I didn't feel too bright this morning and we had a continuation of yesterday's estimating meeting. Thankfully it didn't last all that long - a good job because the longer it went on the worse I felt! Anyway once it was over we could get on with a bit of work!

I also had a bit of a chat with John Walker about my concerns for the direction we're going in with Java development. A conversation that started last night... Basically I wanted him to know who I felt about all the knowledge Thoughtworks had given us being eroded away. He listened and was quite concerned about some points.

Nick and I went out for a bit of a walk at lunchtime as the weather was nice again.

The afternoon was taken up with writing acceptance criteria for the new work we're about to embark on. It was actually quite a good exercise.

We did some chores in the evening - cleaning the bathrooms, and caught up on some bits on television.

It was supposed to be the start of the next iteration today, but due to Friday's announcement that the whole focus of the project has changed we had a run through of the proposed changes.

That meeting took up a good part of the day but it transpires that we may well get away with not having to make that many changes to the code we've already written.

I dropped the car off for Nikki when she finished work as I was going out - Tall Tony's company, Upco were taking us out into Leeds - to the Oracle Bar. We were due to meet there at 7:30pm, a few of us walked down calling in at The Wardrobe for a couple of drinks before making our way across the river to meet the rest of the crew.

It was a very pleasant evning so we all sat outside, food wise Monday night is half price burger night at the Oracle, so it was burgers all round - I had a chicken burger, which was okay. Conveniently (for The Oracle anyway) there wasn't any draught beer, only much more expensive bottles, so we had to make do with those! Upco paid the bill for the whole evening which was good of them.

I walked back to the Crowne Plaza hotel with our BA, Matt who's staying there, we called in at the Hogs Head for one and then we had a drink in the hotel bar while I was waiting for Nikki to come and pick me up.

We didn't get up quite as early as planned, but we still managed to get to the gym.

The afternoon was taken up with doing a few bits in the garden - a few bushes needed trimming, it took me as long to get the hedge trimmers started as it did to actually do the trimming. .Also some plants planting (which Nikki did) and the porch needed a wash (which I did!).

Nikki did some ironing a bit later, I had a go at converting some video files from our skiing trip and was considerably more successful than the previous time I tried,

In the evening we watched the latest episode in the new series of Top Gear and then a few other bits including Muriel's Wedding for the umpteenth time!

Nikki had an early appointment at the hairdressers this morning and I had a bit of a cheeky lie-in!

We had to pop into Leeds to pay a couple of bills, but rather than pay to aprk, Nikki dropped me off and drove round the block a couple of times while I went to the bank - well when parking costs a fiver these days what do you expect?

We washed our cars in the afternoon, they both could really do with a good polish, but that will have to wait until we've got a full day to do it! e a

There were a couple of bits that needed doing in the garden and we watched a bit of Wimbledon, which went on until well into the evening.

Afterwards we had some tea and watched the last two episodes of CSI NY, which had quite a spectacular finale!

Incredibly we also had another £10 win on the lottery making it four wins in the last five weeks!

How times change...

Once upon a time we used to work in a team that was fun to work with, no raised voices, no arguments, short stand-ups and we knew what direction we were going in - happy times indeed.

Roll forward a year and oh dear how different can it be...

Working is no longer fun, in fact it's a bit of a bind, raised voices and arguments are order of the day, there is a lovely fractious atmosphere, we have no direction, the stand-ups should be renamed 'sit-downs' they are that long and the card wall - that's just a mess - there are stories, broken down into tasks and then sub-tasks.

This morning's stand-up was just a joke - it basically turned into a stand-up argument. The focus seems to have gone from development to acceptance criteria. Instead of user defined acceptance criteria we have acceptance criteria dreamed up by a QA who wants everything testing down to the nth degree. Consequently that means an estimate that was one day could turn into three days simply because we have to write acceptance
Then to top this all we ere then given the news that the work we've been doing for the past four weeks has all been a waste of time because they've been to see the people that will be using the system and they don't work in a way that the system we're developing will be of any use to them.

