The Kitchen is Started

It is long weekend here in the UK and so I decided to make a start on the kitchen. It was also a good idea because a good friend of ours JS is going to want to start work knocking a hole through from the Master Bedroom into the kitchen as part of our Master Bedroom En-Suite.

The house is what we call a “Dormer Bungalow” in the UK. That means that it is a single level home that has had extra rooms put into the roof together with a piece jutting out of the roof to provide extra space.

The downstairs has a very large lounge / dining room (30 feet long) along from front to back of one side of the house. The other side of the house has the bedroom and kitchen (front to back). The En-Suite will borrow 2 feet x 4 feet from the kitchen to give all the space that we want.

At the start the area where the new hole is going to be looked like this picture. You can see that all the units are in place and there are small ceramic yellow tiles on the wall. I’ve already removed the doors of some of the units.
	Here is a picture of the same space with the kitchen units removed.
	I have been advised that I should rent a gizmo that is a form of mechanical sledge hammer to remove the tiles but here you can see me using a common or garden hammer and axe! In the end I decided that a plasterers rectangular trowel was the best tool to use. It was thinner and wider and I could remove as many as six tiles in one go.
	Here is the finished product – I managed to strip half the kitchen of tiles and also to remove all the polystyrene tiles from the ceiling. Scarily, one tile was half melted near the hot water boiler and looked like it could have set fire quite easily – that was a real worry!

… and that was my weekend.

I was expecting both the ceramic and polystyrene tiles to  be quite a difficult job to get off the wall and ceiling but in actual fact they came off relatively easily. The ceramic tiles were by far the worst, but the polystyrene tiles seemed to just pull off the ceiling because my father had put them up with 5 blobs of cement (one in each corner and one in the middle). This meant that it was simply a matter of pulling them away.

I was completely shattered after all of that. Now I have to find a way of getting the tiles into something that I can take to the re-cycling centre. I also have rubbish bags full of the old polystyrene tiles that I need to dispose of. Hmmm …

Starting the Project

I am now starting a major project to upgrade my parents home after they have both moved into a care home. I have the privilege of being the proud owner of their home but as the property was built for my parents some 40 years ago (1962) it is in quite a state. My father is now 94 years old and therefore has been less and less able to look after the property.

There are some really difficult moments as we try to get rid of all the things that my parents have kept for years and years. They think that their knick-knacks are worth lots of money but getting the auctioneers in has left us with a different view about all the heirlooms.

However – I have started on the dismantling of the current rooms.

The Kitchen was the first to be attcked due to the fact that we need to knock a hole in the wall between the master bedroom and the kitchen for a new en-suite. We need a 1.2m x 0.6m intrusion into the kitchen. So … I started taking down the kitchen units that need replacing anyway;

I also made a start on the fitted wardrobes in the bedroom;

I’ve got rid of two of the fitted wardrobes now and about three kitchen cabinets.

Not bad for the first day – gardening leave has it’s uses

Night Cross Country Flight

A friend of mine has just mentioned to me that I can create my own maps at maps.google.com and that I can insert lines etc. So … being the adventurer that I am <grin> I thought I would give it a go.

Here is the Flight Path that I followed when I did my Night Cross Country exercise.

Enjoy …

Gardening Leave

This is a euphemism for being asked to leave the premises for a period of time (usually a notice period) until you have successfully forgotten everything that might be useful to a competitor. Oh well – that’s what they’ve done to me. I am now employed for the next three months with full benefits without anything else to do! I don’t have to show up for work, I have had my laptop taken off me, I had to give back my ID card but I get to keep all other benefits.

I’m not complaining you understand … far from it. I am making the best use that I can of the time by going to the gym, helping my elderly parents out and planning the move up to Northwest England.

For my non-UK readers, we have an interesting scheme here whereby if you resign your job you generally have to work out your notice period. In the UK this can be an inordinate amount of time and my contract is for 13 weeks. However, if the employer thinks that you are a potential threat then they can put you on Gardening Leave – an extended holiday with full pay and benefits.

If we were in the USA then I would guess that this could last for two weeks at a maximum given the notice periods over there. I wonder what it is like elsewhere in the world.

Anyway, I now have the time I want to do all those things that I didn’t get time to do while I was working. Strictly speaking I should perhaps be reading up on all sorts of technology stuff but actually I am enjoying getting myself into shape again and planning our imminent house move.

Unfortunately my mother has decided that she will go into a care home since I am coming back to the area.  I would rather it were different but I think it is for the best. As it happens she offered me the family home if I was interested. This is the home that they had built for them over 40 years ago. They then let my Grandparents live in it until they retired from working in South America, and now I shall be taking it over. There is something really special about that which you don’t normally get in today’s split second world. It has been the one address in everyone’s address book that has remained consistent throughout their lives. My children have never known anything different despite being dragged around the globe with me! Gran and Grandpa have always lived in Mayfair Drive.

I’m sure this is of little interest if you were looking for a diatribe or thesis on SOA etc. but it is part of who I currently am. The good part about it all is that it is going so smoothly. You know how it is when you try to do something and there are times when everything seems like hard work and you are blocked at every turn? Well, this time the wheels have clearly been oiled. Arranging to take over the property, getting a mortgage to cover the difference, dealing with British Telecom and British Gas has all been a doddle. Makes you wonder when the bubble is going to burst.

Don’t get me wrong … my parents home is going to need a lot of work! They were decorating it in the time when polystyrene ceiling tiles were the order of the day and are now considered to be a significant fire hazard. Getting them off the ceiling is going to be a major achievement.

Anyway … enough for now.

So what’s next?

I have grown up through learning how to program in Assembler (admittedly only 6502 assembler) through languages such as BASIC, Forth, Pascal, C, VB, Java and 4GLs. I have Object Oriented stuff and moved into SOA. I have also seen a progression from initial standards in BASIC which were around naming conventions and programming standards through the Object Orientation models and beyond.

I think the next important wave coming through is “Agile”.

I was privileged to be able to work with a Multi-dimensional database model called “Express” which was bought by Oracle many years ago and the engine was incorporated into the then Oracle 9i kernel. In all my dealings with customers even back in those days the real key was agility and flexibility in the reporting capability of the product. The requirement hasn’t really changed and in fact the tools that we use today have become even more rigid and inflexible. While the suite vendors are trying to tie you into a single monolithic suite, and the tools vendors trying to create code that does almost everything for you – the business still needs easy to use, dynamic and flexible systems that enable them to get information sooner rather than later. In the days of monthly reporting (a bit like getting your bank statement every year) the data was so out of date as soon as it was on paper it was impossible to run the business and react quickly to issues that had arisen.

Today we are often in the position of being able to provide the end user with a window on their data on an hourly basis if so required. I remember presenting to Oracle World in San Francisco a few years ago and my paper “The Myth of Business Intelligence” is still visible on the New York Oracle User Group website at http://www.nyoug.org/Presentations/2002/bus_myth.PDF. I was arguing then that what business really wanted were tolls that allowed them to dig through the masses of data that they had to find the real “news” in the data. The same is still true but there is a need now for that type of tool that will be simple to use and user centric.

Today, SOA promises agility and is often taken on as a result of that perceived benefit, but the business want that agility so that they can react more quickly to all the information that they are gathering. As a result, agility and business intelligence (real BI) tools are required. SOA could deliver that type of benefit but generally it doesn’t. The business needs to insist on its requirements.