Well, after 16 months of trying to get Overpass up and running as an outsourcing company, I’m going back to contracting.

It’s been fun.  I’ve met a lot of great developers, been to China a few times to meet with software companies, and have worked on projects for small companies here and there.  But my skills as a salesman are terrible—and I hate cold-calling more than anything.  So, it’s time to change direction and get back to doing what I do well.

Even while trying to run my own software business, I’ve continued to code—learning technologies like Silverlight and NHibernate.  The nice thing about taking time off from contracting is that you get to build the skills you want to have, instead of the skills people will hire you for.  I’m my own DIY project and I can never stop learning the new skills.

Getting back to contracting is a big relief to me.  Selling myself (as a developer) has never been difficult, but selling the skills of other developers is tough.

On Monday I start a new contract in Basingstoke.  I’m very excited about it.  My main goal while looking for a contract was to stay out of London.  London’s a great place but I want to get familiar with more of England.  If I can stay away from the crowded trains and tubes, all the better.  I’m starting a four-month contract with a company that looks like it will be a lot of fun.  It also gives me the chance to work from home a few days a week.

It’s a good solid coding job—no offshoring at all.  Also, no mentoring, no team leading, and no budgeting.  It’s going to be great.

Overpass will continue to be a company, but it will be a company of one.

Is this a failure?  Um. . . not yet.

I’m thirty-eight—I probably haven’t even reached this life’s half-way point.  I’m looking forward to the future and am very optimistic about it.  Seven years ago, I was a permanent employee for a tiny company in Reading.  Thirteen years ago, I was a substitute teacher in Missouri and became a qualified to teach high school.  Twenty years ago, I was a soldier learning to speak Chinese.  Who knows what the future will bring?

The lone software developer is the reason for most bad software and most spaghetti code.  A lone developer will sit down and code before making a plan.  Since there is nothing to explain to anyone else, there is absolutely no reason to make a plan or to write any documentation.  There is no reason to comment code.

Any software developer who has worked in a development team knows just how the team dynamic changes compared to an individual coder.  In a team, all your code must be justifiable.  Any areas of ambiguity, inefficiency, or prone to error will be caught by other developers.  Any code comments are written with other developers in mind (instead of simply “Notes to Self”).

A good software team needs a leader.  Software development is very personal work.  A developer sits down and wrestles with code from morning until night.  Even when in a team, he is often alone with functionality or bugs and must do what is necessary to complete them.   Any criticism of this work at the end of the day is a recipe for disaster.  A team leader, with a position of authority (but preferably with a good dollop of tact) needs to be able to step in and clean up the areas ambiguity at the earliest moment (daily, preferably).

I’ve worked in environments where all greenfield projects are given to a Grad student to cut their teeth on before working on the big applications.  Frequently, these small project become critical systems.  When things go wrong, the code is given to more senior developers to fix.  So, senior developers make patch work fixes on systems which began on a shaky foundation already.

But the truth is, not every project is big enough for an entire team.  In those cases, peer review becomes even more important.

Have you seen this video on Google privacy?  It’s creepy!

Apparently, it’s showing in Time’s Square.

It’s posted on InsideGoogle.com here: http://insidegoogle.com/2010/08/do-not-track-me/

I’ve been with the same ISP for 12 years.  I joined Freeserve in 1998 on a dial-up and went to broadband when they offered it shortly after.  Freeserve became Wannado and Wannado was bought by Orange.

For the most part, I have been happy with the service. I get the top package (Up to 8Mb but my area only gets 6). 

But last summer I got an email saying I was using too much internet in the evenings, so they started throttling our usage.  This really sucked.  I couldn’t want live baseball games anymore and services like the iPlayer were unusable.  I suspect the iPlayer and MLB.com were the culprits for the large net use anyway, and I didn’t like feeling like a criminal because I used too much of the “unlimited broadband” I was paying for.  I was paying about £30/month.

So I finally signed up for the 50mb cable broadband from Virgin Media.  I’m paying only slightly more than I was on Orange and the performance is sooooo much better.  I can watch Youtube in the evenings again and I’m actually able to watch the MLB services I pay for.  I’ve had it a few days only and can’t believe the difference it has made.

I cancelled the Orange account on the same day as the Virgin Media broadband was installed.  They said it would take 14 days which I was fine with.  But then, four days later I get a call (on a Saturday morning) from someone telling me I have to pay a £30 disconnection fee because I was cancelling my service and not just transferring it.  I complained but it got me nowhere.  I asked what the fee covers (like, does someone have to do anything to cancel it?) and the guy couldn’t give me an answer.  I’ll just take the hit and pay them and be glad to have them out of my hair forever.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a lot of help with cancellation anyway.  But I did have good things to say about Orange before.  If they were quicker about increasing the speeds in my area, I would have definitely stayed with them.  But then they screw me at the end.  To hell with them. 

