Friday 08 December, 2006 (Ramblings | Games)
90% of primary care physician visits in the U.S. are stress-related, this is probably the same all over the world. The renowned stress expert (although I have never heard of her) Dr. Kathleen Hall recommends taking short mental breaks to play computer games as a good way to clear your brain and reduce stress. This confirms something that I have believed for a long time and that I have experienced first hand. At previous workplaces all of the developers would spend part of their lunch playing Counter-Strike or Halo. I always felt less stressed and in a better mood those days that we played and I often feel like I need to clear my thoughts in the evenings when I get home, watching TV just doesn't clear your mind the same way that computer or console games do. The only problem is that most games require longer than 10 or 20 minutes to play but some of the games on MSN are quite good, I found the game Zuma earlier today and it really is very good... I found the original link over at Dag Königs blog (in Swedish), he also has a link to a Melitta coffee maker connected MSN!
Thursday 07 December, 2006 (.Net | Speaking | Tips | Web)
A couple of days ago I did my first big talk, a colleague and I held a 50 minute session on migrating from ASP.NET 1.x to ASP.NET 2.0 at DevDays 2006 in Stockholm. Luckily it was a big success! I credit our success almost entirely (obviously we had some part in it...) to Scott Hanselman, we found many tips and links on the topic of public speaking on Scott's blog. The most important tip and what we worked on most was "be prepared", we studied our subject vigorously the days before, preparing for any questions that the audience might ask. We also practised our talk, including all the demos, about 6 or 7 times to get the timing right and just feel confident with the content.
In order to Google-boost these great resources and to make it easier for myself to find them again I list them here:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/radiostories/2003/01/22/scottHanselmansTipsForASuccessfulMsftPresentation.html
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PresentationTipsPPT.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PowerPointTipsBeyondBullets.aspx
http://www.toastmasters.org/pdfs/top10.pdf
http://sociablemedia.typepad.com/beyond_bullets/
http://www.venkatarangan.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=dab57735-2976-40d7-a5d0-2e641ddea515
http://www.presentationzen.com/
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/InSearchOfThePerfectMonospacedProgrammersFontInconsolata.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ReadySetVSNETChrisKinsmanAHrefhttpwww.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PresentationTipsForPeopleRunningVirtualPCOrVMWare.aspx
http://www.hanselman.com/tools
Thursday 07 December, 2006 (Agile | Reviews | Scrum | XP)
A colleague of mine informed me of a very interesting document that Henrik Kniberg at Crisp has published as a PDF. It is entitled Scrum and XP from the Trenches and is a detailed description of how Henrik and his colleagues have implemented Scrum. While Scrum is not a prescriptive method and does not require that you work with specific templates or that you perform tasks in a specific manner it is still good to see how others have implemented Scrum and use their experiences to adapt your own implementation of Scrum. It is well worth a read!