Sod This Episode 7
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Wow, we managed to record another show right away this time! We talk about a variety of things – my experiences with my Snow Leopard install, 32 vs 64 bit, dynamic languages and how the world is moving on so fast… lots of talk, and during mixing it occurred to me that I was a bit too talkative myself, which makes things a bit unbalanced :-) Well, I guess that’s how it is if there’s “only” two of you.

In this episode we also include an interview we recorded with Harry Pierson at TechEd US. Harry is an IronPython guy these days, working for Microsoft as the PM on IronPython, and he had a lot of interesting stories to tell. You can find his blog here.

Ah yes, and I wanted to link to that page about 32 vs 64 bit – here it is.

Have fun!

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Sod This Episode 6
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Gary and I have finally found time to record this. Yes, we know, we really need to stay on the ball more… our sincere apologies, we’ll try to do better. We also need to say sorry to those guys who were kind enough to record interviews with us back in May at TechEd US, and who haven’t seen their efforts included yet! Unbelievable, I know… again, we are very sorry.

The first one of two interviews we still have around is the one with Miguel Castro. If you know Miguel, you know he’s a clever guy who never feels a shortage of things to say – if you don’t know him yet, this is your chance to get to know him! Gary and I talk to him about VB and C# developers, ASP.NET and other attempts of changing the world, and how Miguel is currently learning to play the Ukulele in his sleep.

Ah right… and if you ever meet the guy, remember his first name is pronounced Mee-goo-ell. Okay? Cool.

Have fun!

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Sod This Episode 5
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Gary and I have had time in the past few weeks to record interview with a number of different people. We’re not telling for now, but there’s some material for us to go through! For this first post-TechEd episode though, we have chosen to publish an interview I recorded at DevDays Netherlands – ladies first, I’m sure nobody’s going to disagree with that!

Some of the girls I talked to were involved with the recently published Women in Technology edition of SDN Magazine. This announcement article is in Dutch, I’m afraid – but much of the magazine is in English, if you can get hold of one. There’s also this other page with more English information. Very nice effort with that magazine! Pity you decided against the calendar :-D

Here’s who was there for the interview:

Marianne van Wanrooij

Sandra de Ridder

Gaby Lieuw

Mirjam van Olst

Sara Ford

Daniëlle Loppé

Have fun!

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Links from the show:

Here’s that Sarah Blow we were mentioning a few times (she’s not really in London, I think… or is she? Sarah, where do you spend your time these days?): http://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahblow

SharePoint Babes – she was serious! http://sharepointbabes.com/

As an aside, it seems that DX’s Mark Miller is secretly handling parts of the SP Babes website. That’s according to that video on the site. Mark claims it must be a different Mark Miller. Yeah right. :-)

Barry Dorrans – poor guy, mentioned yet again… the sock monster story – go on now, follow him on Twitter!

Seriously: we’ve changed our minds about the swearing. In the middle of the process of getting out episode 4. Yes, seriously. Just listen to it and you’ll understand. Why? Well – as you’ll find out when you listen in, we came up with approach no 1 quickly, which is to make it a feature instead of an incidental thing. Approach no 2, on the other hand, is quite interesting as well: just don’t do it.

We couldn’t decide. Or rather, we did decide, and then we thought well, perhaps that wasn’t right. What if people don’t like us because we swear? Okay, maybe we don’t really care about that so much. But what if these people don’t want to listen to us because we swear? Are there people like that in the world? Yeah, I guess there are… what if they miss something important because they don’t listen to us because we swear? See what I mean?

Okay, or perhaps we just wanted to do whatever is necessary to get the largest podcast audience the world has ever seen. You pick.

Without further ado, here it is: Sod This Episode 4 (right-click and save to download the file instead of playing it in the browser)

In this episode, I talk to Dino Esposito about things he does, Web programming, Silverlight, Ajax, Basta Italia, … and some other stuff, I think. Great guy, Dino, and we have a good time. Listen in and enjoy!

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Links from the show:
Craig’s contest: http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1417
The APL Wiki: http://aplwiki.com/

The answer is, Sod This is already available in iTunes! You can go to their podcast directory and search for “Sod This” and you’ll find it. We haven’t announced this publicly so far, because there’s an outstanding problem with our logo, which for some reason doesn’t appear in iTunes. But if you can ignore that for the time being, you should be fine!

(Note on the side - one listener told me he was only seeing one episode in iTunes. Me myself and also others are certainly seeing all three, so I don’t really know what that is about. If you see the same problem, please let me know so we can look into it.)

Of course it is also possible to subscribe to normal RSS feeds in iTunes - apparently a less than well-known fact. The process is nicely described here: http://learninginhand.com/podcasting/subscribe.html

This brings me to the second of the two questions, the slightly less clever one (with apologies and thanks to the people who asked it!): Is there an RSS feed for Sod This?

The answer is, yes, of course there is! In the top right corner of the window there’s a big orange icon and a Subscribe link for the RSS feed! I didn’t think it was easy to miss, but apparently it is - from now on, I’ll include the necessary links in each post, like this:

Subscribe to Sod This:

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Follow us on Twitter

Finally, another good way to keep up with myself and Gary is to follow us on Twitter. Here’s my profile: @olivers - and this is Gary’s: @garyshort

Especially for the podcast, we have also created another account on Twitter: @sodthis

This account will tweet for each new post to this podcast blog, and myself and Gary will typically also re-tweet in our own accounts.

Btw - for those confused personality types among our listeners - the “I” in this post is me, Gary, in spite of the post author given above.

Here’s the episode: Sod This Episode 3 (right-click and save to download the file instead of playing it in the browser)

Also in this episode Oliver and I do our best to sooth the troubles in Northern Ireland (cough) and struggle to remember the name of Microsoft evangelist Eric Whatishisname (it’s Nelson by the way - we looked it up ). We close out the episode with a short discussion on whether or not it’s taboo to give your daughter away as a prize on the show (seriously she’s just turning 18 so knows everything - you know what I mean, right?).

As always, if you have any positive comments about our show then send them to us, mention them on Twitter and blog your little hearts out. If you have any negative comments then, well… keep them to yourself. :-)

Enjoy the show!

Btw, we’re glad to mention that Michael looks nothing like the picture on the right. Oh well.

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Links from the show:

Michael’s book: http://www.ironpythoninaction.com/
Michael’s blog: http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/
Resolver Systems, the company Michael works for: http://www.resolversystems.com/
Barry Dorrans, the sock monster: http://www.sturmnet.org/blog/2009/03/10/improvements-to-barry-s-book-cover
Eric Nelson’s blog (sorry, Eric!): http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/Default.aspx
DDD Scotland: http://developerdayscotland.com/main/Default.aspx

Gary and I talk about using 3rd party components in development to ease your workload, and other ways of saving the world. An interview with Richard Campbell is included, talking about his experiences with German people at the recent Basta conference, his work with Strangeloop Networks and other things. Richard is of course well known as a Microsoft RD, a speaker at conferences, podcasts like .NET Rocks and RunAs Radio, and he’s also unfortunate enough to have the picture of him on the right published on the internet. No, I did not take that!

Regarding some of the technical comments we got for the first episode – we have increased the volume of the recording a bit, for those who were complaining. But my real advice is, go get a proper pair of headphones, with good isolation or noise cancellation. It’s more healthy and it allows for good dynamics in the recordings, which makes them sound better. Anyway, keep the comments coming, we appreciate them!

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Basta Italia