We also had several serious issues with IBM's superb IDE that is RAD, I had several crashes, the search doesn't always find everything it should, the debugger is fragile at best (although apparently this is how all debuggers behave according to Andy - yeah okay Andy you believe that, but I know different) but worst of all we had some issues with SVN.

The merge capabilities are shocking, there is nothing to help you when 'merge hell' happens, so it's a manual process that takes a huge amount of time.

Then later on I checked in the work I'd been doing, but when Nick did an update there was apparently nothing to be updated. That was until he shut RAD down and restarted it... How dangerous is that?

Monday is the retrospective - it's going to be very interesting - I don't think I'll have anything to raise that's been good over the last two weeks, so no green only red cards from me...

The evening was spent doing the finances and ordering various things on t'internet - a bit of retail therapy after such a shocking day you might think, but not quite. I ordered a new laptop for my mate Kevin (a birthday present for his daughter), I paid the outstanding balance for our September ski course, my road tax was due as is the television licence. Although in amongst I did order a couple of CDs and a book on non-violent communication as recommended by my good friend Mr Jon Pither.

So it was back to work after our trip to London. I had quite a good morning, Tall Tony paired with me to continue on the date drop-down that I started last week. We got the integration and acceptance tests done before getting the code up to scratch.

Nick and I went out for a walk at lunchtime to vent a bit of frustration, although we couldn't vent that much because Paul Gill caught up with us part way round!

The afternoon was a bit of a different story from the morning we'd had a problem with the build that had been sitting there since the morning and it should have been fixed at the point of failure but wasn't. Then two more things were checked-in on top of that - naughty naughty which meant there was quite a bit of stuff to sort out and Tall Tony was drawn away to deal with that. Which left me in a bit of limbo.

Thankfully I didn't have much to do with Andy although Nick says he hasn't been that bad this week.

I wasn't too impressed by some of the things being banded about code coverage, Paul Wilson was all for switching it off, which is somewhat disheartening especially coming from someone who had worked with Thoughtworks last year and saw how important it was. In fact the whole dynamics seem to be shifting away from the way Thoughtworks taught us.

Nikki and I did the usual early Thursday evening gym and keep fit, then I went out for a few drinks with my old cycling buddy Jon. It was my turn to go down to Farsley where he lives. We went to The Fleece, then up to The Village and then to a new bar (can't remember the name) that had been opened by the same chap that opened The Village. While we were in there a chap we know to be a bit of a joker came in with the new that Michael Jackson had died, we were waiting for the punchline but one never came - only for us to find out later it was true...

We had to get up a bit earlier today because Thames Water were switching off the water supply to the hotel on account they're renewing the water mains in the area. That meant us having to go across to the Travelodge just around the corner, on High Holburn for breakfast.

Our train was at 11:35, so after we'd got back to our hotel and packed we had a walk into Covent Garden to kill some time before heading off to get the tube to kings Cross.

The train was on time and we were back in Leeds for 2pm and home for 2;45pm. We got unpacked, had a cuppa before heading off to do a bit of shopping and to pick Indie up.

We didn't manage to get a programme from Wimbledon yesterday as all the programme sellers had gone by the time we came out yesterday, I managed to find one on eBay so I bought that.

She was asleep when we got to the cattery and wasn't too happy to be woken up and put into her box! She miaowed all the was home. It didn't take her long to get settled back in – in fact it was almost as if she hadn't been away, however it's good to tell she's been cooped up for a while because she's been running round like a mad cat all night!

My mum rang up while we were having tea, so I rang her back a bit later on, nothing new just a bit of a catch-up. Talking of catching up, that's what we did on some recorded bit of television in the evening. I also sorted out some of the photographs from our trip.

