Sharon picked me up in the morning and gave me yoghurt and cola.
Today at two we were due to talk over one another's code review, so when I got into work, I spent the time until nine o'clock getting some code reviewed ready. At nine, I walked to the Plough and the Stars on Chestnut Street. I had a bit of trouble finding the place at first. When I got there, a man was blocking the door; I told him I'd come for the documentary and he took me to the manager. The manager, who was pleasant and Irish, asked me whether I'd brought the producer with me, and when I told him I wasn't anything to do with the production but only an interviewee, he sat me down with a cup of coffee.
Sitting next to me was a professor called Rich Pawling, who was playing the banjo. He began regaling me and the manager with tales of Irish derring-do, mainly involving Irish people killing other people they didn't get on with. He pulled out two or three books about the Mollies, and showed us some press cuttings. "You don't think it's all over, do you?" he said. "Here's a story about some Englishman with no brains in his head walks into an Irish bar on St Patrick's day, and makes derogatory remarks about the Irish, and he'll Never Walk Again." (Since I was at that moment an English person sitting in an Irish bar, I inly swore I would be careful not to make any accidental derogatory remarks about the Irish.)
After a while, Dyfrig from Telesgôp turned up. He chatted with me about the Mollys in English and Welsh, but I was finding it difficult to put sentences together in Welsh. (Thinking about it now, this was my first attempt at a face-to-face conversation with a Welsh speaker in Welsh ever, so I'm not surprised I fluffed it. Someone whose opinion I respect tells me it's always hard speaking Welsh to a new person, anyway.) I said my Welsh wasn't really good enough, and he told me that that was okay, because they could use me in English.
I went upstairs to the balcony, where the cameraman was setting up, and the sound guy put a box in my pocket, and ran a wire up inside my shirt to a clip mike on my collar. Rich Pawling said he'd go and get ready. Did they want him as a miner, he asked? He had all the clothes ready, and even a (disabled) pistol. I saw him afterwards and he looked very convincing, with a light on his hat and soot on his face. I don't know how he got all that into his little bag.
The cameraman shone a light at me, and Dyfrig stood just out of shot and asked me questions. I was instructed to wait a second after he'd finished so our voices didn't cross. I talked for about twenty minutes about the Molly Maguires, Welsh and Irish immigration, class struggle, and the necessity for the labouring classes to organise, but occasionally we had to re-take because of the phone ringing. Once I said "as I said before", and I was asked to do it again without those words so they'd be able to put it back in any order.
After that, I came back downstairs and signed the release form (in which I was hereinunder known as the Artist). It had all been so much fun that I was quite surprised to hear I was going to get a cheque for doing it: I hope I can do something similar again someday. I apologised to Dyfrig about my Welsh being so bad, and he said not to worry because I'd given an interesting perspective on it in English. When it airs I'll try to get hold of a copy.
When I got back to Solutions, the code review meeting was just about to start. The lessons I'm taking away from that meeting are that doing things the clever way doesn't usually win you any brownie points. I wrote one module in two ways, one using OO and the other using prototyped subs, and everyone used the OO version. But having the other subs in there made it all more complicated than it needed to be, and I think it got bad reviews because of it. I'll be refactoring it in the next few days.
I checked in new code to metacity today for the first time since my laptop broke.
I made pierogies for dinner.
