Cool stuff that came up, Tom pointed me in the direction of Prevayler, and what with Carlos being in town, I've actually gone and read the background on this now (where does my time go...)

• If prevayler is basically persistent command pattern, can one have non-linear forward acting commands (like the photoshop non-linear history mechanism) ?
• Can you go back in time (like cvs update -D "yesterday"), and live out an alternate reality (good for parse trees, and quantum simulations) ?
• Can you plug in your favourite serialization mechanism, for the job in hand (xstream for readability and hackability [like hsqldb does for me now] or some super fast binary serialization thingmy)
• Can prevayler Commands and xwork Actions all just turn into POJOs, with no implements neccessity...

Steve pointed me in the direction of an alternate (less blogged about) language to Groovy, that is the Scala programming language, it doesn't look at dynamic as Groovy, but it has some interesting ideas that I'll look into later when I get a mo. Also Steve, go and have a look at Robocode, it's a fun way to learn coding (just like the good ol' days), maybe the next meetup should involve pitting attendees robots against each other :-)

Simon recommended that I seek out some of Nick Drake's music, and I have to say I'm impressed, I like music with that bit of emotion to it.