Edinburgh Fringe Festival

One of the big festivals that occurs every year in Edinburgh is the Fringe Festival. Basically a couple of thousand performers, comedians, musicians and actors show up, convert every uninhabited room in the city into a venue and spend pretty much the whole of august entertaining audiences. Oh, and the Military Tattoo is on each night, performed in front of the stunning backdrop of the Castle.

We'd heard a little bit about it before coming here and in the weeks leading up to August there was a definite sense of anticipation in the air.

During the festival the atmosphere is amazing. Each night feels like a friday night. An evening stroll down the royal mile shows off large crowds watching street performers and there tonnes of people handing out flyers, advertising some of the thousands of shows on offer.

Over the 3 or so weeks we tried to get to as many as we could. I think it ended up being 7 stand up acts, 3 concerts and the Tattoo.

The comedians we got to see were Karen Dunbar, Tripod, Kristen Schaal, Rhys Darby, Frankie Boyle, Hattie Hayridge and Brendan Hunt.

All were very entertaining, although I laughed the loudest and longest when watching Tripod, Frankie Boyle and Rhys Darby.

Concerts, we saw Silverchair, Foo Fighters and Jamie T - all were great and it was nice to be able to go to a few concerts in Edinburgh for a change.

The Tattoo was amazing, the pipe bands and the Moscow Military Conservatoire were brilliant just the music and the timing was superb - we'll definitely be attending next year.

Top 5 places to eat in Edinburgh

Over the 4 months we've been here its safe to say we've had a few opportunities to dine out.
Thought we'd note them down, just in case anyones visiting and feeling peckish.

Heres our top 5 (so far):

1. Bella Italia - Great food and excellent service. Theres lots of italian places around but we've been here twice, usually on the spur of the moment, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
   
2. Wannaburger - Aussie burger joint on the Royal Mile, very good burgers. They also make the best milkshakes.
3. Thai Orchid - Went here for Carols birthday, yummy thai food and they stock NZ wine.
4. Hogshead - This a typical scottish bar complete with football on the telly. This place does a really nice burger + fries combo - 2 meals for £7 too.
5. Monster Mash - Bangers and, not surprisingly, mash are their specialty. They also do a good Haggis, Neeps and Tatties.

So there you go. Kinda feeling a bit hungry now, actually :)

If you know of any other good places, feel free to mention them.

It's been a while

It's been a while since I last posted so I'll try and make up for it in the next couple of weeks.

Carol and I sat down and figured out all the things we've done since the last blog post and it's actually been a fair bit so I'll try and log a few tales when I can.

Hope everyone is well, and taking care of themselves.

Edinburgh Sevens

Dan, Joe and I, originally uploaded by stewartr.

When we found out that Edinburgh hosted a Sevens tournament we were definitely keen to go along and watch. Considering the hassle it is to get tickets for the Wellington tournament, it was a nice surprise to find out that the tickets for this one were A) readily available and B) fairly cheap (£20 for the weekend).

An added bonus was that my mate (and best man) Joe was taking the train up to watch it.

The Saturday showed good Scottish form and, although threatened to rain all day, stayed relatively dry. We took our seats in the quarter-filled stadium in Murrayfield and it happened to be right next a very large group of rowdy/drunk kiwis. That meant there was plenty of entertainment to be had, on and off the pitch.

Being a 2-day event, the finals day was a bit of a struggle, but we faired better than some of the ex-drunk, now-hungover crowd alongside. It was kept interesting as, due to Fiji dropping out in the quarter finals, NZ had the chance to win both the tournament and the overall series.

And win they did much to the kiwi crowds delight -at this point the rest of the crowd had got kind of fed up with the rowdy kiwis situated near us, so there was little love to be had elsewhere.

Still the team came over after the award ceremony and performed the haka for us so at least they appreciated the support.

The photo kind of sums up the days, lots of black, face paint and flags. It was Joe and Dan's (pictured) first time up in Edinburgh and, although they spent most of it inside a stadium, I think they thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Lightspeed by Mindscape

Although I've been blogging mainly about my travels lately, I still feel like I want to blog about technical things that interest me when I can -I'm still learning heaps at work and find it helps focus my energy.

Anyway, my good friends at Mindscape are working on a product that I will be following with great interest.

