It's 1995, and a wiry-looking engineer in need of a haircut is working at a tech services company in the Channel Islands. The island is Jersey (you can see the French coastline on a clear day), and he's over here for a week or two for training from his nearby Guernsey home.

This company does everything from IBM AS/400 maintenance to custom PC software development - the developer involved was brought in and trained to work on a banking package on those AS/400s but has ended up on the PC development side through a series of improbable events.

Just over three years ago I packed up my Guernsey life to come and work for Microsoft in Washington. I thought it might be fun to share some things I’ve learnt. This one is about transport.

Be prepared for cross-referenced questions and mandatory fingerprinting to make you feel like a replicant even though you’ve done nothing wrong and your eyes don’t glow in the dark. The gatekeepers at immigration are all-powerful and take their job seriously so you should too as I found out when I had a case of the giggles.

From an earliest memory of a cream colored box emblazoned with letters, mostly black – some red, came an owl proclaiming allegiance to the BBC.

This small box sat silently, patiently even, in our classroom for the best part of a year. On the few occasions our teacher was brave enough to flip the switch the machine would chirp into life with it’s two-tone beep and would state on capital white letters on a black background that it was BASIC. At this point the teacher would key-in the mythical incantation of CHAIN ""CHAIN "" – handily jotted on a nearby note – and feed the beast a cassette tape.

Started by Janet, picked up via Brad.

[)amien[)amien

Ken Egozi tagged me with the latest meme and this time it’s at least relevant :)

Some time between 10 and 12 when my father bought home a ZX Spectrum and I ended up delving into the excellent programming manual when I finally ran out of games to play. At the same time my school opened up the computer room at lunchtimes…

I am now settled into my new, albeit temporary, apartment here in Vancouver, BC working for Microsoft!

For those who haven’t been following my blog long I took a job at Microsoft Canada Development Center as a developer on LINQ to SQL. It turns out my H-1B Visa has been approved and I will be moving down to Redmond in October.

I’ve been quiet on my blog lately largely because I have been preparing to change job and relocate half-way around the world to Vancouver in the beautiful province of British Columbia (where I spent my 2004 summer holiday).

In February I traveled out to Redmond for three days of interviews (one position grew to two, then three). Having read the Microsoft Jobs Blog I was prepared for long hard days but in reality the process was incredibly enjoyable and exciting.

I visited Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond.

I didn’t make any.

Since moving house I have been using my MacBook Pro 15″ 2.0GHz at home, for contracting and even for the odd diagnostics and organization in the office.

The last 20 months have been a bumpy ride with the logic board being replaced twice once for whining and the second time when the inner memory slot went dead. The battery has been recalled and the power supply cable started melting and the paint started flaking off the enclosure but thankfully Apple sorted out all these problems rather swiftly with advanced replacement parts and speedy repairs through local service centers iQ Guernsey and Guernsey Computers.

It has been a crazy couple of months between moving home, spending a week in Seattle and a couple of days in Holland for my real day job (the source of income!)

It was a little too close to my USA trip which has meant I’ve missed my niece trick-or-treating for the first time since I returned to Guernsey 3 years ago which leaves me a little sad. I guess I should be grateful for not being hit with jet-lag and the fact I’m surviving just fine on 5.5 hours of sleep a day which tonight is in a cubicle hotel…

I’ve been invited out to Microsoft HQ for a couple of days (October 22-23) which should be very interesting – more details on the what, why and how at a later date.

I will also be spending an extra day and a half in Seattle, perhaps taking in some of the sights of and maybe meeting up with a couple of on-line contacts for the first time.

The change to WordPress from Subtext went without major hitch. This was great considering I was tweaking the design and articles right up to going on holiday (I wouldn’t do this in a professional environment but my blog is a sandpit for such dare-devil risk taking ;-)

Here are my notes on the experience.

I have been planning on moving my blog off my little Windows Shuttle PC at home onto a hosted service for some time and the latest flurry of activity followed by DSL line meltdown was enough to give me the nudge I needed to get the job done.

Rob Conery provided a useful .NET/Subsonic app to make the transition from Subtext about as painless as possible bar the obvious one of going with a PHP based solution when I know .NET is a better technology.

I’ve switched to a lightweight theme (300KB less per initial hit) whilst we are overloaded with requests from the excellent Daring Fireball regarding the font rendering philosophies post.