Today was actually the main reason why we were in London – Wimbledon! First thing we did was to stock up with provisions from Sainsburys before getting the tube. Previously we've got the tube to Waterloo and then get the train to Wimbledon, however this year we got the tube to Southfields and walked up to the stadium, accumulating several freebies along the way – including a taster of Fullers Organic Honey Dew beer which was rather nice!

It was quite a pleasant walk and didn't take all that long, however when we arrived at the stadium we were not allowed to take our freebie drinks inside – as they weren't made by the official tournament sponsors.

Once inside the grounds we had a wander round, trying to spot any celebrities, but we only saw Sue Barker from a distance and Jelena Jankovic walked past us, but we only noticed her as she'd gone past, so no photo opportunity, unfortunately.

Nikki wanted to get another Wimbledon hand towel so we called into the shop, which didn't seem as busy as it had on previous visits.. We had a sit down on Henman Hill/Murray Mound, whichever you prefer for a while before making our way into Centre Court.

The view up across Henman Hill/Murray Mound

First up was Venus Williams (USA) v. Stefanie Vögle (Switzerland). Neither of us is particularly keen on the Williams sisters, but Venus is preferable to Selena. it wasn't a bad match and Venus won 2-0.

View of the court from our seats - and Venus Williams and Stefanie Vögele

Next up it was Andy Roddick (USA) v. Jeremy Chardy (France) and that was quite an entertaining match which went to 4 sets, with Roddick running out the 3-1 winner.

Andy Roddick after winning his match

By this time it was 5pm, time for Andy Murray to take on Robert Kendrick (USA) , another match that went to 4 sets, with Murray winning 3-1 in the end – by this time it was 8pm! We'd been sat in the same spot for 7 hours! Thank goodness we had seats quite a way back (Row Z) because it would have been a nightmare sitting out in the blazing sun for that length of time!

Andy Murray in action

We then walked back to Southfields tube station – it was pretty busy but well organised so it didn't take long to get onto a train. We got back tot he hotel had a quick freshen up and then headed out for something to eat. After a short walk we decided to got to Zizzis on Bow Street and both of us were pleasantly surprised at how good the food was.

It was past 11pm when we'd finished eating (a bit late really), we had a drink in the White Hart before heading off back to the hotel.

We decided to visit Tower Bridge as neither of us had been inside before, so we took a walk along the South Bank to get there, partaking in a market research poll about what we thought of London on the way.

Looking across London from the West walkway

The tour of Tower Bridge was well worth it, very interesting. There were great views across London from the two walkways. The old engine rooms were fascinating, although the steam engines were replaced with electric ones in the 1970s it was interesting to see the workings of how it once was.

One of the two steam powered engines

After the Tower Bridge tour we went across to the other side of the river, by the Tower of London. We didn't go into the tower, but had a bit of a wander around the outside and watched a bit of one of the displays going on.

The show at the Tower of London - how to fire a trebuchet

We then wandered back along the North Bank and headed up to Covent Garden to get something for tea. We went to Maxwells and I have to say the Vegetable Fajitas that I had were probably the worst I've ever eaten!

Once that culinary delight was over, we came back to the hotel and got ready to go out for the evening.

I had planned to meet Jon from Thoughtworks at the White Hart pub, which is very handily just across the road from our hotel. We had a drink with him and he then took us on a whistle-stop tour of the Thoughtworks offices, where we met up with James, who had also worked with us up in Leeds last year. We then went back to the White Hart, joined by James a bit later. We had a drink and then said our goodbyes because we had to get to the Theatre Royal to see Oliver!

It's a really nice theatre and the show was superb – I came out of there feeling like I ought to have felt after War of The Worlds last week. Rowan Aitkinson played the part of Fagin very well.

It was a bit of an uncomfortable night sleep-wise, the room is rather warm and there is no air-conditioning. The window doesn't seem to seal properly either so it was pretty noisy.

We got up just after nine and went down for breakfast, which was the usual English hotel fare. Once we'd had breakfast we made our way to Waterloo station to get the train to Hampton Court. A half hour train ride and we were there. We didn't have to queue too long to get in.

