has brought some great acts over – we missed Rob Deering at the Dog House earlier in the week due to other plans, which is a shame because he’s good too – so here’s hoping it comes back next year. It’s not quite the Edinburgh Fringe, but still great entertainment nonetheless, and it beats having to travel to London or Manchester to see great live comedy.

As you probably already know, I live on a tiny island just off the French coast. Many of you might not realise just how small it is – about 78 square kilometers in total and about 62,000 people. The upside is the quality of life is a lot better than many places, one of the downsides is that a small population and a significant economic skew towards financial services means there aren’t that many software development people about. I know that I’ve often felt rather isolated and wondered how many other people worked in this field locally – I knew a few, and I luckily got to work on larger teams in the UK mainland fairly regularly in my previous job, but overall the perception was that our profession was quite marginalised, with most IT demand being for network / server administrators, desktop support and managers. Certainly when attending local BCS meetings the subject matter was mostly oriented to that. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate the Internet so much, since there I can be a active member of a huge community.

Last night however I attended a meeting of the Guernsey Developers User Group, which was actually quite well attended. I knew a few people there already but there were quite a few people I didn’t know, and a larger group than I expected, so that’s a good sign. And best of all, the presentation subject matter has a good chance of actually being relevant to our developer existences I’ve volunteered to get involved to help it keep going, and started posting things on their site, as has Damien, and hopefully it will continue.

Due to the local emphasis on financial services I get the impression the vast majority of attendees are using .Net/SQL Server on various business projects, and as such what I do is likely to come across as a bit, um, weird (unless they’re busy making “3D Investment Growth Planning Warrior” and I’m just not aware of it – it could happen). But all the core skills are the same, as I’ve learned transferring my skills from business development, so I expect it will be a useful forum.