Tero Pikala

Banana Store restaurant close to Borough Market has quite interesting idea:

Buy whatever food you want from Borough Market, take it to them and they will cook it for you. It costs 10 pounds per person making it quite reasonable considering that proper meal is easily 30-40 pounds here.

I scanned their leaflet for more information (and some neck bending… )

I haven’t tried this, it’s only commencing tomorrow, but definitely will soon. I just hope their chefs are good, it takes some courage to promise to make food of anything exotic that you can find at the market!

Tags: Food, London by tero
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Coding Horror: The Programmer’s Bill of Rights

Those who have worked with me know that I’m rather sensitive to noise when it comes to programming something that requires me to focus on that task. I’ve read several posts about programmer productivity and it still amazes me how companies continue to ignore these basic things.

When I was at Nokia there was open plan office with some 200 seats. No wonder things evolved to working 3-4 days a week from home and then spending rest of the week at the office drinking coffee and attending some meetings where teleconferencing wasn’t an option. During that time we were so productive that everything was always ready 1-2 weeks ahead of schedule.
Strangest thing about my current office is that someone has decided to put all servers (more than a few) right next to developers. Still after six months I don’t really understand reasoning behind that decision.  Unfortunately my home is next to DLR and it’s not that quiet either so I can’t go back to that partial remote working mode now.

Tags: General by tero
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Since my Bulldog experience was rather similar I’ll post link here as well.
Daily Bread - A Tideswell Mans’ Weblog: Bulldog Broadband - Possibly the Worst company ever

I placed order late August -06, canceled after about 2 months because I got never connected and after 10-15 phone calls and 4 months in late February got my 99 pounds back after filing ISPA complaint against them.

I can understand that there is a company that is trying to grow too fast and gets into trouble for that - I participated Internet gold rush back in 98-00 - but fact is that each phone call to CS costs some money which can’t be offset by interest from few quid. I would think that it would make more business sense to take care of complaints asap to keep people from calling them.

Good luck for everyone with Bulldog!

Tags: London by tero
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