Clap your hands say yeah right

According to Joakim Holm I am dying to make an impression. Well … aren’t we all? Being helpful as always Joakim consequently tagged me. This seems to come with the obligation to reveal five lesser known things about oneself (i.e. myself) and then pass the tagging on to others in need. Thank you Joakim, I wouldn’t miss such an opportunity.

Here we go, five not so well known things about Tobias Hill:

1. When I was in fifth and sixth grade (being 11-12 years old) I and three friends formed a breakdance team. We performed on some local discos and got the entrance paid as some kind of a treat. I do remember the Tobias of anno 1984-1985 as being a rather good breakdancer … but! (as Tony Irving would put it) … my mind could be deceiving. You see, several years later I was encouraged to show a backspin at a party. Having more than one glass of dry martini inside my suit I of course accepted. I got down to “business” and … well, the backspin wasn’t there anymore. I haven’t worn that suit since.
   
   
2. Once I was hit by a knife. A guy living on the same street where I grew up was interested in throwing knifes. He put a lot of effort into finding the perfect balance of the knifes which he kind of manufactured himself. During the testing of one of his knives I was standing on the other side of the branch that the knife was supposed to hit. The blade rotated in the air, missed the branch and got stuck in my face. It entered with its sharpest point in the lower part of my upper lip and then fell to the ground.

   And then there was blood. And then the so-called friend tried to stop the blood with a bunch of leaves. And then I ran home. And then there was a dad saying “My son, what the flying fuck has happened?” (well not really, but along those lines). And then I was repaired. And then a furious dad went to the house of the so-called friend, having a D2D chat. And then our so-called friendship (mostly based on throwing and catching knives) ended.
   
   

3. I was programming demos on the so called scene on the C64 for some years in the eighties. The name of our group was Reaction and consisted (in practice) of only two members, me and my friend Vacuum (later Vogue). My handle was initially Tranz and later on Excite. Our best score on demo competitions was 4th place at the Vårby with the demo “Enjoy the silence”. All we ever released can be downloaded from this excellent site. When I look back on those demos today I realize that in 1988/1989 I was more fluent in 6502 Assembler than in English. The scroll- and introscreen texts are just crap while the net-bouncer in E.T.S is … quite ok (for that time at least).
   
   
4. I have a strange habit to reorganize eggs. I rarely pick an egg from an egg carton without at the same time trying to leave the carton with its centre of gravity as close to the geometrical center of the carton as possible. Uhm. I must have had a traumatic experience with an unbalanced egg carton in the past.
   
   
5. In my childhood I had a large cactus on my room (the only plant macho enough to make it into a boys room I guess). I realized that thorns of different length made different sounds when snapping them. It didn’t take me too long to localize enough thorns to have one octave of tones. This way I learned to play the cactus, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for instance. In fact this is the only instrument I’ve ever mastered.
   
   

So that was it. Now I pass this curse on to Manuel P, Magnus L, arga_killen, Gustaf B and Sebastian R. Looking forward to read your not-so-well-known-facts. Will link to your pages as soon as you are done.

(And to get your inspiration going … read this wonderful rant about this whole thing: 5 things I don’t want to know about you)

I don’t write much these days. But I do read. Here are some ultra short reviews + recommendations/stay-aways for the latest few books read.

THE GOOD

Universal principles of design
William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler
This book presents 100 design principles gathered from a wide variety of fields (ergonomics, psychology, human factors etc.) that have relevance for any design discipline. What I like the most about this book is that a great deal of the “universal principles” are backed by thorough studies and statistics. This makes it more than just another flashy design book full of subjective thoughts. The only minor glitch is that the principles are somewhat strangely ordered … which make the book easy to read but hard to use. Still, highly recommended.



Agile Estimating and Planning
Mike Cohn
A lot of books on lightweight methodologies condemn BDUFs (rightly so) but does on the other hand not really elaborate on how to estimate and plan in a more lightweight manner. I experience that this has led to the misconception (among both critics and practitioners) that lightweight methodologies suggest that no planning/estimates should be needed at all! That is of course wrong and this book gives you the tools you need. BTW, Mike Cohn visits Citerus in September. Read more about it here and here!



Män som hatar kvinnor
Stieg Larsson
Surprisingly good book in the “Mystery & Thrillers” literary genre. A genre which I normally don’t do or like. To be honest I could not really put this one down when I’d got a few pages into it.



Flickan som lekte med elden
Stieg Larsson
The sequel to MSHK. New story, same characters. Once again a really intriguing mystery.



THE SO-SO

No stuff just fluff: 2006 anthology
In one respect this book holds what the title promise. It does not contain much fluff. That is good. It cuts to the chase at once. Unfortunately it does not contain much stuff either. The book is aiming at introducing a diversity of hot tech-topics in a number of unrelated articles. Unfortunately most isn’t hot. Some isn’t even medium. For instance there is a chapter called Extreme Decorator: Total Object Makeover … which I anticipated would be a new take on the the decorator pattern (using dynamic proxies or some clever byte code enhancement technique for instance). Well it wasn’t. It was the same old decorator pattern as was presented in GoF some 11 years earlier. Another article called “The Cornerstone of a Great Shop” presents continuous integration as being a good thing to do. Uhm. For the last 4 years I have done that in projects. Most of my colleagues do as well. However, some topics/articles are more read-worthy why I guess I will give this book series another chance when the 2007 anthology is released in April.



THE AWFUL

Designing interfaces
Jenifer Tidwell
This is a book for idiots and for people who has never seen a graphical interface before. Why would anyone spend time reading that “by using a radio button the user can choose one item in a set of items” and “If you have a lot of content you can use a scrollbar” … GAH! … What amazes me the most is that this book is praised. I guess it might tell us something about the average level of competence when it comes to interface design.



CURRENTLY READING

The ruby way
Hal Fulton

So far so good. Maybe a bit to much cookbooky for my taste.