I paired with Steve today and we started work on adding some more information to the screens. However in true TDD fashion we made sure we had some tests in place first! The day went pretty quickly as it always does when you're busy!

No gym in the evening - it was bathroom cleaning! Once that was done we caught up on the final two episodes of CSI NY, which means we're fully up-to-date now.

We'd had an email from our friends Gary & Monica out in Austria and we hadn't heard from them for ages. I sent them a reply to let them know how we were getting on and what the state the country is in at ht moment!

First thing I helped Paul with a bit of some work he was doing in Lotus Notes. Basically he wanted a web page to only be displayed once everything had loaded - I know a tool just for the job - jQuery! Within a few minutes I had it working just as he wanted.

Nick and I then had a look at getting the tests working after the bit of work we'd done on Friday, before we put the stuff I'd worked on over the weekend in. It all sounded straightforward but wasn't when we got down to it. In fact it took is most of the day to get the tests passing. That does sound worse than it actually was because we had an hour's meeting in the morning and then another two hour one in the afternoon - outlining the upcoming work for the next iteration. Hopefully before we start the new work we'll be able to finish off integrating the documentation.

Nikki didn't bother with her keep fit class and so we both went to the gym a little earlier in the evening. I spoke to my mum and sister Denise on the telephone a bit later on and that was about it.

The clocks went forward last night which meant an hour's less sleep - well it would have done had we got up at usual time! We had a bit of a lie-in, but still went to the gym.

Not much difference from yesterday, I did a bit more Java in the afternoon and got the bulk of what I hoped to finished. Nikki did a bit of cleaning up and some ironing and we caught up on yet more CSI NYs in the evening - two more to go and then we'll be catching up on Heroes.

We didn't have anything much on today. Nick came across to pick up the oven we'd had sat in the conservatory since we had the kitchen done. It was practically new - we bought it to replace the one in our previous kitchen that gave up the ghost. Nick's had blown up on Thursday so ours will do at least as a temporary replacement.

I did a bit of work on some Java, embellishing what Nick and I had been working on yesterday. Nikki did a bit of cleaning up.

In the evening we caught up on some further episodes of CSI NY.

On a slightly sad note, today was the last that Hotel Haselsberger in Kitzbübuhel closed , so that's it, the end of an era. We've met some great people through staying there and we all keep in touch which is fantastic, but it won't quite be the same not spending September with our Austrian family.

Nikki had a hairdressing appointment and I got up just in case Postie came - which he did. he brought the web cam I'd ordered the other evening. Yesterday I'd also had the copy of iLife I'd won on eBay arrived.

So I spent the morning installing the software (and downloading any updates) which was an easy task. The Creative webcam just worked when I plugged it in - no drivers or software necessary - fantastic!

Having iLife means I should be able to organise all our photographs a bit better rather than just having them stored in ransom folders! It also includes some music software to make your own tunes - could be fun!

Later on we went to Crown Point as Nikki wanted to have a look in TK Maxx, but there wasn't a great deal, so we came home again! My mate Jonny was menat to be coming over, but we heard nothing from him and so had tea and spent the evening watching television.

Nick and I started having a look at the dynamic creation of the support documentation. To our amazement it wasn't as difficult as we thought it was going to be and by the late morning we'd pretty much got it working! Obviously we've got the components of the documentation and the tests to write and there is a bit of refactoring required but the functionality is there.

As it was the end of the iteration we should have had the showcase today, but that's postponed until Monday. We did however have the retrospective and a few points came out of that - especially around stored procedure integration.

Nikki did the shopping when we got in from work and then we spent the evening catching up on more CSI NYs.

As we'd finished the Java work we concentrated on getting some testing done and between us we managed to get it all done! That menas we've actually managed to get this iteration finished on time!

Nick and I gave our final presentation just after lunch. This time it was a thoroughly more intimate affair - unlike the previous two where we had a full room, we only had four attendees. However it was good in a way because those four asked questions they may not have felt comfortable asking had they been in a large group. Overall I think it was well reveived, which is good!

Later on I had a brief look at possibly creating the support documentation dynamically just like some of the other documentation is done - using Spring annotations. I think it's going to be tricky, but we ought to give it a go at least.

The usual gym and keep fit in the evening followed by a few bits on television so nothing new there then!

I gave Paul a quick bit of help with some CSS that he was working on. Nick, Jim, Steve and I then spent the rest of the morning reverting the work Ken had done on the stored procedures so that we could get the tests running successfully again. Once we'd done that we were then able to put Ken's work back in (with a few minor adjustments so that we got the same results back as the previous version except with a new column).

