.. oh and yesterday finished off the V1s and managed my first V2* at the Link bouldering wall 
*Red route. Tried it before but couldn’t get off the floor .. a route setter had a go at it and used a feature to start .. when I used the feature i managed the route too. Not sure if it’s allowed but what the hell.
Over the last month I’ve been training like crazy. But what does this mean though? It means that I’ve concentrated on putting in as much climbing milage as possible (indoors unfortunately). Not worried about the grades. Not worried about my leading/onsighting abilities. Just do as much climbing as possible. To start with it was extended Tuesday and Thursday evening sessions. But then I started to to include bouldering/traversing sessions during lunchbreaks.
The result?
.. I’m climbing worse that I have done for ages.
.. and that’s a bit annoying actually.
To make matters worse my fingers have started to feel very, very fragile. Not so much on the climbing (althought they do feel a bit trashed) but on just normal day to day stuff. On the right hand the 1st joint on the middle finger is the worst offender. It’s very easy to just knock it when playing with the kids == pain.
What to take from this?
It’s life Jim. I happen to have put on approx 1/2 stone in weight .. so of course that’s going to be an impact on my climbing. So it’s difficult to know the effect of the extra climbing regime until I can get my weight back down and compare like with like.
It’s all part of the cycle of training .. you try to improve one aspect but another aspect changes at the same time so it’ll always prove difficult to understand a dynamic system.
On a positive note I reckon my technique has come on a lot (esp. being more deliberate about my foot placements) and the realisation that I can choose to just keep on climbing even when the lactose levels in my forearms has reached burning point. All of that will prove useful.
So - what to do next?
Well I reckon I should concentrate on increasing my power/strength and reducing my weight over the next 6 weeks .. reckon it’ll mean I can make a real improvement on my climbing.
I’m also already looking forward to the outdoor climbing season - reckon I should concentrate on doing as many VS routes as I can get on to I need to do as many as I can and I should stop itching after HVS routes .. they’ll come and it’s not like they’re going anywhere. I want to just get more milage under my belt.
New Years Resolutions
1. Over the last 2-3 months I’ve put on about 8 lbs (now weight 13st 4lbs) so planning on losing that in the next month or three and getting on down to 12st 10lbs.
2. My new contract is working in a place where the coffee is out of a dispensing machine 
this has led to two mini resolutions:
- I’ve decided to cut the dried milk out of the coffee and just use the UHT - I reckon this is probably a wise move as I’m not sure how calorific the dried milk is.
- Start using the decaff version of the coffee (or at least alternate) as I seem to be drinking loads of cups at the moment.
3. I’ve come back, once again, to the realisation that to be able to climb harder routes I’ve got to be able to climb harder, individual moves. To climb harder moves I need more strength (or a better power to weight ratio). Therefore switching at least one session a week to “proper” bouldering and concentrating on POWER!
4. Come the new climbing season, get out there and climb as many VS routes as I can
5. Continue my exploration of the Wye Valley climbing opportunties.
6. I want to lose an additional few pounds of weight to help with point 3 but see point 1 first.
.. it becomes smarter than you.
I usually explicitly discover this when a test fails that I expect to pass. I look into why it’s failed, thinking that there’s a bug in the code somewhere, only to discover that actually the code is bang on the money, the test is telling me the truth and actually, it’s me that’s in the wrong.
It’s a pretty cool feeling becuase it means that:
1. The system your building has now become so complex that you can’t model all of it in your head at one time. This then tends to re-affirm why you should have the tests in the first place.
2. It’s also telling you that your system has gone beyond a “simple” system where ad hoc coding and hacking is all that’s required. Your system has now moved into the area of being complex enough that you need to worry about it’s design and architecture.
For me, this kind of event occurs when the individual components of the system are interacting in ways that you didn’t explicitly code ie it’s the interactions that are the things that get complicated rather than the building blocks.
It’s probably not going to live up to the hype but looking forward to seeing The Watchman in the new year.
The music, the effects and the story all sound great ..
