Posted: Mon 9 March, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related |
This will come as absolutely no surprise to many of you, but this morning I had a blinding flash of “Jesus I’m a twat”.
I’ve recently been working on a site where the server is based in the US, and I’ve been trying to sort out a regular task (a cron job, for those who know what the hell I’m whittling on about) that would run at midnight every day.
You can see where this is going already, can’t you? Believe me, I couldn’t until this morning.
I’ve been checking in the morning to see whether the cron job (timed to run at midnight, remember) had run overnight, and each day it hadn’t run. I’ve checked the logs – nothing. I’ve checked the command syntax umpteen times, and checked how it’s running via crontab. All fine. But the bloody thing’s not running.
However, I got a message at 7.05 this morning telling me it had tried to run.
And right then it occurred why this problem has been happening, why the script hasn’t been running at midnight.
It’s because:
- I’m a fuckwit
- The server’s in the US. Midnight in the US is (in this case) seven hours behind midnight here.
So come 7am GMT, the server runs the script at Midnight (US Server time). And all’s well.
I’ve changed it now, so that it runs at 5pm (US Server time) which is (of course) Midnight GMT. It means things will still fuck up come BST, but I’ll change things a bit to rectify that when I get round to it.
In the meantime, well, let’s just leave it that I’m a fuckwit.
Posted: Fri 6 March, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thoughts, Work-related |
This week, I found out that the company I worked with last year in Basildon has now gone into voluntary liquidation.
I can’t say it’s been a massive surprise – when my contract there started, they insisted they’d got at least three months of work available, but it turned out to be less than a month all told. In the time I worked with them, they didn’t generate any new business – and to my knowledge they didn’t really generate any after that time either.
I can’t be too holier-than-thou on this though – as I’ve said before, my motivation over the last eighteen months or so hasn’t been good enough on generating business for my own company either. On the flip side of that though, I don’t also have the other employees, the semi-smart office, or the high-maintenance lifestyles that they had at [Company X] I have virtually no overhead, where theirs must’ve been pretty damn high.
Equally, I’ve got the skills and knowledge that [Company X] didn’t have – they didn’t have a clue about one hell of a lot of the aspects of website design, although they did have a couple of very good Flash guys.
Anyway, looking at my reactions to the news of the liquidation, I suspect that this might bring some more of my motivation to the fore – I know I don’t want to end up in that particular scenario if I can possibly help it.
Posted: Mon 2 March, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Creativity, Cynicism, Depression, House Purchase, House Work, Introspective, Own Business, Thoughts, Work-related |
Over the years, many people have told me that it’s more sensible to have a mortgage than to keep on paying rent. