This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Joseph Pelrine, Knight of the Square Bracket
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
This weekend Joseph Pelrine came to Canberra to meet Software WithStyle. He arrived on friday evening and we headed straight to a bar.
Rowan was meant to meet us at the Airport, as Rowan was the only one who had seen Joseph before. The week before Joseph arrived in Australia to do a ScrumMaster's course. Rowan was already well in to what Scrum is and we were adopting it in our own work as well as work at Wizard. It was definitely time for us to get more legitimate training on the subject.
Unfortunately being a certification course, it was quite expensive. Given the mutual benefits for Wizard and SWS, Rowan went. He came back a certified ScrumMaster. Horray. But better, he came back with news that Joseph was coming to Canberra next weekend.
When Joseph first realised he was coming to Australia he contacted me about his course and just to say hi. Joseph and I exchanged many many emails several years back. Although there was a lag in our emails of recent, the connection we had made lived on. Finally, we had a chance to actually meet and put it to the ultimate test.
The only pictures I could find of Joseph showed him to wear glasses and slightly balding. As the people came off the plane, no less than 4 slightly balding grey haired glasses wearing people carrying laptopish like bags were assaulted by my question "Joseph?" Finally, the last one was actually him.
Straight to the bar. Joseph had previously emailed me that Swiss beer was junk. So he wanted some Australian beer. We took him to the Wig and Pen where they brew their own beer. From there we headed off to Rowan's parents place - where Joseph was going to stay that weekend. We had a nice red and then it was time to part ways.
Our first conversations over the wine were very interesting. We discussed life, women, smalltalking and SUnit and various other interesting issues like Scrum, agility and the nature of complexity in social networks.
The next day had Steve Aldred, Rowan Bunning and Joseph Pelrine come around to my new home. There we began doing some group programming - David Price joined in too. We began to look at SUnit and a thing called 'Toothpick'.
Toothpick is a generalised logging system. It separates the What, from the Where from the How. Eg: What am I interested in, Where should I put it, file, network socket, Transcript and the How such as plain text, Ant XML, etc.
One of the ideas here is to use Toothpick to store results from SUnit in the Ant format so that it can be included in Ant builds. Of course, it can be used for much more than that.
SUnit is moving forward. Soon it will be using events to signal failures, passes, errors etc. It's also moved in to a plain 'SUnit' namespace instead of XProgramming.SUnit. Joseph has done many other things too. I'm sure he must be approaching a release.
We went to the local club, Labor club for lunch. After that, we decided it was high time we geeked it up a notch and watched the new Battlestar Galactica part 1. After that, I introduced Joseph to 'The Office'. He liked it and ordered it on Amazon.
After all that, we headed in to Canberra's once-a-year Multicultural festival. This is a big thing, the whole of the city is filled with tents which are in turned filled with stalls selling food from different countries.
This is generally a sausage of some kind and perhaps a beer. Or of it's an Asian country, some sort of rice with chicken and spice. Various stages were filled with gorgious women doing belly dancing. Another stage was shamefully filled with men and women doing cheap bollywood dancing and miming instead of a traditional Indian dance.
We began at the Polish tent - Polish beer is great. Many other people we saw wandering around apparently agreed with us. So we needed some food, I mean sausage. So we went to.. I /think/ it was norway. They had two different kinds of sausage. We had one each - both were nice. Next we went for a Hungarian sausage. And that's about when the giant storm hit.
The clouds had been building for a while, they were dark, the wind was wild. The rain, when it hit, was sudden and complete. It left nothing to the imagination. Those who weren't there could imagine it was something along the lines of "lots and lots of rain". It was quite out of character for Canberra. Doubtlessly Joseph brought it with him from Sydney.
It rained and it rained and it rained. Apparently Joseph doesn't like the rain. We snuck around building edges trying to get in to a night club. We found one - but they were having a private function until 9:00, then that number increased to 9:30 - and David was wearing shorts.
So we snuck from building edge to building edge again until we got around the other side.. and ran out of cover. Until I remembered a back entrance in to a big pub. We snuck in and dried off and had another beer. The plan from there was to go back home, drink a bottle of white wine, watch Battlestar Galactica part 2, code at 1am in the morning and enjoy ourselves.
In short, the message I was getting from Joseph was a story for life: "Eat, drink and do Mary err, be Merry." But by the time we got home, I was out for the count. We watched Battlestar Galactica and then I went to bed, ending the rest of the nights plans.
Joseph stayed at our place - he stayed on the fold out lounge. It seems he slept well so that's good at least. In the morning we talked more about Smalltalk and about WithStyle. I showed him the Presentation app I wrote using it - the one I used at Smalltalk Solutions. He loved it and decided he wanted to use it for his talks next Tuesday. Great!
So with the last half hour until lunch I set up Joseph a VW7.3 image with WithStyle, with the new SUnit and our changes to it and my presentations as a template for him making his own Tuesday presentation.
At lunch time we went to Steve's place for a BBQ. More sausages :) There we chatted about life the universe and everything. Rowan had to leave early to go to band practice. After that, David, Joseph and myself went to do some Rock Climbing. Shock! A swiss man likes to climb :)
I've never done rock climbing before, but it was a lot of fun. My arms are dead right now. Pulling on the handbreak in the car was really quite hard afterwards. Finally, we dropped Joseph off at the airport, had a small chat about semantics and their applications to programming languages before Joseph went through security and off back to Sydney.
All in all, it was a fantastic weekend. The whole experience was a pleasure. I look forward to seeing Joseph again at Smalltalk Solutions. I'm glad I started emailing with Joseph those many years ago.. it has led to another great world-wide friendship.
If you're in Sydney make sure you meet up with Joseph at the Smalltalk/Ruby Users Group. He's a guru in Scrum, SUnit, Agility, Smalltalk.. heck, many many things. He's just a great guy. Cheers Joseph.
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