Paul Grenyer

Great film! Really enjoyed it. The wife, however, fell asleep in the first 15mins and remained asleep throughout the whole film. I however was completely glued. I have to admit that I didn’t realise the main character wasn’t Jason Bourne until someway through. I haven’t seen the original films for quite sometime and I was putting my confusion down to that for quite a while. This film stands up on its own without the others anyway. It’ll be interesting to see where they take it. It is of course quite formulaic and there is no twist. Lots of action and lots to follow.

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This was my first Bloodstock for two years as this is the first year for two years my wife didn’t decide to have a baby! I have to say it was great to be back! I didn’t realise how much I’d missed it, even though the lineup this year was disappointingly weak and Deicide had, not unexpectedly, pulled out. Maybe next year? Can we have Hypocrisy too, please? Grand Magnus [3] were the first band I saw. Nothing special. Just a straight metal band with nothing of interest to me. I’ve seen Moonsorrow [4] before and even owned an album once. They were better than I remember and I quite enjoyed their set. The most startling thing about Iced Earth [6] was that Jon Schaffer’s hair and beard, having been white two years ago, was now suddenly dark brown! As if no one would notice? They played well as always, but didn’t play Melancholy (Holy Martyr) this time, much to my dissapointment. Sepultura were just spectacularly brilliant as always [8]. Back with their original bassist it was great to hear...

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and feelings about attending the SyncNorwich meetings. It gives me immense pride and pleasure to hear so many people telling me how good and different SyncNorwich is compared to other similar groups in the Norwich area. Between 60 and 70 people turned up for the Lightning Talks event on Thursday 16th August. All manner of people were there, including developers, small company owners, marketing people, hardware people, designers, investment directors, recruiters, photographers, journalists and even an IP lawyer. Several people commented on the positive vibrant atmosphere at the event. This is of course down to the people who attend. They are what makes these events so enjoyable! Of course SyncNorwich couldn’t hold events without its sponsors. Thanks go out to Smart421 for the BBQ and drinks, to Blurtit for the venue, to Pandr for the logo and to James Neal Photography for the official photographs. The photos can be found here . The eve...

Unless you’re between the ages of 15 and 17, don’t bother with this film. It’s crude beyond necessity. All of the good bits are in the trailer. There are a few funny moments from the multitude of celebrities in the film. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them have since regretted agreeing to do it, especially Kelly Brook. There’s little story and no class. Avoid.

Yesterday was a day for firsts! As well as attending my first NRUG , I also attended my first SyncNorwich lunch , despite it being the second one I had organised. Other unforeseen commitments had prevented me attending the first one. I was really pleased with the turnout! Twenty people made it, including all but one of the SyncNorwich team, one of whom even brought his daughter, a small group from Aviva, and the rest were people from other businesses across Norwich, including Blurtit and Nomad . SyncNorwich lunches are purely social with the opportunity of networking for those who want to. A good time was to be had by all, especially the one or two new faces. There will be another SyncNorwich lunch in September, preceded by a dinner on the 6th September .

I’ve just got home from my first Norwich Ruby Users Group meeting. Tonight’s meeting was a Language Agnostic Programming Session held at Blurtit (the regular venue for SyncNorwich ) in Norwich. It was fantastic! There was no internet for most of it so it was about a dozen geeky guys, plus the wonderful Kathryn Wright , laughing and joking about geeky things in a room. And of course there was pizza, beer, tea, coffee and programming! Loved it! Haven’t had so much fun in ages. I’m already looking forward to the presentations or ruby lessons at the next meet. Well done guys!

Do we need another film that’s mostly a selection of references to 80s movies? Yes, of course we do! However the references are the best part about this cliched flick. Although there were a few that only had me laughing in a quite full cinema! I enjoyed the film overall, but it isn’t one I would want to see again and I certainly won’t be going out to get the Blu-ray. There is a lot of language, but all of it is appropriate for the film. The idea of a Teddy Bear that magically comes to life is just ridiculous and I spent a lot of the film wondering if it could have been replaced with a human and still been mostly the same story. See this film if you have nothing better to do or are a huge Flash Gordon fan. Otherwise don’t lose any sleep over missing it.

This film is dreadful, but I loved it. It wasn’t as good as the first one, but still incredible. I don’t think anyone takes this film seriously, including the cast, the writers and the producers. There were lots of gunfights and fist fights. Needless to say the film is totally predictable in every way. One thing I didn’t understand was how Trench (Arnie) knew that the Expendables needed rescuing from the mine. Chuck Norris was superb as Booker! Go and see this film and expect to be entertained and amused. Leave your brain at home though.

What: SyncNorwich 3: Kanban: What is it good for? An introduction illustrated with war stories When: Thursday, September 13, 2012, 6:00 PM Where: The King's Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH, Norwich Sign up: http://www.syncnorwich.com/events/78133472/ This talk will provide an introduction to the ideas of kanban and how it has been applied to software development. Ideas will be illustrated with experiences Benjamin has had coaching teams using concepts from Lean / Agile / Kanban over the last five years We'll cover the basics: The difference between a push and a pull mindset and the impact it has on team performance Visualisation as a way of study and improving work in teams We'll also look at: What was the problem that kanban was trying to solve? Does that apply in your situations? What problems or scenarios does kanban add most value? What are the scenarios where it is not suited (or even detrimental)? We'll finish off with a discussion: ...

What: Walking Skeleton ( ACCU London ) When: 20th September 2012, 6.30pm Where: 1e ltd, CP House, 97-107 Uxbridge Road, Ealing, London, W5 5TL Sign up: http://accu-walkingskeleton.eventbrite.co.uk/ I will be speaking about Alistair Cockburn’s Walking Skeleton for the penultimate time at ACCU London in September. Although this is an ACCU event all are welcome. The walking skeleton was described by Alistair Cockburn as "... a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel." It is also one of the theme's in Freeman & Pryce's Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests. In this session Paul will start with an (almost) clean IDE and develop a walking skeleton for a simple application and demonstrate how Test Driven Development (TDD) can be used even at th...

By Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis, Ian Robinson ISBN: 978-0596805821 I read this book because I wanted to learn about REST for a project I’m doing. This book taught me about REST. In fact it did it in the first five chapters. That’s less than half the book and it could have been quicker! There is a lot of, to my mind, unnecessary detail that could have been postponed to later chapters or even an appendix. I just wanted to get to the code and to the “how”, I’m not overly interested in the “why” in this much depth. Furthermore I found the vast majority of the diagrams incomprehensible and totally unhelpful. However, the book did answer my questions about REST and even using the same REST framework I’d chosen for my project. Unlike a lot of other books, web service clients were not neglected. In fact they were there in as much detail as the server side components with real code! The format of the book is also great for skipping to the good parts and the parts with code.