When Kiwis Invade…

Patrick UK Life

A View From my Room I think that today most people around London, both locals and tourists are going to be puzzled after witnessing hundreds, if not a couple of thousand of New Zealand people descending on pub after pub at every single station along the circle line. It was certainly the last place I thought I would find myself after trying to catch up with a kiwi friend of mine.

The Circle Line Pub Crawl is an infamous event occurring only once each year on the weekend closest to the 6th of February, also celebrated as Waitangi Day for New Zealanders. Although no one seems to know the entire history of this event, the rules are fairly well known. *Only* the circle line shall be taken in an anti-clockwise fashion for up to the full 27 various stops along the circle line. Half pints and shots are acceptable as alternatives to full pints during the 12 hour ride (for those with stamina at least anyway). You cannot hold onto anything whilst riding the line and everything is all about having fun. Another part of this tradition is the 4pm gathering outside Westminster where a crowd of up to 5000 New Zealanders congregate to perform a haka.

Not wanting to entirely crash the party, I hung around for a few stops along the circle line but not before it got entirely messy at certain places. I think the pictures posted speak for themselves.

More chaos

Two-oh-Two!

Patrick Restaurants, UK Life

202 Westbourne Grove

Westbourne grove is a trendy street in Notting Hill, stretching from Ladbroke through to Bayswater and crossing Portobello Road, most famous for its diverse markets. This street is a joy for strolling along, with wide paths that are relatively quiet for the area and filled with dozens of nice stores and cafes. One of the more kitsch places to visit on a Saturday or Sunday is 202 Westbourne Grove, a place that is both a fashion store and café in one.

The polished wood floors host the decently numbered marble and wood topped tables that are all set in the back half of this large store. They have a nice garden out back, filled with six tables as well as the sidewalk tables out the front of the store, under the terrace and Italians heaters that people no doubt enjoy the most during the summer months. Depending on what time you arrive, you are most likely to be waiting for a table, particularly if you are with a party more than two, but fortunately our party of four (consisting of Karl, Caroline, Nathan and myself) managed to beat the busy lunch period and secured ourselves a table within ten minutes of arriving.

The brunch menu is simple with no more than, maybe, eight different choices that you can also compliment with a number of sides. The items are modern breakfast dishes and you pay standard prices for them (up to about £8), as is the decently made coffee at £2.50. The prices for the juice and bottled water on the other hand, are especially steep with a large (i.e. standard tall glass) OJ costing you a hefty £4.24 and a 750ml bottle of water costing you just over £6. The 12.5% service charge is actually quite worth it in this place, with the white shirted and jeans clad staff being prompt and efficient without the over bearing or intolerable attitude you can find at just as trendy cafes. Take for instance, my situation this morning when I accidentally spilt a little bit of my coffee onto my plate of French toast and extremely tasty bacon. Although the incident was not too loud, a staff member upon witnessing the incident promptly offered me a napkin to soak up the coffee and a clean plate for me to transfer my now, slightly soggy toast. It was a lovely way to spend the morning and fill up on food for the day.

TheKua Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Happy Chinese New Year

Patrick Restaurants, UK Life

Al is having a brief visit, and what better way to welcome him to London than to take him to the heart of the Chinese New Year celebrations in Chinatown. Ben, Michelle and my sister accompanied us to tuck into a great dim sum feast, even though it took us a long time queuing to get a table. Service was poorer than normal because of the crazy number of people that just continually flowed through the restaurant’s doors but was made up for easily by the traditional dancing lions entering the restaurant to bring good luck to the place.

Chinese New Year

The Longest Running West End Play

Patrick Theatre, UK Life

The Mousetrap

Last night, Kath and I watched Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” play at St Martin’s Theatre. London has been showing this play since 1952 and it is the longest running one out of all west end plays.

The story is a combination of elements to form a typical Agatha Christie murder mystery – a guest lodge isolated from the rest of society by deep snow drifts, filled with guests, most anticipated and another who turned up out of the blue. There is a murderer on the loose and a policeman shows up predicting the murder of two more people, both linked somehow to the person who was murdered the previous day. A character finds the phone line cut and tension builds as the play slowly unveils a common thread linking several of them together in these suspicious circumstances. As per predictions, another of the characters finds one of the members of the household murdered and further hostilities ensue, as each member’s potential for being the murderer is uncovered.

