Another day

What glorious weather. I’m off to get my holiday scrapbook.

 

I’m still learning Spanish, and it’s a week in! So I’m pretty impressed. Next step is – will I still be interested in a month?

 

I can see that learning Spanish, and the living abroad dream, could easily become a fad I pick up and drop like dieting or the gym.

 

 

 

biggest cocks in advertising

Hola

So it's another day, and I still miss spain. It's a stunningly sunny day yet it's so cold. Of course in moaning I'm being very british. (but then you read the Metro you'd think it's the end of the world).

It's interesting to see those scrum techniques being played out, or not as seems to be the case. I'm sure it is all happening, but from the outside it just seems to be waterfall as usual. Yawn.

And why, why!!! can't clients accept no more money = no more scope.

Spanish

I’m back from Tenerife and I’m not happy. I had no idea how cold this stupid country can be.

 

I had such a great time and I’m seriously contemplating jacking it all in to work in a bar, and why not, I’m only 23!

 

Of course I’d like to learn Spanish first and I’ve started to explore the online ways of doing it. It seems there are plenty of sites ready to teach you Spanish, but how many are any good? A quick explore of You Tube has shown me that there are places there I could get free videos so that’s a start and the good old BBC (who by being the BBC makes me feel it’s a reliable place to start) offers some good links and programming I’m going to explore.

 

It’ll be great when I can say more than Hola

 

Learning

the best way to know you've really learnt something is to be able to teach it to someone else.

I was told that at school and it's so very true. Another thing I was told at school was to be selfish in your education. This doesn't mean be mean, it means take advantage of every opportunity and don't open the door for someone else if it means you are missing out. I think this applies to work as well.

Scrum

Well that was interesting.

 

I’ve just had Scrum training from Agile Bear (http://www.agilebear.com/). It has proven to be very informative; and I tell you what, Scrum seems simple and dead easy to pick up in theory. But when you actually start to practice it (in the little exercises we were doing) you realise that it’s a lot more difficult. None the less, I still think it’s a brilliant approach.

 

 

Be interesting

Russell Davies advice on being interesting http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/11/how_to_be_inter.html

 

 

Great idea really, be more interesting, and people will be more interested.

How to scrum

Interested in Scrum, then I suggest you read (and buy) this - http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches. It's so incredibly informative about one person's approach to Scrum/Agile. It's an easy read which I completed in a couple of hours and covers most things you'll need to know to successfully run a Scrum project.

Wii Fit

The Wii fit is just great. In fact the Wii in general is. It just goes to show, sometimes it bodes well to be daring.

Mac changed it's image and broke away from the beige box and became hugely successful (annoyingly).

PS and Xbox thought they had market domination and that power is what the users wanted. The Wii knocked them for six

New office

Well we’ve moved office. We’re now in the centre of Bristol. It’s not bad at all, each room is a bit of a self-contained box in a refurbished building that I assume was once a bank or something similar. It’s very environmentally friendly in a not too hard to do way, solar panels on the roof, a roof garden, grey water flushing the loos, floors made from recycled tiles, energy saving lights, an environmentally friendly kettle and recycle bins. Plus plenty of bike racks.

 

Many of these things are dead easy to implement in your own home without too much conversion. And of course the long term benefit is it saves you (well in this case the people who own the building) money.