Tomorrow night, the guys from Diggnation will be filming their weekly podcast at the Excel Convention Centre. I started watching the Diggnation podcast about a year ago and it my favourite podcast by far.
If you haven’t seen Diggnation, you should check it out. It is basically two guys drinking beer and discussing the top stories on the Digg.com website. One of the guys is the Digg founder, Kevin Rose. It makes me laugh so much that I can’t watch it on the train for fear of embarassing myself. The podcast is probably more popular in the States. No one I know here seems to watch it. Maybe I enjoy it so much because of the laid back California jeuvenile humor I remember. You can find Diggnation at the Revision3 website or in iTunes. I plan on being there to see it tomorrow and am pretty excited.Head First Design Patterns
One of the perks of where I’m working now is being able to work with talented developers again. I don’t mind the occasional solo projects, but you can learn a lot more by working in a development team. One guy I’m working with is very big into design patterns and I’ve actually become
very interested in them myself.
I tried to learn some design patterns for C# about six months ago, but found them to be very complex. I was also working with some people who didn’t really see the point of them. The last contract I spent trying to convince the developers that they shouldn’t be using inline SQL in a page source. So, I didn’t have much luck learning it on my own very well. Now, I got loads of code to marvel at and compile.
When I mentioned my difficulty picking up Design Patterns to my colleague, he told me he had trouble with some of the concepts too until he read “Head First Design Patters“. He recommended it as a first book on the subject.
Head First Design Patters is a book about Design Patterns in Java, but the concepts all work with C# and seem to be the same GangOfFour patterns used by .Net developers.
The book is very easy to read and a lot more eye-opening than a lot of the other computer books I’ve read. If you are interested in learning Design Patterns, let me pass on my friends recommendation and suggest this book.
Changing in the Stalls
I’ve been riding the motorcycle into the new contract for a month now. The last contract was great–I could work in my boots and jeans and didn’t have to worry about bringing a change of clothes. Now, I’m back to the compulsory uniform (meaning suit and tie). I’m wearing jeans or wet weather trousers into work and keep my suit shoes and trousers under my desk. I get into work, grab my suit and change in the toilet stalls.
There’s an art to changing in the toilet stalls. I’m still getting to grips with it.
First, you have to find a clean stall (no drops on the floor) with a hook.
Second, you have to find a quiet time of the day to do it.
I had a very embarrassing situation last week where I tried to change in a toilet at a busy time of day. I went into my stall and pulled off my boots, took off my trouser and was just folding them up to put into my bag. A queue was forming outside the stalls. This is when all of the change fell out of my pockets and onto the floor. It all rolled out of the stall and into the growing queue of people waiting. Since I was in my underwear and socks, I didn’t really want to walk out and start picking up my change, so I put my hand under the stall and started feeling around for the coins. I knew I had some £2 coins and I was going to need those for lunch later–otherwise I would have taken the hit and avoided the embarrassment. Eventually, everyone started kicking the coins back under the stall door. I deepened my voice and tried to say something masculine like “Yeah, nice one. Cheers mate.” I waited until all of the other stalls emptied and the queue was gone before I left.
It’s not easy changing in the toilets. Luckily, at the bank I’m working at now, the stalls are pretty clean.
When I told a colleague how difficult I was finding it changing in the toilets, he commented that it worked for Superman. But Superman didn’t change in the toilets– he used a phone booth or a broom closet. I couldn’t see Clark Kent sneak into the bathroom and check all of the stalls for the cleanest one to change in. “This looks like a job for Superman. Let’s see . . . this one? No, too smelly. This one? No, someone didn’t flush. This one? Skidmarks,” he would say before resigning to the first smelly one.
My point? Brink back the phone booth.
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