Posted: Wed 11 July, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Getting Organised, Introspective, Photography |
Of late, I’ve been updating my photography portfolio site with more photos, and also looking at what the next stage should be, what I should be doing next. On that score, I’ve now got some ideas, and I’ll be aiming to start putting them in action over the next month or two.
When I look at the portfolio site, though, I still wonder whether I should add a photoblog or not. At the moment, I know I couldn’t add a new photo every day in the same way that Chromasia or DDOI do. But then maybe if I had the incentive to do so, I would.
At the same time, though, I wonder if a photoblog is what I actually want. It’s a portfolio, at the end of the day – do I want to then be adding in regular images to a different section? Particularly if they’re done on a regular basis, and thus perhaps not up to the level where I want the site to be? That’s my problem – as yet I still don’t know. Of course, the easy answer is that if I don’t know, then I’m not yet ready to do it, and that’s fine with me as well. Maybe it’s just something I need to think about for the future.
As it is, the front page of the site updates the main image every time the page reloads. Maybe for now that’s enough…
Posted: Sun 17 June, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Introspective, Thoughts, Work-related |
Recently, I’ve been talking to some colleagues and so on about personality types, and the like. (And yes, this is – to some degree or other- also linked in to the stuff a while back about Belbin, personality profiles, and so on) In some ways it’s related to current work situations, which I may or may not blether on about at some other point.
Anyway, I’ve always figured that there were really only two types of people around, when it comes to work. Actually, it’s probably a Venn diagram, where there’s some people who fall into a nice intersection of the two – although I’ve only met a couple of those, and I’m certainly not one of them. But so far as I see it, most people fall into one of two groups- Talkers and Doers. (Or, in Geek, Doer and !Doer)
Me, I’m a Doer. I’ve never been in doubt about it – while it might take me some time (for reasons previously discussed at length) to get interested, or to build up the impetus, when I get going on something, I get it done. That’s something that’s obvious to anyone who works with me- set me a task, and it’ll get done.
Talkers, on the other hand, plan things out, talk about project plans, put in policies and procedures everywhere, constantly complain about how busy they are, yet they never seem to really get anywhere, or produce anything – well, except for whole rainforests of paperwork.
In fairness, I don’t think there are actually many Pure Talkers or Doers. In my own work, yes, I put in a rough plan of what I intend to do in a certain timescale, and will talk to people about how their idea will come into reality. But that’s all I need.
Currently, I’m working in a team where the split is probably 2:1 between Talkers and Doers. Not ideal. And the Talkers are currently wanting to replace even more Doers with Talkers. No-one seems to have yet thought ‘well, if we get two project managers at the cost of two developers, who’s actually going to make the site?’ In some ways it’s actually quite amusing to see this process happen, where the Talkers always assume someone else will be doing the actual site, but without taking into account who that will be.
Posted: Wed 23 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Introspective, Thoughts, Work-related |
As I was saying yesterday, currently I’m slightly swamped with work, but at the same time I’m finding myself a bit disinterested in at least one major dollop of the stuff I’m currently involved with. It’s not a great combination really, is it?
And of course that conflict has raised up some interesting issues for me, and some analysis of my working preferences. Hence the title.
In my normal job at the moment, I’m (finally) getting some interesting stuff to do, bringing the site into the 20th century, adding in some database-driven functionality, making it more dynamic (in the context of using server-side stuff to generate the pages, and do it smoothly and consistently) and generally letting my brain work on some groovy stuff that they want/need. In short, for me, it’s fun.
In the other big piece of work, I’ve got to adapt an existing piece of software to the client’s requirements- they’ve paid for the software already, and while it’s OK for their needs, it doesn’t do all the bits that they want it to over the next few months. So I get to figure out how/why it works, and extend things. OK, not so bad, all things considered.