I’ve tried moving some images off site but it’s just typical this happens the week before I move to proper hosting. My poor home DSL line is melting!

Scott Hanselman posed the open question on his Hanselminutes podcast and there have already been some good responses. My own plan includes:

My girlfriend gave me the well-regarded Code Complete, Second Editionfor my birthday. I shall read it cover to cover and adopt good practices I am not currently practicing.

I loved my trip to Japan and thought it would be fun to reflect on what I've learnt.

[)amien[)amien

I placed eleven items this year into my Amazon wish-list for my family and girlfriend to pick from and all were quickly purchased.

A few days later my mother asks if I can put some items to buy because after purchasing one or two the others have now gone.

As anyone who’s been reading this blog for too long will know I’ve been taking a degree in computer science (well, the closest the Open University had) in my spare time since 1999.

Yesterday the results came through for my final year where I managed to achieve a grade 2 pass (which requires 70%+ on both assignments and exam).

Will only be a short one as I’m pretty tired from all the walking and traveling around.

Got into Fukuoka and spent a few days exploring and a few evenings being entertained by Jo who also gave me some pointers on Japanese culture etc. I also subjected his friend Hidori ? to my incredibly poor attempts at Karaoke although my rendition of Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Home almost veered onto the side of not quite making ears bleed.

I’ve wanted to visit Japan for quite some time but the opportunity never seemed to present itself. When my friend Matt wrote to me about his trip there and posted some great pictures of Japan at his photo blog I was more tempted than ever.

With my project reaching a milestone this week it seems like the perfect time to take a well deserved holiday. Clarissa can’t get the time off and isn’t too interested in Japan so I’m holidaying solo again (first time since Vancouver/BC in 2004).

The project I’ve been working on professionally for the last two years reaches a milestone this week and so is a great opportunity to take a well-deserved break for a couple of weeks.

I was hoping to head out somewhere as far out as Japan but things are held up in a complicated set of scheduling dependencies and a looming demo to investors.

I’m back home again after our whirlwind of activities in Southampton.

The indoor carting was quite cool fun although as usual the carts felt too slow and the indoor surface meant sliding on every corner regardless of slowing down so no attempt at fine tuning those race lines to the edge of your tires. Well, maybe there was, but I wasn’t slowing down enough to find it.

So, it’s that time of year again.

The 5th of November. Bonfire night. Guy Fawkes.

A few weeks ago I got a cut, mysteriously, on my left middle finger right on the outer knuckle joint. In fact on the very spot of an old scar – I forget which of my many little incidents caused that one but it probably involved a BMX and my childhood thirst to perform tricks beyond my ability.

Anyway, this cut bubbled up into a nasty looking thing. A tower of bubble, bubble within a bubble.

Taking a computer science honours degree in your spare time is a massive commitment and one that I’m not sure I would have embarked upon had I appreciated just how long the road would be when I started back in 1998.

It has taken me 9 courses, 7 years, 46 assignments, 8 exams and 1 final project (a mini-eBay).

It’s been long overdue but you can thank Blogger for being down for long enough to force me to move my blog to the same host as my web site.

I’ve been wanting categories, track-backs and finer control for some time. I looked at dasBlog, .Text and CommunityServer and rejected each for one reason or another before settling on Subtext. It is far from perfect but it’s the best .NET blogging engine for me right now – yes I know there are some great PHP blog systems out there but I have an aversion to PHP.

Okay, after a few nail biting days of;

“Your course result will be available Wednesday 22 March 2006”

Forgive me readers for I have sinned. It’s been ten days since my last post.

This is one of those rarer posts about my personal life for people who know or care…

Fellow #webdev member Steven Woods has tagged me with the latest meme so here it is…

Err, yeah that’s the same job. It’s the only one I’ve had since school.

Jackson is a rather small cowboy style town that apparently is even busier in the summer than the winter. Everybody in town is very friendly and helpful apart from the miserable bar staff in the Cowboy Village who could barely be arsed to tell us what they had available to drink. We spent more time at a bar called Sidewinders which is a sports bar with far too many televisions and watched American "Football".

The people at our hotel, The Ranch Inn, were incredibly helpful and also had a free open WiFi hot-spot which my laptop made it’s new best friend.