The frontage of Hampton Court Palace

One thing that struck us both is the size of both the palace and the gardens they're vast! There is so much to see – and that's just the parts that are open to the public! We had a good wander round inside and out in the gardens. We went into the maze – well you can't very well go to Hampton Court and not go in the maze!

The Pond Garden

The main courtyard

We were there for around four hours and got the train back at around 5pm. We came back tot he hotel to freshen up and then went out for something to eat. We made our way across to Leicester Square and went to Wagamamas, which was pretty good. We then called in for a few drinks on the way back, but the pubs tend to close at 10:30pm in London so it wasn't a late night!

We were up fairly early as we needed to get Indie off to the cattery. She obviously knew something was afoot as she disappeared under one of the beds upstairs and it was a two-man job to catch her!

Once we'd done that I nipped across the road to see Mike and Pat and then we caught the bus into Leeds. Our train was the 13:05 and we were in London for 15:20.

We purchased a couple of underground travel passes and then got on the tube and off at Holborn (as opposed to Covent Garden which would have been a bit busy). The hotel (Travelodge Covent Garden) was easy enough to find it's right at the top end of Drury Lane – bang opposite The White Hart pub where I've arranged to meet Jon from Thoughtworks on Monday! As hotels go it's okay, a bit tired perhaps, it looks like it was another hotel and Travelodge have bought it but not done a great deal with it.

After getting our stuff unpacked we went out for a wander down to Covent Garden – it was heaving! We came back and got ready to go out in the evening. In our street map book I found a page I'd printed off the internet when we visited in 2004 for an Austrian Restaurant called The Tiroler Hut, so we decided to try to find it and go there for tea. It was a bit of a tube ride away – in Bayswater. We wandered around (it wasn't a particularly nice area I didn't think) but couldn't find the place – we can only think it has closed down (however subsequent investigations have proved that not to be the case - but the entrance is really rather small so we must have missed it! ). Neither of us liked the look of any other eating establishments so we came back up towards Covent Garden and went to Pizza Express – not very exciting I know, but at least we knew what we were getting!

Well if I though that I didn't see eye to eye with Andy (the new lead developer) yesterday, then today was off the scale. This time though he was throwing his weight about as seems to be his way, the started dissing Thoughtworks. Now both Nick and I have an awful lot of respect for Thoughtworks, they are at the top of the tree when it comes to all thing Java. They were all extremely clever people taught and us some very good cutting edge techniques.

I think part of Andy's problem is he doesn't understand half of what they did and so derides it as 'not standard practice'. Coming from somebody that doesn't know Spring, Ibatis, Annotations, Generics, JUnit, HTMLUnit or Selenium it's a bit rich! The fact that Andy has only ever worked in one place, which was a large corporation as a Java programmer says an awful lot. He's only ever been used to one way of doing things and in his eyes it's the right way. He obviously sees me challenging him as some sort of threat and doesn't know how to deal with it, resulting in confrontation.

In fact it got to such a point today that I he was getting to me that much I had to walk out of the room, muttering under my breath as I went. Which I know isn't the way to go. I need to take a leaf out of Jon from Thoughtworks book, he was very good when it came to discussing things, he'd been studying non-violent communication, I think I ought to do the same and then lend the books to Andy too!

I managed to get some proper dates into my drop-down list, plus all the tests refactored to cope with the change. I also made a point of the fact that we needed to get test coverage up! Unfortunately that meant a lot of work for Nick because he'd copied some stuff out of another application for the single sign-on and that needed tests writing around it.

We didn't do that much in the evening, watched a bit on television, had a look at a few things on t'internet and that was it.

I had a fairly good day, though I can't say I'm getting on that well with the new lead developer we've recruited. He's one of these people that like to throw his weight around and is another of these people that thinks his way is the only way. It's interesting to see that we've recruited a lead developer who knows basically nothing about any of the technologies that we're using except for a bit of Java.

