Headphones

Note to self (soon to be forgotten) : leave the headphones in the bloody bag pocket next time. One day I’ll get more organised – and part of this will involve the common sense move of leaving headphones in my bag. Otherwise I get what happened last night/today, that the ones I was using will have mysteriously moved (I’m reckoning it was probably when I tidied up on Wednesday) to somewhere “safe” (for which read “un-fucking-traceable”) and the other pairs have all disappeared too. Not that they were that good, but it’s just very bloody annoying.

Well, I’ve got another pair. My journey to Middlesbrough will now have music, thanks to the joys of laptops, MP3 files, and – yes – headphones. These ones have a nice little plastic case too, so it shouldn’t be rocket science to keep them in their rightful place. However, knowing me, expect a similar post next Friday…

Ouch

Maybe it’s just because I’m tired and my eyes feel like they’ve got grit in them, but this story has made me wince. Lots.

Presentations

Two down, one to go. DiamondGeezer’s post today shows that he’s having a similar set of problems. Thanks, DG, it’s made me chuckle.

Bias by any other name

In work today, an email has been circulated by the head honcho. There’s a form being distributed asking for each employee of the council to record their personal details (address, ethnicity, blah, blah, blah) as allegedly the HR department (AKA “that bunch of useless twadges”) doesn’t have them recorded.

One part of the missive from upon-high is this

Collecting this information is important for other reasons. For example, the government have set targets for local authorities to achieve on the percentage of ethnic minority staff employed by local authorities compared with the local population. At the moment, we do not have all this information on our workforce and if we are to meet government targets, we need a system in place to collect and monitor it.

Now, to my mind that’s just Inverted Racism. The government issues targets, which should be adhered to. So what happens when – as I suspect – the council discovers it’s ‘below target’ for some ethnicities? Do we see a situation where a less-qualified person gets the job so that the “ethnic diversity” boxes can be ticked?

I thought/hoped we’d got past all this shit when we entered the 21st century. Obviously I was wrong. To my mind, people should be employed on their attributes, their skills, their job history – not because of their gender, ethnicity, religious preference, sexuality, or any of the other politically correct stereotypes. Is that too much to ask for? I feel the same about the forms that circulate with every job application now, requesting that you detail ethnic background etc. Frankly, what relevance is it to my application whether I come from Africa, Asia, America, Australia, or Europe? What does it show? Surely it’s better to simply take people on because of their application, not in order to fill in a little tick-box to show how ethnically diverse the company is.

UPDATED : As she says in the comments, Gert has added her own piece here in response to this post. Thought-provoking, definitely.

Gary Jules – Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets

In a fit of bandwagon-jumping on a par with the media’s new-found love of Jordan following I’m a non-entity, I’ll be seeing Gary Jules in concert next Thursday. Anyway, it occurred to me that I really should know more of his recordings than just “Mad World”, so I got a copy of the album “Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets”.

And I have to say, it’s actually not bad. His voice is very reminiscent of Cat Stevens Yusuf Islam throughout – for me that’s no bad thing, but other people may disagree. Not a bad album – but also nothing else on the album is even vaguely reminiscent of Mad World, which seems slightly strange.

FirebirdFox (again)

I take it all back – FireFox is now running at a decent speed again. I’ll blame the spunk-twadges of Dell instead of those at Mozilla.

Additions

The observant among you will notice another addition to the sidebar over there >> . Mozilla’s FirebirdFox version 0.8 has now been released, and I’m using it. It’s still one of the better browsers on the market for the geeky among us. However, it does seem to have slowed down a bit since Firebird 0.6. Still, maybe that’s just me being picky.

And it’s better than what I’ve spent my morning doing. The first of three presentations about which Content Management System the council really really wants. The first one used MS Word® to enter the content, and doesn’t appear to be overly keen on anything other than IE as a browser – their main sales/developer geek went white when I mentioned Opera…

Even better, we’ve got Stellent at some point this week. I’ve got my sharpened shitty stick primed and ready for action. Imagine my joy.