Once we got that in place we had a few minor changes to make to the tests and then everything passed. So that's our first stab at incorporating a host of changes into the application that Thoughtworks wrote - something we didn't think we'd ever be able to do.

Nick and I went out for a bit of a walk at lunchtime as the weather was quite nice and we didn't have our presentation to do today - the final installment is tomorrow.

Nikki and I went to the gym early evening, I'd reloaded my iPod shuffle with a load of new songs - but for some reason it doesn't want to play in alphabetic sequence, which is how I like it. Not sure why but no matter what I did when we got home I couldn't chnage it.

The new series of The Apprentice started tonight so we watched it - the contestants always come across as upstarts and this bunch are no exception! They all seem to think they're the best thing in the world ever when clearly they're not... still it makes for interesting television!

After a brief discussion this morning Nick and I decided to give up on working out how to create tests for the logging stuff. Instead we concentrated on getting the new versions of the stored procedures integrated. The new versions return more information that we have to include on the screen, We started in the correct manner by creating tests which was going quite well until we reached a rather hairy bit! Then we had to resort to changing the code to include the new information, run the tests and see what broke!

Nick and I also had the second sitting of our presentation which all went very well, again the injection of a bit of humour seemed to do the trick.

In the evening I set up the laptop so that Nikki could record the sound from one of her DVDs and I also had a look at getting my turntable hooked up properly to the Mac so that I can record some more of our old vinyl.

Today was the first of the three that Nick and I were to give our presentation on Java and test-driven development (TDD). It hadn't been plyaing on my mind at all, but it must have done during the night because I had two dreams about it! One where I gave the presentation on my own and there wasn't enough content which meant it was a rather short presentation, the other I was giving the presentation and I couldn't get the people in attendance to stop talking!

Nick had been off last so we had a bit to sort out beforehand - such as how we were going to do the demonstration of of TDD and pair programming. We got it all sorted with about 5 minutes to go. It was quite well attended and went off without any problems - we injected a bit of humour so that it wasn't boring. I got some good feedback which was nice.

We then spent the afternoon working out how we could unit test the logging stuff we wrote last week. It doesn't appear to be that straight-forward...

No prizes for guessing what we did in the evening - gym and keep fit!

We got up just a little bit earlier than normal for a Sunday (9am instead of 9:30am) and went to the gym.

As today is Mother's Day we went over to see my mum in the afternoon - we took her a some tulips and a nice little vase for them to go in, Every Sunday driver and his dog must have been taking their mothers out because the traffic was quite heavy and very slow! Anyway we stayed at my mums for a couple of hours. My sister Denise called over with her partner Neil and their daughter Molly.

When we got home we had some tea and caught up on some more CSIs - in fact we're up to date with that series now - we've only CSI NY, Heroes and 24 to go!

The weather was quite pleasant today so we got the cars washed in the morning. Mine could do with a proper polish but I'll wait until it gets a bit warmer and it's not such a bright day!

After lunch we did a bit of tidying up in the garden as we hadn't done anything since last year and there were plants that needed trimming and a lot of dead leaves from autumn that needed sweeping up.

We spent the evening catching up on some more episodes of CSI.

We continued including the logging bits and bobs into the code today. The frustrating thing was when we came to run the tests they were again failing randomly It's something to do with the database access. We got them to run on one machine and so could at least check-in some of our work.

As part fo the work we did try to ascertain how we could write test around it but we weren't sure how to go about it, that's gonna be a question for Nick next week - when he's back from holiday. Anyway we managed to get about a third of the way through what we think needs to be done, so at least we've made a good dent in it!

In the evening Nikki went off to do the shopping and I did some work on the presentation that Nik and I are doing next week on Java and TDD.

We started watching the latest series of CSI that we'd started recording in January!

We got the final four tests out of the way first thing and then were able to check the work in - however getting the application deployed took a while - for some reason it was randomly failing. Anyway by lunchtime we were there, that meant we could get on with doing some work on incorporating logging which was what we did in the afternoon. Several times we revised the way

Today Google launched Street View addition to Google Maps and so we all had a bit of a play at lunchtime. There are only limited locations, but Leeds is one of the locations available. It's amazing - when they did our street it was obviously a Monday because the bin was out! The quality of the images is so good we could even make out Indie sat in our bedroom window!

Nikki didn't have her keep fit class so we both went to the gym.

We had to change a load of tests today because a couple of the stored procedures have been amended. It took us a while, but we worked out exactly what needed changing and got the majority done within the day - only four tests left to do tomorrow,

Nikki and I both went to the gym just after we got in from work. Then after we'd had tea I went out for a drink with mu old cycling buddy Jon. It wasn't a boozy session by any stretch - we went into Pudsey just had a couple of pints in BAr 577 and Beaujangles. I hadn't seen him since we went round to his house over Christmas - time just seems to fly by!