As it was I found any of his input to be more of a hindrance than a help. Anyway I managed to get some tests written around a JSP with a drop-down list with some dates in. I also got it connected through to the stuff I'd written yesterday. So that means I've managed to create a JSP that goes down through a controller to getting some data, all fully tested and most of it under my own steam! Plus it was the first task to be fully completed and hence the first thing on the velocity graph.

I just now need to enhance the data that comes back to the screen, at the moment I'm only returning some hard-coded strings, ideally I should be returning dates because when the stored procedure has been written that's what will be returned.

Nikki and I did the usual Thursday evening thing, gym and keep fit. Once we'd got back we had tea, I spoke to my sister Denise on the phone. She sounded pretty tired but that's because it was her first day back at work after her operation.

It was on with the start of work for iteration 1 today. I started writing some tests to drive out some code for one of the web pages, which I found quite difficult. Mainly because I started at the database and tried to work my way up from there. A better approach would have been to start at the web page and work down from there. Oh well lesson learned!

As we were out last night we didn't get chance to do any chores, that meant we didn't go to the gym. Instead Nikki tidied up downstairs while I did the ironing upstairs.

When we'd finished we caught up a couple of bits of television we'd recorded from yesterday.

It was a day of purely meetings - as predicted a rather long estimating meeting and then a presentation at lunchtime about the GLOBE project (that we'd worked on last summer) and how it all fits into the scheme of things.

Nikki and I finished work around 4pm as we were heading down to Sheffield to see the 30th Anniversary show of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds at the Arena.

Getting down to Sheffield wasn't a problem, but we had a bit of a nightmare getting into the Arena ou'llcar park. The traffic seems to just be a free-for all - people pushing in left, right and centre. It's a good job Nikki was driving because I would have got rather annoyed!

We actually got into the Arena at around 7:30pm and had planned to meet Paul from work who was going with his dad. As it was they hadn't arrived and didn't do so until about 20 minutes late and the show started at 8pm. Nikki and I had a drink and then went off to find our seats.

Start of the martian invasion...

It was quite an interesting show, some good effects (the tripod that descended from the ceiling and the pyrotechnics). The 'hologram' Richard Burton was a little disappointing, it was obviously computer generated however his lip sync and darting eyes spoiled the effect.

Martian destruction...

We did meet up with Paul and his dad for a drink during the interval and we were meant to do so afterwards but it was just so busy it proved impractical.

Forever Autumn

Overall I came away from the show feeling a little under-awed, having spent over £120 on two tickets I expected to come away feeling like I'd seen something spectacular (or out of this world, if you'll excuse the pun! but I didn't.

If we thought the traffic was bad going in tot he Arena, it was nothing compared to getting out and across to the motorway. It was just about midnight when we got home.

Nick was getting a little bit down in the dumps today - I think the fact that we still were struggling to get the integration tests working was getting to him. As it turned out it was the work that Tall Tony did that was causing us an issue so we had to get him involved. I reckon we should have it cracked in the morning...

We had a showcase to let people see what we've achieved in Iteration 0, then this afternoon we had the retrospective. Tomorrow is the start of Iteration 1 which will no doubt mean another lengthy estimating session.

There was a huge thunderstorm today that seemed to go on for ages.

Nikki and I went to the gym and keep fit as per usual, we then watched a few bits on the box.

We had to take Indie to the vets for her annual booster jab this morning and her appointment was at 8:50am. That meant we had to be up rather early. Thankfully as I hadn't had that much to drink last night getting up wasn't a problem.

Indie doesn't like going in her box, nor does she like going in the car, but she didn't flinch when the vet gave her the injection! After we'd been to the vets we nipped in to Pudsey to pick up yet another parcel from the Post Office - this time it was the 50mm lens I'd bought in eBay. Plus I had a couple of eBay items I needed to send out.

Then instead of doing into Bradford we went to the Aldi at Beeston to get some minor provisions.

