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Training Log


03 Feb - 3 cycles, 1 run, 1 swim

23 Jan - Run 30mins

14 Jan - Cycle 2 hrs

10 Jan - Cycle 2 hrs Swim 500m

09 Jan - Cycle 2hrs Run 30 mins

07 Jan - Cycle 2 hrs Swim 1000m

23 Dec - Cycle 30 mins Swim 500m

19 Dec - Cycle 2 hrs

17 Dec - Cycle 2hrs

16 Dec - Cycle 45 mins Swim 500m Run 35 mins

2 Dec - Swim 700m Cycle 2hrs Run 30 mins

1 Dec - Cycle 2hrs Run 30 mins

30 Nov - Cycle 45 mins Run 60 mins

29 Nov - Swim 600m

28 Nov - Run 35 mins Cycle 60 mins

27 Nov - Cycle 45 mins Swim 500m

26 Nov - Swim 500m

24 Nov - Cycle 120 mins, Run 30 mins

23 Nov - Cycle 75 mins, Run 45 mins

23 Nov - Cycle 75 mins, Run 45 mins

19 Nov - Run 44mins, Swim 500m

20 Nov - Cycle 90 mins

22 Nov - Swim 500m

2 Sept - Run 1hr, Swim 750m

1 Sept - Run 1 hr

15 July - Swim 500m

14 July - Run 56 mins

30 May - Swim 500m

29 May - Run 1 hr

20 May - Run 45 mins

19 May - Run 45 mins

18 May - Run 51 mins

17 May - Swim 500m

16 May - Swim 500m

11 May - Swim 700m

10 May - Run 1hr, Swim 600m

09 May - Swim 500m

07 May - Run 53 mins

Book list


Staying On by Paul Scott

Microsoft Expression Web Step by Step by Chris Leeds

Living Into Leadership: A Journey in Ethics by Buzz McCoy

Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 2 by Laurence Moroney

Jeeves Omnibus: No.4 by P.G. Wodehouse

ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming: Problem - Design - Solution by Marco Bellinaso

Under Kilimajaro by Ernest Hemmingway

C# 2008 for Dummies by Chuck Sphar, Randy Davis

Design Patterns Explained by Shalloway & Trott

When Character was King. A Story of Ronald Reagan. by Peggy Noonan

ASP.Net in C# 2008, from Novice to Professional by Michael MacDonald

Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett

Scrappy Project Management: The 12 predictable and avoidable pitfalls every project faces by Kimberley Wiefling

Managing Humans by Michael Lopp This may say more about me than the author but: - This book fits into the category that I call 'management bromide.' Like all those management books at the airport. Lots of words, not many 'take-aways.' - Rands works consistent 72-hour weeks, month o

Alpha Project Managers: What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not by Andy Crowe

Enterprise Development with Visual Studio .Net UML and MSF by Hansen & Thomson

Get Carter: The Hamish Carter Story by Phil Taylor The real heroes of this book are Chris Pilone and Marisa Carter. If you are into triathlon, take a read and see if you agree with me.

Nadine Gordimer (Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature) by Dominic Head There are a number of problems with this book. I read it to gain a better insight into Gordimer's books (all of which I have read). I did not get it. It is a PhD thesis, written for Eng.Lit. majors. The conclusion is all about whether Gordimer is a post

User Interface Design for Programmers by Joel Spolsky Dated. There are better, more recent books on this subject. Imagine my surprise when all the examples were in Win97!

The Incongruous Spy by John Le Carre England in the '50s. When class was still a driving force. Early Le Carre.

Sarrat and the Draper of Watford by John Le Carre

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre In 'Our Game' John Le Carre predicted the Chechen war six month before it happened, except he set his book in South Ossetia, the next valley over. In 'The Mission Song', last year, he predicted a civil war in Kivu, Eastern Zaire (Democratic Republic of

The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar Well worth a second read. Just as relevant now that the dot-com boom and crash and resurface has occurred. We now have some perspective on what he was saying, and whether or not he was right.

