Paul Grenyer

J.R.R. Tolkien must be turning in his grave. I came away from seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (in a stifling Odeon IMA) in several minds.  It’s true that only about 25% of the film followed the original story and there were a number of scenes that left out detail that could have been included, such as the encounter with Beorn, Bilbo taunting the spiders in Merkwood and Bilbo putting the lids on the barrels before the dwarves are pushed through a hatch into the river by the Wood Elves. Maybe some of these will be featured in the extended edition. I’m also struggling with the fact that there were no Orcs in the book either, just goblins. After the first thirty minutes I stopped being annoyed and started trying to see the film as a film, rather than as an adaptation of a book. And then it occurred to me that although the Hobbit is an excellent book, it’s quite a simple story and may not translated directly into a film well. Although the film felt unnecessarily long, a...

Trite as it may sound, I moved to Norfolk for love. I was working in London to pay for a flat in Colchester which I wanted because it was an easy commute to my job in London. My girlfriend, however, lived in Norfolk and I was travelling to see her every weekend. Clearly, the only logical move was to get a second mortgage, based on my London salary; jack in my job the instant that mortgage cleared and move to Cromer with two mortgages, no income and no job lined up. My thinking at the time was that my wife (a zoo keeper) would find it hard to find work if she moved and I (as a senior java developer with years of banking experience, plus the conceit that that brings) would simply walk into a development job. I had overlooked one tiny detail: there are only about 8 Java shops in Norfolk. It was sheer luck more than anything else that landed me my current role. I’m not sure if the dearth of Java jobs in the county is a reflection on Norfolk or on Java but what I do know is that we de...

What:  NorDev 7: Agile as Enterprise Culture (Aviva) & Preaching The Gospel (Neontribe) Where:  Virgin Wines, 4th Floor, St James' Mill, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1TN When: Wednesday 9th January 2014 @ 6.30pm Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/152603352/ Stories from Suncorp: Agile as Enterprise Culture  Rob Hills (Aviva) As part of Aviva’s ambition to adopt Agile the group COO created an exchange programme with the Suncorp Group in Australia and New Zealand. A team of 4 Aviva people travelled over to see the Suncorp IT and Business operations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane from July to October this year. What we saw was an organisation that has been on a long, challenging and rewarding journey to embrace Agile at Enterprise scale within the Insurance and Banking sector. This talk will share the background to the exchange programme and the companies involved, share what we experienced including a video we creat...

I don’t think I ever want to go and see Paul Foot again. Some of his act was funny, but most of it was just silly nonsense, although the concept of distractions seemed to work quite well. I don’t understand how he can get away with jumping into the crowd and touching people, let alone laying across people. Maybe everyone else there knew what to expect.

It wasn’t until I checked in on Foursquare that I actually managed to find out who was supporting The Pixies . It was The Jezabels . They were surprisingly good. They only played for half an hour and the first three songs all sounded the same, but it was good and in places quite dramatic (I like dramatic!) and the drummer was excellent. I won’t be rushing out to buy their album or EPs though. The best I can say about the Pixies is that they sound much better live than recorded and I think the PA in the Hammersmith Apollo did them justice (the last time I was at the Apollo was for Europe and they were fantastic). Unfortunately they did nothing for me, although the 100 minute set (we didn’t stay for the encores) did pass quite quickly and the rest of the room, including my wife appeared to be having a fantastic time. The Pixies are clearly talented musicians with an adoring fan base, they’re just not for me.

I was at university and about 20 when I really discovered reading for pleasure. I started with Arthur C. Clarke’s A Space Odyssey quadrilogy and then moved on to the Rama series. I read Arthur C. Clarke pretty much exclusively until I was 29 when I discovered Alastair Reynolds and Richard Morgan. Now I read other stuff too. The thing about Arthur C. Clarke is that he rooted all of his stories in real science. Now that I’ve read other authors I see that sometimes the story suffered because the science was often favoured over the story. There was a lot of hype around the new Gravity film starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Surely there’s only so much of a story you can write about two people in space suits stranded in space? I did wonder if it was just going to turn into a dialogue between them until they were unexpectedly rescued - luckily I was wrong.  Although I was also reassured by the fact the film was advertised as only 90 minutes long. Gravity could have been an...