Not Travelling
Posted: Sat 6 February, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Health, Own Business, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »One of our plans this weekend was to go over to the NEC and visit the International Spring Fair, a massive trade fair held every year.
However, somehow I’ve managed to stuff my foot (again) which means that walking is currently pretty painful. No idea quite what I’ve done to the damn thing, but it’s becoming a more regular occurrence round these parts, which isn’t a good sign. Thing is, it’s not damage in the same location as before, so it’s not like one weak spot or anything.
We could still go, but I think it’d be pretty silly to do a two-hour-plus drive each way and walk/limp round the NEC while on a dodgy foot.
For the rest, I can hold off ’til the Autumn version, so it’s not a massive loss- just a delay to a couple of things.
All told it’s a bit of a bummer, but for once I’m trying to let common-sense take over from ‘Well we’ve planned it so that’s what we’re going to do.”
Documentation
Posted: Thu 4 February, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Security, Web Development, Work-related, Writing | 3 Comments »In the run-up to the Festering Season, I had one hell of a lot of work coming in with some documentation that needed doing in order to get us what’s known as PCI-DSS accreditation. PCI-DSS stands for “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard”, and it’s a total fucking nightmare.
Anyway, one of the big steps in attaining this PCI-DSS standard is to have somewhere around a metric shit-ton of paperwork. No kidding. There’s some 230-odd points in the PCI-DSS standard, and each one of the bloody things needs documenting. It’s a serious bit of work just getting all the paperwork done.
With the other stuff I also had to do in order to get everything in place, the documentation took a back-seat, and we ended up getting it done by me speaking into a dictaphone, and then getting an audio-typist to type it all up. It was supposed to save me a stuff-load of time. And it worked – I’d got all the dictation done in two and a half days, and the typist did everything in time for mid-January.
Or so we thought.
It turned out that the audio-typist was a tossbag, and didn’t actually do all that much in the day they were in – at the end of which they said they’d done it all.
Cunty fucking bugger.
It’s taken me the intervening three fucking weeks to get things back to where I thought I was in mid-January. Three weeks of doing this sodding documentation, three weeks of making sure it’s right, and that it all makes sense. Oh, and still doing all my normal insane workload as well.
This goes some way to explaining why I haven’t been writing much on D4D in that time – I’m utterly damn sick of typing, and didn’t have the time or headspace to do much here.
I’ve just now finished the documentation for PCI-DSS. We’ll review it tomorrow and next week, so I’m sure there’ll be some edits. But that’s just fiddly crap – the most important thing is that I’ve broken the back of it. I’m done.
I’m also utterly fucked. But that’s beside the point. I’m done with the documentation. Happy, happy day.
Shit, Meet Fan
Posted: Sat 23 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Work-related | Leave a comment »It’s been a quiet couple of days here on D4D™, and with good reason.
On Thursday, the database at work died in spectacular fashion. It’s been getting shaky for a while, but this week it keeled over totally, and since then I’ve been putting in silly hours getting things back to something approaching usable.
The problems are many, but basically the entire site – user-facing and company-facing – is database-driven. Without the database, there’s no business. It just grinds to a halt. So it’s been a case of “fix the essential bits, deal with the rest later”.
The other main problem is that the database was originally written as a proof-of-concept, a basic thing that’s then been extended and extended. Think of the original as a bungalow. The current site, all built off that bungalow, is the size of an airport, and all balanced on the roof of that original bungalow.
Because it wasn’t written with “the big picture” in mind, some of it is downright fucking nasty- and I suspect the original developer was also learning as he went along. For example, there were no date columns in there ’til I came along – instead it all used some very dodgy string-handling to figure out dates.
One of the main tables in the database now has 170,000 records in it. Which (in the database scheme of things) is nothing. Well, until you realise that each of those 170,000 records has 180 fields in it. That one database table is 600Mb in size. Oops.
So the last couple of days have been spent in Database Intensive Care. I’m through the brunt of it now, but it’s meant that other things – food, sleep, relaxation, D4D™ – have taken a back seat. I’m still going to be working on stuff around this for the next week, but things should be a bit calmer now that the urgent repairs are done, and it’s now more a case of fixing the underlying issues.