Boring I know but this pension, after some searching and head scratching, seems to be the one to go for:
Hargreaves Lansdown SIPP (Self Invested Personal Pension)
Really low charges and the ability to pay into an index tracking fund (HSBC’s FTSE All Share Tracker) at below normal fees sounds the business to me.
Just got to find the money to pay into it now.
UPDATE
HSBC FTSE All Acc - Total Expense Ratio 0.27%
L&G International Acc - Total Expense Ratio 0.92%
I’ve taken out a Reseller package from UK2.NET and can now offer website hosting
I’m in the process of moving a whole bunch of sites across to the new system:
Tents
www.tents-direct.co.uk
www.tents-direct.com
www.tentsdirect.com
www.tentsdirect.co.uk
www.tentsdirect.com
http://www.mailordertents.co.uk/
www.familydometents.com
www.familydometents.co.uk
Spanish Properties
www.utopian-properties.com
www.utopian-properties.co.uk
www.utopianproperties.com
www.utopianproperties.co.uk
www.spanishbarsforsale.com
www.spanishpropertyrepossessions.com
www.spanishpropertyrepossessions.co.uk
www.propertyrepossession.eu
Tiered Solutions
www.tieredsolutions-hosting.com
www.tieredsolutions.com
www.tieredsolutions.co.uk
If anyone needs their websites hosting drop me an email at hosting@tieredsolutions.com.
I’ll be putting together a website to detail what the hosting offers, support details, costs etc. and publish a link to it later next week.
I’ve been using Rhino Mocks v3.5 for the last month and it kicks butt! The new AAA notation, the use of mocks without creating the repository and the lamda notation mean that mocking out tests is a helluva a lot faster and much easier to read than previous versions.
I can now say that I wouldn’t want to go back to previous versions of the .NET framework just becuase of this one tool you get with v3.
Rhino Mocks is a mocking and stubbing framework for testing .NET code. I’ve known about it and used it on and off for a couple of years but never gotten into it too deeply for the following reasons:
- The code that gets produced is confusing to a non test/non mocking person. It appeared to be too much effort to learn it’s syntax for what it was offering. I say this from the perspective of other developers in any given team that I might be working with and NOT from my perspective.
Why is the other developers perspective important?
Becuase if I started introducing this kind of code into a project then I’d have to justify it to other team members and they too would need to get up to speed with it. This extra work is not to be taken too lightly.
- It’s only relatively recently that I’ve taken the TDD approach to development and I’ve therefore had no real imperative to expend time/effort in looking into this area more deeply. BTW this is one of the best reasons for choosing to use TDD; it automatically drives you to want to learn about producing better code to help enable better TDD. It actually quantifies what “better” code means, rather than just being a woolly term that no two developers could ever agree on.
So, with this in mind, I’ve actually started to use Rhino Mocks in anger over the last nine months to improve my development efforts.
This includes:
- Using the Stubs to quickly create stubbed versions of underlying sub-systems of functionality. There are many reasons why you might want to do this.
- Using Mocks to help me quickly refactor my code around interfaces rather than concrete implementations.
Conclusion very quick way to stub out some underlying object/system/service. In the past I’d tend to create an actual stubbed object/system/service but with this technique you don’t actually have to do that. You either place the Rhino Mocks into your calling code directly (if it’s only used in one place this is the quickest but rather dirty) or develop an interface to the system your going to stub, stub it and then use Dependency Injection (DI) to allow your calling code to use it.
- Actually doing proper behavior testing rather than my more usual state testing.
InternalsVisibleToAttribute
Just spent the last 30 minutes trying to remember the name of this bloody attribute .. finally found it after much googling and thought it best to record it here so I can find it in the future a little quicker.
InternalsVisibleTo: Testing internal methods in .Net 2.0 - Useful overview.
M$ reference on this system.runtime.compilerservices.internalsvisibletoattribute class
The argument against .. which I currently don’t buy. The alternatives are worse.
M$ reference on the access modifier Internal.
UPDATE
There is an issue with using this attribute and strongly named assemblies. You’ll get an “Strong-name signed assemblies must specify a public key in their InternalsVisibleTo declarations” error.
Read Read Black Wasps article on C# Friend Assemblies and how to get around this error.
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