Category: General

Cold
It is really cold here in London this time of year.
A temperature of around 32 degrees, also known as zero centigrade or Celsius, feels much colder with windchill and humidity that seeps away any energy that’s left in the air. The result is icy cold that made me wear my otherwise emergency ski face mask. You don’t look too good with that thing on, but you know you’ll survive.

Football
Will you hate me if I tell you that I am a reborn soccer fan? will you hate me if I tell you that despite it being cerebral, intellectual and beautiful, compared to soccer, baseball just does not cut it?
See, in soccer, you have 90 minutes of essentially non-stop action. You have 22 men who have to run, jump and kick (the ball or one another) for the entire time. In England’s Premiership, the odds are high as is the pay. There are underdogs and top dogs. Monied teams that almost have their own league going compared to the not-so-monied teams.
Yes, there is a lot less that you can plan for, because the game is so fluid, but that is also where a player’s personal skills come into play. But if a team of individuals does not gel, it is doomed.
Baseball and American Football are almost all about fits and starts. Soccer just moves on, action never stops, and when it is done well, it can be breath taking.
The catalyst for this rebirth and rediscovery comes from a visit to Stamford Bridge stadium, home of one of the wealthiest teams in the game, Chelsea. It was exciting, it was so skillful, it was exhilarating.
British Football also has its own brand of soap opera (a la baseball, T.O., etc.) and gallery of characters, such as Chelsea’s own coach, Jose Mourinho, that is known to all as Jose. In short, it is all good exciting distraction like other sports, British style.

Children
We are expecting; very exciting, very thrilling, scary too.
For me, being with my nephew is also like a fast-forward to having a 3-year-old.
He is adorable, funny, and just a boy. But definitely something to look forward to. And yeah, not much sleep. I know.

We are spending the Christmas holiday in London with Jill’s sister, her husband and their lovely son.
To get here, we bought our flight tickets far in advance, about 4 months ago, and landed a very decent deal with Virgin Atlantic (decent is facing the fact that taxes and security fees now amount to between 30-50% of most ticket prices on international flights).
What you, lucky reader, need to be aware of is that if you are flying Virgin’s economy class (like most mortals do), you are going to experience THE most cramped seating arrangements in the air. We are talking worse than anything from American, anything from United, Continental or Delta. We are talking really really bad. Knees at the back of the seat in front of you, too narrow to work on your laptop, really really narrow.
In short, really not good.

Yes, their interactive video selection is stellar and the screens are relatively large (probably because you can touch them with your nose, practically), but it is just a sham. Pay the extra $50 and fly properly.

To validate the XML files I am generating against a schema, I used this very simplistic code:

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setValidating(false);
factory.setNamespaceAware(true);

SchemaFactory schemaFactory = SchemaFactory.newInstance(XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI);

Schema schema = schemaFactory.newSchema(new File("my-schema.xsd"));

factory.setSchema(schema);

Document doc = factory.newDocumentBuilder().parse(new File("my-file.xml"));

If anything is invalid, exceptions are thrown.

Be sure to include the following line:

factory.setNamespaceAware(true);

otherwise you will get this cryptic error:
cvc-complex-type.3.2.2: Attribute 'xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation' is not allowed to appear in element ...