Cycle tour

On Sunday I am starting a small cycle-tour, upon which I will be visiting various members of family. Will spend Sunday cycling 90-100 miles to Dorset, to my parents' house. It's my mum's birthday - parents, bro & sis are getting back from holiday the day before - and other sis will be arriving on Sunday having been in Zambia since January. She should be bringing her bloke too, who I so far have met for a grand total of about 30 seconds.

Will spend a couple of days there, then cycle to Dorchester to see the grandparents. Probably stay overnight, then head to Poole / Bournemouth to visit other family. This will take me (a) through Wareham, home of the Purbeck Icecream company. They make chilli icecream, which I am hoping will be in abundance there. And (b) via Corfe Castle, Studland & across Poole Harbour. I was in the Studland area in June, unfortunately in a car, having spent hours in bloody traffic on a fucking lovely day. Resolved that I would have to cycle there some time, and this seems like a gret opportunity. Maybe a bit of Brownsea Island too. Went there on a school trip once, saw loads of peacocks.

Will probably get the train home from Poole.

I'm really excited about it - have done a few long-ish rides now, but with other people. I'll be riding at my own pace and testing my own limits. And taking random pictures of stuff. And if I want to cycle through places like Winterbourne Stickland or Piddletrenthide because they have cool names, then there's nobody to argue with that. You know there's a Christmaspie near where I live. Mmm, christmas pie.

Java

Learning Java for new job. Anybody care to clarify all these bloody XML libraries? I'm supposed to be learning the Apache xerces and xalan libs

From what I can see...
there's javax.xml.* stuff
there's org.w3c.dom.* stuff
and there's org.apache.* stuff

First two look like they're standard Java things, but why are there two different packages? And the Xerces javadocs on the apache site link to the javax.xml.* and org.w3c.dom.* stuff. What's up with that? I thought it was a separate lib.

And where the hell do I get example code for the Apache libs?

Wedding

Went to dgym's mate's wedding @ the weekend, in Tiverton. Short, sweet service, as they should be, at a hotel, with much cake and partying afterwards. Most people stayed in the hotel that night. Morning was interesting, one of dgym's other mates approached us at breakfast, a bit worried that during the course of the evening, his bed had become separated from its legs and was now sitting at quite an odd angle.

Turns out that's where the real party had happened - champagne was ordered, illicit stuff was smoked, champagne was poured into ice buckets by those who had smoked too much illicit stuff, ice buckets were tipped out onto carpets, at least two people were defenestrated (ground floor room) and beds somehow lost their legs. 

I don't know why it was us who ended up rushing to the nearest Homebase at 10:15am, with 45 min before we had to check out, to pick up screwdrivers & glue to fix the bed. So dgym went off to work his DIY magic while I went to pack our stuff. I think it ended up at least looking like a normal bed. They didn't check the rooms when we checked out, so I don't know whether he got away with it.

The traffic sucked getting down there, and we made it to the ceremony with about 2 minutes to spare. But dgym said he was glad he got back in touch with his mate (the one whose wedding it was) at the start of the year. Reminds me, I have old schoolfriends I need to get back in touch with. Well, one in particular who keeps popping up in my dreams.

Hey - finally an opportunity to use the word "defenestrated" other than just mentioning what a cool word it is.