So my epic holiday is nearly over … i go back to work tomorrow after more than 3 weeks away. I actually can't wait to get back! I so enjoy the work that i do, and i appreciate the structure of knowing what is going to happen each day.

Here is my holiday summary:

• A few days at home relaxing and getting ready
• Four days in Germany
• A week in De Panne, on the North coast of Belgium over Christmas
• Back home and time with family and friends
• Dealing with horrible damp mouldy walls that got really bad when we were away

For more details and photographs, read on … but beware of the mould pictures if they might squick you out!

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Tonight i saw a wonderful example of "the old Moon in the arms of the new", better known as earthshine.

When the Moon is new (and right now it is very new – just a thin sliver of sunlight is peeping around the side) then someone standing on the Moon would see a full Earth. Think how bright a full Moon can be for us on a clear night – the reflection of the Sun provides us a lot of light on such nights. Imagine how much more brightly it works the other way around – so brightly in fact that we can see the Moon shining with the reflection from the Earth.

If you do not see the silhouette of the trees, turn your screen brightness up. Then you should also see the earthshine on the unlit part of the Moon.

Our camera is not made for night time, but it does have a 3-second exposure. Unfortunately the tiniest shake shows up greatly exaggerated. I managed to capture this shot with the camera stuck against the window frame using blu-tack, and using the two-second timer feature. Otherwise the act of me pressing the button causes too much of a shake!

Oh by the way, i forgot to say, there's Jupiter shining as brightly as anything, too! The combination in the early night sky made for a beautiful sight, of which my photograph only conveys the tiniest fraction. If you have a clear night tonight or tomorrow, do have a look. It's incredible.

So yesterday's post was actually not the last post of the year! :)

A few nights ago i saw somebody's blog had little icons next to comments, showing the country, browser and operating system of each commenter. I found that quite interesting and decided i wanted the same on my blog. I discovered that it is part of the FireStats plugin and so i installed it. Little did i know the impact that it was about to have on me!

FireStats reveals a whole lot of fascinating information about who is visiting your blog. Suddenly i can see the most popular posts, find out the search terms that people used to get here, or the referrer page that sent them here. I used to think i was just writing my blog for a few friends, but now i see that people are coming from all over the world, mostly for information about CouchDB and … Caturday! HAHA! I haven't done a Caturday post for ages! Perhaps i should start doing them again!

So i put up the "Currently popular" widget in the navigator. It's pretty nifty because it changes every day. I also installed a few more plugins and made a few tweaks:

• I enabled title slugs in the URL for all my posts. The old URLs still work, however.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin puts links to related posts at the bottom of each post. It calculates 'related' by category, title and content. It's pretty good! I have been reminded of old posts that i'd forgotten about!
• Unfancy Quote Plugin has removed the so-called curly quotes that were appearing where i did not want them – ie in example code
• WP Super Cache ensures speedy rendering of pages, particularly if hundreds of people were to look at a page all at once. Instead of continually querying the database, once it knows the content of a particular page, it can just display the cached version.

WordPress plugins are so for the win!

In other news, i finished reading Design Patterns today. It wasn't such a hard read as i thought it would be; it's actually quite easy to read one or two patterns at a time. The summaries are also very useful, for comparing and contrasting different patterns.

The State and Strategy patterns were quite obvious. Mediator seems almost the same as Observer to me. No matter how many times i read and understand the difference between Adapter and Bridge, i cannot seem to remember it long-term. Memento is my favourite pattern. It's like asking someone, "Please remind me of this in a minute!" and they say, "Oh, okay" even though they have no idea what it means!

Visitor seems to me like the stupidest pattern ever, but maybe i have misunderstood it. It seems to contradict everything that makes sense about object-oriented programming, to have something that goes around doing things to other objects, violating encapsulation, and it has to be hard-coded to deal differently with different objects. It makes me think of Aspect-oriented programming actually.

I went to the library and borrowed a book for the holiday: Why Is Uranus Upside Down? And Other Questions About the Universe by Fred Watson. A nice bit of light reading, i think! ;)

Happy Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year) to all who celebrate it. I was thinking about maybe going to Southampton for the celebrations, but after a weekend away i feel i need a night in.

Also, happy new moon, new month to everybody. I have been particularly fascinated with the moon the last couple of months. It's one good thing about the days getting shorter; i get more interested in the night sky and love to see what i can observe. I recently obtained a pair of binoculars and i can spend ages looking at the moon through them. I would love to get a telescope! :)

In other news, i hear Tom Felton has an album out. It seems Tom is pretty good on the guitar, but unfortunately does not have a singing voice to match …! Here is a little medley of Tom Felton music.

Playing around with the gimp and the photos of the moon.

Last night i went to visit a friend with a telescope and we had a great time looking at the moon, stars and Jupiter. Through the telescope i also saw three of Jupiter's moons, looking like tiny pinpricks of light.

We had clouds to contend with, but our moon just looked so beautiful, even with a few clouds covering it.

