Planet Nectarius

I’m really excited about my current project. It’s super interesting. Not at all trivial and potentially very useful. I’m playing with things like Thrift, HBase/Hadoop, Postgresql, Skytools. I’ll be gluing things in Python, with a touch of Java to watch what happens to HBase.

I’ve never programmed in Python before and I’m loving it. It truely is fun.

I need to get up earlier. I keep having to skip breakfast and it makes it hard to think.

In other news I bought another book.

I finally got my film developed from Hong Kong and Paris. Here are my two favourite from HK.

And some from Paris.

my generous Parisian friend:

Real coffee in London exists:

I finally found a place. So I can move out of the hostel. Good timing too, I move the exact day my booking ends.

I’ll be living in West Hampstead. I work near Old St Station, it looks quite a way on the map, but it’s actually no more then half an hour taking the tube (including the walking). That’s London for you. I kept getting confused, it took me 50 minutes to commute from Coburg to the city in Melbourne. Not only is London more compact, but there is less waiting around for the transport to turn up.

To celebrate, I’ll go to the natural history museum tomorrow, and see if I can find somewhere that sells coffee plungers.

Maybe I’ll actually feel like I live here after my first night sleep in my own bed.

I’m in London now, after a fantastic time in Paris.

I still haven’t developed any film, so no photos from HK, but I put some of Fi’s on flickr.

The second night I was there, all the Paris museums were open for free at late night. We went to the modern art museum. It was free from 9pm to 1am, and there was long lines of people queuing up till after 12 to be let in. The whole place was completely packed.

There was an amazing vibe, everyone was going around thinking, “that’s a bit crap”, “that’s pretty cool”, “oh wow that’s awesome”. I think heaps of people starting off being skeptical of the whole modern art thing and were completely converted by the end.

The highlight of the museum was a movie about the architecture design of Harvard (I think it was Harvard). It was done entirely with marionettes. I can’t really convey how awesome it was. There was vice chancellor like character that looked like death.

For the first time in a museum I got a sense that there was some kind of interaction between the art and the people/audience (very different to the Louvre). It was challenging, engaging, sometimes emotional (I can be a bit squishy). No wonder it’s the most visited museum in Paris.

The other highlights of Paris, was of course the wine and the cheese. But especially playing Gin Rummy while watching ‘Peggy Sue got married’ in French, and drinking wine till late while listening to a free jazz band in a cosy bar. Basically just hanging out. Thanks Fi.