Tor has an addiction to buying books about how to bring up Charlie.  We’ve gone through Gina Ford, who should be shot, Sleep without Crying, Bringing up boys and a pile of others.  They are all bollocks. They all have this nuts assumption that all kids are the same and you can program them to do what you want.

Basically having a child will let you know one thing completely, that you never thought of before too much.  We are ALL different.  Each and every one of us is an individual that reacts and responds to things completely differently.  Charlie is utterly different to all the kids his age as much as I am different from all the people I work with.  And that is fantastic – that is what life is all about!  Some people are a pain in the arse, some people are hugely entertaining and some people are really clever.  As an immodest parent I believe that Charlie fits all of the above.

As an example of the bilge that these books talk about there’s a toddler book that Tor has by the loo – I optimistically think it’s just in case we run out of paper.  This book says -and I paraphrase because I can’t be arsed to write it out properly – that the author doesn’t believe in letting children discover that they can hurt themselves.  Again to paraphrase the book says that they don’t believe “in the old ways where children were allowed to put there hand or foot in a fire to discover that it hurts.” Well I can tell you that that is exactly what we ended up having to do.  After a few months of grabbing Charlie back from the fire and telling him off eventually I had to say to Tor, he’s going to have to do it.  Fortunately when he got close enough to feel the real heat of the fire he turned to me and said “It’s hot Daddy,” to which I graciously replied “I know that’s what I told you!” so he didn’t hurt himself.

The next thing the book went on to say was that during a hot summer they needed to get a fan out.  In order to show their child that this was dangerous by putting a pencil into the fan and demonstrating the danger of putting your finger into in.  They then went on to tell a story about how they accidentally dropped a glass and broke it.  To show how dangerous this was to their kid they took a shard of the glass and demonstrated how it could slice into a tomato.

If I did this with Charlie I can guarantee you that there wouldn’t be a pencil or glass left in the house as he had a go at mincing pencils in fans and destroying glasses to dice some salad.

I appeal to all of you – don’t bother with these ridiculous books.  Until I write one.  That’ll be really good, 306 pages all with one line on it saying, “Don’t worry, you are doing your best -and by the way as long as you love and support them they’ll be fine.”  It’ll be 4-ply too so if you do run out of paper in the loo you’ll be fine too.

I generally work in largish teams of people when I’m out on contract and I’ve noticied that even if you are sitting opposite someone you tend to use IM to communicate.  This could be Windows Messenger, Skype or one of the many many other IM clients.

Yesterday I found myself doing it again and I suddenly thought about how wierd this is.  You could reach over and physically touch someone and yet you are writing messages rather than talking.  Sometimes if it is important you’ll suddenly break out of the text chat and straight into a real voice conversation.  If you are overhearing this sort of communication it’s the most bizare thing.  All of a sudden someone deep in thought typing and staring at their screen will turn to the person next to them and say angrily “Yes – but I’ve appended the variables to the query string!” and the person they apparantly just started shouting at out of the blue calmly replies to them and then both parties go back to the squabble over IM.

Some people could argue that this method of communication is going to ruin social interaction (they’ll also probably read the Daily Mail) but I think that this can be a very important and valid ways to get things done.  But as with everything there is also a downside.

IM Pros

1 – How many times have I been deep in code, trying to think my way through or around a complicated problem and the someone has tapped me on the shoulder for a chat.  It completely breaks my flow and now I’m not really concentrating on either the conversation my colleague wants to have as I’m still half thinking about the code – but even worse I know it’s going to take at least 15 mins to get back into it.  If that person had quickly fired over a message on IM without breaking step I could zap back something along the lines of “Not now, give me x mins and we can talk.”  That way I’m not interupted and can get my job done faster and the person who wanted a chat will get my undivided attention when I’ve finished whatever I’m up to.