I would never subscribe with Orange broadband again—nor would I ever recommend them.  I’ll also probably leave their mobile network when my contract is up.  I went from a satisfied customer (mostly) to an unsatisfied customer.  All they get out of it is £30.

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything.  I can’t really say that I’ve been too busy—I’ve been enjoying the summer.  Since the kids got out of school, it’s difficult to get much work done.  So, everything is on hold until September.

I haven’t even been tweeting lately.  I guess I feel social media fatigue and am waning a little on Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc.  Everything I think of to write about seems too mundane to write once I start typing it.  So, I don’t write it.  This is not what a blog is all about.  A blog should allow you to write what you want regardless of whether it is worthy of someone’s attention—if they want to read it, they will (or won’t).  I seem to be experiencing an inexplicable self-consciousness whenever I start writing something lately. It will pass soon, I’m sure.

On the tech side, I’ve been playing around with Silverlight a lot.  I have a hot and cold relationship with it.  Sometimes it seems like such a gimmicky technology which flies in the face of web standards.  At other times it seems like something that is so cool, you shouldn’t ignore it.  I’m getting a lot of agents calling me about WPF work in the banking sector—so it may be picking up soon (since WPF will probably lead to Silverlight work).

I just got back from a week-long holiday in Paris—well, actually most of it was spent at Disneyland.  I listened to some Michel Thomas French CDs before going over and tried to use French as much as possible with varying levels of success.  Despite learning Mandarin and Vietnamese, I failed the only semester I took of French in high school and always had trouble with masculine and feminine nouns (I had the same trouble when learning Hindi and Spanish).  I think I learned more in the past few weeks than I did that entire high school course.  Still, my French knowledge is really lacking—but having finally visited France, I am motivated to learn more of it.  It was a lot of fun, and very easy to travel to from London on the Eurostar.

Now that summer is drawing to a close, it’s time to get back to work.  I’m going to either start looking for more Overpass clients or find a contract somewhere.  The next few weeks will be pretty busy.

Last weekend I took my family to the Cornbury Music Festival near Witney in Oxfordshire.  It was my first music festival—there weren’t many (I don’t know if there were any) near San Diego when I was growing up.  There are loads of festivals in England—they call this the festival season.  We saw some great bands like Squeeze, the Blockheads, Joshua Radin, etc.  I get the impression it’s a festival for the older crowds (30s and 40s), but there were some younger crowds too.

Cornbury was recommended as one of the most family-friendly festivals there are.  It has three stages.  This is only the 7th year, but they’ve had some big names play it.  This year the headliners were Jackson Browne and David Gray.  The kids loved it.  This was their first camping experience.

One of the highlights was watching Charly Coombes & The New Breed on the Riverside Stage (the small stage).  I had never heard of them before and there was only a small crowd watching.  They are obviously a pretty new band, but I’m sure we will be seeing more of them.  I’ve already bought their album on Amazon.  Here’s a video I found on YouTube:

It was a great festival and the weather was reasonably nice.  It was very cool to bring some blankets and a football into the Arena where we could watch the bands while kids could play football off the side if they were bored.  I highly recommend it—especially if you have small children.

On Tuesday I gave a talk at the primary school to a bunch of six-year-olds.  Each class year was learning about specific country for the entire week.  The year 1 one classes  (first graders) were learning about America.  So, I went in and gave them a little introduction to my favourite sport—baseball.

I loaded up a gym bag with a few bats, some bases, a couple of gloves, and some balls from my baseball collection.  I gave a short little presentation on what I liked to do at their age.  When I was little, my hero wasn’t Wayne Rooney—it was Tony Gwynn.  We didn’t play football, we played baseball.  I told them about my little league team.  I let them each hold a baseball and feel what the gloves and bats felt like.  I showed them my special foul ball I caught at a Padre game in 1996 after years of taking my glove to the ballpark (still in a protective case). 

Then we went outside to hit balls and run the basis.  I used wiffle balls and a foam bat.  We set the bases out in a small diamond and had all the kids stand in a semi-circle in the outfield.  Each child came up to the plate to hit the ball while the others cheered them on.  I threw underhand and most of them were able to hit it and run the bases.  It was a great time.

Most people in England don’t know very much about baseball (the same way most people in the States don’t know much about Cricket).  It was one of the things I missed the most when I moved here 12 years ago.  No baseball. 

Baseball is such a big part of American life. Even if you are not a fan, you have a general idea how the game works.  It’s woven into our culture.  Television programmes make occasional references to baseball.  We use baseball terms in common speech.  So, when kids over here watch American TV programmes, they don’t always understand when there is a baseball reference.  I was watching Arthur (the cartoon—not the Dudley Moore movie) with my kids and they were playing baseball on the show.  My kids are familiar with baseball, but many of their friends are not.

But kids here love football (okay, soccer).  Even at six-years-old, they knew a lot about the World Cup.

