Ian Nelson

During 2007, I unexpectedly achieved a long-held ambition by increasing the number of books I regularly read (as opposed to merely buying, then leaving them to languish on the bookcase!).

With the return of the dark wintry nights to this sceptered isle, I’ve been taking the opportunity to flesh out my Family Tree a little more.

So, I was using the First operator to return the first item element in a sequence matching a predicate.

Ten years of professional software development have given me a healthy awareness of edge cases – I’m always trying to code defensively, validate input, catch exceptions, use assertions, and of course pick holes in sloppy specifications (“ah, but what if…”…

It gives me unparalleled joy to announce the birth of Mr Benjamin George Nelson.

I’ve finally gotten round to processing and uploading photos from Paulo’s Last Munro weekend.

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a few days in London attending the Software Architect 2007 conference at the Barbican centre.

As discussed recently, I’ve been trying to knock together a class struct to represent a UK postcode, provide a means of parsing a string as potentially being a valid postcode (or optionally just an outer code), and split that postcode into “outer” and “in…

Wikipedia cracks me up sometimes.

Many moons (and about four jobs) ago, a wise DBA by the name of David Hanson once recommended to me a book called Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed.

I’m off to the MSDN Technical roadshow in Harrogate tomorrow, and am actually really looking forward to it this time.

When I mentioned Edward R.

Fifty-three years since Darrell Huff published the seminal How to Lie with Statistics, and still we have newspapers as august as The Times pulling the oldest trick in the book: At first glance it all looks very impressive, but closer inspection of the com…

I am now a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer in .NET 1.x technologies.

I keep intending, and forgetting to post a couple of videos from our US holiday last April.

On this Remembrance Sunday, permit me to share with you a photo that my cousin Helen took this week of our Granduncle’s grave in France.

Late last night I reached a small but significant milestone in my family tree research: I now know the names of my sixteen great-great-grandparents!

“INTPs are always so mentally active that they continually delve into new interests… The interests of an INTP would be enough to occupy him for several lifetimes if that were possible.” — A description of the INTP personality type, Paul James.

Having accepted that Returning DataSets from WebServices is the Spawn of Satan and Represents All That Is Truly Evil in the World (or at least, not exactly best practice), I’ve been trying to make a conscious effort to instead use lightweight custom objec…

As I mentioned last summer, I do enjoy whiling away a few hours attempting to solve the maths / progamming challenges set on Project Euler.

I’ve recently completed a stint of jury service, which lasted a little over two weeks at York Crown Court.

On our first morning in California, we headed out to breakfast, which was preceded by a short session of Breakfast Prep’, courtesy of Jocelyn.

Monday 10th April 2006 Travelling West during the daytime is a blast, especially on a sunny day.Time it right and you can experience daylight for 24 hours, which afforded me time to catch up on some reading.For Christmas Joce had given a book entitled Fre…

Monday 10th April 2006 The sun was still shining as we touched down at SFO, about 22 hours after we’d woken up.If every day could last that long, I swear I’d get more work done – or maybe I’d just spend more time playing Civilization… We picked up the car…

Last month Jocelyn and I took a trip to the States to visit friends and family, attend Teri & Jimmy’s wedding, and take a vacation to Nevada and Arizona.

Back in November 2004, I had the idea of making a “Generic Sorter for Strongly-Typed Collections”, by harnessing the mighty power of reflection.

The single most popular entry on this blog is, surprisingly enough, this quick post from Summer 2004 where I did a quick experiment to “prove” that in .NET the quickest way of proving that a string is empty is to compare its length to zero.

Hertog Jan Doppio Double is the only one of my twenty-four Advent beers to come in a stone cork-stoppered bottle that weighs more than the drink contained within!

The penultimate beer on my 2005 advent calendar was Ruby Red from the St.

Fraoch is a 5% ABV Scottish beer that brings back many happy memories of late nights spent in the bar at the Clachaig Inn.

“Jingle Knockers” isn’t exactly a phrase that inspires confidence, but this 5.5% ABV from Skinner’s Brewery in Cornwall is really good, definitely on a par with the stuff I’ve tried from Hambleton Ales and the Harviestoun Brewery.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are many great things that have originated from America – not least of all my good lady wife – but I’ve always thought that “American Beer” is something of an anachronism!

Smuggler’s Ale is another bottled beer which found its way into my calendar via an Asda beer competition.

There’s something a wee bit disappointing about picking up a bottle labelled “MOROCCO ALE” and finding that it is, in fact, from nowhere more distant than Harrogate – the Daleside Brewery to be precise.

Friday night saw me out celebrating in Halifax at our departmental Christmas meal (FWIW, I drank a few pints of Santa’s Little Helper from the Caledonian brewery).

Gadzooks!

Halfway through my great beer advent calendar 2005, and tonight I’ve enjoyed the popular Leffe Blonde, a potent and delicious 6.6% ABV beer from Belgium.

I just realised that I forgot to blog about yesterday’s advent beer.

What’s on your desktop background?

It’s over a month now since Visual Studio 2005 officially RTM’d, and during that time I’ve been fortunate enough to have been using it for the majority of my time on most working days.

Ah, I do enjoy beers by the Wychwood Brewery, who have a particularly good website (i.e. better than most of the brewery sites I’ve come across so far).

Rosey Nosey by Bateman’s Brewery has a deceptively cutesy name, but it turns out to be a really decent-quality ale with plenty of flavour and a pleasing warmth.

Another day, another beer.It’s a hard life.Mars Magic is a rather unexciting 4.6% ABV “Premium Ale” (it says here) from the Wold Top Brewery.Noticeably lacking in anything resembling a head, it did however seem to improve as I progressed through the half-…

Wednesday night’s tipple was the rather strange 5% ABV Kronenbourg Blanc, from UK brewing giant Scottish & Newcastle.

A return to form today, with the vase of fate serving up a helping of Riggwelter, the Black Sheep Brewery’s delicious 4.7% strong Yorkshire ale.I could drink this till the cows come home.Or perhaps that should be the sheep, for (according to the bottle) t…

Today’s festive ale is the Teignworthy Christmas Cracker, a strong (6% ABV) dark and warming malty bottle conditioned ale from deepest Devon.

Another superb ale tonight, and this one is close to home.

Third Time Lucky!

Well, this evening’s advent beer couldn’t be more different from yesterday’s.

This is surely one of the best ideas I’ve ever had!