LightSpeed is an Entity Modeling framework that follows the convention over configuration mindset that is popular with the Ruby on Rails crowd.

The benefits of Lightspeed over alternative frameworks (from the documentation):

• Convention over configuration.
• Support idiomatic .NET domain models: (Validation, databinding, change notification etc.)
• Highly usable API and low barrier to entry.
• Internalizes best practice patterns: Session per request, Unit of Work etc.
• Testability built in.
• Small, lightweight and fast
• Solve the 95% case – i.e. more like Rails than NHibernate.

I imagine this approach would suit green fields development where the Domain Model is very closely modelled on the underlying database.

As Rails has shown there can be a huge productivity gain from keeping the simple case simple and it's a great option if the accompanying constraints fit within your requirements.

They are taking a page out JetBrains book and offering an Early Adopter Program where you can download weekly beta releases to test it out and provide feedback.

General Update

Well things seem to be settling down nicely.

• I got a job with an Investment Management firm, very nice bunch of people, not too big, not too small and they're keen on things like Agile and Domain Driven Design (thats a good thing).
• Just moved into a more permanent address, quite close to the city centre, Carol did all the work on that one, its just right for the two of us, can put a matress in the lounge if we have visitors, and my favourite bit, it had an Xbox in the cupboard. YE-AH.
• Carol's still job hunting at the moment, but things are looking promising, watch this space.
• Played a couple of games of hockey and Carols well into her rowing, which is a lot more laid back than she's used to.

Other than that, we want to head down to London for visiting at some point and we're looking forward to people coming up and staying. My best man, Joe, is coming up this weekend to watch the rugby sevens at Murrayfield and NZ chances are looking pretty good.

Peterhead Road Trip

Last weekend was a bank holiday weekend so we took advantage of the extra day to travel up north and visit some of Caroline's extended family in Peterhead.

Warning! Descriptions of family relationships many cause dizziness and confusion.

We had a few issues hiring a car - due to our lateness, the place we had booked from was closed and it seemed the only company cars available was at the airport - 20 mins from town. Nevertheless we did manage to get our wee car and set out on the highway.

The roads weren't too busy and the countryside heading north is quite pleasant so it was quite relaxing getting out and about, after having to rely solely on public transport for last few months.

It took around 3 hours to get to Peterhead, driving through Dundee and Aberdeen, with the last part of the journey following the rugged coastline. Seeing as it was all new sights, the time passed quite quickly.

Upon arrival we were warmly welcomed by Caroline Bachan, a cousin of Caroline's grandmother. We were well fed and on Sunday we were given the royal tour of Peterhead by John and Isabell, Caroline's grandfather's brother and sister.

It was quite interesting to hear about the family history, where Carol's grandparents played when they were young and stories of how Peterhead was affected by WWII. Although the local accent was what I would call strong, I found I didn't struggle understanding what was being said - for the most part.

Unfortunately, even though we'd given ourselves 2 days to explore and go visiting, it definitely wasn't enough so theres quite a few people we still need to meet at some stage.
We thoroughly enjoyed our visit and have already said we'd return in the not-too distant future.
It's quite nice to know that even though we're a long way from home we still have close friends down in London and family up here in Scotland.

But we still miss everyone else :)

Code Monkey

http://sstjean.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html

This song thats going around made me Laugh Out Loud. It's spawned quite a few YouTube vids as well.

As for the song lyrics - lets just say that they weren't too far off the mark in some respects. Whats scary is that in the ukelele remix - he could have described my job - except I'm still having fun :-).

Code Monkey dance video

Code Monkey ukelele remix - Live

Top 5 moments: Auckland to Edinburgh

5. Bodyboarding on the standing wave at Wild Wadi Water Park (Dubai).

4. Opening scene to the theatrical adaptation of the Lion King in London's West End. The music and the way the animals were presented - just awesome.

3. Early morning breakfast on Sydney's waterfront - a great way to kick off our travels,.

2. Italian dinner, a few beers watching Chelsea vs Liverpool and that fateful sampling of Double Apple shisha with Nigel and Bevan.

1. Our first afternoon in Edinburgh. With our impressive initial sighting of Edinburgh castle and introduction to our new flat.