I’m spending all of this week on a Java course (J2EE). It’s a broad but shallow course, giving an introduction to a number of things in the J2EE SDK, but not going into much detail on any of them. Yesterday and today, for example, we’ve covered JDBC (database access), JNDI> (which doesn’t really have a VB equivalent as far as I know – it’s a service that allows objects to be looked up by name), sending and receiving mail, and servlets (dynamic web pages – the Java equivalent of ASP). Dizzying.

You’re probably all getting rather bored with all these posts about how excited I am about learning all these things… But that really is all that’s going on in my life at the moment. So that’s what you get.

The only other event worth noticing is the long-awaited arrival of spring. We’ve had winter here all the way until this weekend – temperatures barely above freezing, even though it’s already the end of March. Wool-lined gloves and thick woollen scarfs in March! Now at last we’ve turned the corner, it seems.

It was even warm enough at midday today that I spent half of my lunch break walking around in a tiny park at Gray’s Inn. It’s a private garden, really, open only for 2 hours around lunchtime on weekdays. And it’s only got two entrance gates and no straight way through, which gives it a peaceful atmosphere – there’s no through traffic. And full of cheerful daffodils. A nice spot to spend half an hour in the sun.