You see it through a telescope and it just hangs in front of your eyes. You totally appreciate that it is a gigantic sphere floating through space around us. It is truly breathtaking to see in 3D. And this was just through a telescope designed for bird watching! I think i will get a proper astronomy telescope and see what we can discover!

The camera is a total sham when it comes to photographing stars and planets.

Wherever you are tonight, look at the full moon, and have a look for Jupiter too. It is beautiful. I wish i had some good equipment for viewing and photographing such spectacular celestial sights. This is about the best i could do.

Tomorrow i'll try photographing earlier in the evening, when it might come out better.

I'm not the only person who has been photographing Jupiter tonight …! :)

I saw a shooting star! :D

I persuaded my partner to come out with me; we went to a field nearby where it was much darker and we could see the Milky Way! I pointed out Mars, Orion, Pegasus, Triangulum, Andromeda, the Plough and the North Star. That's about as much as i know at the moment. We saw a very bright star, it seemed to be pulsating and flashing hues of red, green and blue. At first i thought it must be an aeroplane, but it stayed perfectly still, and on consulting maps since we got home it was almost certainly Vega. A very bright star, quite nearby, spinning fast, circled with dust and possibly one or more planets! :D

I am hoping to go out tomorrow evening and watch the very best of the Geminids meteor shower, but i wanted to go out tonight whilst it is so clear, in case it is cloudy tomorrow. I just turned back towards the Plough to get my bearings when i saw it – a meteor shoot straight across, really fast and really small, but no mistaking what it was. Unfortunately it was too quickly gone for my partner to see it too, but i feel really pleased that i saw it! :)

Everyone in Europe must seriously look for shooting stars tomorrow evening at 17:45 GMT. There's going to be like an average of one a minute. You're bound to see some if the sky is clear enough!

Astronomy is suddenly cool, it seems! This morning one colleague came in and said, "I saw Mars last night!" Another said, "I saw Mars this morning, and possibly Venus too!" I said, "I think i might have seen Mercury this morning!" and another colleague sent us all an email alerting us to the Geminids meteor shower coming up this Friday! :D Yet another colleague was explaining to some others how you can find Mars very easily because Orion is pointing directly to it at the moment. The first colleague said, "I looked for the Plough but couldn't find it" and i was all like, "Ahhh, the Plough comes up about 10 or 11 o'clock at the moment!" GET ME!! A few weeks ago i wouldn't have been able to point out the Plough if i was staring directly at it!!

This is very exciting!! I am with my cousins on Friday evening when the best of the meteor shower will occur. I so hope to be able to take them out into the garden after the piano lesson and introduce them to the delights of cosmology and star-gazing! :) These days i can't help but notice constellations and planets. I was just out for my run and Mars just kept catching my eye all the time! It is a very good time of year with these dark, clear nights.

My run was a bit slippery, though. I had to be careful. It is definitely getting easier – i am noticing a pattern: Monday night is hard because it's a new programme. Mid-week is way easier than Monday by comparison. Saturday is hard, i think simply because i go early in the morning and i'm not properly awake yet. I do like to do it that way, though. If i left it until later in the day i'd probably be putting it off and feel bad about it. The hardest thing is actually to get the shoes on and get out there. As soon as i'm in to it, i've got the music playing, and i just know i'm going to do this for the next half an hour and come home again. It's easy. I'm start to feel a bit like a robot: i run when i'm told to and i walk when i'm told to. I generally end up doing 2.5 to 3 miles. No big deal, but i love the feeling of getting fit and healthy! :)

We have our good friend Nat with us for the weekend, and are having a lovely time together.

I got up early yesterday and went for my run. I saw both Venus and Mars, with a nice half-moon between the two, plus a whole lot of stars. It was beautiful. My run was a bit harder yesterday. I don't know if it's because it was so early in the morning, or if i was hungry, or maybe because my right leg felt slightly twisted. Two of my 60-second runs were also up steep hills, which made it very hard. I also missed a turning and ended up going a much longer route, so had a long walk home after i had finished the programme. Still, i made it, and i am going to download Week 2 for tomorrow evening.

Nat and i went out into Winchester, went to see the Great Hall, and were pleased to find a nice sculpture exhibition by Bill Woodrow. We spent most of the day wandering round town, doing little bits of shopping. Had a horrible lunch in Subway (note to self: never visit Subway in Winchester again!) and a lovely coffee in Costa. Happily you can ask for fair trade, decaffeinated coffee with soya milk and they make it just the way you want it for no extra cost.

We didn't get to Library 2.0 (aka the new Discovery Centre) but i am looking forward to visiting that soon.

Last night was great for seeing stars! I saw Orion, and found Mars again quite easily. I saw the Triangulum (M33) Galaxy clear as anything, but i was like, "Hmmm, what is that cluster of stars in a triangle shape?" and i had to go on heavens-above.com to find out it was a major galaxy! Just before i went to bed i am sure i saw the Plough. It makes me really happy to find these patterns in the stars that people have been observing for millennia.

Okay, going to get my keyboard out and make music with Nat! :)