Development Blues
Posted: Sun 21 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, People, Work-related | Leave a comment »Things have been a bit quiet here of late, mainly because I’m snowed in work time with one big project that’s dealing with a metric fuckload of data coming in by XML. It’s aq nightmare in many ways – and also decidedly scary because of the sheer amount of personal data involved in each record.
Additionally, the company that we’re connecting with are – to be polite – not all that helpful. I got to see their documentation before we started the project, and that looked OK. However, the documented examples don’t actually match up in any useful recognisable form with what we’re getting out of the process.
During this week, among other things, the company has realised that the documentation they sent us initially was out of date – two versions out of date, no less. So they said they’d send the latest/greatest version. And then sent the self-same two-versions-out-of-date documents. The file actually has the version number on it, so it’s not (or at least you wouldn’t have thought it was) rocket science in the least to be able to send the correct documentation.
Once we’d got the up-to-date documentation, I queried the data coming back from the company, as it didn’t match the examples given. Oh yes, I was told, “We can’t put in examples for everything.“. Yes, you can – particularly when it’s what your customers are using to develop their interactions with. Random data format changes aren’t helpful either – “We’ve stopped sending the numbers with four decimal places – yes, we know our documentation says we do this, but we don’t any more”
As you can imagine, it’s making life pretty difficult. There’s a lot to do still, and I can’t rely on the information from the original company. Always a joy.
How Not To Do Things
Posted: Thu 18 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: 1BEM, Work-related | Leave a comment »At work, one of the sites is called – for want of a better name – Money Manager. (That’s not the real name of it, for obvious reasons. But related, in one way or another.) It’s the brainchild – and to some degrees the baby – of one of the directors. His idea, his name, his plan, his approval throughout.
Ever since it was first created, it’s been in my head as Monkey Manager. The scripts for backing it up are called monkeybackup, the database is monkeyDB, so on so forth.
The rest of the web team have also taken to calling it Monkey Manager. No good reason, it’s just catchier and/or easier to remember than Money Manager.
Yesterday, in a “what we’ve been working on this week” email to all the directors, I referred to the site as Monkey Manager. Not once, but three damn times. I didn’t even realise until I re-read the email at work this morning.
No-one’s said anything yet. I don’t know if they will. But all the same, the first reaction from me (and, to be fair, my colleagues) was “You fuckwit.”
Can’t say fairer than that, really.
Productive
Posted: Sun 14 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »Tonight’s actually been fairly productive.
With Herself away I’ve been able to catch up on some rubbish TV and get cracking on the website work I planned to do this weekend.
So all in all a quiet night, but a productive one.
Changing Plans
Posted: Sat 13 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »This weekend was supposed to be a quiet one. Herself was supposed to be really busy throughout, and staying elsewhere for two nights. She was going to be out on Friday at the theatre, on a course over the weekend, and then down to Basingstoke for a work-related course on Monday. Which meant a nice quiet weekend for me – allbeit looking after the animals etc. – and getting some outstanding work done.
At the last minute though, the weekend course got cancelled “because there weren’t enough people signed up for it”. No bad thing really, it gives Herself the wekeend back, but still quite a pain in the arse – especially considering that it had been paid for, along with buying specific materials for the course. We’ll get the money back for the course, that’s not an issue. It’s just all deeply annoying.
So the weekend changed a bit, and today I also ended up driving over to Fakenham to pick up the stuff we’d left there. (at the request of the course organisers)
Still, I’ll do some of the necessary work tomorrow while Herself’s off down to Basingstoke for Monday. Better than nowt.
Visitation
Posted: Tue 9 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Work-related | Leave a comment »Why is it that whenever I work from home, it seems to be a day where everyone and their uncle arrive?
So far today we’ve had the local Avon lady call, and the postman with some sodding huge package for Herself that needed to be signed for.
This is a totally common occurrence – I’m at home, we get spudloads of people knocking on the door. I don’t mind too much, it keeps things varied – it does, however, drive Hound fucking barmy.
Bowling
Posted: Sat 6 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Introspective, People, Sociable, Thoughts, Work-related | 2 Comments »The bowling night on Thursday was actually quite a lot of fun – helped by the fact our team won, but still, quite a laugh all round. I know, you lot never expected me to say something like that about a work-based social event. Truth be told, neither did I.
I do find bowling fascinating though. Any time I go, there’s always at least one lane of people with absolutely no fucking clue whatsoever about throwing a ball down the lane. Pretty much all the time, they’re in the lane next to one with at least one decent person playing – by which I mean someone who knows what they’re doing, and scores over about 125 or so in a game. Not perfect, but a damn sight better than the people next to them.
And yet those people with no clue never (and I do mean bloody never) take a look at the person next to them, and see if they can figure what they’re doing wrong/differently. It’s bizarre.
When I first went to bowling – admittedly, many moons ago now – I did exactly that. I watched some decent people and figured out most of it from there. It’s not difficult, just watch and learn. As a result, I’m not bad now, (I tend to average around 110 – 120 per game) pretty consistent in how I bowl, and if I went more regularly I’d probably be a lot better. (Which might be something to think about doing, I don’t know yet) There were other people on Thursday a lot better than me – and others a lot worse. So I’m probably somewhere in the midle.
But even there, the people who were really bad at it didn’t seem to want to figure out anything about how to improve it.
For me, I always want to learn, want to improve on what I’m doing if/when there’s someone around who’s far better at [activity X] than I am. Maybe that’s where I differ with a lot of people, I don’t know.
The Long Way Home
Posted: Fri 5 March, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: 1BEM, Travel, Weirdness, Work-related | 1 Comment »I really worry about one of my colleagues. He’s mentioned on several occasions about his lack of navigational ability, but last night took the biscuit.
On leaving Bury after the company bowling trip last night (i.e. not the normal “departure location”) he took the wrong turn. His route should’ve been from Point A on the map below to Point B. A nice easy run. However, the route taken was slightly different…
One hell of a diversion...
Yep – a wrong turning meant that he went from Bury to Norwich, back down to Newmarket – past the place he lives! – to come back to Mildenhall.
I despair…