I think this is possibly something that everyone goes through at some point in their life, the desire to be more cultured. To me and most people this means going out and buying a lot of “classic” books and giving them a good going over. If you had tried to get me to do this a few years ago there would have been no chance of it happening, but it just so happens that I’m starting to get really into reading so this is a natural extension of things.
I’ve got my self the following books, anybody with any suggestions feel free to drop me a comment or e-mail.
* Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
* Heart Of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
* Animal Farm (George Orwell)
* Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
* Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
* Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
For something a little different I also got The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, a slight change of pace.
I’ve nearly finished reading Heart of Darkness, not taken long really. Not surprising considering it’s only 100 pages long, I can’t say it’s had a huge impact on me. I may be missing the point completely but nothing really seems to have happened and I’m onto the 3rd chapter (of 3). None the less the point is that I’ve now read a piece of history and have an informed opinion of it rather than just hints of what it’s about from what I’ve picked up listening to other people.
Since getting my new job I’ve been rather quiet on the blogging side of things, mostly do to the fact that I’m actually doing something with my time rather than just sitting around tinkering. Strange I know, but you get used to it.
As you’d probably expect, I’m not really supposed to talk about what I do for security reasons of course. It’s mostly working for the Swift group (caravans, motorhomes) doing their internal systems and web sites. Other things as well, but it’s mainly that. It’s all very interesting, a big change from serving customers in a supermarket thats for sure. It’s a really strange feeling actually going to work and learning something, I generally come home every night having picked something new up.
Since I started the job I’ve learnt that my coding abilities are much better than I thought they were, having being subjected to the woes that are legacy code. Definetly a nice feeling, it’s always rather hard to rate your abilities when you have nothing to compare them against. For better or for worse I’ve been developing in VB.Net, something I tried to stay away from when coding for my self but haven’t been able to avoid recently. Not my cup of tea really but it’s another addition to the CV. Speaking of legacy code, there’s been some serious Daily WTF material lying around. A prime example was this beauty:
Sub Function GetTime(ByVal hours, ByVal minutes)
Dim hours
Dim minutes
Dim yHours
yHours = hours * minutes
GetTime = (yHours / minutes) + (hours * minutes)
End Sub
Really interesting! Note the lack of any variable type declarations as well! It hasn’t all been like this, but there certainly a lot of amusing things.
One resource I’ve found invaluable since starting to code professionally is Scott Hanselman’s utilities list, there are so many handy little tools there that I can’t believe I’ve managed to live without! Some perfect examples are Lutz’s Reflector and Jeff Key’s Screen Ruler. A tool for “reverse engineering” compiled .Net assemblys and a floatable screen ruler respectivly.
Hopefully I’ll be getting back into this properly soon, until then, have fun.