Hunky Doray

When my wife asks me to do something round the house, my usual reply is “I’ll do it”. Now, look at that for a second. What have I committed myself to there? As far as I can see, I’ve simply committed to doing something. There’s no ‘how’ or, more importantly, no ‘when’, either implied or otherwise. How then does my wife hear this as “I’ll do it now“?

It’s not just my wife that hears an implied schedule in this either. As you may know, when a baby arrives things can get a little hectic around the house. Dishes can pile up, vacuuming tends to go undone for a day or two, and there’s always washing to be done. We have a lot of people wanting to help us, which is great. Our mothers have been the first in line when it comes to offering help around the house. When they see the things that need to be done, they instinctively ask if we want them to do it. And my instinctive response? “I’ll do it”.

The same rules apply here as above. I have not committed to a schedule. I see not immediate need to clear up the dishes, or brush the floor. However, if these things are not down by the time the original samaritan returns it’s assumed that I can’t cope. In fact, there is a general assumption that the father will not be able to cope with the house work. I find this just a little annoying. Sure, I’ve been up through the night. Sure, the wee fella cried a bit. Yes, there’s a pile of ironing to be done. And yes, I’ve been at work all day. So? I do appreciate help round the house, don’t get me wrong. But I can cope with ironing.
I can put on a bite of dinner. I can even work the washing machine.

This post turned into a bit of a rant. Apologies. Maybe the lack of sleep has had an affect

It’s been a just over a week now since I became a dad for the first time.

Noah was born on Friday 4th July at 12.02pm, by elective caesarian (he remained stubbornly breech). He was a very reasonable 7lb 12oz. The only slight problem was that Diane needed a general anaesthetic after the spinal didn’t work for some reason. That meant, of course, that I wasn’t allowed in the room for the birth. I didn’t even get to cut the cord. I was actually more disappointed for Diane, as she wasn’t even conscious when the wee fella was delivered. But we can’t complain. That was the closest we came to a complication.

Diane and Noah came home the following Monday. I found Diane’s recovery pretty remarkable. She was on her feet the day after surgery. She’s not one for letting things keep her down.

And the result of all this? A very content little boy, who would probably sleep through most of the night already if we weren’t waking him for a feed. In spite of that, both Diane and myself are pretty tired. That’s probably down to a lot of nervous energy, apart from everything else.

Now, both Diane and Noah are sleeping, it’s maybe a good time to get my head down.

I had an interview the other day. You know the kind of thing, sitting at one side of a boardroom table with a firing squad on the other, ready-aim-firing technical questions for an hour. Like most, sane, interviewess, I prepare for these. I read. I code. “What questions would ‘I’ ask?” This time was no different. Sort of.

The job in question required knowledge of PHP. Now, it feels like half a lifetime since I’ve used in PHP in anger (that’s how I remember coding in PHP, at least), so I thought I had a little more preparing to do than usual. I spent a couple of evenings reading, coding, “What questions would ‘I’ ask?”-ing and felt I’d more or less covered everything I’d need. Security, database access, objects in PHP etc.

I was ready. Confident. Wrong.

First question was about the difference between GET and POST. Ok. Next, retrieving values that have been GETted or POSTed to your application. Fine. How to you find the size of an array in PHP? The exchange went something like this:

“Mmmm … in Python that would be the len function … mmmm” (Inner voice - Good start cretan.)

“Erm, there’s a method on an array ….” (Inner voice - They’re laughing at you now)

“length?” “No” “len?” “No” “size?” “No, it’s count” (Inner voice - It’s count, you idiot)

This was the prelude to a series of basic PHP questions upon which I poured huge buckets of FAIL. You see, I’d forgot to go over the basics. In all my preparation, I had neglected to take even a cursory glance over the fundamentals of the language. The very things that will leave you if you don’t code in a language for a while. I spent that part of the interview being able to answer all those questions in Python and Java. Big help.

Lesson learned? Keep a hand in everything that’s on my CV as much as possible. That’s scary, because over the past 11 years, I’ve been in contact with a *lot* of technologies. I know that I’ll never remember everything I’ve ever done, but surely I should be able to remember the basics. Some of them.

BTW, I got the job.

My copy of iPhone Open Application Development arrived the other day, and I was very excited by the possibility of actually seeing my code run on actual hardware, like an actual programmer.

I can’t get the flipping toolchain to build anything. The linker *will not* see anything in $HEAVENLY, the home from home for my iPod Touch (yes, that one) filesystem. I’ve installed the toolchain as per instruction, several times.

I know I’ve done something wrong. You now those moments of intelligence blindness you get, where you simply can’t see how you’ve done something wrong, but you’re absolutely convinced that you must have, because you’re the only one in the entire world seemingly having problems (that isn’t quite true).

Those pesky kids with their SDKs and Apple certificates may still be one step ahead … for now.

Update: I can get applications to build if I compile and link separately. I’m afraid I’m just a poor Python coder. Can anyone tell me why this would make a difference?

Because something that’s 2% of my life takes up 80% of my time, and makes me forget that 98% of my life is fantastic.

I know there is one because I have it. Some have diagnosed me as having a particular mutation: A55-H0-L3.

This particular gene mutation manifests itself in an almost Tourette-like inability to stop myself from issuing forth whatever inane utterance hits the frontal lobe, all the while believing myself to be funny, sincere or intelligent. The ease of use, and high availability of outlets like Twitter and blog comments only serve to spread the stupidity further, multiplying its effects.

I suppose I’ll come to terms with it. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue to make enemies of those I admire, annoy those I like, and talk my way out of opportunities to work with clever people.

As I mentioned, I spent the remainder of last night painting the nursery (or what will become the nursery). I must’ve been getting really tired, or, more likely, it’s the result of a Baptist upbringing, but I started to draw parallels to my day job (writing software). I spent most of my time taping up skirting boards and windows. In fact, the majority of my time was probably spent preparing to paint, rather than actually getting anywhere near the walls with the roller. But, all this preparation meant two things happened: the actual painting went much quicker; and it was a neater job in the end. And that got me to thinking about testing, specifically, test driven development, which, coincidentally, I’ve just given a presentation on at work a couple of weeks ago. Why write your tests before you write any code? The reasons are the same as my painting job: you’ll end up with neater, smaller code written faster with less mess to clean up afterwards. You’d think I’d learn my own lesson, but I’m still in the habit of getting down to coding instead of testing. Maybe I should paint more rooms in the house to drive home the lesson.

Just a test … everyone has one of these

So, I’m still trying to get this place sorted out. After a couple of abortive attempts (and a host change later), I’ve settled, once more, for Wordpress.
I’ve been putting a lot of development work off until my new machine arrived. Some might call that laziness. I call it … laziness. There are a couple of projects that desperately need my attention. The new machine has arrived, so I suppose I’ll have to come up with a new excuse.
I’ve been using Twitter a lot recently as a replacement for actually having to write blog entries. I think Twitter suits me better. I don’t have a good enough memory to store enough interesting stuff for a blog entry, but Twitter allows me to drip feed my exciting offline life onto the InterWeb no matter where I am.
First child due to arrive in July, and the mum-to-be is already nesting. I foresee a lot of paint-stained masochism masquerading as DIY in my near-term future. Speaking of which, I must get back to the torture that is the paint roller.
Oh hum.