We started working on the logging stuff this morning and managed to get somewhere - we know how to get the logs written to a different file, though we need to sort out the logging level. That was the first part of the day, we then spent the rest of the time trying to navigate through the application to trace what screen called a particular stored procedure. Talk about a nightmare - we just seemed to go round in circles and rapidly came to the conclusion that the application is far more complicated than it needs to be.

It was quite frustrating at times but at least the day went quickly!

We caught up on a few other bits of television in the evening - including a documentary we'd recorded from Radio 2 about 'goths' which was quite enjoyable.

Nikki also wanted to be able to record something from the television onto her laptop so that it could be imported into iTunes, something I managed to achieve - although I'm not sure of the sound levels so I just need to check this.

I started on the GLOBE4 project today, which meant being in a meeting for most of the day, discussing and estimating the forth-coming work.

The first thing we've got to do is to get the logging framework up and running. Thankfully Nick and I have already done a small amount of work in this area so at least we've got a starting point.

Not sure about my estimating skill though - most people thought it would take 3 days to do the work, I on the other hand reckoned on 13 days! However I had factored into my estimate writing tests which I don't think anyone else had. In the end we settled on 8 days, so we'll see how it goes!

In the evening we went to the gym and keep fit and we watched the last few episodes of High Altitude.

We got up relatively early to go to the gym. A quick check on my Blackberry revealed that all was still not well at work - I'd had an email to say that the machine wasn't expected to be up until some time today.

As per normal we went to the gym. Nikki then went off into Bradford to have a look in TK Maxx, I stayed at home and did a bit of work on the a presentation that Nick and I have to give next week about Java. I also put some more CDs into iTunes. Whilst doing so I came across the website for a band called Bob that we were both into in the 1990s - it's only recently been launched and contains all of their recorded material including radio sessions - fantastic! It appears there will be plenty more content including all their demos plus live recordings and videos. Needless to say I've bookmarked it.

Again the coverag eof the ski racing was somewhat sparse - in fact I don't think there was any. Nevertheless we had our snow fix by watching some episodes of High Altitude - which was superb.

We had a bit of a lie-in. It's my sister Jacqueline's 40th birthday today and I needed to get her present so we went off to the White Rose centre. After looking round I didn't find anything suitable, however I did get a few other things one of which was Guitar Hero for the Wii at the bargain price of £35.

From there we went into Leeds. I got her a necklace from the Swarovski shop, I also had to get another card for her as I'd left the one I'd bought at home . The plan was to go to see Jacqueline after we'd been into Leeds but she was out and about looking at cars so it looks like I'll have to call round during the week.

The ski racing wasn't as well covered as it has been previously which is disappointing to say the least - especially given that this is the last weekend of the season. We caught up on the little bit there was and then watched some other things.

I've been on call all week and the machine is being upgraded this weekend - I got a call late in the evening to say that the upgrade hadn't gone smoothly and that the machine was actually still down. It doesn't look as though the schedule will be running on time...

I continued where I'd left off yesterday with getting the CSS into 40 or so Lotus Notes forms. It didn't take all that long. Paul then came up with few more little tweaks that he wanted.

That meant I didn't get much chance to do any work on Plone, but I did have about an hour or so, in which I investigated the possibility of being able to check out pages so they could be worked on without the published pages being affected. It didn't take long for me to find that it was indeed possible, it's just an add-on that comes with the base install of Plone that need to be installed.

When we got home I installed it on my laptop to see how it worked and it's just as we hoped! There does appear to be a slight bug in that it won't allow a user other than the administrator cancel a checkout. That will obviously need resolving before we implement it into production.

We caught up on the day's ski racing in the evening.

I thought I'd be back on with Plone today - but oh no, there was still some more work required for Lotus Notes - essentially bringing some consistency between all the pages - there were a number of issues with spacing. I spotted that on some pages (created by Notes) there was a rogue tag that was causing an issue. There was also a body tag that had been defined in two CSS documents that was causing problems. Once I got that sorted and he content centred correctly on the page things looked much better. I manged to get it working correctly in Firefox. By the end of the day there were a few small things left - such as ensuring the CSS documents are imported in the correct place on each of the pages, as there are 40 or so of them that'll give me something to do in the morning.

We went to the gym and keep fit early evening and then we worked our way through more ski racing form Sweden.

