My cousin and his wife gave everyone a CD of their favourite songs. It's a great album, and it reminds me of them, and a great day, when I listen to it. Let's just ignore the whole piracy aspect to this... Now when I got married, I didn't give anyone anything - I paid for their booze all night, what more do they want?!

If you want HSBC to take them, which they will happily do for you for free, you'll need to bag them up correctly into denominations (i.e. 1ps in a bag, 2ps in a bag, 20ps in a bag etc), and to the correct value. It takes a bit of time, but you can do it in front of the TV for the evening, or whatever. They simply chuck the bags onto the scales, and they know how many coins of the same type there are by the weight. If the bag is light (or heavy I guess), then they won't accept it. Word of advice - take a bag of spares, or be very sure about your counting, or you'll end up bringing a load back!

Right now, you still need a computer to hook your iPad\iPhone up to in order to register it, back it up, transfer CDs onto it, get photos off it etc, etc. Possibly in 5-10 years time, when WiMax, with speeds of 100Mbits/s is everywhere, and your iTunes library is stored in the cloud, they may well discontinue Macs. Having said that, designers will still want to use Macs, because of having a proper keyboard and more importantly a mouse. I can't imagine trying to do fiddly design work using my sausage-like fingers.

You want a Sony Dream Machine. Each tap of the snooze button is 8 minutes (I guess the closest they can get to 1/8th of an hour?), so if you double-tap (my standard), you get a 16 minute snooze. Triple tap, you get a 24 minute snooze, so on up to an hour. Also, it's got a daylight savings button. When the clocks go back, I simply take turn off daylight savings, and it takes the time back an hour. I hope this clock never breaks. It's the best I've ever owned.

This may be irrelevant, but I found that when they renamed a bunch of our servers, I still had some links in my Network Places (not mapped drives), and Explorer locked up loads. When I deleted those links, I found that Explorer started to respond much quicker - it was like before Explorer was trying to find the resources I had links to, even though I wasn't trying to browse those links. Who knows why...

Sure - I was being a bit rash. However, if you start bumbling on about normalisation and talking about the 4th normal form, I'm going to start to wonder why, and if it was book learnt, and not based on any experience. In all reality the 4th normal form is quite impractical from a business perspective (OK, not always), and if I'm hiring someone who's being that pure about their database design, they're probably not going to be able to balance the need to be technically accurate with the need to design things that can be built quickly, and do the job with the minimum amount of effort. BTW - like your idea about mixing the database and chess stuff up for senior DBAs.

In all honesty yes. I didn't say I'd employ someone I could have a beer with, but was awful at his or her job, I just said I didn't want to work with someone who I couldn't have a beer with. It's a differentiator; the being good at your job is a given.

We tend to start off with a logic test (it's a programming test, but it's not specific to a language). We then move on to ask some fairly specific OO, .NET and SQL questions, to which there generally is a specific answer. We then move onto some questions asking them to talk through solving a problem. We use designing a chess game from an OO point of view, and designing a database schema for a car rental company, and simply keep asking more probing questions about their answer until we feel we've guided them to a good solution. If they don't seem to get it, drop it. You'll know if they seem to know what they're talking about. For instance people who can design database will get what you want from them straight away. People who are book-learnt will waffle about normalisation, but never really get there. We decided we'd rather hire someone who's very logical than someone who can quote MSDN. For us, there's been a direct correlation between book learners and poor scores on logic tests. The last guy we hired simply admitted he didn't know the answers to a few of the more tricky questions, rocked the logic test, and within 2 months was writing some fantastic code; he made a real contribution. He also had a social life outside work that wasn't programming. The others who could quote MSDN just wanted to program when they got home. I don't want to work with people who don't have other things to talk about when you're having a beer after work.

Thanks!

Oooh, shiny! Any chance I could have one? I'm at gmail.com, and the first bit's tom.wilko Thanks!

Have you guys tried Evernote? That can be accessed online, from a desktop app, and from a phone app (I use the iPhone one, but I'm sure there's an Android and Win Mobile client too). And as long as you sync your phone\desktop, you can use it offline too.

Unfortunately, that doesn't stop digital fiddling, it just makes me feel guilty... :(

All the previous posts have been about gangsta rap, not hip-hop. DJ Format produces great hip hop. Also, try Jurassic 5 - it's not about b!tches and guns, but some quite cool lyrical skills. Then there's Pharcyde, who are in a similar vein. Also, some Jay Z and some Kanye West is good, although the pair of them stray too much towards gangsta rap for my liking.

This is surely similar to design patterns, in that they have names that make it easier to talk about high level design concepts without having to go into great detail. It's quicker to say "this uses the observer pattern", than try and describe objects signing up to the events of another object etc - you both know what you're talking about. It's the same with these phrases; If someone says "Let's take this offline", I know what they mean, and they don't have to say "how about we have a phone call after this one where we talk about this thing". I do agree that they're frustrating at times, and you can come across as speaking a lot of balls, but used sparingly they can be quite useful *cue verbal battering*

Totally - if it's important, they'll leave a message.

:laugh:

I worked in a culture where even 'challenges' was considered to have a negative connotation. You didn't have problems, or challenges, you had 'opportunities to learn' :wtf:

If you download Firefox 3 RC3, you actually seem to get the full version of Firefox 3. Of course, I'm sure you'll want to go back and download it to be part of Firefox Download Day. Or not.

That's because it is the Rugby school version of Football. Although the whole William Webb Ellis picking the ball up and running with it to create the game is probably urban legend, it's why Rugby is sometimes called (Rugby) football. It's like Fives - there's a version of that called Rugby Fives, and that's 'cos it was the flavour they invented (?) at the school. I think I might be arguing a completely different point here...

Perhaps Port? That's stronger than wine (~20%), and it's pretty sweet. It's not sparkling, but I'm sure you could run it through a SodaStream :-D