Oxfam Thursday - Blagging, Nails and a Bit of Naughtiness!

I'm doing quite a few shifts in the shop at the moment, at least twice a week, and mostly downstairs, so hardly worth a mention. Yesterday, however, we had a chap come in with a donation, but there was a twist:

Customer (Geezer): "If I give you these books, can you let me have one in exchange?"
Me: "'Fraid not, mate. That's not how it works."
Geezer: "You sure?"
Me: "Positive. Take my word for it."

He was a bit disgruntled, but donated the books anyway.

John and Michelle were in. Michelle had some new nails, with little butterflies printed on them, which I commented on. John showed me some books which were quite rare and one of these was from The Olympia Press:

Formerly, certain books were banned from being published in the U.K., the Marquis de Sade's, Henry Miller's, etc. To get them, you had to go to France and The Olympia Press published them in English. The dust jackets were reversable and were white on the other side with no markings, so you could get them through customs without them being noticed.

I finished early and went to a seminar in London, at Skills Matter, called The Rise and Fall of Mutable State, given by Malcom Sparks. It was a short talk about one of the features of functional programming languages and a little on the history of programming (everyone's heard of Turing by now, but who's heard of Alonzo Church?). There was a lengthy Q&A afterwards, with lots of talk about Clojure and an extension for Java called Guava. I'm surprised no-one mentioned Java 8, which is purported to have more functional support.