Posted: Sat 15 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Animals, Cynicism |
How unimaginative do you have to be, to call your two Dalmatian dogs Pongo and Perdita?
I saw a couple in the park this morning while walking Hound (which is her nom de blog, rather than demonstrating a lack of imagination) who had done exactly that…
Posted: Fri 14 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Depression, Own Business, Thoughts, Work-related |
There are some time periods where I really do love working on websites, and getting everything together in the way it should be. Sometimes those time periods are months, sometimes they’re only weeks, days, or even hours.
Currently I’m not getting any of them at all. The combination of the current “proper” workplace (which uses one of the loosest definitions of the word “proper” yet known to man) and the current set of external clients has conspired to bring me to a point where, frankly, I fucking hate what I’m doing.
No, I guess that’s not fair. I still enjoy hacking about with sites, HTML, CSS, databases, SQL, and all that crap. I do enjoy – even love – doing that. I know, I know, that’s incredibly sad. Don’t knock it.
However, the people described above are conspiring to make me hate the work side, the people I work for, and bosses in general. That’s not really anything new, if I’m honest.
But all the same, right now, when I’m looking at a weekend of shit work, because some fucking idiot who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and has brought their site launch forwards by two fucking months, and when the crap is at least neck-high (and rising) at work, and it just makes me want to jack it all in and say “Screw it”. I don’t tell them how to design a fucking house, yet they seem to see no problem in telling me how to build a website.
In fact, in my lunch-hour today I was doing a lot of thinking, and I’m pretty sure that the next job I get is going to be one where it all either works out and comes together, or I have to look at either a) going back to being self-employed (although that still leaves the issue of fuckwit cunt clients) or b) going for a complete career change – perhaps still doing my own websites like Wheres Good on the side, in my own time, but not actually working on websites full time at all.
And to be honest, I’m not exactly happy about being pushed into a position where that seems like a smart way of developing myself.
Posted: Fri 14 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts, Weirdness, Work-related |
OK, you have an ex-SysAdmin who has been fired, told he’s a useless cunt (in exactly those terms) and who you’ve now re-hired as a consultant to take you through the period where you don’t actually have a SysAdmin.
In the meantime, you want to take the site that SysAdmin wrote, and give it a new look – effectively, redesign it, but without changing any of the underlying functionality. It’s purely cosmetic, a “changing of the guard” type thing. The redesign is seen, company-wide, as being pointless, and a waste of time/effort, as the next big job is – um – rewriting the underlying structure of the entire site, as it’s currently a nightmare. However, this will take about three months. So first you want to do the redesign, before going and doing the serious work. Bear in mind, the redesign will take at least a month.
While this SysAdmin is back on contract, you plan to tell him to impelement the redesign of a site – the site he wrote single-handedly, over five years – and bear in mind, this site redesign is the main reason that the conflict arose in the first place. SysAdmin doesn’t agree with the redesign (and has been exceedingly vocal about it), thinks it’s being done for the wrong reasons (it is and that the necessary time to do it could be better spent elsewhere. (it could) And you’re going to insist that SysAdmin tests it all, and makes sure it doesn’t conflict with any of the parallel sites that all run off the same basic underlying code and templates.
Hmmm, why do I suspect that this site redesign is going to be an utter nightmare?
Posted: Tue 11 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Thoughts |
You know one of the most depressing things around? Getting quotes for car insurance.
Up ’til now, I’ve been a named driver on Herself’s car insurance – it makes a lot more sense for the first year of driving, as that’s when insurers add on an arbitrary amount, just for having passed the test. Of course, the downside is that after a year’s driving, I still have no No Claims Bonus. Ah well.
Anyway, once we’ve moved – as and when it happens – to Norfolk, it’s most likely going to mean that we need two cars, which’ll mean the current one becomes mine, and another (smaller) one becomes Herself’s. And that means I’ve got to sort out insurance on the current one. So I’ve been getting quotes.
So far, MoreThan will cost me £646 , or £57 per month, and DirectLine will cost me £690, or £57 per month. (No, I haven’t quite worked that out either – I probably mis-read something)
Then I went to Norwich Union, just for a laugh. Their “Quote Me Happy” campaign has been laughably bad, and I know when I was looking for house insurance they were awesomely high – in fact, about twice the price of anyone else. So OK, same details, and *quote* – fucking sweet Jesus H Christ on a smelly warped pine crutch – £1532, or £140 per month?!?!?
Quote me fucking incredulous, more like. Now I can see why all the people in the adverts piss themselves laughing when they get their quote…
Posted: Fri 7 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, Work-related |
Ah, fantastic.
Arsehole Boss has organised a change of mail servers for the company, moving it all to a new server with a new hosting company. (well, with the hosting company we picked a while back, but hadn’t moved things like mail servers to yet)
No warnings, no information, just a call to say “It’s been moved”. At 4pm on a Friday.
However, as most people use IMAP instead of POP3, (Yours Truly being an exception to the rule) it means that most people’s mail records were held on the server. Which has moved. And not been backed up.
90% of the office has now lost all their mail records for up to the last eighteen months. All the mailing lists, auto-responders, mail groups, and forwarding etc has been deleted, with no real records of what points where, or why. In short, everything’s gone (unless you kept regular local backups, which of course 90% of people didn’t)
Arsehole Boss was warned repeatedly by ex-SysAdmin that this would be an issue, but of course AB knew better… And the chances of recovering any of that mail archive? Pretty much minimal, as only ex-SysAdmin has access to any of the backup data. Do we have passwords to get to it? Do we fuck-as-like.
All together now…
Oh, what a beautiful morning
Oh what a wonderful day…
Posted: Fri 7 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, News, Thoughts |
OK, first of all, I’m not saying any of what follows to be denigrating to the people who did suffer in the suicide bombings on July 7th last year. I just want to make that absolutely clear.
However, how does huge media coverage of the memorial events make any difference? And why are we all being pushed into a 2 minute “memorial” silence for it? I don’t have a problem with the various news services showing the memorial events – personally, I think they should be private, for people who were involved and affected by the events, rather than this Diana-esque national outpouring of faux grief, but that’s my view – but I don’t see why entire breakfast programmes and so on had to cover the subject.
Maybe it’s just me, but the BBC and ITV programmes this morning seemed to be glorifying the acts of terrorism – and wasn’t that supposed to be becoming a criminal act? The BBC bleated on earlier this week about how a survey said that 13% of those surveyed thought the bombers were “martyrs” for “the cause”, yet now they’re going through the events in detail, showing how badly everything was affected. Is that not making the bombers, the causes of these events, into – to some minds at least – heroes?
I realise that the London bombs affected a lot of people, and I agree that there should be memorial services, events and the like. Should they be made national, with things like the 2 minute silence? Probably not. Should the memorial services be televised, with people’s grief and memories of the events made public, made into just so many more 3-minute filler items? No.
And how do the people who were involved feel? Surely these news reports, with video footage of the events, just brings it all back to life for them?
I don’t know. I don’t know anyone who was affected by the London bombings. I can’t speak from experience. What I do know is that the media coverage just leaves a really nasty taste in the mouth.
Posted: Thu 6 July, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts, Work-related |
OK, here’s a simple one…
If you were applying for a job as a web developer, and you included a couple of sites you’ve worked on as showcase URLs for what you could do, wouldn’t you make sure that they were actually working? And not just a “new website coming soon” page?
Or is that just me?