Once a year I head out with a bunch of friends for a week of winter sports. This year my snowboarding buddies and I (a skier) decided to skip the unfriendly European slopes and flip over the Atlantic to Jackson, Wyoming in USA for a whole 10 days of slope mastery.

As always our first flight landed us at Gatwick. One overnight stay led us into flight 2 to Atlanta, Georgia via Delta Airlines. The flight was a whopping 9.5 hours but luckily quiet and under booked. If they hadn’t smashed the handle on my new luggage I might have given Delta a full 5 stars.

I don’t actually wait until the new year to make resolutions but this is a convenient way of posting…

I have far too much stuff already, books unread, movies unwatched and games unfinished. I certainly do not need a new 30″ Dell LCD especially as it is missing all the lovely inputs of my 24″ Dell. The two exceptions this year *might* be a new TV for the lounge and a new Apple x86 laptop to replace the aging x86 Dell and PPC PowerBook.

This year I broke with my life-long tradition and spent Christmas not at my parents house with my family but with my girlfriend and her family in Germany.

The flight there was uneventful but dull thanks to Aurigny’s one-flight-per-day to Stansted at mid-day. This means 5 hours + of milling around. Thankfully Stansted isn’t quite as bad as I recalled and there are a few book and game shops to browse around in and I managed to keep my shopping down to a mere 3 books… Shame I already had 3 in my backpack.

Questions stolen from the same source as the last one ;-)

[)amien[)amien

I’m just back from another trip to Germany, this time by way of Gatwick and on to Munich by redeeming some BA miles that had accumulated.

I thought about writing another little travelogue but then it wouldn’t make much sense as my previous trip to Höchstadt is still undocumented – I left readers wandering around the outskirts of Paris. So here’s the short version…

One of the problems with a capitalist society is the conception that if something is not number 1 then it should be killed/will soon die and make space for another attempt. These products may be profitable and have their own niche and killing them just hands back the market-share to the number 1…

Some of my favorite products have been shelved over the years, here’s a few that deserve some kind of record in the annals of web history.

My apologies for the second part taking so long to arrive here. I wrote this section a while ago before Zoundry Blog Writer threw it away. Doubtful I could write again with as much enthusiasm I left it but a series of questions has prompted me to write it again. It was better the first time, I promise.

We had left Disney behind us now, heading south-west to avoid the hot city streets of Paris and on towards Versailles. With high expectations of “the largest palace in Europe”“the largest palace in Europe” we arrived underneath a hot midday July sun amid a mass of tourists. This did not bode too well.

Yesterday, at St. Pierre du Bois Parish Church, my eldest little sister got married and I was fortunate enough to be the one to give her away. The ceremony was perfect and the newly appointed best man got everything spot on despite the one days notice. My little brothers even managed to perform their usher roles without supervision.

After the obligatory photos and confetti storm we headed to the beautiful island of Herm, just a 15 minute trip by boat, for drinks followed by conversation and a rather unusual but tasty mix of food in the specially erected marquee. We toasted the married couple and tried to put into words our own personal messages in their book while snapping the many photos that were filling film and memory card. My sister’s red trainers (put on for the reception, not the service ;-) were well hidden beneath her dress but will no doubt appear on some of the pictures.

Unlike my previous trips I had little access to the Internet while away and failed to take writing materials. Many of my observations and thoughts were lost but here’s what’s left in my mind:

Driving in France was less terrifying in my own car than in the left-hand drive rental cars I’ve used in the past. The run from St. Malo through Rennes, Le Mans and up to Paris was uneventful punctuated only by the unidentified random songs and the splatter of unfortunate insects emptying their stomachs onto my windscreen at 140kmh. I went through Paris, around the five lane ring-road several times and even drove along a section of road where I could see the fabled Arc de Triomphe, noted across Europe for being a top spot to avoid while driving because of it’s twelve avenue junction that surrounds it.

The agenda for my trip is coming together although various changes had to be accommodated because of factors outside of my control, the biggest one being me now returning home right after Nuremberg followed closely by the change to take my car across for the French leg.

The timetables from Saint Malo are sketchy at best and we still needed to get around between Saint Malo, Disneyland, Paris and Charles De Gaulle airport. So with haste I equipped my Nissan Silvia S14 (200SX) with the headlight converters, first-aid kit, warning triangle, jump leads and a spare bulb kit. A map, torch and compass may also be useful if I can find decent ones locally, failing that I’ll muddle through. It is being serviced tomorrow night and hopefully the Pioneer iPod adapter will spark to life too.

LemurGirl has passed me a music meme, so here I go!

It goes all the way up to eleven! Uh, “1,966 songs, 6.7 days, 10.48 GB” according to iTunes.

My girlfriend Clarissa has given me a bug, and not the sometimes fun type that involves single-stepping to locate and subsequently fix. She has a very high temperature and her doctor has signed her off work for a week.

Either I’ve got that to come or I’ve been lucky. Why is the human body so incapable of signaling to the brain exactly what the problem is, perhaps with a shopping list of useful nutrients and vitamins it could do with to help the fight?

A little after 5am Friday morning last week when I arose somewhat dazed from bed and made final preparations for a trip to Prague. My sister is getting married in July and my future brother-in-law was kind enough to invite me along to his stag night.

We arrived at the airport for our 7am flight to London Gatwick and I was introduced to two of the guys, Glen H and Michael Knight… Within minutes local airline Aurigny had announced an hour delay to our flight because of fog. Fog is a regular problem here and when it occurs planes are not allowed to land, despite the landing guidance systems in place, for reasons best known to the airport. There are few flights out from Guernsey and even fewer destinations means being fogged equals missing your connecting flight and there goes your holiday. Fog coming back means sitting or sleeping at Gatwick and explaining your absence to friends, family, or boss.

We checked in as two small groups to avoid the disproportionate delay with checking in larger groups and headed off to the airport shops for breakfast and retail therapy.

Somebody once told me that there is no rationalization for checking in hours ahead and it is merely a ploy for you to spend money while you wait. Those in government cite security concerns but the fact is you can drive through most of the borders of Europe with only a cursory glance and minimal security checks.

Every year I head out skiing with some snowboarding pals for some high-adrenaline thrills coupled with binge drinking. It’s not always a pleasant combination and this year I took my fifteen year old brother with me so my drinking took a back seat.

Not every day was eventful so here’s the first part, the London experience!

Just got back from a week skiing and boarding in Flaine. On our last visit we were wading knee-deep in powder just to get on the lifts however this time the god of snow had wandered off leaving Helios in charge. We soon unimaginatively tagged the runs that were open ‘Ice world’, ‘Rock world’ and ‘Walk world’ – no guesses as to why.

We finally found fresh powder off-piste near a big drop and had a lot of fun… Until one of my skis disconnected and smashed into my shin. Damn the French guy at the rental shop, I told him I wanted them tighttight – there again I also asked him to put stickers on the underneath of Em’s board saying “If you can read this please phone my mum”. He did neither.

Christmas came and went and now once again the end of year looms menacingly just a day away.

My Amazon wish-list saved me from the tedious “What do you want?” “I don’t know” exchanges that seem to plague this time of year. I had a similar experience with a rather gorgeous Swiss woman before eventually surprising her with a lovely piece of original artwork depicting a sailing yacht. She also became the first person I’ve subjected to my Christmas family dinner which actually turned out rather well.

As some of my friends know I’m currently studying with the Open University for my computing degree.

This year my exam results, along with a number of fellow students were delayed… Until 3 days before Christmas where they promptly announced with lots of students wondering exactly what happened. It appears many of us got distinction grade (85%+) coursework… and grade 3 quality exam results (60%+). Some people with very good coursework grades have failed entirely.

So the ball went very well indeed. We are lots of food, met lots of people and drank my own body-weight in alcohol. At some point my friend Wazzy acquired the world’s fattest cigar while I attempted to redo my bow-tie without a mirror or fine motor skills.

Tonight was the party for the place I’m currently contracting and although the food was fine I ended up feeling very hot and dizzy in some pubs afterwards and had to head home rather abruptly to the annoyance of friends. I should really be in bed but I still feel icky.

Hello and welcome to yet another person jumping onto the already overloaded blog-wagon.

My name is Damien Guard, I’m a freelance software developer living in Guernsey in the Channel Islands.

Tonight I’ve been invited to a large ball for a large bank as part of the whole celebrating Christmas roller-coaster.

So, for the first time in my life, I have equipped myself with a dashing dinner jacket, new dress-shirt and a real bow-tie! Combine that with existing black trousers, shoes and a pair of cuff-links I got last Christmas from a client and presto the ensemble pops into existence.