I was called out at around 1am and got back to bed around 2am, then it took me ages to get back to sleep - every time I drifted off, Nikki stirred and woke me up! Not sure what time I did actually get to sleep, but thankfully I wasn't too tired when it came to getting up.

I continued with the work on the widgets for Lotus Notes today - it gave me chance to refamiliarise myself with jQuery as I haven't done any for a while. That was pretty much my day taken up and I think I've finished the widgets now, so tomorrow it should be back to Plone.

When we got home I'd had an e-mail from the model shop in Innsbruck to say that it wasn't a problem that I didn't want them to send me the train I'd ordered, much to my relief!

We went to the gym not long after getting home and it was busy when we got there but not quite up to the usual Wednesday standard.

There was some ski racing from Åre in Sweden on today that we'd recorded, so we caught up on that. This weekend is the last one of the season so we won't have any more to catch up on until at least October then!

I had a bit of a break from Plone today as I had a couple of widgets to do for a Lotus Notes application. We also had our monthly team meeting which was nothing to write home about! It was a bit of a heads down day and so it went rather quickly.

On the was home I had to get some petrol, so I called in at the petrol station on Regent Street, as usual it was rather busy and so we had to wait a while. The traffic was also pretty slow so we didn't actually get home until well after 6pm.

We didn't do a huge amount after tea - now that we've caught up on the ski racing we watched quite a few Ski Sundays that we have recorded over the last few weeks. Nothing we haven't already seen to be honest...

I'd had an email from a model shop in Innsbruck to say the model train I reserved last year had finally arrived. The way the pound is against the euro at the moment it's going to work out rather expensive so I replied to say that I hope it's not a problem for them that I'd rather not now have it. We shall see...

Back to work for me today, which meant back on with Plone.

There had been a new instance installed on Linux, however rather than Ubuntu it was Red Hat, a flavour of Linux I have no experience of. That said when it came to installing the LDAP stuff all the prerequisites were already installed so it was just a case of amending the buildout config file. Amazing considering all the effort I had in getting them together and working on Ubuntu .

Once the LDAP plug-in was installed it was a case of pointing it to the server and that was it! We copied the content across from the old instance and now we have a live instance ready to be used. It was a bit disappointing to hear later on that it may not be a strategic solution for the company. For the time being though we are continuing with the work on it, but it may not become the intranet replacement.

It was the gym and keep fit as usual for a Monday and then we sat down to watch the last ski race that we didn't get through yesterday - only to find it had been cancelled due to the weather! Still we had plenty of other stuff to catch up on.

Jaz and Tanya had to be away for 10am as they were picking up a new Cocker Spaniel puppy from a lady in Bingley. That meant we were up by 9am and once we'd waved them off were able to do the usual Sunday morning trip to the gym.

The weather was very poor outside - rain, sleet, snow and wind, so it wasn't worth going out so we spent the rest of the day catching up on numerous hours of ski racing. We've almost caught up, just one more race, which hopefully we should manage to get that watched tomorrow evening.

I had a call from my sister Denise to say that my nephew Mark had been set upon in Wetherby last night. He had to go to hospital and have some stitches in his head. Overall it hasn't been a good week for him as he had a prang in his car earlier in the week.

After we'd had bacon sandwiches for breakfast we decided to go into Leeds as Tanya does like shopping! I think I was the only person who didn't buy anything!

In the evening we went down to The Marsh for a drink - the prices don't get any cheaper in there! From there we got a taxi to Kebabeesh in Greengates.

It wasn't a particularly late night as i think we were all tired after last night!

After I'd had my breakfast I cracked on getting some chores done. I cleaned the bathrooms upstairs, dusted and vacuumed in the bedrooms.

The gas engineer came to service our boiler around lunchtime. Interestingly he didn't turn up in a British Gas van, but a plain white one. He was apparently a contract engineer. As it was he was probably better than a British Gas engineer because he just got on with the job instead of telling me that the boiler was old and really ought to be replaced and then trying to sell me one!

Once the engineer had gone I had a bit of lunch and then started cleaning up downstairs. I'd just about finished by the time Niki got home.

We were expecting our friends Jaz and Tanya in the early evening - we haven't seen them since my 40th! I know Jaz from my days in the RAF - we were at RAF Brawdy together and he was also my best man. They come from Lytham near Blackpool, but are currently living near Penrith in the lakes while they have an extension built on their Lytham house. It was about 7:30pm when they arrived.

For tea we'd done a sausage casserole, we spent the evening catching up and having quite a few drinks. It was nearly 1am when we went to bed.

Pretty much the same routine as yesterday without me doing the ironing and making the bed in the guest room as opposed to doing the ironing!

