These days I’m occupied as a java developer at a company called Cicero Consulting. The company is a combination of several services, but they are all related to banking and finances. Luckily in a way that shouldn’t hurt us to much during the economic downturn.

The company is like a small family, and we’re currently about 20 people working there. We have 8 developers that does consultancy and product development. I started out with product development in on our core product called Cicero Financial Planner. It is product delivered in various forms to major actors in the Norwegian banking sector and enables them to do effective client counseling.

Fast forward to november and I was sent out as a junior consultant to a (for me) large project related to the financial field. Being a consultant is in many pretty different from working in the office. Both good and bad. I’ll probably write a post on this later as I get more time to compare. But the biggest change is perhaps working in a focused team again.

In the product developer setting we were 2-3 developers working on different parts of the product. This meant that you felt somewhat alone with what you were working on. In one way this was bad. It raised the threshold of starting a conversation about the aspect you were working on. I guess this is perhaps a bad personality trait that I have. I’ll work on it. On the other hand it also gave a lot responsibility and freedom to influence decisions during the development process. A huge bonus.

In the team and project context (in my specific case at least) the roles are somewhat reversed. There’s plenty of opportunity to discuss the different topics of the ongoing development process within the team, but smaller opportunities to be a part of decisions. This is both good and bad. It allows you to offload this work to others (or, it newer reach you), but it is frustrating when (in my eyes) bad decisions have are made. The decisions can also take quite a lot of time to clarify with the customer. Which is pretty frustrating when they’re minuscule in my eyes.

So, what do I favor? I can’t decide. Working for yourself, being your own boss and being allowed to make decisions contra the interaction and focus in a team. I think both have their merits. Either way, change is good and conditioning.

I guess that sums up my current status as to work.

The second item is a pair of mini bands from Iron Woody Fitness. I plan to use these on the bench press, push ups, x band walks and probably a myriad of other exercises and mobility work as I get acquainted with it.

Just hoping both items will arrive before Christmas…

The workaround is simply:

svn up -r head

Source: [Studio] Using the Maven Release Plugin

This post at miktex support forum outlines the symptoms, cause and solution.

Lesson to be learnt: whine less.

As a person somewhat interested in possibly doing something by myself work-wise some day, I ran into the Personal MBA Manifesto site that more or less gives a list of books and magazines to read and study by oneself to attain knowledge similar to an MBA.
The manifesto states that you wont attain all the knowledge needed by the books alone, you need to be out there working with your own start up or something similar. I’m kind of a skeptical, but I enjoy reading —so I’ll definitely pick up some of the books for summer or something like that (already posess Getting Things Done by Allen for a year or so. How is that for Getting Things Done?;) —I’ll get right to it after exams.)

Last week was also the birthday of the typeface Helvetica. I found Magasinets article(norwegian) a enjoyable read. BBC also has good coverage.