Lean Poker

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I had a lot of fun attending a Lean Poker event last weekend!

Me at Lean Poker

Me at Lean Poker

It’s a type of event where programmers get together, form teams and spend the day writing code competitively, to see who can write the best automated online-poker player. We don’t play for money but for pride, and the main aim is to practise writing beautiful code and lean principles. That said, given the time constraint of a single day, the focus is usually on Deliver as fast as possible and by the end I’m flurrying around to keep errors out of the code. We try to get quick feedback during the day (more on that later) but I thought I’d do a write up about the event to give people who haven’t attended one of these before an idea of what it’s like!

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All Hallows Day

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Candles lighting up the cemetery on Halloween in Vaszar.

Candles lighting up the cemetery on Halloween in Vaszar.

We didn’t dress up and go trick-or-treating for Halloween in Namibia, but Jack-o-Lanterns and spooky costume parties are what come to mind when I think of the time around the transition from October to November. In Hungary –and it turns out many countries in this area– it’s celebrated a bit differently and spooky costume Halloween parties have only started to become popular in the 21st century.

On 1 November, Hungarians travel to the countryside for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on 2 November. They visit the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried and decorate the graves with flowers and candles. It looks really beautiful at night and I took some photos when we were in Vaszar on the weekend. It was a dark night and the pictures are mostly out of focus, but I think they’re still pretty.

It turns out Halloween is a combination of the words Hallow (meaning holy or saint) and e’en (a contraction of even, which is the Scots spelling of eve or evening), and the celebration has a long Christian and Celtic folk history.

Just Married!

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On 19 July 2014 I married Berni in the St György Roman Catholic Church in her home town, Vaszar. Thank you to everyone for celebrating with us as and for your kind wishes on our special day, as we bound our lives together with love!

With love from Berni & Siôn — 19 July 2014

With love from Berni & Siôn — 19 July 2014

Cat vs Crow

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Very strange. On Thursday, on my way to work I saw a cat in the park being harassed by a crow so I recorded it. Unfortunately the video isn’t very sharp because the animals were far away and I was recording them with my phone. I thought it was really funny, as if the crow had a big problem with the cat being there, meanwhile the cat completely ignores the bird.

Funniest of all, I walked the same route the next day and they were there again doing the exact same thing!