Except that well, it’s boring. While integrating new bits into this site software is a challenge, and will provide a lot of work, most of that is because the way it’s currently written is fucking shocking. It’s got some major issues -things like templating classes being used for no good reason (and I must admit, personally I loathe templating classes in most circumstances) which just make the site overly complex – and run like a three-legged arthritic dog with piles. As for amending it or extending the functionality, well, good fucking luck.
More importantly, though (and something I only discovered today) is that this site software has some major security issues. Techies will know what I mean (and pull agonised faces) when I say that the site is hyper-prone to SQL Injection attacks. And this is a company that’s expecting the site to hold data on upwards of 50,000 people. Believe me, it’s a major worry, and one that can’t be easily fixed without even more rewrites of the entire thing.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I’m coming to the conclusion that actually, I really don’t like going through other people’s code and trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking. I know that in the time it’s taking me to figure this stuff out, I could be writing something from scratch that’d do the job properly, rather than trying to force someone else’s software to do the same thing, only less well.
I can’t deny it, I’m bored. I’m uninspired by the entire analyse/adapt process, and I’d rather just get on with writing my own version. I enjoy writing new stuff, figuring out problems, getting things working. I hate fixing challenges when they’re caused by someone else writing abysmal code – and getting paid for it.
I think that’s what really gets to me. The creators have been paid for this piece of crap, and have probably swanned off and sold it to a number of other places too. And while it works, it really is a heap of cack when it comes to doing anything else with it. Maybe I need to write my own version and try selling that in competition with the existing product.
Then at least some other techie could look at my stuff and swear at it before writing their own version.
Posted: Tue 22 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Introspective, Own Business, Work-related |
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been having a bit of a crisis with regard to my workload, among other things. If I’m honest, a lot of it is down to the fact that- at the moment, at least- I have to admit that I’ve taken on too much at once. As well as the normal day-to-day work, I’ve also got one big project on the side, as well as a couple of smaller ones on the back-burner. (Although that still means they’re in my head, and need to get done) Additionally, there’s one new one where I really need to talk about it a bit with some other people. Oh, and of course there’s also all the stuff around moving house. Not much on at all then.
In fact, if I just listed the stuff I’m getting paid for at the moment, it’s still working 7½ working days per week. Not one of my saner moments, admittedly.
Fortunately, the big project has a first deadline of the end of June, and everything should still be OK for that – it’s just that a couple of the steps along the way have sort of slipped a bit. There’s some reasons for it (and I’ll probably write a bit more about those later) but mainly it’s because I just can’t at the moment motivate myself to go ferreting through bizarrely-written databases. Particularly when they’ve been done in SQL Server, rather than anything decent.
But at the moment, well yes, I’m just feeling a little bit stressed about the entire thing, and not really having all that much fun. It’ll sort itself out, I know – and fairly soon now – but all the same, right now it’s a bit more chaotic and pressured than I’d prefer.
On the other hand, well, maybe I’ll learn something from this. (Although I kind of doubt it, somehow)
Posted: Wed 9 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Introspective, Thoughts, Work-related |
You can tell when colleagues respect your independence and/or silence about workplace matters – and, of course, the fact that things told in confidence stay in confidence – when they give you a copy of their CV to review and edit it so it looks better and makes sense.
It’s no bad thing, to be honest, and I do take it as one hell of a compliment to be trusted with things like that. Quite honestly, it’s pretty cool.
And then some other people think I’m hard to get on with. Can’t imagine what would give them that impression. *cough*
Posted: Sat 5 May, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Introspective, Thoughts |
In general, I seem to be quite happy with a fairly chaotic life. I’ve never really done the entire ‘career path’ thing – and if pushed I’d probably still stick with the definition of ‘career’ as ‘to ricochet wildly from place to place’ instead of the more standard ‘job progression’ definition.
