Tony Sneed's Blog

Today my son, Kerrigan, turned one year old. And boy, what a year it’s been. Not only for him, but also for me and for my wife Zuzana – for us as a family. We found out February 2005 that Zuzana was pregnant with our first child. I was attending a leaders’ meeting for KJB over in the Czech Republic, so I immediately shared the good news with everyone there, including the founder, Ricardo.

I remember taking our Bradley class the following summer, then the Preparation for Parenting course from GFI. The weeks following the birth were filled with swaddling and shushing. We moved to Slovakia at the end of May, about two months after I left Disney. After spending 3 weeks finding an apartment and another three weeks settling in, we all picked up and flew back to Los Angeles, so I could complete the long-but-worth-the-wait process of actually becoming an instructor for DevelopMentor.

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We like bubbles!

Kerrigan has started crawling (not swimming!) and will celebrate his first birthday on November 6th! Can you believe it’s already been a whole year? Boy, does time fly — we must be having fun!

Just Hanging Out

I’ve “gone dark” on my blog since coming to stay in Thousand Oaks about a month ago, primarily to focus on preparing to teach the Essential .Net 2 course for DevelopMentor. So far the prep has gone well and I’m past the half-way point. There are 14 lessons, and I’ve prepared technical notes, demos and a teaching outline for 8 out of the 14. I’ve also found time to practice-teach the lessons, so I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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Atop Conway Castle with Derek & Verena

After finishing the DevelopMentor Guerilla course in London, I hopped on a plane up to Manchester to visit the parents of my brother Tom’s wife (Sue), Derek and Verena Thomas. What a contrast between the capitol city and the English countryside! Although Sue’s parents live in Preston, they picked me up in Manchester and we proceeded to Grasmere, the place where William Wordsworth did most of his writing. I don’t know about the poetry, but the ice cream there is to die for. We also took a walk around Lake Windermere (to work off the ice cream), and I had my very first glass of Bitter English Ale.

The next day we took quite a drive up to see Conway Castle in the district of Wales – didn’t see Prince Charles though. The castle was enormous, and the wall actually surrounded the entire town there. It was hard imagining the kind of effort it took (and the lives it must have cost) constructing it over 700 years ago. The castle was in great shape, with a very informative display in the chapel describing the role of religion in medieval Great Britain. The only downside was not being able to see it all with Zuzana and Keri. But I promised to being them with me the next time we come to visit. Besides, I’ll need some help with the wonderful meals prepared by Sue’s Mom (or Mum as they say). I did manage to bring back some English cheese, tea, porridge oats and bacon. There were a lot of things I discovered that we Americans borrowed (or stole) from the British. It was sure nice leaning how it’s done properly and getting back in touch with my English roots – the name “Sneed” is actually old English for “scythe,” which explains what my ancestors used to do for a living J.

Who Invented the Internet?

I’ve just finished my very first DevelopMentor Guerilla course – what a blast! I’m now one step closer to realizing my goal of becoming a DM instructor. There are still more steps to complete, but I think I’m well on my way. The last step, of course, will be to do the actual course preparation, but I’m in the process and have completed technical notes and demos for 4 out of 14 lessons. It should take me just a couple of months more to finish.

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I suppose it’s always been kind of a dream of mine to teach software developers (at least since I started writing software back in 1994), spending the rest of my time delving into the technology and tinkering with some of its more esoteric aspects. After all, software development is pretty much a glorified hobby, at least to me. It just so happens I also get paid to do it, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Alien Coder Lands in London

The problem is, working in the real world tends to make you somewhat lopsided in your grasp of the overall technical landscape. Inevitably, the tasks of the current project are usually focused on one particular side of things, like writing code to access the database from the middle tier, or fleshing out a user interface for the client app. Sometimes you do end up doing the whole kit and caboodle. But more often than not, especially in a team environment, you specialize in one or two aspects of the development lifecycle. That can lead to getting very strong in some areas, but staying rather weak in others.

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I’m now sitting in the Prague Airport waiting to catch a flight to London to sit through DevelopMentor’s week-long course, Guerilla Essential .Net 2.0. I haven’t got much time before the plane boards, but I thought I would take the opportunity at least to start this blog, seeing it’s been a couple weeks since my last post and a lot has happened since then.

First of all, we just returned from a week-long visit to Zuzana’s family in the middle of Slovakia. Her parents live in what is probably the third largest city in Slovakia (next to Bratislava and KoÅ¡ice), called Banska Bystrica. That said, its population is less than 300,000 (the size of a small suburb in Los Angeles), and it retains quite a bit of old fashioned charm, with many of the blocks of flats painted in bright colors.

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In case you haven’t heard by now, Skype is a service that, like MSN Messenger and others, lets you make free voice and video calls over the Internet, provided people on both ends of the conversation have installed Skype and a microphone with speakers and/or headset. To make video calls you need some sort of web cam.

Click to go to Skype

What sets Skype apart from the other Internet telephony services is the clarity of the signal and the additional services it provides. For 2 cents per minute you can call any telephone in the US. For about 6 cents per minute you can all land and mobile phones all over the world. This service is called “Skype-Out” and is so inexpensive that I use it to make local telephone calls within the city of KoÅ¡ice, Slovakia, where I live. It ends up costing about a third as much as a traditional phone call here. (Unlike America, local calls are not free – they cost on average of 20 cents per minute.)

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