Here are the events for which I’ve bought tickets so far…

• 6th March: Alex’s Adventures in Numberland
• 8th March: The Future of Capitalism
• 9th March: Who Are We – and Should it Matter in the 21st Century?
• 10th March: Civilization: The West and the Rest

I’d recommend anyone who will be in Scotland to check out their listings as there’s something for everyone.

To have a rewarding Whisky tasting you should line up 3 or more different drams that allow you to experience the differences between them.

Equipment

It’s important to have a correctly shaped glass to taste the Whisky, don’t go in for the crystal tumble numbers you see in films, go for something Tulip shaped like a Champagne glass. These allow you to take in the aromas of Whisky a lot better.

Good!

Bad!

Serve a single shot (dram) of each Whisky in a room temperature glass.

The Process

My process for tasting Whisky is:

• Selecting Whisky
• Eyeing the Whisky
• Smelling the Whisky
• Tasting the Whisky

Selecting Whisky

To get the most out of a Whisky tasting you should try to have a number of differing styles available to try. You can do this by region or by selecting based off tasting notes.

Try to have one Whisky from Sherry casks, a smoky Islay and two lighter Whiskies. Maybe even a sweet one. You can consult my guide to help you here.

Eyeing the Whisky

Start off by having a look at the colour of the drams you have. You will be able to see a difference in colour which reflects the sort of oak barrel the Whisky was aged in.

Whisky is matured in previously used barrels from American or Spain. The American barrels tend to be from Bourbon so they add a light colour to the Whisky. The Spanish barrels have had Sherry in them which creates a darker, reddish colour. If the Whisky is reddish in colour you can expect a medium-sweet fruity Whisky.

Smelling the Whisky

Cover your hand over the glass and swirl the Whisky around a bit. Open up part of your hand and take a sniff of the Whisky. Don’t try to smell it like Wine as the alcohol will burn your nose. Move the glass towards and away from your nose to get used to the smell of the first Whisky.

Don’t taste the Whisky yet! Pick up a second Whisky and do the same. Notice the differences between the two, then go back to the first glass. There are many different aromas present in Whisky but they tend to fall within a few major styles.

Try to notice if the Whisky seems Sherried, floral or peated. You might be able to detect traces of honey, spice, nuts or fruity notes. The more you do this, the better you will be at detecting the subtleties between drams.

Tasting the Whisky

Finally, you are ready to taste the Whisky. Take a small drink and hold it in your mouth for as many seconds as the Whisky has spent years in the barrel. Move the Whisky around your mouth and draw in a little air to enhance the flavour.

Once the time has elapsed; swallow and take in some air. This will finish you off with a warm and slightly burning sensation.

In between trying Whiskies be sure to cleanse your palate with some water or an oat biscuit. Enjoy!

At this point the baby is the the same size as an Apple pip or a Marble.

Fast forward 6 weeks and we are talking Baseballs and Avocados:

The baby (we don’t want to know the sex) is due on the 26th June. Right during the knockout stages of the World Cup. Alison says she’s going to wait for an England game to give birth!

Baby Instructions

To help me not make some common mistakes I was helpfully given this picture guide.

Twitter is an opt-in version of IRC. Think about that for a second. Now imagine the IRC chat room has people you respect (for me Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry and Martin Fowler), and you can hear their thoughts. If there’s anything we have learnt about the Internet over the last 2 years it’s that stalking is at an all time high. It’s also becoming mainstream.

I was very sceptical about Twitter. Seeing it as a way for people I sort of know spamming me with fascinating anecdotes about getting pished with their mates the other night. But it’s quite simple, just keep it professional and only listen to people you know and/or respect. If your life is all about High School Musical then you can listen to the ramblings of the stars from the show. If you are deeply into software development, then all of your heroes are already on board.

I think to get the most out of Twitter you need to either have the iPhone/Android/Blackberry application, or not have it unblocked at your work. But it really is a genuinely interesting new source of information I check multiple times a day along with my SMS, email and rss feeds. I feel more connected and as the circulation figures for gossip magazines will tell you, people love being a little too intimate.

Feel free to follow me!

This week has been a great week for hearing about new tech. On Tuesday I did a presentation at work about Hudson and Sonar. Hudson is a CI server and Sonar is a great way to track metrics on your codebase.

On Wednesday I went along to the Java User Group Scotland and checked out a great talk done by Selcuk Bozdag on Flex development. Flex allows you to make pretty cool Flash based applications which can talk to remote services. It isn’t tied to Java like I originally thought. There’s an awful lot of out of the box charting and video tools which seem useful.

On Saturday I went along to the Microsoft sponsored Developer Day event. They had 4 different tracts offering mainly .NET and MS SQL Server talks. I enjoyed listening to the Virtulisation and Ruby on .NET talks especially. I then managed to find some Perl/Flex developers I could talk loudly about the evil that is IE6 to restore the balance.

