Coolangatta++

Just spent a superbly relaxing and contemplative several days high above the beaches of beautiful Coolangatta in the south-east corner of Queensland.

A friend (thanks Mark!) had a couple of spots free in a time-share apartment over the New Year and invited us down.

We got out paddling on the golden sands, walked up to the monument on the dividing line between New South Wales and Queensland, and did some shopping in Pacific Fair.  Several mornings I got the red corpuscles moving with a swim in the pool on top of the building.

And I did lots of lounging about.  

From my comfy apartment bed I could look back to the green green bush of the Gold Coast hinterland, up the coast line toward Surfers Paradise, and around out to sea and the Coolangatta beaches.

And I could code.  :-)

While Ray munched several novels I spent several days reminding myself why I love and why I hate C++.  Of course I could not leave my laptop behind - at least I had no internet connection. So that's sort of like unplugging, right?

Battling with templates and code that would compile but not link, but eventually I made some progress.  Member methods with template arguments were not a good plan.  G++ seemed to get a nasty headache and generate some intermediate files I have never seen before.

Bit more cleaning up and I will submit this dogpile.  I think there must be some sort of rule that says XML serialization code has to look butt-ugly.  I really will have to write some unit-tests for DndTool to harness this beast.

In other news, I have just gotten a call from Nokia who have offered me a job at their offices in Brisbane.

I think that just about clinches it and it looks like I will be staying here, signing off from Google, and supporting Mr Smith while he spends time with his folks.

Wistfulness ensues.