BBQ's, BDO and the 70's

Finally managed to catch up with some friends that I haven't seen for a while on Australia day. In true aussie style we had a bbq at our house, it was a nice relaxed affair and included most of us having a swim in the pool. It was great to catchup with all who attended, there is a definite possibility that the bbq may become a tradition.
On Saturday I attended a surprise 30th birthday party. Not only was it a surprise but it was a theme party with us all decked out in 1875 style. It was a real blast to see all the afro's and bad shirts and all the 70's music. I was fortunate enough to be able to borrow most of my outfit from my mother, at times like these it's great to have a family who hoard things. After a trip to the op shop we also managed to get some great clothes for Greg which included brown cords with flares and one of the worst jumpers I have ever seen. We had a good time and I managed to win best costume for which I proudly took home some fuzzy dice :)
On Sunday I attended the Melbourne BDO, it's been quite a while since I attended a big music festival and I really enjoyed it. There were some awesome acts but SOAD was the best band I saw all day. Already looking forward to who will play next year.
I had the day off word today to recover and it's great after what has been a few months of full work to finally have some time out to spend with friends and catch some bands. Will definitely have to do that more often.

Media Center 2005 is Awesome

Late december I setup my own media pc, it's basically just a nice and grunty pc (p4 3.2ghz, 1g ram) with a couple of large sata harddrives. I then added a HD card which allows me to watch SD and HD television through the pc.
When it was released I put XP Media Center 2005 on there and pretty much got it setup how I wanted, but I couldn't use the tv functionality through their yet as the HD card didn't have compatible drivers. Anyway I was still pretty impressed with the user interface for music as this allows you to easily see on you the album list etc on a tv screen, also has soom really cool visualisations and shows the song it is playing when it starts and finishes just like on rage/video hite. This is useful but not exactly groundbreaking.
Then our other pc broke and I had to get the motherboard replaced under warranty which meant I had to put the media pc into action for Greg's business so no Digital TV. Finally I got it back last week and over the weekend I discovered that the HD card now had compatible drivers for Media Center.
I installed them and I am now firmly on the Media Center Bandwagon and here's the reason why. You can pause live tv !!! While you are watching something it takes a temporary copy so if you are watching something with no ad's and need a bath room break or you missed a crucial bit of plot line etc you can just hit rewind and watch it again. Then you can even fast forward back to where you were. I can see that this will be getting a lot of use when the footy season kicks in :)
Now that it works so well I am getting a new case and cpu fan which should make it super quite, next on the list is a remote as I'm currently using a wireless keyboard and then my dream media pc will be complete (at least until I find a reason to justify buying something else for it)

Sql Server 2005 Beta 2

Just got my hands on the sql server 2005 beta kit. This consists of 3 dvd's of sql server goodies ranging from the software itself to hands on labs, white papers etc. So I'm looking forward to spending some qaulity time running them up.
The only trouble is that I am also in the process of downloading the new CTP of visual studio which apparently has team foundataion fully working in there so looks like I will been having a busy few weeks....if only all this word didn't get in the way ;)

Hello 2005, goodbye old programming practises

Well it's sure been a while between posts.
I got stuck in a really high pressure short deadline project which we fortunately wrapped just before the holidays happened. To cut a long story short a lot of things went wrong and looking back a lot of it was due to communication. Fortuantely we delivered a great product, but the experience of all the team members on the project was not good.
Over the holidays I've reflected a lot on many of the issues that occurred and I have decided that it is time to look at some new methodologies as the old ones just aren't working to well. For a while now I have been looking at some of the great stuff that is coming out with the new visual studio in the team foundatation product. One of the really interesting bits is the addition of MSF Agile while is basically a way of adapting msf to work for projects that are less formal.
As a lot of the stuff that I work on we don't exactly know how to do when the project kicks off it seems to me that trying to apply formal methodologies is just fraught with danger, so best to look somewhere else.
I am currently reading a good book on the methodologies behind extreme programming and I have just ordered another book from amazon on using extreme programming in .net. So hopefully towards the end of the month I will be ready to embark on some new ways of working on projects.
I'll keep you posted on how successful they are.