Being at my new job, its certainly pushing old skills that I hadnt used for a long time while English Teaching. It was hard enough getting back on the coding horse, but the schedule were working to is extremely tight. We are to ship our working Beta for after the New Years holiday.

I'ts19th today giving us potentially 10 "working days" or "20 days", I'm currently doing the "render" feature which is only about 40% finished but has loads of bugs and still needs a lot of attention. The trouble is, I'm booked to go on holiday back to Scotland on the 23rd December, leaving the team in the lurch for the high pressure period. Makes me feel really guilty but its already paid for and I haven't been back to UK for nearly 2 Years. It's a tough one aright.




As a result we've all been asked to do overtime, everyday 10 till 10 or more, potentially 12 hour plus shifts. As I live quite a distance out of Tokyo, my last train is at 10 so I have to leave about 9:30, again this heaps on the guilt as the rest of the team are working well into the night !

Just the other day a team member asked me "What's overtime in Japanese ?" (I'm the dictionary as I have pretty good vocab.)

Hmm says here "zangyou", I replied.

I have a funny feeling this is a word I'm going to hear a lot of.

Having not programmed in PHP for a good while but still knowing the basics, I was looking for a book that wasnt going to teach me from the ground up or wasnt going to dive into advanced abstract theory.

I confess I'm a O'Reilly fan basically for the geek factor and kudos you get from having a set of them on your desk, but hey.... Psssst wanna know a secret ? Most of them aren't actually that good!

There I said it, I feel a bit bad about it, but its true. Sometimes having an O'Reilly Java book on your desk looks good, but the book itself and your abilities might suck. People still go "ah-ha your an O'Reilly guy eh ?"  thinking you have things like "ability", "talent" or "genius".

That aside, This is a good book. I've found it perfect for jumping back into the world of programming with real life problems, examples and solutions.

Now to collect the set !