I may have baulked at the prospect of my local council spending my taxes on a probably fruitless attempt to stop it, but I’m certainly pleased to hear that Reading has scrapped the loony one way IDR plan. The idea was that turning the whole of the IDR into one giant roundabout would ease traffic congestion in the town, however taking our usage as an example, a trip to almost anywhere in town, like the sorting office, or the station would have resulted in us having to drive a complete circuit around the town centre to get there and back. Currently we only have to use a short stretch of the IDR for most journeys, so making the change would increase the amount of time we would have spent driving around Reading not reduced it. Unfortunately for Reading taxpayers though, their local council has now spent a truckload of money on a totally fruitless exercise – it’s back to the drawing board for how to solve Reading’s traffic problems.
Tag Archives: Reading
Official
So I’m now officially the Churchwarden for St James Finchampstead, and all the associated responsibilities that entails.
I was sworn in, along with my fellow Churchwarden at a service in St Mary Minster in Reading. Officially this wasn’t supposed to be our service, this was the service for Churchwardens in Bradfield, Newbury and Reading Deaneries – Sonning Deanery was allocated the Windsor service on Thursday, however quite apart from clashing with choir practice, Reading is a lot easier to get to after work than Windsor! We needn’t have worried though, as when they asked the Sonning Churchwardens to stand it seemed like a large number of other people had had the same idea. We spotted the wardens and clergy from California and Crowthorne, and were sat next to the group from Wargrave. Indeed we weren’t the only additions, there were wardens from Maidenhead, and we even had a lone representative from Witney Parish in the Oxford area. Interestingly the warden from Witney was Douglas Hurd – well Baron Hurd of Westwell now. He was MP for Witney until 1997 – a seat now held by David Cameron.
Anyway, the service itself was fairly straightforward consisting of two hymns, Taizé style prayers accompanied by the choir of St Mary’s Thatcham, and of course the admission of Churchwardens. The formal part of the admission consists of repeating an oath read out by the Diocesan Registrar, and then is followed by the Bishop of Oxford’s Charge, which is effectively the sermon. In this Bishop John spoke about his hopes for the Diocese, using Philippians 1, 3-11 as his text. Oh and despite having a broad range of churches represented we used the modern Lord’s Prayer (as was used at the inauguration service) rather than the old cop-out of defaulting to the modified-traditional version. After the service was a chance for everybody to meet Bishop John and our fellow Churchwardens.
Bishop John’s sermon was a good one, and he had a nice mix of serious points and laughs to get his ideas over. He challenged us to make our churches welcoming and open to all which pleased me. We got a chance to chat with him after the service too, as Rev Richard has actually managed to book him twice to come to St James already, and he’s only been in the post for a matter of weeks! Having said that we’ve had Bishop Stephen along twice in the past year, so it will be nice to welcome Bishop John along too. Bishop John certainly seemed to be making a conscious effort to try and talk to as many people as possible, and when I mentioned that we would be in Taizé at the same time as he and the Oxford Pilgrimage is there he said it would be good to see us at the service on the Sunday morning before they leave. All in all it was a great evening, now the hard work of being Churchwarden begins!
Picking Up a Parcel in Reading
One of the more annoying hassles we discovered when we moved to our present house was that we had moved into a postcode delivered from the sorting office in Reading, rather than the more convenient offices in Wokingham or Crowthorne.
Although in general it’s not too much of a problem where our post comes from, if the postman is unable to deliver a package for some reason, it does mean that we have to go into the centre of Reading to pick it up. Unlike most of the parcel delivery companies the Royal Mail have their main site right in the centre of the town, adjacent to the railway station – due in part of course to needing to be close to the railway for Post Office Train.
If you look at the picture, the sorting office is the big building in the bottom of the shot, with the parcel collection office being in the top left corner. The car park containing all the red vans is where the Royal Mail park their vans, and the other car park is for the Vastern Road retail park, which includes a few large retail units and a TGI Friday’s Restaurant. Bear in mind that the largely empty situation in the rest of the car park is pretty normal – very rarely is that car park full. The only available parking, and indeed the parking everybody uses is in the retail park car park.
