Chris Worfolk's Blog

While in London, we stayed at the Judd Hotel. It was a mixed bag.

On the good side:

• It was nicely furnished
• The staff were friendly
• Good location, just round the corner from King’s Cross
• It included a cooked breakfast

On the bad side:

• It was freezing cold – the doors and windows did not fit properly which let the cold and the noise in
• The bathroom was so tiny I could barely fit in it
• The wifi might have been free, but it sucked. I couldn’t access my emails or connect to my VPN and trying to download anything was lost cause.

Earlier this month we visited ICE Totally Gaming to get to know potential customers and suppliers. It was my first trip to the ExCeL centre which is predictably huge.

Many of the stalls were very impressive. One had a slot machine connected up to a Oculus Rift headset and when you won you got taken on a roller coaster ride.

Not surprisingly, there were lots of men in suits and women in far less clothing. I was very proud of the good twenty minutes we spent discussing sexism and objectification of women.Then we had a good stare.

London was as horrible as ever. It took me an hour and a half in a taxi to get there the first morning.

I recently went to see Book of Mormon, the musical by creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

It was pretty good. Not amazing, but pretty good. I was a little disappointed that it was not about Joseph Smith, though Elina points out that it would have been difficult to do it about that for a wider public audience.

If anything, I think I was a little disappointed by the audience. The best jokes were often missed while the rather racist bits such as mispronouncing an African girl’s name, were lapped up.

Some of the songs were pretty catchy at least. The theatre was also pretty good; you were able to get a drink at the bar with reasonable speed.

We had a party. It was good. So good that I have only just recovered enough to blog about it.

Michael Lewis’s book The New New Thing tells the story of James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Healtheon and myCFO. More accurately, it tells the tell of James Clark trying to programme his boat Hyperion, while in his spare time becoming a billionaire.

It is a strange story. Clark is almost certainly something special having made a huge amount of money with all this companies. He saw the future again and again. And he capitalised on this without actually making proper businesses.

Silicon Graphics was a business success. However, Netscape never was and was ultimately flogged to AOL (for shares) while Healtheon is a company I had not even heard of and had to look up on Wikipedia. There there is a short article to be found about how it merged with WebMD.

Clark’s skill seems to be creating an idea and giving it a spectacular IPO without ever really building a business. And he is very, very good at it.

I am a big fan of Steinbeck. While Of Mice and Men was enjoyable, it was The Grapes of Wrath that truly sold me on his writing. I do not consider myself that well read, but if you said you had you were and had concluded Grapes of Wrath was the best novel ever, I would find that totally believable. His graphic deception and insisting of emotion and hopelessness has been surpassed by no other book I had read.

It was for this reason that I picked up East of Eden.

Given the success of his earlier work, it seemed odd to discover that Steinbeck believed that everyone has one great novel in them – and that East of Eden was his.

I am glad nobody really asked me what it was about in my first few weeks reading it. The truth is I had no clue. It wasn’t about something notable like the Great Depression. It was just about life. Life in Salinas Valley, particularly the life of two families, the Hamiltons and the Trasks.

Is it Steinbeck’s finest work? That I am not sure. However, I did enjoy reading it just as much as any of his other work.

I have been working with a client based on Harrogate for the past few months.

Actually, I have been driving up there for over a year now. Previously I was working with a client two days a week, which was fine as I was able to drive in early and miss the traffic. It is a very pleasant drive when you do that: countryside abounds.

However, having taken on a new client, it has been more appropriate to be there standard office hours. This quickly introduced the misery of the commute. Especially as most of it has been done in the dark.

If you leave Leeds at 7am, you can arrive in Harrogate at 7:30am. If you want to be there for 9am though, you need to set off at 8am. It brings out the worst in human behaviour too. People using the right lane to avoid the queue, and then going straight on at the roundabout. It’s usually an Audi, and such drivers are worst than child molesters.

Thus I am looking forward to avoiding the daily commute, at least for a short while.

Normally I am a big fan of Sam Vimes and the City Watch. I did not enjoy Thud! as much as I did some of the other novels though, due in part to finding it a bit harder to follow than most storylines.

It did produce a fantastic quote though.

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self

And it is not like a novel with The Watch, trolls, dwarves and Death can ever really not be enjoyable.

Watership Down is the tale of a group of rabbits who leave their borrow and set off, eventually making a new one on the so-named down.

Obviously it is a metaphor for the struggle between the left and right wing in modern politics. However, this is sometimes quite cleverly hidden. For example the author Richard Adams attempts to disguise this by saying in his introduction “this is just a story I made up for my daughters and has no more meaning than that.”

For month after month I have long awaited the arrival of a Discworld novel entirely devoted to the postal system. So much so that I assumed I had built it up so much in my mind that it could only disappoint. But it did not!

Moist von Lipwig is a cool character. More importantly however there was an indepth discussion of the clacks and how it works. Technical details, that’s what I like to see. There was not much laugh out loud humour until nearer the end, but enjoyable the whole way through.

What is all this nonsense about chapters though?