Let’s try again

After a Mace style hiatus I am typing here after a 7 month laziness streak. Inspired by Ade Oshineye and having recently been reading Penelope Trunk’s blog I have decided that I will again write down some of my ideas on here just for the hell of it.

September 2006 was the last entry so since then what’s been going on…

Well I’m now in London after my two months at ThoughtWorks University and am very much enjoying the quality weather that we are currently experiencing in the capital. It looked like I might be going to the states at one stage but it wasn’t to be for now so the UK it is for now.

I’ve finally given in to Ade’s constant encouragement to start putting my photos onto Flickr instead of Picasa so I’ve been spending quite a bit of time this weekend putting my pictures up there.

I’m now working on a Java project having not done any Java since the second year of University, so that has certainly been an interesting learning curve for me after a year or so only doing C# and ASP.NET at RBI. My only comment with regards to that is that I did not understand how people could wax so lyrically about an IDE as ThoughtWorkers do about IntelliJ. I must now eat my words, it is indeed incredibly good and makes development so much easier than any other editor I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

One of my new year’s resolutions was to try and take my NLP skills to the next level and in that spirit I signed up for an 18 day NLP Practitioner course with ABL World Ltd. I’ve done 3 out of the 6 modules so far and it has been a fantastic learning experience for me. I’ve met some people that I would never have met otherwise and heard some ideas that I’d never previously considered. No doubt I will cover that a bit more in some future posts.

In the interests of stepping outside my comfort zone I have also signed up to do a salsa class with the Bishopsgate Institute starting in a couple of weeks time and hopefully I will be doing a standup course too, starting in May – assuming I got my deposit cheque to them in time to secure a place.

That’ll do me for now but I will expand on some of the above in the coming days.

The big cost of avoiding little risks

Excellent article on the BBC website about companies persuading customers that they need to buy insurance on just about everything that they purchase, with particular reference to mobile phones and hire cars.

I personally have never bought mobile phone insurance – it tends to be excessively priced to the extent that you’d have to lose your phone at least once a year to make the policy worthwhile.

One type of insurance that has proved worthwhile for my brother (and is not mentioned in the article) is watch insurance. I don’t know the exact details of his insurance, but I do know that everytime anything has gone wrong with his watch the company has replaced it with the latest model, no questions asked.

Now that’s customer service!