I went to Fernando's stag night on Friday. Had a great time - I ended up smuggling them all into my local for a last beer or two just after midnight, just after we shouldn't really have been allowed in - thanks, Andy!

Fernando and Helen got married on Saturday morning, the day after the stag and hen nights. I hope it went well - I know I was feeling a bit dodgy on Saturday morning - but then I did have to get up before seven.

Fernando's a real gent. He's working in Paris at the moment, and he bought me a present - a copy of the live Camille album that I've not been able to get a hold of in the UK, Live au Trianon.

It's really fabulous. If you've not heard Camille, run, don't walk to your nearest record shop and pick up something - La Fil seems to be available in loads of places. I promise you, she's like nothing you've ever heard. And the fact that I don't understand a word of the lyrics seems to make it even better - it's a pure musical experience.

The French can't make good popular music, you say? Give her a try, trust me. I bought about half a dozen of her CDs as Christmas presents this year.

There's a downside, though. If there's one thing I hate more than copy protection, it's incompetent copy protection. I can't listen to the CD itself on my CD player - it sounds awful, clicks every few seconds. But I had no problem ripping the CD to iTunes, and burning myself a new copy that plays fine. What's the point of that?

Updated: It was Friday night, not Saturday night. Doh!

I was only in the ThoughtWorks office for a day - I started at my first client on day two. No faffing around!

I'm now working at a large media company, the name of which would be quite familiar to anyone in the UK. No, it's not The Mail. ;-) The system I'm working on is basically the mother of all web CMSs. Makes a nice change from all the financial systems I've worked on for the last, err, twenty odd years, God help me.

Nice to work on a really big system, too. They need to serve at least 250 complex pages per second, sustained. I'm sure I'll learn a huge amount about scaling.

There's a lot of other stuff that's new to me, too. They pair all the time. On my first day, I knocked up a simple path manipulation method or two on my own one lunchtime, and when I mentioned it, they looked at me as if I'd just admitted a taste for necrophilia. I shan't be doing that again. More on pairing later - it's a big subject.

Iterations are only a week long, and with a largish (40+) team, it'll be interesting to see how that works. I've not really seen the whole system in operation yet - there was an implementation last week, which I gather threw things off a bit, and I had a half day at the end of last week's delivery.

With that size of team, big scrum style meeting are obviously out of the question, but there's a whole team stand-up at ten each day, at which you only speak if you have something to say that everyone needs to hear, followed by a more scrum like sub-team meeting. I'm in the pink team - very metrosexual. Each sub-team has its own dedicated business analyst and QA person. No more writing my own Selenium tests!

They - they, err, sorry, we, do just about all project management using index cards - no XPlanner or the like. Hope not too many get lost! They only software system the developers have is an ill-used Wiki.

Hours are ten 'till six, which is strange to me, but perfectly normal in the newspaper game, I'm told. Margo would love it!

The tool in use are mostly things I'm pretty familiar with - Java, Eclipse, Subversion, Spring, Hibernate, jUnit, the usual suspects. We use Velocity for templating, though, and Oracle as a back end, so there's techie stuff to learn.

No Python - yet. ;-)

All the development boxes are Windows, I'm afraid, though people are able to build the system on their Macs and Linux boxen.

Good news is I have a Notes client for my Mac now. It's still horrid, but at least I can leave the Dell brick at home.

I don't have a desk of my own, which I really don't like much, but that's life as a hired gun, I suppose.

Oh - and they have a nice, healthy canteen, so I hope my dietary habits will improve a bit.

Last thing - I'm off for "Immersion Training" in May - two weeks in Bangalore. Should be a blast.

Err, that's it. ;-)

Very busy with induction stuff today. I needed to get it all sorted, 'cos I start on a client site tomorrow! They don't hang about.

They've given me a horrid brick of a Dell to use. Well, to be fair, pre-Mac, I would have thought it was fine. But once you've experienced Mac, nothing else compares... And I have about a squillion user IDs to remember.

Everyone seems friendly, which is more than can be said for Lotus Notes...

It's my last day at work today, and look, how sweet, they baked me a cake.

This afternoon and evening are going to be brutal. I was out 'till three drinking Red Stripe last night, so I'm going to have to start off gently...

ThoughtWorks on Monday...

Update: I also got a very nice lens, and a less nice hangover.

And while we are talking about Margo, welcome to the blogsphere! What does Iksha mean?

Most of the bits of kit on my desk are now decorated with post-it notes. Matt's having my chair when I leave, being the only non-midget in the company. Steve A's getting roadkill. Margo's the worst, getting in first requisitioning my 21", 1600 by 1200 monitor before anyone else, and grabbing the stand it's on. And my scissors. She's even after my scissors.

There have even been attempts to nab stuff that's mine. Neil's been nosing around my USB drive. Margo has even tried to get my Homer figure, and I'm expecting a post-it on dawkins any time now. They had better not try anything, that's all I'm saying.

Picking over the bones, and I'm not even gone yet. Sigh.

BTW, my leaving do is next Friday. All welcome. Well, all non-teetotallers, that is.

My new baby, now christened "dawkins", has arrived. It's lovely.

The Great Firewall of China test. Are you blocked? I seem to be, though strangely Mum isn't, in spite of her not infrequent mentions of what's going on in Tibet. She'll be spitting. In a tranquil, Buddhist sort of a way, that is,naturally. ;-)

Via Katherine.