Paul Grenyer

I've just booked tickets and accommodation for the second Metal Hammer Defenders of the Faith featuring a co-head liners Dimmu Borgir and Lamb of God in Birmingham on Thursday 12 February 2009. I've seen Dimmu Borgir a couple of times before (once recently at Bloodstock ), but I've been desperate to see Lamb of God since I was introduced to thier latest album Sacrament last year. It will be well worth two days holiday and a drive to Brum.

by Richard Murch (ISBN: 978-0130219145 ) Although I have actively, and sometimes passionately, resisted the move into any sort of management beyond team / technical leading for many years, I'm finding recently that I'm becoming more interested in project management. It's a sobering fact that where I am now I have a team and I need to manage them better. Project Management by Richard Murch was (how shall I put it?) strongly recommended and presented to me by my current boss. It's a reasonably sized hardback book at 220 pages, plus appendices. The information on each page is, in most cases, both verbose and spread out, so it could have been a much smaller book. I would have scrubbed the final chapter on the internet altogether until I noticed the publication date of October 2000. It's a book of its time and therefore describes the more traditional project management techniques based around quite lot of documentation and rigid process. As such there is no mention of ...

Until recently I hadn't bought a desktop PC for over five years and in that time I'd only bought one laptop (IBM T60 that I'm still very fond of). When I got the money out of my limited company I decided to get a few things, one of which was a new PC. I wanted something with lots of RAM a fast processor and Windows Vista. Efficient PC was suggested to me and they seemed to have what I was looking for so I ordered an Ori with: Phenom Quad Core 9950 4GB of RAM Nvidia Geforce 8600GT 512MB Netgear 108Mbps Wireless Ubunto Windows Vista What I received was a beautiful black tower and a seriously quick machine even following Windows Vista patching. The setup of the network card was a little problematic, but straight forward once I got the hang of the right configuration utility. The first machine I received did have one major problem. It reset (not rebooted!) itself randomly, even when in use. After getting in contact with Efficient PC they took the machine back and traced the f...

Charlotte and I continued our love affair with Norwich Play House and Comedy last week with Mark Steel . I've heard Mark on the radio on a number of Radio 2 and Radio 4 comedy shows, but I've never realised how political he was. Having said that he made a lot of sense. We sat right in the centre of the front row again, but luckily we were ignored this time. In fact he didn't pick on anyone in the crowd who wasn't either late or didn't heckle on him first. We had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Mark was on stage for over two hours, with a interval. Very good value for money and we'll certainly go and see him again.

I have now read all of Alistair Reynolds Revelation spaces books and I loved every one. The Prefect was no different. It took a little while to get into, but once the plot started to emerge it was very addictive. It is set in the Glitter Band before the Melding Plague and takes an interesting look at Demarchist society and how it works. There are plenty of references to the eighty, the Sylvest's and the Shrouders. Along with an explanation of what really happened to one character from the original Revelation Space novel. The only complaint I have about the book is that, like Absolution Gap, it does not really reach a conclusion. It just ends and leaves a lot to the readers imagination. I am hoping that in both book's cases, this is so that Reynolds can pick up the stories and elaborate further in future books. I am now intending to take a brief pause and revisit CS Lewis and read some more Richard Morgan before tackling Reynold's non-Revelation Space based books. (ISBN: 978...

I think the credit crunch is getting everyone. This year's ACCU London Christmas party at Pizza Express was well attended as usual, but a number of the usual suspects were missing. This does of course mean that there were some new faces and even some old ones that don't make it out so often. There was a worrying about of technical discussion. Maybe I'll go back to drinking for next year. A small delegation went to the usual ACCU haunt (Chandos) where the good time continued for a short time. I was staying with friends on Isle of Dogs and thoroughly enjoyed the walk from Trafalgar Square to Westminster to pick up the Jubilee line to Canary Wharf. It was strange seeing the Lehman's building with half the lights out and the illuminated green band missing from the top.

I heard today that my Boiler Plating Database Resource Cleanup proposal has been accepted for the 2009 ACCU Conference . Obviously, I'm very pleased as I was unable to go last year and many people have already asked me if I'll be going in 2009. I can now say that I will be there for at least one day and hopefully the duration. I will also be presenting Boiler Plating Database Resource Cleanup at ACCU London in February. Watch this space for details.

Elf Yourself

Ever since I've been thinking about getting a Blackberry I've also been trying to find an MP3 player with a DAB and FM radio, as the Blackberry doesn't have any sort of radio and I do listen to it on the move quite a lot. As soon as I started looking I found several MP3 players with DAB radios, but they all had one draw back or another (funny size, strange shape, odd aerial attachment etc). Then, almost by accident I stumbled on the Cowon iAudio D2 16GB MP3 Player with DAB Digital Radio : Affordable PMP The iAudio D2 does not compromise quality and features for its compact size. Cowon provides the latest innovations in digital multimedia technology to provide incredible video and audio quality. The D2 supports QVGA 320x240, 30fps video files and audio files including the high quality lossless codecs such as FLAC and OGG, along with the usual MP3, WMA and WAV. The D2 also provides a TV output for seamless transfer of your viewing onto the comfort of your living room TV. ...

A development role writing critical web-based business process software using predominantly Java based technologies... Read more .