ASP.Net 3.5 For Dummies by Ken Cox Covers a very broad topic, very well.

Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding The Best Technical Talent by Joel Spolsky See my blog entry about this book.

Then We Came To The End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris Didn't like it, actually. Didn't finish it. I thought it was existentialist actually: depressing, boring, pointless, unlikeable characters... Also the sense of humour might be a cultural construct. It was like the American version of 'The Office,' wh

Telling Tales by Nadine Gordimer This was an anthology of the best short story writers. Gordimer was the editor. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Kenzaburo Oe, Chinua Achebe... Recognised as the best in the world. Profits go to the AIDS Foundation.

In Our Time by Ernst Hemmingway Hemmingway was young when he wrote this. It was his second book. You can tell that he had it, even then.

MicroSerfs by Douglas Coupland The trouble with Coupland's novels is the absence of any sort of traditional plot. Lots of characterisation in this one,but lacking the climax/ denoument/ ... I think my English teacher used to call this sort of a novel 'picaresque.' Ie, like Chaucer's 'Ca

Visual Web Developer for Dummies by Alan Simpson Well worth it. The results will be up on www.hexagon-global.com tomorrow. Didn't actually go far enough for me. There was more I wanted to do, that I didn't know how to. Keen to move on up the learning curve though.

None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer I didn't actually get it until the last chapter. The whole first half I was thinking "This is a woman's book, it's all about the intricacies of relationships amongst 40-yr-olds, across barriers of race, gender, age, orientation... Husbands and lovers an

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made by Andy Hertzfeld If you remember 6502 assembler, 68000 assembler, AppleBasic, 32k of ROM, one accumulator, LisaGraf, Pascal for systems programming, Ronald Reagan taking a landslide over Jimmy Carter... If you remember poring over the circuit diagrams in the Apple red book

Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell A thinly veiled morality play. Favourite quote: "The populace are swine and advertising is the rattling of a stick in the swill pail."

Coming Up for Air by George Orwell Interesting book. Is it a mid-life crisis, a marriage crisis, an occupational crisis, a decrying of the rape of the English countryside, a pre-war fin-de-siecle, or a stream-of-consciousness rant?

A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell They say that Orwell is the trendy read for the chattering classes in England these days. I'm certainly enjoying him. Might be the start of a bit of an Orwell season for me.

Burmese Days by George Orwell "I have had many masters in my life," old Sammy said. "The worst was Colonel Wimpole sahib, who used to make his orderly hold me down over the table while he came running from behind and kicked me with very thick boots for serving banana fritters too freq

Orchestrating Your Project by Jim Young The author gave me a copy of this book a few years back for services rendered. The advanced topics in the last couple of chapters, I found interesting and useful. Especially a model for stakeholder-management.

I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter This book answers the question "What is consciousness?" I have to say Douglas Hofstadter bored me this time around. I loved 'Godel Escher Bach' but I must be getting older. Intellectually challenging and intellectually diverting aren't as much fun ...

Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide by Craig Larman Good book.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemmingway Still great. Lending it to a friend who i a writer, has lived in Paris, is following Le Tour de France every night. But has never read this book! Ernesto was in his 20s and figuring out who he was.

Project Management Case Studies by Harold Kerzner, PhD. Case studies are a different way of learning, but I don't know if they work if you just read them by yourself?

Home Buyers and Sellers Guide I'm going to do it, finally. By end of August?

Version control with Subversion by C Michael Pilato The things I have to read...

The Rational Robot Users Guide by Rational Corp Nerd central.

Becoming An Australian Citizen by Australian Government

It's Never Too Late... by Patrick Lindsay

Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell Our developers are all getting a copy for Xmas

Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling by Harold Kerzner This book is THE AUTHORITY. Memorise it. I have ordered the case studies and study guide that go with it. Boring in parts, but that's not the point.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder Still great, after all these years. But now that I'm older the most important fact seems to be that DG missed the market. After all those late nights in the lab, the Eagle didn't save the company, VAX got there first and they were too late.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh Puerile farce. Painfully slow. Only one good chapter. Nearly didn't finish it. Wasn't exactly 'Brideshead Revisited.'

