Last night at the Diggnation taping, someone asked if they could take my picture (well, a lot of people’s pictures) because I was wearing a Digg shirt. Someone posted my picture Flickr. Here was me sitting in the audience of 1,000 people.

Unlike the picture on the left-hand side of this site, you can see I started growing my hair longer and sporting a beard.

I’m still excited about the great event last night and am really glad I attended.

You can see the rest of the photos on the Flickr site here.

I read a blog post by Scott Adams on the Dilbert Blog last week which really made me laugh and think. I have nothing to say, really, but hope to direct you to this post if you haven’t seen it:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/a-feeling-im-be.html

Last night at the Diggnation taping, someone asked if they could take my picture (well, a lot of people’s pictures) because I was wearing a Digg shirt. Someone posted my picture Flickr. Here was me sitting in the audience of 1,000 people.

Unlike the picture on the left-hand side of this site, you can see I started growing my hair longer and sporting a beard.

I’m still excited about the great event last night and am really glad I attended.

You can see the rest of the photos on the Flickr site here.

Right now I am standing at a lay-by waiting for AA to show up. I have a puncture in my motorcycle rear tire. It was flat when I got to the station tonight but I rode on it to the nearby petrol station an filled it up. I can see the hole and hear th hissing. I thought I could make it home on that refill, but thought better of it on the road. I don’t want to have a full blow out and lose control of the bike. It’s dark and drizzly and ther is nothing to do while I wait-except this.

The cars are speeding by every few minutes. I can’t help but think about how I race past them every night.

I hope the AA man can fix this. He should be here soon. In the meantime, I’m listening to Prince’s Planet Earth album on my phone. I would take a leak in the bushes if it weren’t for the constant headlights coming around the corner.

I’ll let you know how well the AA man does.

I’m trying to use a Pocket PC blog writer app this morning. I have a QTek 9100 phone with a slide-out keyboard, so I thought I could make use of train time by writing blog posts.

The application I’m using is a free one called Diarist2 developed by Kevin Daly in New Zealand. I’ve had a few problems with it so far. Mainly, I lost a post because I had written it before I had my blog settings set up. After entering the settings, my post was gone. Now I’e writing in OneNote Mobile ond copying into Diarist2. It’s actually working very well now. Diarist2 supports images, but I think I need to upgrade my Dasblog engine first.

Diarist2 is a decent tool. Thanks Kevin. His website is http://www.kevdaly.co.nz/

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.

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.

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.

I’m not really a great fan of graffiti, but you can’t help but admire some of it. In my area growing up, you saw of lot of it. There’s the tame stuff you find in toilet stalls or phone boxes which just seem to be a waste of time.

But some graffiti is truly impressive. I don’t mean impressive in a “Beat Street” sort of artistic way– I mean impressive because you don’t know how someone was able to do it. In San Diego growing up, you would see it on freeway overpasses which must have been very dangerous for whoever carried out the vandalism. Whoever it was, they weren’t thinking small.

For the last month, I’ve seen another impressive bit of graffiti from the train each morning in Reading on my way into London. It’s been there for at least a month. Someone has somehow painted the largest tag I’ve ever seen on the top one of the tallest buildings in the center of Reading. Have a look at the picture.

Like I said, it’s been up there for at least a month (probably longer) and I don’t know how the landlord will be able to paint over it without some pretty expensive painters with mountain climbing equipment.

But, really, how was someone able to do this without being noticed? I have no idea what it means and it isn’t that legible (I think it says “Stenc the CUP”?).

I would complain about it being an eyesore, but the reality is that Coca Cola (or any other big business) would put a billboard up there in a second if they could. If I had to choose, I would prefer it be this daredevil vandal instead.