The weather was quite pleasant so we did some bits out in the garden - I put up a bracket for an extra hanging basket at the front of the house.

I also had a bit of a play with the lens, taking some photos out in the nice weather.

We spent the evening just watching some bits and bobs on television - interestingly we had another £10 win on the lottery - making it three wins in three weeks! I suspect that will be it for a while now though...

As is usual on a Sunday morning We got up and went to the gym first thing. Nikki's nephew Dane was in there, we hadn't seen him since he brought his newly born son round at Christmas. It was good to catch up - not sure how long the gym thing will last with him though!

In the afternoon we went over to see my mum, we then went across to Nikki's dad's for tea. The weather was glorious so we sat out and had tea looking out across Nidderdale which was very nice. It would havebeen even nicer had there been some mountains.

We got home around 8pm and watched a bit of television although there wasn't anything of note on.

We had to take Indie to the vets for her annual booster jab this morning and her appointment was at 8:50am. That meant we had to be up rather early. Thankfully as I hadn't had that much to drink last night getting up wasn't a problem.

Indie doesn't like going in her box, nor does she like going in the car, but she didn't flinch when the vet gave her the injection! After we'd been to the vets we nipped in to Pudsey to pick up yet another parcel from the Post Office - this time it was the 50mm lens I'd bought in eBay. Plus I had a couple of eBay items I needed to send out.

Then instead of doing into Bradford we went to the Aldi at Beeston to get some minor provisions.

The weather was quite pleasant so we did some bits out in the garden - I put up a bracket for an extra hanging basket at the front of the house.

I also had a bit of a play with the lens, taking some photos out in the nice weather.

We spent the evening just watching some bits and bobs on television - interestingly we had another £10 win on the lottery - making it three wins in three weeks! I suspect that will be it for a while now though...

Nick and I continued with the integration tests and got somewhere but we didn't get them finished.

In the evening I went out with my old RAF mate Steve Carolan. He now lives in Bradford and was going to get the bus up, but I told him it would probably be easier for him to get the train up and I'd pick him up from Pudsey station. So that's what happened.

It wasn't a particularly boozy night by any stretch, in fact I started the night drinking blackcurrant and soda! We had a few drinks in The Marsh - which was actually quite busy. From there we walked around to The Fox and Grapes and had a few more in there.

We were trying to work out the last time we'd had a night out, but couldn't work it out although it had to have been at least 2 years ago. That's mainly down to the fact that Steve is a security guard and works quite a lot of nights. Anyway it shouldn't be that long until the next one - it's 25 years this September since we both joined the RAF together so we'll be arranging a celebration for that!

Nick and I continued from where we left off yesterday and made some quite good progress - so much so we now have a green build and with it achieving something our colleague Philip said we wouldn't be able to do!

We then set about doing some integration tests around the Ibatis stuff, but that was proving quite tricky! I had to feel sorry for Tony, the contractor from UpCo today, he spent the whole day battling with RAD and Websphere and getting nowhere. In the end we had to conclude he'll need to have RAD reinstalled. So far we've estimated a drop of about 30% in productivity through having to use RAD, which in my eyes is unacceptable.

I was supposed to have been going out with my old cycling buddy Jon tonight, but he had something else on so we've postponed until next week.

The eBay auctions finished at 8pm, just after we'd got back from the gym. Only three of the five items I put up for auction sold. I had an email from the buyer of our old Technosat receiver who only lived in Bradford so I gave him a call and he came across to pick it up, paying cash in the process. That has to be the eBay fastest transaction ever! The other two buyers also paid up so I packaged up their items ready to take to the Post Office on Saturday morning.

Not much different today than yesterday. Nick and I managed to get the database integration sorted, by calling a basic stored procedure via Ibatis - we've even got some tests around it!

Once we'd got that done we concentrated on trying to get the application published on both Jetty and Websphere. Jetty wasn't much of a problem, but Websphere is causing some issues, meaning more investigation tomorrow.