Anyway, today Beth went off into town to pick up a parcel, and drove into the car park. Being a Saturday morning, TGI Friday’s was closed, and the rest of the car park wasn’t busy, so she went to park in one of the spaces by the sorting office. When she got out, there were new signs warning that the car park was not for use of Royal Mail customers, and someone further up was arguing with some clampers, who had clamped their car in the few minutes it had taken for the person to go in and collect their parcel. Apparently since Wednesday they have been sitting in that part of the car park watching for people parking and going to the sorting office and then clamping them – cost being £120 to release the car. Whilst of course it is their car park, and they can limit access to whoever they like, with the amount of space their usually is in that car park it does seem to be a tremendous own goal by the owners of the retail park to annoy large parts of their potential customers by clamping them for collecting a parcel. Needless to say, the topic has kicked off discussion elsewhere, and even made the local paper. Locals are well advised to find somewhere else to park when they need to collect a parcel.
Developer Day 4
Today was the fourth Microsoft hosted Developer Day, held at the Microsoft UK HQ at Thames Valley Park in Reading. As previously I’d been signed up to go pretty well since it became available, and as with previous events it did not disappoint.
As with the previous events I’d been through the online agenda in advance, selecting the sessions I thought looked interesting, and as before, the sessions I actually attended turned out to be rather different!
My first session was ‘How to Write Crap Code in C#’ presented by Ben Lamb. The slides for the session are online, together with some of Ben’s previous sessions. In terms of the content, he was somewhat preaching to the converted in my case, as on a couple of occasions I’ve had to sort out performance in bits of code. In the case of this talk Ben took a simple task – to count the occurrences of particular words in the complete works of Shakespeare (oddly enough almost the same task as my current employer got me to do at my interview for the programming test), and demonstrated a multitude of different ways for doing it wrong. Amusingly for one example, despite writing it really badly, on some occasions it didn’t make much difference, however when he got to strings, that was when he really hit the big time in terms of speed, indeed he actually had to partially optimise the example so it completed within the allocated time for the session. The fundamental problem is that .Net is really bad with strings, as they are immutable – complicated string manipulation should be done with a string builder object instead. Unfortunately many programmers who cross over to .Net don’t realise this and carry on using strings as they have done in other languages…
In terms of the delivery, I thought that Ben seemed decidedly nervous – but then I’m sure I would be when faced with 160 people! Unfortunately he also made the classic mistake of not running through your entire presentation before doing it, as he would on the day, which when coupled with his decision not to use his regular (and cluttered) account on his laptop meant that part of his demonstration didn’t work correctly. He also had the other presentation nightmare, running out of material. Having said that, he did seem pretty knowledgeable, so I suspect it may well be a case of the classic not enough time to pull it together issue…
Anyway, for session 2, I popped into the next door room for ‘Ruby on Rails for .Net Developers’, presented by Dave Verwer. I particularly wanted to see this session, as Ruby on Rails is one of the hyped up technologies about in the industry at the moment, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As you may have gathered, Ruby on Rails is the competition for Microsoft, so it was an interesting choice of session. In a double whammy, I spotted as Dave walked into the room, that unlike the other speakers, he wasn’t using the PC/Powerpoint combo either, he had a nice Mac laptop, and was using Keynote for the slides. For the demos he was using my favourite Mac text editor Textmate too. However, in a bit of a poor demonstration, he succeeded in crashing the Mac completely on one occasion, and having it lock up on him on another – quite impressive, but for the wrong reasons. Interestingly he also task swapped using the Mac equivalent of ALT-Tab which I found surprising – I tend to hit F9 and use the slick Expose effect instead.
Putting aside the method of presentation, in terms of content, it was very interesting. I can certainly see where the Ruby on Rails reputation for being magic comes from, but ultimately that comes from working the way the framework expects you to work. Whereas other environments try to be as flexible as possible, Ruby on Rails seems very prescriptive about how it would like you to do things, and I suspect the magic will very soon wear thin if you tried to do things slightly differently. Having said that, I think it’s perfectly possible that somebody could take the same principle and apply it to other languages and environments. It’s very nicely done, and certainly powerful, but most definitely hyped.
Session 3 was a somewhat difficult choice as all four sessions seemed attractive, plus Barry was doing one of the four, and Sarah was doing another. In the end, I went with Dave to hear Sarah talking about blogs and blogging, and Dan, a colleague from work checked out and was impressed by what Barry said. Sarah was another person hit by technical difficulties. At one point she had four different laptops on the desk trying to find one that the Microsoft network would allow to connect to the internet – something that was a key part of the talk. Ironically by the time they managed to get a laptop that could connect, she didn’t use the internet anyway. Impressively through all of that Sarah kept her cool, and delivered a great session, certainly covering the basics of the various collaborative technologies that are around, and more importantly giving real world examples of how her employers are using the technology to get their disparate programming teams on opposite sides of the world to work together.
