I've just started on a renewed reading campaign. Here's the books I just ordered :

• How to Talk to Anyone
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
• All Marketers are Liars: The power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World

To keep things up on the technical side, I recently received Professional ASP.NET 3.5, so I have that to plough through also.

I am also attending the Business of Software 2008 conference in Boston next month, where some of the sessions sound really interesting. I particularly liked the title of this Pecha Kucha session by Bob Pritchett, entrepreneur and author : Fire someone today and other surprising tactics for making your business a success

Just recently we have been interviewing for a new developer.

I have found it incredulous, the amount of people with considerable experience that cannot do hex / dec conversions. One of the things we do during an interview is to have people write code - this is normally a short 10 minute test where we give them an app with one function that converts a hex string to decimal, we ask them to refactor the function so that it no longer using the API call to do the conversion (they have to do it themselves in code).

We go to great lengths to make sure we have explained the task correctly, sometimes we prompt them earlier in the interview with a questions about converting - 'What is 16 represented in Hex, what is 30 hex in decimal etc). We even provide a working application and allow them to play with it for a few minutes to familiarize themselves with it's intent and operation.

The task is designed to show us the coding style of the candidate, but we've found that instead of looking at their code we're looking at blank pages - there seems to be a glut of people (at least, that I am interviewing) that don't even know how to start. We've had people simply stare at us blankly, people just sit and twiddle a pencil, people get flustered and simply say 'I cannot do it, sorry'

Are we just getting below average or unsuitable candidates or have people forgotten this skill (working in number systems other than base 10). Have today's development tools abstracted all this low level stuff away so much that people just don't need it anymore (and therefore have teaching institutes stopped covering it) ??

GEO 42.2814047728377:-71.5726983547211

A bit of a detour from technical content, but I think this affects many technical people.

This weekend I was reading some of Steve Pavlina's 'Personal Development for Smart People' blog (not that I am a smart person ). Of particular note was his 'How to become an early riser' post - apparently he gets a lot of hits on it, so I guess it strikes a cord with many people.

His recommendations are pretty straight forward, get up at a fixed time every day and go to sleep when you are tired. This is something that anyone can do if they want. In fact we all do it every day by getting up in time to arrive at work on time.
I think the reason his method is successful is because it is used by people who want to get up earlier. The very fact that you're reading that post takes you at least 50% of the way to achieving it.

Anyway, in practice it sounds great - set a fixed time to get up and then be reactive at the other end of the day (i.e. vary the time you go to sleep), obviously over the first few days you'll adjust your sleep time until you get to a sustainable balance. BUT BUT BUT I don't think this works if you are a 'midnight coder'

If you're anything like me, this works some of the time, but is fundamentally flawed, in that I find it easy to get focus (into the zone) and when I'm there that's it...
A trivial thing like needing sleep will not budge me, I'll finish when I finish, when I've planned that project, written that document, coded this section, completed this test, finished designing this x, y or z.
The result of this is that I finish at 3:30am, it suddenly hits me that I am wasted, I go to sleep and the last think I want or need is to get up at 5am, no way! My snooze button is going to earn it's money today. I am getting up at the last possible second (that still allows me to get to work on time).

The answer - I don't really have one. The best I can come up with is a flexible day, sometimes I'll need it to be 24 hours, sometimes 28 hours, sometimes more.
I need a good 8 hours of sleep, I need a good 8-11 hours at work, I need an evening with my better half and I need 0 - ∞ hours for my other stuff.

So, while I'm waiting for the rotational speed of the earth to slow by a variable amount (as chosen daily by my good self), I guess I just have to put up with choosing between being an early riser or doing stuff in the evenings - can't have it both ways !!