We had a meeting to discuss the forthcoming work for Iteration 1 which starts next week. Although from the sound of it there is still a considerable amount of preparation work required - the biggest part being we haven't yet got a finalised database.

Nikki and I went to the gym once we eventually got home - the delay beong due to what looked to be quite a serious accident on the inner ring road.

The Magazine CDs I'd ordered arrived today and I also won a 50mm camera lens on eBay. As for my stuff that's on eBay, a few more bids now, the auctions end tomorrow so all will be revealed then!

No meetings or presentations to give today which meant I was able to dedicate the full day to some Java stuff. We had a look at Cruise fisrt off, but rapidly decided we had some more work to do before we could get any further - namely around the single sign-on getting it working on Jetty.

It soon became apparent that Nick and I were out of our depth somewhat and so we had to enlist the help of the other Tony from UpCo. He had some serious investigation to do on it and so Nick and I got on with another task that needed doing - database connectivity.

Not much activity on the eBay listings as yet - a few watches and one bid each on two items, hopefully things will hot up as the auctions draw to a close on Thursday.

I'd taken in the camera that Nikki got from work as Anne at work was interested in buying it. I wanted to make sure she was happy with it so she took it home to have a play. She was happy and brought me the money in today. I told her I was happy to let her have it for what I'd paid for it, but she gave me a bit more.

Nikki did some emails in the evening and I had a look at doing some PHP - the website I'd written a few years ago for my record collection could do with updating and rewriting. I want to refactor the code into object-oriented rather than procedural code - more in line with what we've been doing in Java. There is a great PHP plug-in for IntelliJ which works rather well.

First thing I had to give the Plone demonstration to the retail team which went very well. They all seemed to like what it offered and how it could be used.

Once I'd finished that I was back on with helping Nick in continuing to get the test coverage up. t took just about the whole day but we did get the first part of the build green. We've still got quite a few more tests to do but at least we've got some coverage now.

Our new lead Java, Andy started today and he should be getting involved in XTrans just as soon as he gets settled in.

My eBay listings were scheduled to start at 7pm tonight, all the listings are for three days. Not much activity so far, one bid on a filter and that's it.

Nikki and I did the Monday gym and keep fit thing, I then rang my mum when we got back. I told her we'd probably pop in and see her at the weekend as we're off to Nikki's dad's.

We did the usual Sunday morning gym session.

It wasn't a day for doing anything outdoors, so I did some eBay listings - which seemed to take and age. I'll probably put the listings up tomorrow.

Nikki did some tidying up, we made the bed and that was basically the day.

It was the final of The Apprentice, which was pretty good and we watched some other bits but nothing of note.

I ordered some CDs - in the gym this morning a track - Shot By Both Sides by Magazine came on my iPod and I realised we didn't have any of their albums - something I have now rectified!

We had to go into Leeds today to go to the bank.

Nikki wanted to get a new coat so we had a look in quite a number of shops but it wasn't until we wandered down to Crown Point that she found one in TK Maxx. We also had a look in a couple of the electrical stores as we were after a DAB radio for the kitchen but they were all quite pricey, but when we got back into Leeds we had a look in Dixons and they had one a Roberts RD-41 on special offer - under half price, so we bought it.

Later on we went for a drink in All Bar One and then to Pizza Express as we had a special offer voucher. We got the bus back home, watched a bit of television before I fell asleep in the chair! That's what drinking in the afternoon does for you!

We also had another £10 on the lottery!

Nick and I had planned to look at PDF and barcode production today, but we set up Cruise so that we could promote the XTrans application. To do this we needed the help of Steve because he's got the Cruise know-how. Basically it meant amending some XML files and once we'd got it sorted we tried to check the application in. All went well until we found that we didn't have any code coverage in terms of testing! Consequently we spent the rest of the day writing tests around the single sign-on stuff - which proved to be a bit of a challenge!