Following session 3 was lunch, which at an extended ninety minutes, I was worried was going to be pretty boring. Having said that the organisers had arranged a selection of mini talks and discussions to fill the time, ironically none of which I actually listened too! In the end I used the time to mingle a bit, chatting to various people, and in the end finishing up in an interesting discussion with Liam Westley who develops software used by shopping channels like QVC.
For session 4 I’d highlighted two technical sessions to attend, and went to neither, choosing instead Richard Costall and Dave McMahon, shamelessly ripping off Crackerjack, playing Double or Drop with the vast selection of swag that they brought back from TechED in Barcelona. Although they maintained that there was no technical content to the session, that was a slight bit of a fib, as the questions were all based around a series of video interviews they had conducted with key industry figures during TechED. Although it wasn’t the sort of deep technical content that a lot of other sessions contained, it was certainly interesting, and as always with their sessions, great entertainment. Perhaps the only criticism I’d make is that it would have been better if they had made use of the embedding feature in Powerpoint to make the whole presentation a lot more slick by embedding the video interviews into the presentation with the questions. Using the presenter view in Powerpoint they could also have removed the need for the other document they had that listed the prizes, and certainly the need to have a switch box and multiple laptops. Unlike many of the presenters who were swapping back and forth for demonstrations, their presentation was an ideal use for the presenter view, and would have been much the better for it.
Before session number 5, we had a brief talk from the Edward Gibson, Microsoft Security chief and ex-FBI man. I have to say that whilst what he was saying was fairly interesting, and certainly important, the whole ex-FBI routine which involved standing on the top of the arena area outside the building in ray bans (it was decidedly grey and overcast today) and bellowing in our direction probably left most people with a fairly poor impression of the guy and his attitude (which is about as polite as I could phrase it), and ultimately detracted from the message. Certainly for the kind of audience at the day it was pitched in totally the wrong way, and Microsoft really need to do something different for this kind of audience.
By session number 5, my brain had largely switched off. Unfortunately I was in Extensible LINQing presented by Oliver Sturm, which seemed like a very interesting topic – ultimately one I think I’m going to have to check out the notes when they are posted. Sadly this is the second Developer Day on the trot when Oliver has been handed this last slot, and really something like the Costall and McMahon show might have been better at this point.
So was it worthwhile going? Most definitely, and I’ll certainly be keen to get my name down for DDD5. There definitely needs to be a bit of work in making sure things work – one colleague commented that he thinks that Memphis (the conference room at Microsoft rather than the city) was cursed as he’d never seen a session at a Developer day in there that worked! To my mind you’re always going to get some things that don’t work on the day, it’s inevitable with some of the stuff that is being demonstrated, but certainly there are ways to mitigate the risk…
Race for Life 2006
I’ve just uploaded the pictures I took of Beth and a number of other women from St James taking part in the 2006 Race for Life, held in Prospect Park, Reading, in aid of Cancer Research. As some of the people in the St James team were from the Youth Group and Junior Choir, the team shots that include them aren’t generally available, however there are some general views of the scenes in the park, and also a shot of Beth finishing and getting her medal.
As you no doubt will have realised it, it probably wasn’t the ideal day to run a race, as although the event started at 7:30pm, when it was starting to cool, with the record breaking temperatures earlier in the day, it was still pretty warm at the start.
We had a large contingent of people from St James, many running and walking in memory of Rev Sheila, our former priest-in-charge who died as a result of breast cancer. Having said that, as an indication of quite how many lives the disease touches, almost everybody was running for a number of other people too.
The race was divided into two, runners and walkers. At the front were the more serious runners, the fastest of which completed the 5km course in just over 20 minutes. The fastest of the St James participants came in not too long after that, with many of our team coming in between 30 and 60 minutes. Beth came in at 55 minutes, which was just over her target of 50 minutes, partly because she ended up quite a long way back in the walkers at the start.
For such a hot day, there were relatively few problems that I saw – most people drinking lots of water as they went around the course. The organisers also relented over not giving out free water at the finish. Certainly all our participants seemed to have got around without too many problems.
In terms of the money raised, a quick total up amongst about half the team before the race came to about £2000 – a really superb total. I’m sure Beth will be posting a full description of what it was like to participate over the next couple of days.
Incidentally, if at this point you are thinking that it is slightly sexist, only allowing women to enter – it is possible for men to get into the race – with a little bit of deviousness. We spotted a couple of men, with valid numbers, in this years race in fairly obvious drag – complete with handbags… 😀 Whether they managed to enter themselves, or whether somebody else entered for them we don’t know. Having said that, the officials didn’t seem to make a fuss over it, and they added to the entertainment on the night.