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire by Piers Brendon My favourite is the Governor General who, as his first act, had the Foreign Office files mulched to make a papier mache ceiling for the Officers' Mess.

Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 by The Office of Government Computing Well written. Easy to swot from. Lots of good appendices about what should be in each of their PM artefacts, and role definitions and all good stuff. Plus a full set of templates downloadable. Now have MSF, PRINCE2, RUP and PMBOK that I can use.

Creating Web Pages for Dummies by Emily Vander Veer, et al This is a fantastic book. It covers entry-level HTLM, Frontpage, Dreamwaver, Flash, Javascript, e-commerce, and XML. Also comes with a CD with 30-day trial versions of all of them and XMLSpy. Well worth the money!

Project Management Professional (PMP) Examination Specification by The Project Management Institute This is the last of the books that I bought in Bangkok. Interesting to read how they did a global role delineation study. Then rendered this down into domains and tasks of a typical project manager. Certainly rounding out the role.

Q & As for the PMBOK Guide by The Project Management Institute Will be a useful swot aid when I come to sit the exam.

Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman Boring. A lot about what MRI scans have added to our knowledge of how the brain works. The next book might have more practical application. Cognitive Therapy is a fascinating and fast-moving field. This just wasn't the book.

HTML 4 for Dummies by Ed Tittel, Mary Burmeister I see why the subtitle is 'A reference for the rest of us.' It was an exercise of the most sleep-inducing, to try and read this book front-to-back. Fortunately I was on a long flight.

And Never Stop Dancing by Gordon Livingston, M.D. Another good one. Great story of the six old-age pensioners on a yacht race from LA to Hawaii. Sound bite: 'The generation that cannot distinguish celebrity from achievement.'

A Great Place To Work (What Makes Some Employers So Good, and Most So Bad) by Robert Levering It's all motherhood really. Nevertheless I always enjoy reading these uplifting books about how treating people well is the best thing. And interesting to learn a bit more about Elton Mayo and the humanisers of modern management.

KICKBACK Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal by Caroline Overington An amazing Boy's Own ripper of a tale. Makes you want to be a wheat salesman to Iraq. Well, momentarily anyhow.

Get A Life by Nadine Gordimer Written in a 'stream of consciousness' (ie, hard to read) stye. It is about Auden's quote, "Oh what authority gives Existence its surprise?" Good for you, but not enjoyable. Like Bergman's movies.

Organisational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) Overview by The Project Management Institute You can get more information than this from the web site. Don't waste your money. Might be useful as a sales aid, to pass to an executive in the lift, for example.

A Woman In Charge. The life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein Of course I mainly bought this book to gain more insights into the dynamics of my marriage (joke). It's a rewarding book, but overly long.

Project Manager Competency Development Framework by The Project Management Institute Another useful resource. I stacked up pretty well in the performance clusters. Just need a PMP now to cover off the knowledge clusters. Useful for self-assessment every six months.

The Pickup a novel by Nadine Gordimer Just stunning! See the review in my blog.

Managing The Project Team by Vijay K Verma Damn fine book. You read it, and you belive everything in it. Then you go back to work and make a basic mistake the next day. These rules are better learned at one's mother's knee. Nevertheless I continue to strive to be the best damn SDM in the world.

Practice Standard for Work Breakdown Structures by The Project Management Institute It is good to have a practice standard for work breakdown structures. I think that this one will improve over time.

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by Gordon Livingston, MD His is a kinder, gentler, more accepting, more thoughtful world. I recommend it. Admirable.

Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg Documents the life-and-times of the people working on the Chandler open source project.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software by Erich Gamma et al. One of the bibles of all serious OO programmers. Keep it next to the PC. It will make your design more thoughtful.

