Trains, trains, training, trains

I seem to spend half my life on the train these days. A couple of weeks ago I was told, "You're going to Bournemouth to work at LV=". "Great!" I thought, "Some real work at last!" - and it has been great, BUT - with the other work I was doing nobody minded if you took most of Monday morning getting there, where here I have to be there on the dot Monday morning at 9, which means I have to be there in Bournemouth the night before, which means that instead of taking a direct X-Country service from New St to Bournemouth which takes 3-3.5 hours, I have to get a train to Bristol, change at Bristol Parkway, get another train to Southampton Central & then another to Bournemouth, taking 5 hours instead. I set off around 2.30, get to Brum for the 3 o'clock train & wind up in Bournemouth by 8pm. So much for the weekend. Coming home, I take the 17:45 from Bournemouth X-Country, and that takes 3 hours, so it's about 9ish by the time the bus deposits me back in my neighbourhood.

I'm so tired. I'm so tempted to take a week off & get my bike fixed. I'm sitting here in a course in edgeConnect, a sort of GUI based abstraction layer for Java so you can get business people (theoretically) to build their own web apps. I'm unconvinced - it seems quite quick & dirty to me, like fag-packet stuff. Useful for prototyping but I'd be tempted to hand over a fag-packet prototype to some real developers to turn into a proper enterprise app. There's few enough people use it that it's more likely to be a hindrance on my CV than anything useful - something to make loony recruiters hassle me to do more edgeConnect stuff when Java is my main squeeze, my darling that I understand, want & adore. edgeConnect feels like a dizzy blonde Essex girl with a double-figure IQ compared to the admittedly not so glitzy but way brighter geek girl that is Java. First impressions, but tbh I've had plenty experience of these "tools" that use GUIs to try & do your programming for you, and they rarely do that well.