Nexus 4: Ordering on Launch Day – Never Again

Dabbling in Android as I do, when I recently saw that Google were releasing the new Nexus phone (the Nexus 4) I thought to myself, “hell, why not – it’s nearly Christmas after all and I’ve been good all year”.

So this morning I logged into the Play Store and along with 1000s of other waited, periodically tapping F5 waiting to see the ‘Notify Me’ button change to ‘Add to Cart’. When it did (at about 8:05 am) all hell broke loose. I added the 16GB version of the phone to my cart and then tried to add the ‘bumper case’ – which resulted in a nice error message and notification that my cart was now empty.

Ok, forget the case for now, just get the phone sorted (I can order the case in a day or so when the smoke has settled). I must have tried a dozen times to get to the payment screen. Sometimes the ‘Add to Cart’ button would revert to ‘Notify Me’ and then back again sometimes I got an error when I added the phone to the cart, other times it would be when I clicked on the Go To Checkout button.

Dealing with Recruiters – a Contractors Survival Guide

I’ve been contracting for about a year now and this has meant that I’ve had numerous dealings with recruiters and recruitment agencies. While I’ve been quite successful in obtaining contracts I’m afraid that my opinion of many recruiters (not necessarily the agencies themselves) is that they do not provide any value to the process, indeed the detract from it.

Solving Android SDK ‘No Such File or Directory’ error in Eclipse

I’ve hit this problem a few times now but this time I should probably write it down for my own sanity. Over the weekend I upgraded to Mint 13 (which is brilliant by the way) and because my laptop is running 6GB of RAM I opted for the 64-bit version of the distro to make full use of it.

Having Eclipse and the Android SDK ‘installed’ on my separate /home partition I didn’t need to bother reinstalling everything (but my blog post on how to do it still holds) so assumed I was good to go – but I was wrong.

SCRUM Down

With my PRINCE2 Practitioner status about to expire I wanted to replace it with something a bit more relevant in the current market. While PRINCE2 is still a recognised qualification I just have not found any need for it since leaving Local Government. Very few jobs that I was interested in required it and when I mentioned it in interviews etc I found that it was not really working greatly in my favor. With the cost of a two day recertification course around £399+VAT and following my attendance at a #digpen event back in March where Derek Davidson of WebGate International bestowed the virtues of SCRUM and Agile I decided to look into it a little deeper.

Contracting – A Year (Almost) After Taking the Leap

So it was about this time last year that i decided to move out of Permanent employment and into the cattle market that is Contracting. Looking back I have to say that I’m happy with my decision and have no regrets on that front. That said, the last year has not been plain sailing and in this post (during which I will try not to rant too much) I’ll try to paint a fair picture of the good and the bad from the last year. Contrary to what many people may think, my decision to enter the Contracting market had nothing to do with charging huge day rates. Yes money is important but, as people who know me will confirm, I always say

“If you don’t like what you are doing then do something else”