The play introduced each character marvellously and you get a strong idea of the nature of each character very early on. The entire cast performed brilliantly in each of their roles, with perhaps the only misgiving being the stronger English accent coming from the man that was supposed to be Italian. I could not guess the ending of this play, and in true murder mystery fashion, can also not give it away. The Mousetrap is a legend on London’s west end and despite being the butt of many jokes and comics is definitely worth watching when you get a chance.

The Kua.com Rating: 9 out of 10

Fixed Velocity is a Fallacy

Patrick Work Related

Velocity in an XP sense is a historical rate of “work completed” per iteration. Measuring and using velocity is powerful because:

  • Planning based on actual velocity figures gives you a more realistic plan than depending on the optimistic/pessimistic estimates of developers;
  • It is generally cheaper to work out how much time work really takes, than spending excessive time attempting to guess how much it will;
  • Dramatic changes in the number give greater visibility to issues a team may be having;
  • The rate indicates if a deliverable is on track, or if scope needs to be re-negotiated.

A fixed velocity is unrealistic because in the real world as there is always a force working against it… friction. Project friction takes on a number of forms including:

  • Communication breakdown – Sometimes it’s difficult to get answers from the business, or maybe team members forget to tell each other important things that take up time as people find out issues.
  • Environmental Issues – Development environments are never perfect and as you depend on more and more external resources, the team faces additional risk not being able to complete a story because of a database or server is down.
  • Ineffective Iteration Planning – Poor quality story cards slipped by the Iteration Manager and required excessive time going back and forth trying to work needed doing, or the third party prerequisite never came through.
  • Constrained Resources – Depending on key members for particular tasks can be an effective way for ensuring good productivity, but team members can be ill, or be required for other things. Bringing on new people should affect a team’s velocity in some manner.

Keep in mind the following list of things you may experience when you have a fixed velocity:

  • Planning based on an inaccurate number is like setting yourself potentially unrealisable goals instead of the more useful forecasting you can do with a real velocity measurement.
  • You lose major visibility into issues affecting the team, making it more difficult to identify and address them.
  • The importance of maintaining the magic number adds another opposing force typically misaligned to the core business objective. You lose all sorts of things such as a sustainable pace (read more about the 40 hour week and the need for slack time), a reduction in quality of output leading to additional maintenance or a poor user experience, and more accounting games as iterations lengths or other numbers are “adjusted” to continue the facade of a fixed velocity.

Like most things in an agile process, velocity is one of those metrics that provides another feedback mechanism to help you plan and identify places where you might benefit from change. Use real world numbers to help you, instead of the artificial ones that handcuff you.

BBQ at Bodean’s

Patrick Restaurants, UK Life

London is one of those places where I would not expect to find any BBQ cooking, not withstanding any of those American chains that serve an average affair. After a bit of research I uncovered a few little gems and so, this weekend, I went to Bodean’s BBQ in Soho for lunch.

As you walk in the door, their ground floor does not appear like your typical London restaurant, with the long tables surrounded by rotating high chairs and retro diner-like decorations making it feel like a casual American diner. Downstairs holds more table seating and they serve food with proper table services, opposed to the cafeteria and take away style upstairs. A number of TVs show American basketball and NHL most days and the rest of the décor, though not fancy, is extremely well suited for this place.

The food on offer is what you would expect for a BBQ smoke house restaurant including BBQ baby back ribs, pork spare ribs, beef back ribs, BBQ chicken, Jamaican Jerk Chicken, Pulled Pork and Beef Brisket. They also serve a number of other American foods like Buffalo Wings and Clam Chowder. I ordered the half slab of baby back ribs that were both deliciously tender and quite filling. The best thing about this restaurant is their own brand of hickory smoked BBQ sauce, with each table equipped with at least one bottle for easy access.

Details: Bodean’s BBQ Smoke House
Found on: 10 Poland Street/16 D’Arblay Street, London, W1F 8PZ (Soho) and 169 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7SS (Clapham)
Contactable on: 020 287 0506 (Soho) 020 7622 4248 (Clapham)
Highlights: Good place for American ribs and their distinctly branded BBQ sauce
The Kua Rating: 7.5 out of 10