2 – You can have discussions over IM that you wouldn’t have out loud.  These could be along the lines of technical conversations where you need web addresses or lines of code zapped backwards and forwards.  You could be trying something out but you don’t want to broadcast to everyone in the immediate area that you don’t know if it’s going to work and you just want to work directly with someone else.

3 – You can speak your mind.  If you are worried about offending someone it is easier to have a text conversation as you can consider what it is you want to say before saying it.  This isn’t always possible in a face to face chat as you may forget an important point.  In a text chat you can take a bit of time to think rather than having to go straight back.

4 – You can ignore them.  You can’t ignore someone standing at your desk – it would be rude, but no one is going to get upset if you ignore a IM for a few minutes.

IM Cons

1 – It can be very secretive.  It is very easy to have a conversation behind someone’s back in plain sight.  Normally this may be the odd bitchy comment or exasperated “You’ll never guess what suchandsuch has done now!” that you’d probably have with people on your lunch break, but it can become quite insidious and undermining.  For example I was working with a weak Project Manager who was perfectly nice, but not really that effective.  This combined with everyone jumping on IM as soon as they’d just had a meeting with them to moan to the rest of the team pretty much wiped out any respect the team had for the PM and made a difficult project neigh on impossible.

2 – Its FUN!  Swapping jokes, firing over funny links or merely whittering to each other over IM is fantastic fun.  And possibly a major time waster.  This is probably the biggest worry for employers over using IM.  They want everyone to focus on their jobs and not thinking up witty retorts to their mate in Accounts.  However if your team does have loads of time to waste sending silly IMs or even worse are happy to ignore their work whilst sending messages then the problem is going to be something other then their IM habbit.

3 – Text communication removes all other human communication channels.  You cannot see someone’s face or read their body language.  It is really easy to write something (normally in jest) that is taken in the best case out of context or the worst case is taken really badly.  A quick example was someone asked me to change something over IM.  I sent back “Whatever” and didn’t add a smily at the end.  The next thing I knew the phone went and I had a really angry PM to deal with.  Even after I calmed them down I still am not convinced that I was just mucking around and of course I was happy to make the change.

So to sum up, and don’t forget this is only my opinion, I couldn’t work as effectivly without IM.  Even with the aparant stupidity of sending the guy sitting next to me IMs – I think as a method of unobtrusive communication about stuff that can wait it is vital.  Missusing IM I believe shows that there is a problem with something in the company, if someone is being undermined in IM chats then more than likely they would be undermined by people anyway.  If people are just using it to gossip then there is a problem with the respect of employees for the company.

Hello to the five or so people who accidentally find my blog.

If you’ve been here before you may notice that I’ve switched the design back to the standard theme and also changed the name of the blog.  Basically I’ve realised that although I am a web developer I can’t always post about developer stuff.  Writing tutorials for example, if you want to attempt to do them well anyway, takes bloody ages and I don’t have time to do that regularly.  Also although I may find a cool bit of code or nice way of doing something 9 times out of 10 I think about popping it up here and then realise that it’s probably going to be of interest to a very small number of people who have probably either discovered it themselves or come up with their own fix.

While I love my job as a developer I also started this blog because I’m interested in writing.  I used to write plays, sketches and I’ve got a couple of unfinished film scripts and novels knocking around that will probably never see the light of day.  But to be honest if they turn into anything that would be a bonus as the real purpose of them is for my own personal enjoyment of writing.

So I’ve decided that while I’m still going to have techy stuff on here, which would be impossible to avoid with the job I do, I’m not going to limit myself to just writing about code.

I’m also going to *gasp* do a bit of work on the site by actually doing a design and implementing it to fit in with my new content.

Right now I should probably apologise to the many readers of this blog which would be disappointed by this approach, but I see the stats – adding blowing tumbleweed would be an improvement.

Hopefully this new approach will get me writing more, and hopefully there’s someone out there who may be interested in what’s here, but realistically guys – I’m doing it for myself.   Sorry.