Daily Grind Wonderings, wanderings and waffle

Have you ever sat back and thought about what is going on, right now, in the places that you have visited? Like the sea hitting your favourite secluded beach in Greece; who is climbing up to the Sun Gate in Peru; who is sliding down a chute in Wild Wadi in Dubai; who is camping on the island that you canoed to in Canada?

Here are some of the places I’ve been to, via Google Earth:

I’ve done loads more, but don’t want to use up all your bandwidth!

Went to see a really good film - Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), based in East Germany. It’ll drag you in, if you let it!

Wake up at 7am, watch Transworld Sport (best programme on TV), have a shower - walk to the newsagent, listening to the birds and the silence of no cars, pick up a newspaper and some milk. Come home and make toast with strawberry jam and a nice hot cup of tea.

Woot! It was worth buying my Worcester rugby top and shirt - they’ve managed to stay in the Premiership. Gives me a reason to wear one/more of them to the 7s next month at Twickenham, though hopefully it won’t be a similar event to me fracturing my elbow in Dubai, when I saw the 7s there.

Watch this film if you want to laugh and cry at the same time. I really like this genre of gritty English films - with the usual suspects of Alison Steadman (superb), Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall. Jane Horrocks is superb as well - watch out for the chocolate-licking-off-breasts scene.

Life isn’t so sweet by the way. I think it’s called irony?

I was thinking about stopping the beer intake and only drinking wine - but this article shows that, on average, wine has more calories in it than beer.

I can also recommend Heinz Chicken Noodle soup. Great for when you have painful teeth.

Interesting and fun book.

1. As a customer, do you really know what you want? Are you able to convey this to the provider?

2. As a provider, do you really know what the customer wants? Are you able to understand what the customer is conveying and turn this into understandable specifications for:

- your developers; your testers; your trainers
- your customer, to sign off against

3. As a customer, do you still know what you want once you’ve got the software in front of you? If the software does not do what you want - where did what you want go amiss?

Please tell me how you want it to work, rather than keep telling me what I have given you is not what you wanted. Assumptions annoy me a lot, especially when they are not communicated to me.

I think I have come to the realisation that software development is not for me. Maybe a change in tack is required: maybe moving back into a more administrative role - SQL DBA or 2nd/3rd line hardware/desktop support.

Just come back from watching this at The Phoenix in Oxford. It’s a feast for the senses, especially the eyes. If you do see it - allow your mind to become detached, rather than try and rationalise what you’re seeing.

Palindromes - quite a disturbing film, with the central character being played by lots of people; not entirely sure I’ve got a handle on why so many different people.

A Room With a View - quite a young Helena Bonham-Carter. I like this film a lot.

Ah yes, something else I was going to write about - accents. Denholm Elliot (in RWV) has a fascinating voice; Rick Stein also does. I can listen to Rick Stein talking for ages - he should have been on Jackanory.

Dr Strangelove - haven’t finished watching this yet.

And as I’m on the subject of films - it’s one of my favourite actor’s birthday today: Jack Nicholson! Mum hates him and finds him creepy, so I like to wind her up sometimes

Changed distro back to Kubuntu. It’s nice to see that all of my hardware is now recognised properly, except for the nVidia card - which I had to revert back to using Lynx, to get the drivers from nVidia.

Oh, how I laughed at the relevance of this Dilbert.