Thank fuck my assessment isn’t next week.
Assessment
Posted: Thu 21 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Work-related | 2 Comments »This week I’ve been in the new job for three months, which meant it was the end of my probationary period.
It’s also meant I’ve gone through an assessment, which was an interesting experience, to say the least. It’s been remarkably positive – in fact, it’s been excellent – and it’s been nice to see that the company really does appreciate what I’ve been doing with them in that time.
Somehow I’ve managed to get “Excellent” grades throughout the assessment. Even the bits of self-assessment where I’d graded myself as less than Excellent have been upgraded from the company’s perspective.
All told, it’s resulted in a 15% pay rise – not bad – and confirmation of my role as Lead Developer. I’ve emphatically said that for now I don’t want a title with Manager in it – I still feel I’m more of a doer than a manager, it has to be said.
I’m happy with the results of the assessment, and that the probation period is over. I’ve known from early on that my job was pretty safe, that I’ve been doing a lot of work and fixing a lot of stuff that has been inherited from previous developers etc, but all the same it’s still good to know that the probation period is well and truly over.
Getting Rid – More Stuff
Posted: Mon 11 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Own Business, Photography | Leave a comment »As well as getting rid of the poxy hire car (with luck), we’re also getting shot of some other stuff through eBay.
Admittedly, Herself is being the driving force on it – the majority of the stuff is hers, which makes it a good reason for her being so – but we’re working on it.
The really big lot is the floor tiles – we bought enough to do the floors in all the rooms in the house, plus the extensions we initially thought we’d do. However, we’re now pretty sure we won’t be doing the extensions in the foreseeable future, and the thirty-odd remaining boxes of tiles are taking up space in the garage. So they’ve been on eBay, and we’ve already sold a third of them, with people wanting the other twenty as well.
The next big set of lots is going to be Herself’s doll’s house and furniture. Nothing’s been done with it as long as I’ve known her, and again it’s all taking up room in the garage. We’ve looked at other options before, but now it’s going on eBay, and we’ll see how it goes (or even if it goes) from there.
And my part in the proceedings? Primarily, it’s been about taking photographs of the stuff that’s for sale, working in some small way to build up my photography portfolio a bit, see how things go on that score too.
Homeward Bound
Posted: Fri 8 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Work-related | Leave a comment »Driving home tonight was an experience, to say the least.
Having finally finished at 7pm – hunting bugs on a site that was due to go live, written by the newest colleague, and whose job depended on it working properly – I ended up driving on icy roads, through patches of freezing fog.
Even better, the A11 had standing snow (not much, admittedly – but enough) which reduced the clear road to one lane in each direction. And once you’ve got someone on that who’s driving at 30mph, pretty much every else behind them’s driving at 30 too. Well, unless you’re one of the cretins who decides to still go belting past in the (snow-covered) outside lane.
All told it took me an hour and a quarter to get home, rather than the normal 45 minutes. I won’t deny, I drove like a little old lady on the bit from the A11 to home, because those roads were really interesting – and of course I’d never live it down if I crashed again on the same road as before. (Although speaking of which, I’ve now seen the results of at least five other spangs on that same corner since I whacked it)
In all, a spectacularly no-fun drive, but at least I got from B to A safe and intact. And that’s what it’s all about really, isn’t it?
Snowed In
Posted: Thu 7 January, 2010 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Weather, Work-related | Leave a comment »When we went to bed last night, the weather wasn’t too bad – still the remaining snow and crap from the last couple of weeks.
This morning, that had all changed. Starting from about 5.30 – and don’t ask why I was up at that time – it snowed vaguely heavily. By this I mean “heavily for the UK“, rather than “Heavily for anywhere that’s used to decent snowfall, and is currently laughing at the UK“. All told we got about 2-3 inches in three hours, which meant that frankly I wasn’t going to go in to the office.
Fortunately, I can work from home just as easily as I can work in the office, only I get to stay safe and warm, and don’t have to make a non-essential journey.
Sounds like a plan to me, and it looks like it’s going to be a quiet weekend…