Where Not To Stay

Posted: Sat 17 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Advertising, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Bah, HumbugLast week I got an email from Travelodge about a promotion they’re running.

Basically, it’s a heavily discounted rate on their rooms over the Festering Season, on limited rooms booked for stays between 29th November 2009 and 10th January 2010.

For myself, I’d hate to be in a Travelodge over the Festering Season. While they’re OK for an overnight stay – and even, to some degree or other, for staying in while working away from home – they’re still soul-less holes at best. And to spend time over the Festering Season in one of this sinkpits of despair would, I suspect, be more than I would want to bear.

Then again, I’m probably not the target customer for this kind of thing. I stay in Travelodges when I have to (like the recent contract in London) rather than for leisure/pleasure. Given the choice otherwise, I’d rather stay pretty much anywhere than going to a Travelodge.

Taking a Break

Posted: Fri 16 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Animals, D4D™, Domestic, Travel | Leave a comment »

Today, Herself and I are off down to Berkshire for the weekend. Partly it’s about seeing friends in the area, partly just for a weekend away from the world, and partly just because.

Hound is coming with us and will go off to stay with the people she used to see when we were down there, so she’ll be happy.

Psycho Cat will have the house to himself for the weekend (we’ve got one of the family to pop in for purposes of feeding/watering, and dealing with the chickens) so he’ll be as happy as he ever is – although he’ll also cop a strop when we get home, because we’ve brought Hound back with us.

The Girls won’t care one way or another, so long as they’re let out, fed, watered, get their eggs collected, and get put away at night.

So all told, everyone should be happy.

D4D™, on the other hand, might be a bit quiet. Depends how many things I get to write and set up for future publishing, really.

Site Difficulties

Posted: Thu 15 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™ | 3 Comments »

Some of you may have noticed some problems over the last few days with getting D4D™ to load.

For once, this wasn’t down to me being a fuckwit and messing something up, but instead down to some problems with my hosting company.

Initially they lost all connectivity and everything on them disappeared completely from t’Internet, although that got fixed pretty quickly. When that all got restarted though, it appears that another user of the server cluster D4D™ is on was doing Something Naughty, which led to further outages for D4D™ and some other ones I deal with.

All should be back to normal now, but I thought I’d just post it up in case anyone cared.

Criminal Mastermind

Posted: Wed 14 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Stupidity | Leave a comment »

Some people really are too stupid to live, in my opinion.

In this case, a fugitive fraudster who decided he’d keep on updating his Facebook page and is then amazed when the police catch up with him.

Cameroon-born Maxi Sopo’s messages made it clear he was living the high life in the Mexican resort of Cancun.

He also added a former US justice department official to his friend list who ended up helping to track him down.

The criminal genius at work…

Gagging the Press

Posted: Tue 13 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Media, News | Leave a comment »

While Private Eye covered this in some detail last week, the shit appears to have officially hit the fan today with the Guardian’s announcement that it has been barred from mentioning a certain question to be asked in Parliament this week. From the story…

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The question (according to other sources) is about Trafigura, and their toxic oil dump back in 2007. And this is what it’s all about…

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

It’s all publicly available in this list of Parliamentary questions – which makes the entire media-gagging order look pretty fucking stupid, and more and more as though Trafigura et al. have something to hide. Which is pretty fucking stupid in itself.

New Office

Posted: Tue 13 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Work-related | Leave a comment »

I’m pleased to say that the first day in the new place went OK. It was surprisingly organised – although some of that is due to the fact I’m inheriting a set-up and role from someone else – and everything seems to be pretty much in place.

The working set-up I’ve got is insane (in a good way) in that I’ve now got two computers (a Windows box and a Linux box) to play with, and three widescreen monitors.  I don’t actually need all three, one per computer would be fine, but my predecessor had deemed it essential, so *shrug*, OK.

I’m still getting some bits set up – test servers etc. – but I’m getting there, and we’re doing OK.

In addition I’ve already had the induction gubbins, met the directors, and all that jazz. In my last permanent role, I’d been in the job about four months before we did the full induction thing.

So all told, not a bad start. Be interesting to see how it works out from there/here.

New Job (Blah, Blah)

Posted: Mon 12 October, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Introspective, Thoughts, Work-related | Leave a comment »

As regular readers know, today is the start of the new ‘proper’ job.

As per usual on these things, I’ve no idea whether I’ll be able to write anything here during the day or not. Time will tell on this, as with most things.  I’m given to understand that the first morning is going to be a combination of “Death by Powerpoint” and “Insanity by Paperwork”, so that should be a fun introduction to the place.

I still have my reservations about the entire thing, as my experiences with permanent roles have never been exactly positive. In fact, the one I started roughly this time last year (To be precise, a week tomorrow) was one of the most unremittingly negative experiences of recent years, for a number of reasons that I’ve never got round to writing about. Maybe one day.

So for now, I’m looking at it as being a six-month contract. That gets me through to March/April next year, and I’ll see how it goes. I think that’s the best way for me to handle it at the moment – six month chunks I can deal with, “permanent” still brings me out in the shivers. (And that’s a whole other post too, I know)

But for now, well, once more unto the breech, and all that jazz.

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