I just read over this report:

Sound Output Levels of the iPod and Other MP3 Players: Is There Potential Risk to Hearing?

and it’s great. I bought a pair of Sennheiser headphones a couple of years back mainly because I enjoy my music and wanted to hear it without it being massacred by earbuds.

I wrote some visualisations for Windows Media Player to see what different codecs were doing to the frequency range too…

So, now when I sit in the office looking über cool in my big white retro looking headphones I know that in just a few short years I’ll be laughing at you poor deaf b*st*rds.

Updated: It’s just been pointed out to me that I may be laughing but you won’t be able to hear me so it won’t matter.

Xansa. I haven’t bothered to blog at all about my time there as I only lasted 6 months, and it was two years ago. The account I worked on had a particular culture to it that I found I couldn’t work with. I’m not going to expand on that here for the same reason I haven’t blogged about it before – there are some great folks there trying really, really, hard to do some great stuff, but there’s a lot of difficulties that make it difficult for them to.

So, why am I posting this now? Well, this strange thing keeps happening; every few months or so I get a clump of searches for Xansa and variants of it showing up in the logs – from inside Xansa’s network.

So… Hello Xansans (or whatever the correct plural noun is). I wish you all well. May your god smile on you and shower you with good fortune. :->

So, it’s ages since I last blogged anything and even then a lot of was BlogPaper… So what’s up with that?

Well, I try to blog things that genuinely contribute to the world. Things like Poo and What is professionalism really about? Writing things like that contribute gives me a sense of meaning, of being able to help others.

What I’ve tried to avoid is a link-fest to unrelated things I spotted on other people’s blogs – you have Technorati for that – or short thoughts on things flying round the blogosphere. If I haven’t got time enough to research and understand stuff I generally won’t blog it, Tim O’Reilly justifies that for me:

way too interesting to blog it

I’ll be back with some photos soon…

I’ve been accepted to speak at Waterfall2006 with the following session:

If It Was Good Enough for Shakespeare: A Fresh Look at the Need for Talent in Software Engineering

Friday morning at 6.33am my third child arrived. Sam’s a big boy, just half an ounce short of ten pounds. Despite this my wife delivered on just gas & air in a little over three and a half hours. Bloody hell she’s amazing. She was totally in control the whole time, following the midwife’s instructions to the point of managing to not push when told not to…

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I’ve been a Christian for 4 and-a-half years now; although my involvement with Christian friends and my interest in knowing more about God has been much longer. Well, today I became baptised; a very interesting and beneficial experience…

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Well, I disappeared for a while. Things are very busy and very interesting at my place of work currently. We’re running two projects with tight deadlines, both of which are now going quite nicely and we’re trying to adopt more agile approaches.

A few of us are blogging on our experiences introducing new agile practices – as we go. Learning such lessons as… don’t introduce refactoring until after you’ve introduced developer testing. Andy (colleague) is attempting to procure some lava lamps for the LLPDCA (Lava-Lamp Powered Developer Conscience Alerting) aka CruiseControl.

I’m gonna take some stick for this for being a heartless man. But it’s not going to stop me saying it. But before I do let me just say that I am not heartless. Far from it. I have been deeply touched by the South East Asian earthquake. I watched the children swept away. I watched the mother run into the sea trying to save her children. On News 24, safely on my sofa – just like you.

It made me cry.

Then I watched the Vicar of Dibley on New Year’s Day. It made me cry. Richard Curtis is a writer of enormous talent.

For those who missed it, a good description can be found on the BBC’s site.

Follow the link at the bottom to Make Poverty History and read up:

Over the next 12 months a series of landmark meetings are taking place where world leaders can finally stop 30,000 people dying needlessly every day, just because they?re poor.

30,000 people dying needlessly every day

If 150,000 people die as a result of the Tsunami, that’s just 5 average days of death due to Poverty. Poverty that we can stop; that we can change. Death that is so routine, so mundane, that it fails to make the news any more. That’s why we had Break The Chains back in 2000, Band Aid too many years ago and Band Aid 20 this year.

This is mad and we must stop it.

The signal-to-noise ratio of technical recruitment amazes me. The number of CVs I see where the technologies listed don’t match the must-haves of the job spec is astounding.

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Last weekend saw an impulse purchase of Canon’s new EOS 20D Digital SLR. Well, hardly impulse actually. I’d been thinking about buying the 10D for some time, but had never quite convinced myself; then I heard the spec for the 20D, jumping up to 8 mega pixels. I’ve checked and they’re all there.

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