While at the conference I was approached by some guys from the disposable memory project who were at my talk the previous week at the Glasgow Techmeetup. They handed me a modded film based camera with instructions to hand it to someone else after a single usage and after all the exposures were used the last person would hand it back to someone else. Hopefully I’ll get to see what this led to!

7pm in Room M329, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow.

After my talk is over I’ll put it up online. But for now I’ve put up a page about the project for those interested in what I’ve been doing with 1.5 years of Thursday.

On the way over to Antwerp from Glasgow I was amused by an old lady who when told she couldn’t have pie and beans on the plane promptly asked for a stick of rock and a cheese sandwich instead. I’m with her on the unhealthy plane meals revolution! I later arrived at Antwerp train station which is probably the most impressive train station I’ve ever seen. While still in UK mode I then hailed a taxi and tried to get into the passengers side for UK cars (which is the drivers seat in Europe). After convincing the driver that I didn’t want to steal his vehicle I then told him where I needed to go. He struck me with a confused look, asked if I was sure, then pointed to my hotel straight across the road. Kudos to him for not driving me around town then dropping me off at the same spot.

I chose the flights and the hotel myself (on JPMs dime) so I only have myself to blame for the hotel I chose. After quickly figuring out that the locals in Antwerp do not speak French or English and that I’ve never wanted to learn Dutch in my life, I realised this was going to get complicated. I arrived to my room after walking over a patch of dried blood. Luckily enough the tv had UK channels so I was able to watch the news and football in my room. It was around this time that the incessant knocking began. I had somehow booked a hotel which was also a Leprechaun retirement home. Every pipe in the building seemed to have a steady knocking sound like someone was hitting it with a hammer.

When I go abroad I use the same suitcase which was a corkscrew, a photocopy of my passport and some coins. I have now figured out that there is another thing I’m missing….a power converter. I wasted a lot of time going round stores in Antwerp unsuccessfully looking for a UK->Euro converter. My hotel unsurprisingly didn’t have one so I resorted to asking randoms if I can charge my iPhone off their USB ports (not cool).

The conference itself was a 3 day affair for me. It was hosted at a purpose built cinema/exhibition hall at the North of Antwerp which was easily accessible from the brilliant and cheap Tram system. All the big players in the Java space were there (including MS touting their Silverlight tech) and offering assorted goodies to get you to visit their stalls. The badge you got had an optional RFID tag which you could use at vendor booths to give your details over. It was also used to show you how full each room was and with what nationality. There were over 3000 attendees but only 100 were from the UK. Holland and Belgium by far had the largest mindshare, though everyone was speaking English (go old empire!)

Each day there were 6 timeslots for talks and you had a choice of different talks to attend. At the end of each day there would be free beer and games like fussball/wii. I really enjoyed going to Devoxx but I can’t say that I’d like to go to a conference alone again. I’d talk to someone who was sitting next to me at the start but you were always going to a different talk after and you’d never see them again! This was more difficult in the evenings as I had to go to restaurants alone (something I’ve never done before). Since I didn’t have any command of Dutch, I frequented Italian restaurants as I could still remember my tourist Italian from our Honeymoon to Florence.

One close call I had was when I got into the rhythm of asking the person next to me if they had been to a Java conference before and what talks they were excited about. I was about to do this during Brian Goetz’s concurrency talk but the talk started just as I was about to ask the same line of questions to the middle aged bloke sitting next to me. During the Q&A part of Brian’s talk the bloke next to me and put up his hand. Brian Goetz then said “Ah, I see Joshua Bloch has a question”. That’s right, I was about to ask the Chief Java Architect at Google if he had been to a conference before. Apart from writing large parts of the Java language, the guy was doing the keynote speech the next day!

A nice touch at the conference was the Whiteboards spread around the entrance. They had questions asking for your opinion on upcoming Java features and what people are working with today. I couldn’t resist helping start a TopGear-esque Cool Wall. The results are available online now from the devoxx site.

If you work in an Industry where you need to get training every now and again which usually costs around a grand. Ask your boss if instead of going on the exorbitantly priced training course, you would like to use around 3/4 of the same cash to go to a foreign country and have a great time (while learning!). It worked for me anyway.

I’ve always previously rented accommodation and it made sense for us to buy our first flat as we were moving out. This was just before house prices dropped by over 10%! I’m slowly getting used to living in the East End and within a month of my moving here a Dominos has opened to try and recoup some of their lost profits since I moved.

The huge news that I have is that in August this year Alison and I got married in the Trades Hall in Glasgow. We had an awesome day that wethoroughly enjoyed. We went to Florence for our honeymoon and drank many espressos.

