Working Week

Posted: Fri 28 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Getting Organised, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

A display of the way the company “works”…

  • Monday : According to company lore, we’re moving offices in a week’s time to London. Three new people – two developers (one web dev, one application dev), one admin-type techie- start work in the current office, all on the understanding that we’re moving to London. All three live in London, and two have just moved to London primarily because of the new job.
  • Tuesday : As described here, it’s a U-turn, and all of a sudden the web development teams are staying in the current office, while everyone else moves to London.
  • Wednesday : All change again – the web development team are going to be based in London for a month, as the newly built team won’t be at full strength ’til September, so web stuff can be done in London, then moved back to the current office in September. During that month, the web people will all work on temporary computers, or perhaps laptops.
  • Thursday : All change. Again. Now all the developers, both web and application, will stay in the current office. There’s no need for them to do the month in London. And it’s just the office admin and non-techies who will be based in London.
  • Friday : Who knows? I’m sure I’ll keep everyone up to date as the day goes on…

Blocked

Posted: Thu 27 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Thoughts, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

I don’t know why, but my brain’s just not working right today.

I’ve got three posts in “Draft” version at the moment, and I can’t get the right wording for any of them. I hate being like this – thankfully it’s not a common occurrence. However, when it does happen, it drives me nuts.

I know what I want to say, I just can’t think of the best way to phrase it. I need to dump my brain somewhere, and for once D4D™ isn’t the place…

Shatter

Posted: Tue 25 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

Hmm, maybe this is just me as well, but if you saw workmen heaving on a sheet of glass in order to pull it from its frame (we’re talking about a sheet of glass probably 8 feet high and 10-12 feet wide) would you decide to walk behind them as they were pulling with all their force?

The stupidity of some people – or maybe it’s just the completely blinkered lack of awareness of surroundings, I don’t know – just befuddles me. This morning I’ve seen not just one person do this, but seven or eight. The window is being replaced because the blackout film on it is bubbled up and knackered, but it’s one huge sheet of glass, and if it had shattered (as it eventually did) while some numpty was walking past, and they’d been hurt, you can bet that said numpty would’ve been first on the line to the personal injury lawyers, and it would never have been that numpty’s fault for walking past people obviously having a problem with a bloody big sheet of glass.

I despair.

Holiday In The Sun

Posted: Tue 25 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Travel, Weirdness | 4 Comments »

OK, now this one befuddles me a bit – and every time I read the words, I still don’t get the concept behind them.

Who the hell would actually go on holiday to Beirut?

What’s next? Parachute holidays to Afghanistan? Fire-fighting trips to Iraq?

Canon

Posted: Sun 23 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Photography, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

I knew there was something I hadn’t installed on the new PC, and today it came to me. All the drivers and software for the EOS20D – no drivers, no software, nowt. Ooops.

And just when did I discover this? Yep, when I was trying to move some photos around. Ain’t it always the way?

And then when I looked on the Canon site, it’s got all the bloody updaters and revisions for the software, but has it got the original files? Has it buggery. Cue a mad hunt through the CD Graveyard – really must organise that a bit better at some point – and eventually found the relevant CD.

So now I’ve installed all the original programs etc., and then I have to update them all. It’s fucking bizarre.

Ah well.

Good Policy?

Posted: Fri 14 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

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?

Fair?

Posted: Mon 10 July, 2006 | Author: | Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness | 5 Comments »

OK, before I get started on this one, bear in mind that I’m a self-confessed numpty when it comes to football, so I’m probably barking up entirely the wrong tree with this one…

Anyway – what I was thinking about, particularly in light of the end of the world cup, is why is the final result (assuming full-time and extra time have been completed) dependent on penalties? To me it seems actually quite unfair, basing it all on a “sudden death” kind of thing after two hours of play – particularly since the goals that have happened become irrelevant. (And before any smart-arse pops up with the comment, I know that the penalties thing only happens when it’s a draw, so perhaps the goals from the main match are now irrelevant – but bear with me on this, OK?)

So why does it go to penalties? Why not base the final victory on something that’s at least related to the game of the last two hours? Examples that spring to mind would be ball posession – that the team that’s had the most posession wins; or base it on fouls and/or dives – where the team with the lowest figure (either in the match, or in the tournament – which would be a nightmare of record-keeping, but would provoke rather less fouls, dives, and bookable offences, I suspect) wins at the end of it.

Surely those methods are fairer, or at least more relevant? To base the final result on penalties seems to be far more “luck of the draw”. Perhaps basing it on something match/statistic-based would be a bit of an anti-climax, I suppose – but it would still at least have a basic connection to the game they’ve been playing for the last 120 minutes…

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