Ordinarily on a Friday we would have finished a bit earlier, but Nikki wanted to get something completed so we finished at normal time.

I was meant to be going out with my old Air Force mate Stevie Carolan, but the weather was appalling and he texted me to see if we could take a rain-check (literally!) until next week. It's a good job really because I'm on call and the phone rang at just about the time we would have been going out... It wasn't something I felt I could deal with and so had to ring Roger and it was something he wasn't familiar with!

As I didn't go out Nikki and I watched a few bits on television.

It was a day of all sorts - I had was called out briefly last night and so had the fallout from that to deal with. I then had a chat with Paul about my appraisal and the fact that I wasn't happy with a sentence in it. He fully understood my discomfort and agreed to change it.

As part of the XTrans project we'll be trying to do the showcases in the Java development office using a projector, so we gave that a go this morning - apart from having quite a low screen resolution it was okay and we can at least give it a go.

We had a look at how we might produce the barcode labels which involved having to download some files (which I should now be able to do as I have been given access to do so) but I couldn't do which hampered us somewhat.

I attended a Microsoft Powerpoint course in the afternoon - not that I am a great user of Powerpoint but I thought it might be useful. As it was I was probably the most experienced user on the course - but I did find a couple of bits quite useful.

There was a request for me to give another Plone demonstration - this time for the retail team, whose manager was one of those getting quite excited about its possibilities at yesterday's presentation. I have agreed to do it on Monday morning.

It was gym and keep fit as usual in the evening.

No Java for me today - I had to get an agenda together for the Plone presentation I was giving later on in the day. I also had a few minor tweaks to make - such as include some images to make the pages look a bit more interesting.

At lunchtime I popped out to get some petrol, it's easier to do it then rather than on the way home, when it always seems to be busy.

I had a chat with Nick a mid way through the afternoon to find out what he and Tony had been working on. They'd managed to get the build running through fine and were having a look at how to produce some barcode labels.

The Plone presentation went very well and there was some real enthusiasm from a couple of people there who could see some real possibilities for how it could be used in the company as a whole - even out in the stores!

The meeting ran a bit over so I didn't leave work until 5:30pm which meant we didn't egt to the gym a bit later than we have done recently. Still it wasn't too busy at least.

It was the semi-final of The Apprentice so we watched that after we'd had tea.

Again quite a good day - we did some more work on the single sign-on stuff, making sure it actually did work properly when it was moved onto the web server - and it did!

Once we'd got that out of the way we spent quite a bit of time looking at what was required in order for the Ant build to run. We had some problems with RAD and SVN. For some reason RAD doesn't integrate very well with SVN and it gets confused rather too easily. That meant we were battling against that for most of the time. Thanksully we did manage to get the build running - but there's a long way to go yet!

The two new starters Mark and Mark were introduced today, one of them is very self confident - he's a member of the architecture team, the other is fairly quiet and unassuming (at the moment anyway!) and he's a member of the Support team. As there currently isn't any Java support he spent most of the day shadowing us, which must have been quite boring for him - but better than reading HR stuff!

In the evening Nikki put the poster from this year's Hahnenkamm race into its frame, I sorted some of the photographs from our recent trip to Munich and had a wee strum on my guitar.

It was the start of iteration zero of the XTrans project today. We had a meeting to discuss what we ned to achieve over the next couple of weeks. We've also got an external chap in from a company called UpCo who are based in Leeds. He seems pretty decent and is also called Tony so he can't be all bad!

Nick and I took him through some of the stuff we'd worked on over the past few projects and we went through the singe sign-on work we'd done last week. Consequently the day went quite quickly!

There were a couple of new starters in the department both called Mark - one in the Architecture team and the other in Support, they weren't introduced so I dodn't know anything about them as yet...

Nikki and I had the usual Monday night gym and keep fit sessions but nothing else exciting. I did have an email back from Jean (the lady we got Indie from), she was glad to hear from us and was grateful for the photos we'd sent.