Nikki's journey home wasn't quite as bad as last night but it was a tad longer than it should have been. We went to the gym & keep fit, I spoke to my sister Denise on the phone and then we had a bit of tea before watching a bit of television.

It was back to work again for Nikki today, so she got up early in order to get the bus. I got up at 9am and to be honest I didn't have a great deal to do.

I caught up on a few bits of television and did a bit of ironing. I had planned on making the spare bed, but Indie had other ideas on that - she decided to sleep on the duvet, so I thought I'd better leave her.

Nikki had a bit of a nightmare journey home on the bus - it took nearly an hour and a half! We had a quick cuppa and then went off to the gym. Even for a Wednesday it was particularly busy - so much so we couldn't even get on a cross-trainer when we got time - that's the first time ever! We did eventually manage to get on everything we wanted to.

I spoke to my mum on the phone when we got home, we had some tea watched a bit of television before bedtime.

Nikki didn't have to get up to go to work as we were catching the train down to London at 10:40am. That said she did set the alarm clock an hour early for 7:30 instead of 8:30!

The reason for the dau out was I wanted to visit Profeet to get some ski boot professionally fitted.

We caught the bus into Leeds and got the train as planned. We were in London for just after 1pm. We got the tube over to Covent Garden and had a wander round. From there we walked over to Oxford Street and had a look round John Lewis.

My appointment at Profeet was at 4pm and we had to get there. The nearest tube station was Putney Bridge and neither of us had ever been so we left about an hour to get there. As it was that was just about the right amount of time. The shop was only about 10 minute's walk from the tube station.

The fitting process takes 2 hours, which is why they work on an appointment only basis. As it was I think I was there just over 2 hours because the left boot needed quite a lot of tweaking. Once done the boots felt nice and comfortable. I suppose the acid test is to see what they're like when I ski in them.

We headed back towards Kings Cross but our train didn't leave until 8pm we had a look around St Pancras, which is amazing. It's incredible to think that at one stage in the past there was talk of it being knocked down!

The train home was on time and there were no delays, we got back into Leeds about 10:30pm and there was a bus 5 minutes later, so we were home for just after 11pm.

It seemed like a long old day!

Nikki got up early to go to work, but she bdid mange to finish at 11am.

I got up around 9am and then continued with trying to get the LDAP plugin installed on my version of Plone - much to my amazement I got it to work! Now All I've got to do is to is to get it working on the installation at work - that's possibly next week's challenge!

Nikki got home just before 12. We had a bit of lunch and then walked into Pudsey as we had an appointment with the mortgage advisor at the Halifax. We wanted to see what options were available to us so that we could reduce the term of our mortgage. The best option appears to be just to pay lump sums each month rather than change our payments because if we increase the monthly payments then we'll be committed to that amount. Rather than rely on us paying the extra voluntarily we could just set up a standing order then at least the money is deducted at source and that way we're not tempted to spend it!

In the evening we were going to Sheffield Arena to see The Killers. We left home about 6pm and had contemplated parking at Meadowhall and using the park and ride from there, but as we got to Sheffield in good time we parked at the Arena car park instead, which wasn't too bad.
The support band were Louis XIV, but we didn't watch them, we weren't that impressed with what we'd heard of them!

The arena filling up prior to Louis XIV coming on stage

The Killers came on about 9pm and it was a really good gig - Nikki is more keen on them than I am, but nevertheless I did enjoy it.

An excited Nikki looking forward to The Killers coming on.

The stage and light shows were fantastic. It's a shame about the idiots who seem to think it's fun to throw beer about - they've obviously got more money than sense because at £3.50 a pint it wasn't cheap! Not sure whether it's just us getting older but it the music did seem to be a tad loud and we both had ringing ears when we left!

Look carefully and you can just make out The Killers!

The gig finished just after 10:30pm. It wasn't too much hassle getting out of the car park on back onto the motorway. In fact we were home just after 11:30pm, which is much earlier than either of us expected!

For the second week in a row we managed to get up earlyish and go to the gym!

We didn't have all that much planned, I removed all the duplicate songs from iTunes and then started loading all the recent CDs we'd bought.

In the afternoon Nikki's brother Stuart came over with his daughter Kayleigh-Jo (whose 6th birthday it was on Friday). They stayed for about an hour and half. Kayleigh-Jo had various presents to show off - not least her shocking pink iPod shuffle!

I continued loading the CDs after they'd gone and then once that was done I tried to find any album artwork we didn't have - that's going to be a long job because there is quite a bit missing!

We spent the evening watching yet more ski racing and I also continued investigating the various prerequisites for Plone LDAP.