Over the falls

Parenting is one of those things I never really understood, I just do. I know there are heaps of books you can buy on the subject, and that lots of people must freak out because they're not doing it right, and then go buy those books. Or maybe parents in law buy them as a discreet way of telling their children's spouses that they're not doing it right, or maybe nobody buys them at all... Either way, my approach to parenting is really simple; children are people. They're often really short bizzare crazy people, but they're people none the less. I worry a bit about the supernanny and the baby whisperer training children to regimes and schedules. You can train children to behave according to your rules, the same way you could train a monkey or a goat, sure. But you don't treat people like that. All kinds of organisations from the Third Reich to Heaven's Gate have managed to successfully train people to behave in a particular way. They didn't get their...

I had the pleasure of getting an e-mail out of the blue from an old friend last week - thanks to the inter-connected world of the blogosphere. He'd ran across my blog (from Cam's blog ) and had read up to find out what it was I'd been doing since we parted ways in college. It was kind of weird to talk to someone after such a long time and have nothing much to say that he didn't already know! Dan's been adventuring in Indonesia for the last seven years, and he's finally 'sold out' and started publishing his writings. You should prime your rss readers (I found one that I love - this one !) and head on over to his new blog to get the latest updates on his progress -they'll be required reading around these parts. Welcome aboard, Dan-o!

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying to come to terms with exactly how to use the Novation Remote Midi Controller in conjunction with Reason... Well, I'm still trying to figure it out - I've thrown away nearly everything that I've created, but today I managed to create a song that was worthy of persistence. If you'd like to hear it, you can download it here . I figure I'm using about 2-3% of the software's features. Not even having the faintest idea how a synthesiser works, I'm viewing the exercise as something of a random knob-tweaking frenzy... So many buttons to push, so little time...

In Software Development Land, there is one kind of project that nobody wants to end up on. Identifying features of these projects often contain wildly unrealistic goals, crazed unrealistic timelines, a lack of adequate requirements or supporting technical infrastructure, and often, a combination of all of those things. These projects are affectionately termed 'Death March' projects. I know the name sounds a little extreme, but that's really what they are called. (Here's the wikipedia link to prove it.) I've just survived a project that has had me working crazy hours, weekends, public holidays, and basically any time that I wasn't asleep in an effort to pull one of these off. It all wrapped up today, and in the end, it wasn't that bad. Well, it was actually pretty bad in some ways. For example, my kids haven't seen me in 36 hours, and my wife hasn't actually kicked me in the balls , (but to be honest I wouldn't blame her if she did), so for the...

This was driving me crazy - here's an easy cut and paste solution to not being able to use the DOM to rename a node for lazy developers like me: public static XmlNode RenameNode (XmlNode node, string namespaceURI,string qualifiedName) { if (node.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element) { XmlElement oldElement = (XmlElement) node; XmlElement newElement = node.OwnerDocument.CreateElement(qualifiedName, namespaceURI); while (oldElement.HasAttributes) { newElement.SetAttributeNode(oldElement.RemoveAttributeNode(oldElement.Attributes[0])); } while (oldElement.HasChildNodes) { newElement.AppendChild(oldElement.FirstChild); } if (oldElement.ParentNode != null) { oldElement.ParentNode.ReplaceChild(newElement, oldElement); } return newElement; } else { return null; } ...

On Friday the current amorphous collection of cells (and more importantly their digital replication instructions) that make up me passed a milestone: the completion of their 32nd lap around the giant mass of incandescent gas that brings life to the planet Earth. Or, to put it somewhat more concisely, it was my birthday. My Dad and my Congo-family had sent me some money in celebration of this momentous event, and despite my inclination to pay some bills, my Wife insisted that I spend it on something for myself. It's pretty rare for me to have some money that I have to spend on fun stuff. You know what? I discovered that if you check out the shops, there are a LOT of things you can buy. I mean a lot. And they all look really cool. So, after much prowling and perusal, I had narrowed my purchasing field down to the following. a) some kind of digital camera, or b) some kind of musical instrument. In the end, I decided I couldn't afford to buy the kind of camera I wanted, and yet I ...