Writing ... or Just Practicing?

It's probably safe to say that only a limited number of the few people who stroll past my blog each week were fans of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Or even, while they might recall their 1968 hit single "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (which, I read somewhere, was produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym of Apollo C. Vermouth), are aware of their more ground-breaking works such as "The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse". So this week's title, based on their memorable non-hit "Can Blue Men Sing The Whites" is pretty much guaranteed to be totally indecipherable to the majority of the population. Except for the fact that the BBC just decided to use it as the title of a new music documentary. Read More...

It's a strange experience when you open the curtains in the morning to be faced by men in high visibility jackets and hard hats only a few yards away, and 30 feet above the ground. Mind you, the noise made by the assortment of cranes, diggers, and other plant they use - combined with regular hammering and occasional swearing - means you don't get to overlay in the mornings. I've even got to know most of them, and give them a cheery wave as I try and convert from half-asleep to some state of semi-awakeness. Though they do seem somewhat reticent about waving back to a zombie-like character with a dragged-through-a-hedge-backwards hairstyle, and still adorned in a bright blue check dressing gown. Read More...

Listening to the radio one day this week, I heard somebody describe golf as being "a series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle". It struck me that maybe what I do every day is very similar. If, as a writer, you measured success as a ratio between the number of words you write and the number that actually get published, you'd probably decide that professional dog-walker or wringer-out for a one armed window cleaner was a far more rewarding employment prospect. Read More...

I've been trying something new and exciting this week. OK, so it's perhaps not as exciting as bungee jumping or white-water rafting, but it's certainly something I've not tried before. I'm experimenting to see if I can use Team Foundation Server (TFS) to monitor and control the documentation work for my current project. As usual, the dev guys are using agile development methods, and they seem to live and die by what TFS tells them, so it must be a good idea. Maybe. But I suppose there's no room in today's fast-moving, high-flying, dynamic, and results-oriented environment for my usual lackadaisical approach of just doing it when it seems to be the best time, and getting it finished before they toss the software out of the door and into the arms of the baying public. Read More...

Every now and then I get to write actual code rather than just documentation. Usually there's either a crowd watching in amazement that I can actually find Visual Studio, never mind knowing some of the magic keywords that make it all work when you press the green arrow button. Or else everyone is cowering behind their desk in case my computer can't cope with the culture shock and explodes. Isn't it wonderful when everyone has so much faith in your capabilities - after all, I've read the .NET Architecture Guide (endlessly, as I've been working on it for the last year) so I ought to know a bit about this stuff. Read More...

I'm not much into wearing daft T-shirts, or T-shirts with logos that proclaim my technical proclivities (such as being a Windows user, or knowing how to configure a DNS server), though one of my favorites is a T-shirt with a big picture of an organ donor card. It carries the slogan "DONER CARD" with the tagline "I want somebody to eat my kebab when I die". However, one of my other daft T-shirt logos came to mind the other day as my wife was trying to adjust from the relative warmth of a week away in Madeira to the distinct chill of an English December. Read More...

I just discovered last week that I'm supposed to be able to "moving quickly and lightly", be "as sleek and agile as a gymnast", and be "fleet of foot". Either that or I'm supposed to be an X-ray and Gamma ray astronomical satellite belonging to the Italian Space Agency. Not much hope of any of these happening, I guess. Probably I shouldn't have decided to search the Web and see what "agile" actually means (and, in case you are wondering, the Italian satellite is called Astrorivelatore Gamma ad Immagini LEggero. Read More...

OK, so we don't actually make cheese sandwiches here at p&p. Well, as far as I know we don't (but if we did, they'd probably be the best cheese sandwiches in the world...). When I'm over in Redmond I have to stroll across the bridge to Building 4 and buy one from the canteen, though it's worth the effort because you get four different kinds of cheese in it - as well as some salad stuff. Only in the USA could someone decide that you need four different cheeses in a sandwich. Here in England a cheese sandwich is basically a chunk of Cheddar slapped between two slices of bread. Take it or leave it. Maybe it's because there is always so much choice over there, and people can't make up their mind which cheese to have. Read More...