Now I’ve updated my blog and gave it a shiny new skin I’m planning to update it more often again (this is the 10 millionth time this has been said on a blog).

It’s good to be back!

I needed this to be great, so I invited my brother to come up and stay for a week as it’s sod all use having a great time on your own, Alison was at work this week. Now we just needed events.

Monday

Ok fine, Monday was not that great but we did get to go see Hot Fuzz at the cinema. Hot Fuzz is of course the new movie by Simon Pegg, Nick Frost et al. You can’t help but review it without mentioning the previous movie created by the cast, the sublime Sean of the Dead. Hot Fuzz is an action/comedy, which sets it apart from Sean of the Dead by genre so it’s quite suprising to see a lot of stunts performed. The film has a good plot and good laughs on the way. Pretty much does what it says on the tin and I hope the crew keep bringing out a movie of the same calibre every 2 years.

Tuesday

My Brother had never seen the Scottish Parliament building before so on Tuesday we went through to Edinburgh. During the afternoon we had a guided tour (by Alison) around the parliament building and the parliamentary offices. After that we went to a cocktail bar so I could figure out the recipe for the best apple/vodka cocktail I’ve ever had (thanks Jordan/Steve for showing me that place). This led up to the main event of the day which was seeing Bloc Party and the Corn Exchange.

Bloc Party have just released their new album A Weekend In the City. It’s a slight change of style from the previous album, a bit more of an epic sound like U2, Radiohead etc. It’s got some good songs on it but the lead singer does have a tendency to lyrically kneecap them in some way.

The gig itself was pretty good, the band looked quite scared as at the previous 2 gigs they had performed in Scotland the crowd started a mass brawl (Glasgow) and threw a coin at the lead singer (Aberdeen). They started their second song by jokingly asking “Does everyone in Scotland hate us?”. Eventually they got into their stride and had the crowd going after slagging Aberdeen crowds, that always goes down well. The Corn Exchange is an alright venue which reminds me of Glasgow’s awesome sweat inducing venue to end all venues the Barrowlands Ballroom. One thing that annoyed me about the Corn Exchange was that there was no cash machine inside and they didn’t take cards so I only had £10 during the whole gig.

After the gig we went to some more pubs around Edinburgh city centre including one which was a series of interconnected small rooms, it was very strange like being in someones living room and the girl doing the table service was quite obviously high on something.

Wednesday

Some days go down in your personal history as a great achievement that you will never forget. This was one of those days. Some of you will know that Glasgow has an underground train system that goes all round the centre of the city. I happen to live above one of the stops. Some more of you may know that there is a drinking challenge to go to every pub on the underground and have a drink at each stop. This my friends in known as a Subcrawl, and on this day we managed to complete the 15 station challenge in 7 hours 15 minutes. Right in time to watch Liverpool give Barcelona a stuffing on their home turf.

We started out the day by getting 12″ subs from Subway (the takeaway), this would be the only food we would have till the end. So at 1pm we embarked on our wonderful journey. We did the south side first as you don’t really want to be around there when the locals were around. Some highlights on the south side leg of the journey were going into some Rangers pubs to see the Rangers wallpaper and pictures of all the former Rangers captains. One pub even had ties with a Vietnamese branch of the Rangers fan club.

We decided that vodkas were the best option to get round quickly on the south side. Once we hit the north side of the underground (the nice part) we quickly switched to pints. We got quite lucky as we didn’t really hit the drunk state till about 13 pubs round, so despite nearly getting thrown off the subway at Hillhead by a member of staff, we did manage to make it all the way.

Special mention has to go the the Honours Three pub off Shields Road, it was really hard to pull ourselves away from it’s medieval weaponry, £1 pints of Stella and great Glaswegian banter.

Thursday

For some reason I always think exercise is a great idea while hungover. Somehow it exonerates you from what you did the previous day. This meant that we went and played 5 a sides at Kelvinhall. The game was pretty good but I wouldn’t recommend it after a huge drinking session the previous day. We used the rest of this day to catch up with our regular TV programmes (24, lost) and watched shed loads of Curb your Enthusiasm.

Friday

By Friday we were pretty shattered mentally and physically from all the events we’d been attending. So on Friday I taught my brother bass (basically how to use a shoulder strap and hit strings, bass ain’t that complex). We then merrily worked our way through Pixies, Weezer and Nirvana’s back catalogue of easy sing along songs. A bottle of Jack Daniels accompanied us later in the night.

Alison arrived home with a bunch of friends later on and we had a guess the song I’m playing game and managed to get rid of some of the nastier vodka that we have accumulated over the years.

By Saturday my brother was off home and I entered a period of mourning for what my body had been subjected to from a week of alcohol, sport and music. But it surely was a week to remember, and I definitely recommend every one else tries to have 5 days like this sometime this year. You won’t forget it.