Surprisingly, the classes I spoke to knew a little bit about baseball from Wii Sports.  That was their exposure to it.  At the end of playing with one of the classes, a little girl who hit the ball pretty well said to me “I never hit the ball on the Wii, but I hit the ball today.”  She had a big smile on her face. 

I’ve done my part as ambassador.

Four years ago, my colleagues at BNP Paribas gave me an iPod Nano as a leaving gift.  It worked great and I use it all the time for running.  I have a big iPod Classic too, but this little 1Gb gadget is perfect for my runs (since it has the flash memory and I find it easy to navigate the music while running than I did when running with an iPhone.

The problem is that a few years ago, after running with it through the rain, the click wheel stopped working properly.  It works eventually but you have to fiddle with it.  For example, the menu button wouldn’t work until you clicked it about 5 times.  It was annoying, but I learned to live with it.  I thought about replacing it, but it hardly I couldn’t really justify the expense to myself to get a new one.

So the other day, I stumbled upon some videos on how to fix various problems with iPods, iPhones, etc.  Since my Nano was probably way outside any warranty anyway, I decided to fix it myself.  Around my house, I’m known for fixing things and making them worse (like flooding my own kitchen or making a small leaky tap to a large leaky tap), so it went against my better judgement—but I tried it anyway..

I bought a new click wheel for £3.99 from http://www.appleiphoneparts.co.uk/.  It was tiny and it came in an envelope the next day.  They have loads of parts  I also bought a iPhone toolkit from E-Cell on ebay (http://stores.ebay.co.uk/E-Cell-Global) for £2.95.

I then watched a video made by  DigiExpress in the US (http://www.digiexpress.us/) which walks through how to replace it:

I had to pause this video loads of times at each step, but I got it to work.  It took me about 20 minutes.  My 4-year-old Nano is just like new. When the battery goes out on it, I will be able to replace that too.  I’m chuffed about saving some money by fixing myself, but I’m more pleased that I didn’t have to add yet one more piece of technology to a landfill somewhere.

The weather here in Oxfordshire has been fantastic the past few weeks.  It’s not like English weather at all, but a lot more like the California summers I’ve grown up with.  The weather has been sunny and about 80 degrees Farrenheit.  The other day while I was driving with the windows down in the car and the music blaring, it reminded me of taking long drives in the States—except that I was sitting on what should have been the passenger seat and driving in the lane that should have had oncoming traffic.

One of the things people ask me a lot (during small talk, of course) is if I miss the California weather.   I do, but not so much.  One thing I’ve found since moving here is that English people are a lot more concerned with the weather than people who grow up in California.  The weather in San Diego was always nice, so there was never a need to chat about it.  Sometimes it rained, but not so often.  In England I can see why there is an obsession with weather.  It’s not that the weather is rainy all the time, it’s just that you get a lot of gray, bleak, days.  When the weather is nice, you feel like you need to really enjoy it.

When it’s 80 degrees, people start to complain about the heat.  It’s too hot to do anything.  I’ve lived in Texas for a few years—now that was heat.  I worked at Sea World of Texas in San Antonio through the Summer where every day reached over 100 degrees.  But after living in the UK for the past 12 years, this weather is too hot.

The past few winters have had record snowfall and it has nearly closed London.  But it’s nothing compared to the times I’ve visited Minnesota in the winter.  But the infrastructure here is not geared for extremes in weather.  Most homes don’t have air conditioning and most towns don’t have many snow ploughs.

This weather will end soon, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.  As I write this, I’m sitting on a blanket in a part watching my kids play in park sprinklers.  Life couldn’t be better.

Two years ago, I bought the iPhone 3g.  It was awesome.  I missed the first rush to buy it, so had to wait for weeks until more were available. 

I liked most things about it.  I was annoyed that it didn’t sync very well with my Windows machine and it forced me to use iTunes, but it was so cool I overlooked all that.  Then it bugged me that I couldn’t tether the phone to laptop so I could surf the web using my 3g connection on the train (so I would have to take out a second contract with O2 for mobile broadband").  But I have to overlook that too.

Six months ago, I got a call from O2 saying my contract was up and asking if I wanted to upgrade.  I told them I wanted to wait for the iPhone 4.  So, as June 7 approached—I couldn’t wait for the iPhone 4 announcement to see what it would be like.  I registered my interest on the site.  The new phone would have a clearer display, video editing, a webcam!  Apple is touting as a game-changer.  The rush is on.  The pre-orders have already sold out. 

You know what?  I don’t want to be a part of this any more.  I don’t want to be someone who drools over the next Apple product.  These game-changer features are incremental improvements.  I never look at my current iPhone and say “Man, the resolution on this thing is awful!”  I never once thought—”If only I could edit video on this thing.” 

I don’t want to wait for new stock or stand in a queue.  I don’t want to pay through the nose for the privilege.  I don’t want to read any more news stories about new features.  I want to break free.

I got my new phone.  It’s an Android phone—the HTC Desire.  It does most everything I need it to do and it was much cheaper.  Highly recommend it.