Eight days ago I felt very ill. I had a headache, a fever and no desire for food. I knew what was coming… three weeks before that my son had contracted chicken pox while at nursery, for him it was pretty mild as it is in most children, sadly for adults it’s severe.

The progress of chicken pox is small spot, large spot, fluid filled blisters, scabbed, or in medical terms:

On the Sunday I had a few small spots, the symptoms weren’t too bad in the morning but by the afternoon my joints all started to hurt and the fever took over. It was at this point I hit the Ibuprofen. People seem to think that the spots are itchy, the real problem is that they are painful. It’s like having your face tortured, I just wanted to remove my skin.

The worst problem was some spots that were infected in my scalp and on back of my neck. Following a phone call to my doctor I was giving anti-biotics, this cleared the pain and the infected spots very quickly. Before this having a shower was agony.

By the second day of the spots erupting I hadn’t eaten anything much for three days. This is because you lose your appetite and the spots develop inside your throat meaning it’s painful to eat. I ended up fainting and scaring the crap out of my wife who had to revive me.

By day 3 I had hundreds of spots all over my head and body. You can see my looking unhappy above. The days after they spread to my lower body and hands. The more annoying spots were on my eye lids (leaking into my eyes), ear canal, inside throat, armpit, soles of feet and on my fingertips.

This is me today (below), 7 days after the first spots appeared. It’s a lot better as at this point as the pain has subsided from the spots, now it’s a constant battle to stop from scratching all the scabbed spots leaving a scar:

At this point my 4 hourly cocktail of drugs includes anti-histamines, cocodamol and an anti-biotic. That’s what keeps me smiling (as not seen above).

In Australia, the US and Canada every child is immunised against chicken pox. If you have a kid, do everything you can to make sure they get the mild version when they are a child; you really don’t want this as an adult.

For the first time the runaway success that has been the Startup Weekend movement is coming to Glasgow on 25-27th May.

From the official site:

I would encourage any developer, web designer, student, ideas person or artist to go along and get a feel for what it takes to get a simple pitch built up into a minimum viable product with a team over a high intensity weekend. I’ll be attending as a coach at the event. I’ve enjoyed plenty of these events before as an attendee and organiser so I’m looking forward to trying out the coaching role.

See more details for the Glasgow event here, which is being organised by Michael Hayes of Rookie Oven fame

Around this time of year it’s great to have a festive tipple such as Bucks Fizz, Mulled Wine or Mulled Cider. I’ve started making my own Mulled Cider recently as it’s made from fairly common spices.

Ingredients

• 4 cans of cider (Scrumpy recommended)
• Spices: 6 cloves, 3 star anise, ¼ nutmeg (finely grated), 1 cinnamon stick, 1 vanilla pod (halved, or ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract)
• Juices: 1 orange, 2 clementines, 1 pomegranate (with seeds)
• To taste: 4 or 5 tablespoons of caster sugar

Method

Add the cider to a large pan. Heat it on low heat for 3 minutes.

Add the spices and the juice of each fruit.

Then crank up the heat to boiling. Once boiling turn the heat down and simmer for 6 minutes.

Grab a spoon and take a taste of your wonderful concoction. It probably needs sugar. Add two tablespoons of sugar at a time until you get a good balance of sweet and spicy.

Once the sugar is mixed you can enjoy your creation immediately. Grab a ladle and put it into a mug or glass.

Result! Have a very merry Christmas!

This recipe is based on a Jamie Oliver recipe.

Last Saturday I attended the Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2011 conference in Glasgow. I posted before about the sessions I’d planned to attend, which I ended up ignoring.

The event itself was exceptionally well run, timing was like clockwork and you didn’t see anyone running around trying to find the right video adapter for their laptop. It’s incredible that such a well run event can also be free. The only minor problem was the lack of air conditioning, which meant enduring a tropical climate for popular sessions.

Personally I haven’t had to code for .NET for anything serious since 2007, so I’m not overly keen on attending sessions on ASP.NET or about the latest library being reproduced for c# programmers. This has proved tricky at previous DDD conferences I’ve attended where you have no choice but to attend a .NET based session. Thankfully this conference proved to accommodate with sessions where the programming language wasn’t important.

I started the day off at an open discussion event hosted by Craig Nicol on “Professional Development”. There were only a few of us at the session but it was a wonderful way to wake up at 9am while discussing what we all considered traits of a professional developer. Craig guided the session by using a mind map already containing the BCS definition of professional development. Colouful anecdotes were retold by the session attendees and it was good to hear about the working environments of others.

Feeling inspired, I then headed along to Gary Short’s presentation on “Asymptotics and Algorithms”. Gary himself was part of an ongoing Twitter drive-by that ended up with a satirical twitter profile being created in his honour. Not that I want to feed inflated egos’ but this session was brilliantly done. Gary clearly knew his stuff and had that knack of taking something complicated and making it simple to understand.

After lunch I attend the BDD with F# session. I was under the impression that F# was similar to Clojure, but I couldn’t of been more wrong; there wasn’t a single piece of parenthesis in the entire talk!

The final session for me was Chris McDermott’s introduction to Kanban development. In the session Chris went over the important parts of Kanban and then discussed how he could have used the methodologies practices in his past. The idea of evolutionary change over time, rather than using a change everything approach is very compelling. I’ll keep this talk in mind next time I have to introduce an agile change in an organisation.

I met up with Chris, Rob Lally and a few others at Thai Lemon Grass for a post conference meal. The meal like the conference was excellent. I can’t thank the Scottish Developer community enough for making this day happen.

This saturday the Scottish Developers are treating us to their annual free conference in Glasgow: Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2011 (#dddscot for short).

There’s 6 tracks on this year which were voted on in a free vote, and there’s still a strong .NET theme. Here’s the sessions I’m planning on attending.

09:30 – 10:30 :: Colin Gemmell
From .NET to Rails, A Developer’s Story

10:40 – 11:40 :: Gary Short
Asymptotics and Algorithms – What You’ve Forgotten Since University

12:00 – 13:00 :: Phillip Trelford
Behavioural Driven Development (BDD) with F#

14:30 – 15:30 :: Nathan Gloyn
Is your code S.O.L.I.D ?

15:40 – 16:40 :: Chris McDermott
Introduction to Kanban

I should of prepared a grok talk myself. But I’ve just started a new business, which will be the subject of one of my next blog posts!