Things have been a bit quiet here of late, mainly because I’m snowed in work time with one big project that’s dealing with a metric fuckload of data coming in by XML. It’s aq nightmare in many ways – and also decidedly scary because of the sheer amount of personal data involved in each record.
Additionally, the company that we’re connecting with are – to be polite – not all that helpful. I got to see their documentation before we started the project, and that looked OK. However, the documented examples don’t actually match up in any useful recognisable form with what we’re getting out of the process.
During this week, among other things, the company has realised that the documentation they sent us initially was out of date – two versions out of date, no less. So they said they’d send the latest/greatest version. And then sent the self-same two-versions-out-of-date documents. The file actually has the version number on it, so it’s not (or at least you wouldn’t have thought it was) rocket science in the least to be able to send the correct documentation.
Once we’d got the up-to-date documentation, I queried the data coming back from the company, as it didn’t match the examples given. Oh yes, I was told, “We can’t put in examples for everything.“. Yes, you can – particularly when it’s what your customers are using to develop their interactions with. Random data format changes aren’t helpful either – “We’ve stopped sending the numbers with four decimal places – yes, we know our documentation says we do this, but we don’t any more”
As you can imagine, it’s making life pretty difficult. There’s a lot to do still, and I can’t rely on the information from the original company. Always a joy.
Last night I had to do a late(ish) night drive – a delivery from Herself to some friends who are testing out some of her cake recipes. (Don’t ask) They’re in a village the other side of Dereham from us, and a drive of about 20-ish miles. Not much, but enough. Because the roads are seriously winding, the AA route finder estimates that the journey takes 57 minutes. For 20 miles. No idea how they work that one out, it as it’d mean (hey, no shit Sherlock) an average speed of 20mph. Suffice to say, I wasn’t driving at 20mph…
Running late, Herself had said she’d be there by 10pm, and I didn’t leave the house ’til 9.45pm. I volunteered to do the drive/delivery, as I knew I’d be faster than Herself, but also that if Herself came with me I’d knock her sick, as she doesn’t travel well…
In the end the delivery was made at 10.10pm. 25 minutes to do 20miles. That’s quite a lot faster than the AA’s expectation then.
I love night-driving – in fact it’s probably one of my favourite aspects of driving. There are bits that are dodgy about it for sure- and night-driving in snow or fog is no fucking fun whatsoever. Well it is, just in different, and not entirely positive ways – it certainly highlights both how stupid other people are, and how easy it is to zomb out in those situations. But anyway, night-driving in general is just fun – in my opinion, anyway.
Strangely I tend to drive faster at night where possible – I think it’s because you can effectively see round corners a bit, in that you can see approaching headlights a significant time before you can see a car. In daylight you’re reliant on line-of-sight a lot more, but at night there’s a bit of advance warning. Of course, I could still come a cropper with animals in the road, or some twerd driving without lights, or a stopped car by the side of the road round a blind corner. Or something.
All told, I made it both ways in one hour dead – including conversation time at the delivery point. And thoroughly enjoyed the drive – particularly with it being soundtracked by the new Massive Attack album, “Heligoland”. Excellent stuff.
Just a short filler, this – but YouTube’s chief counsel has written a post about YouTube’s current battle with Viacom about hosting ‘illegal’ videos.
The best bit is this :
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
That’s pretty stunning, however you look at it.
Over the last two days there’ve been two news stories about some truly incredibly bad driving – they really do have to be seen to be believed.
First there’s the story of the person caught driving to the garage – with their bonnet up in front of the windscreen. How they were able to see at all is beyond me.
And then there’s the one (with video footage) of the truck driver pushing a car along the motorway. Not just pushing – the car is sideways-on, and the entire thing is happening in the outside lane. I didn’t think truck drivers were even allowed to use the outside lane…
Gob-smacking.
At work, one of the sites is called – for want of a better name – Money Manager. (That’s not the real name of it, for obvious reasons. But related, in one way or another.) It’s the brainchild – and to some degrees the baby – of one of the directors. His idea, his name, his plan, his approval throughout.
Ever since it was first created, it’s been in my head as Monkey Manager. The scripts for backing it up are called monkeybackup, the database is monkeyDB, so on so forth.
The rest of the web team have also taken to calling it Monkey Manager. No good reason, it’s just catchier and/or easier to remember than Money Manager.
Yesterday, in a “what we’ve been working on this week” email to all the directors, I referred to the site as Monkey Manager. Not once, but three damn times. I didn’t even realise until I re-read the email at work this morning.
No-one’s said anything yet. I don’t know if they will. But all the same, the first reaction from me (and, to be fair, my colleagues) was “You fuckwit.”
Can’t say fairer than that, really.
A few days ago I noticed that a certain hate-filled hypocritical shitrag had a big story about how shocking the latest Lady Gaga video is. And then goes on to have screenshots in the story of all the pieces of the video for Telephone that people should be shocked or offended by.
Anyway, now it’s time to make your own mind up, as the video for Telephone is available online. Choose for yourself, not based on what the hate-rag says.
Well OK, I’ve had the car for three years today, but it’s actually six years old.
In the time since I bought it, I’ve doubled the mileage on it (57,000 to 114,000) which means I’ve averaged 19,000 miles a year in the damn thing. Thank God last year was a lower-mileage year, or I’d be well over the 20,000 per year. At the moment I’m doing about 350-400 miles a week in it, which is going to break out to be about the same again this coming year.
In that time I’ve had one serious clonk (December ‘09 with the fence) and three lesser ones (two involving deer, one just a smashed door mirror) as well as a range of scrapes that got documented a while back, although they’re all gone now thanks to the bodyshop farce after the December ‘09 crunch.
Somehow I’ve managed to not get any points on my licence – not even ones for speeding, which is nothing short of miraculous – and I’ve done well.
The only downside is that I’m back to square one with the insurance, having lost my two years of no-claims back in December. Ah well. Swings and roundabouts, and all that.
I don’t know how much longer the Mondeo will go for – it’s started having issues and needing work, as I mentioned when it got the MOT last week. But I’ll keep it ’til it becomes either too expensive or too much of a pain in the arse.