The Triathlete's Guide to Mental Training by Jim Taylor PhD & Terri Schneider Useful for the very committed triathlete after 'Prime Performance.' Less useful, but still interesting for schleps like me.

Microsoft Solutions Framework Essentials: Building Successful Technology Solutions by Michael S.V. Turner The most thorough and detailed description of how to run a project the MSF way. MSF v.4 has got a lot more in it than v.3, and has gone more towards the Agile manifesto.

Influence Without Authority by Cohen and Bradford Skills one has to manage in the modern business world. Probably should be one of those books to read every Xmas holidays until it comes to me unconsciously.

Blog

June 14

Upcoming Release of JpegSizer 7 from TangoTools

I’ve just been beta-testing the soon-to-be-released version 7 of this product.

The feature I was looking for was the ability to be able to run all my images through it, changing nothing except the dpi weight.

Doing this I managed to take images in a variety of formats from various sources (including a hi-res camera) and create a stream of Jpegs all at 105 dots per inch, and sharpened up a bit too.

The end result was an Images folder that came down from 30MB to 6MB, and an appreciable uptick in image rendering speeds.

Hexagon Global includes this step as standard in its rollout process.

TangoTools, in Seattle, WA is a small ISV that produces useful tools, (JpegSizer does much more than this). They offer good value, and have a human face.

Look out for JpegSizer v.7.0 when it is released.

5:25 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Computers and Internet

April 29

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11:02 AM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Joke

April 16

Presentation skills MasterClass. Wish my MBA syndicate had come up with this.

Actually we came pretty close on occasion. That preso on 'The power of team expectations' for Organisational Behaviour was pretty damn theatresports, as I recall... Good Times...

11:50 AM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it | Presentation Skills

April 07

Dolphin Leaps Out of Water, Delights Waiting Market!

Hexagon Global Corporate Enterprises has this week rolled out the Q209 release of their flagship product ‘Dolphin.’ This is a Beta release, which was scheduled for Q2 (April, May June). To-date all releases have been on-time and under budget.

This release features:

A strong AJAX presence in the UI.
A new jobs-site sampler website, which shows off the Ajax partial-postback feature.
A complete re-design of all pages.
Enhancements to the RSS Feed Concentrator.

Screenshots are displayed in the photo gallery of this blog.

The caveats with this release are:

It is best viewed in IE7. Cross-browser compatibility is slated for later in 2009.
A lot of the functionality requires users to create themselves a free username on the site and log in using it. Anonymous users only have access to a small subset of features. There is another class of paid-for site membership with access to value-added services like the upcoming sharemarket tipster product.
Currently a lot of the content on the site is pro-forma content not intended to be taken seriously. The site is intended to showcase our capabilities. This is only the second quarterly release of the product. We have big plans for it.

In line with our product road-map, the Q309 release (July) will feature:

a sharemarket tipster system (for our members only).
a sample e-commerce site for the hospitality industry.
to-do list functionality.

Development of these features has already started.

Check it out here. All feedback gratefully received.

11:39 AM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it

February 27

Press Release: Corporate Sponsorship Opportunity Considered and Rejected

Manchester United are seeking a replacement for the embattled US banking firm AIG, which has confirmed it will not be renewing its sponsorship contract when it expires next year.

Current front-runners for the contract are said to be Air Asia, Sahara, and Saudi Telecom.

Hexagon Global Corporate Enterprises briefly considered the opportunity:

However four considerations decided us against it.

We at Hexagon are perfectly happy with our corporate sponsorship of the Hector’s dolphin, and other endangered sea mammals. This campaign is far more in line with our corporate values.
The name is too long to fit comfortably on the shirts.
Endangered dolphins have never been accused of being overpaid rock-stars who fall over in the penalty box far too often.
Hexagon Corporation’s business proposition is around offering good products cheaply; being unassuming; and doing business completely without guile. In this context association with Manchester United would be ‘off message’ for us.

The rarest dolphin in the world

12:01 PM | Add a comment | Permalink | Blog it

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