However, in other ways I have put a lot of routine into my life. There’s a good reason for this, which I’ll get to in a minute, but I am aware that in many ways my days are quite routine when seen in the context of someone who professes to prefer a chaotic life. In fact, in general you can predict the rough outline of my days quite easily – when I’m likely to get up, what my morning activities will be, where I’ll go for lunch, that kind of thing. It’s not to any serious OCD-like level, but yeah, there’s a definite schedule to a fair amount of what I do.
Actually, there’s two primary reasons, if I think about it. First is that human life doesn’t really manage all that well when faced with a truly random lifestyle. The brain likes a routine, for whatever reason. And a ‘normal’ working life also imposes on that routine – the train timetable, the working hours, the 7½hour working day, they all combine to make a routine for a major portion of the day.
The second reason is rather more personal – if I have a sketched-out routine, I can deal with it even when my brain isn’t working at full power. And in the days where I was suffering from really serious insomnia, it was a good bet than when I was awake, I wasn’t operating on anywhere near full power. Hell, it would’ve needed passport control to even get into the same country as full power. So a routine allowed me to operate on what could be fairly termed as ‘autopilot’ – and operate fairly well. Most of the time, unless I was working on far too long with minimal sleep, moost people probably didn’t even realise how badly sleep-stumped I was.
Now though, I seem to be doing a bit better for sleep. Or at least it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be. It’s still incredibly disturbed, and so shallow that even Hound walking around will wake me up, but it’s better than it ever used to be. And the routine is still there – I’m not as sure why, now, except that it’s just ingrained into my subconscious.
Posted: Sun 8 April, 2007 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Introspective, Own Business, Photography, Thoughts, Work-related, Writing |
One of the classic childhood questions is “What do you want to be when you grow up?“. It’s something I still ask myself with depressing regularity.
As it is, I’m fortunate enough to be in a role I actually enjoy – by which I mean the website writing, database guff etc., rather than ‘the role/company I’m in is the one I’m going to stay with forever’ – and which I do in my spare time as well as in a full-time job. Yes, I would prefer to be chainging it slightly, and be working more for myself instead of in the more corporate environs, but that’s something I’ll work on now that other parts of life are rather more settled.
But there are other things hovering on the periphery, too.
In many ways I would love to be a writer – I think that’s probably the same for most bloggers, to be honest – although d4d™ would never get a book deal. I’m at least vaguely realistic on that – d4d™ is too scattered, it doesn’t really have a defined theme. I’m not knocking those bloggers who have managed to get book deals (well, except for Belle Du Jour, but I never read that one in the first place, and never really understood the hype around it, if I’m honest) and I think people like Scary, Reynolds, Girl, and Waiter Rant absolutely deserve to get those deals. But they all have a theme, and I know d4d™ doesn’t. Then again, it was never intended to. And in many ways it actually emulates my head far too accurately.
All the same, yes, being a writer is something of a dream. It’s something I’m going to work on and attempt to get back into- years ago I wrote two novel-length things, both of which I still have copies of (and, to some degree, cringe now when I re-read them) but they worked. They were more catharsis, and dealing with shit that was in my head and life at the time, and since they’ve been completed, a lot of those issues have been dealt with, so over recent years there just hasn’t been that need to write in the same way. Well, I say that – but then I look at d4d™, and wonder if actually what I need is to take a break from that, and channel the writing energy that goes into d4d™ into something else for a while. But that’s a while off yet – there’s other things in the mental flightplan first.
The other real thing that keeps coming back to me, though, is photography. I’d love to be a photographer, to be able to make a living from that. Again, I need to work on it a lot, and to develop some themes that I can build on. Again, the ideas are there, and in this case the projects I’m thinking of would be longer-term ideas, projects with a theme that would also (I think) be commercially viable.
There’s a couple of others that’d be nice to do to, but that rely on skills I simply don’t have – I’d love to be an artist, or something of that ilk, but absolutely lack the ability to draw anything – but when all’s said and done, it comes down to three or four things, or any combination of them, really. And really in no particular order.
- Properly Self-employed
- Photographer
- Writer
- Web Developer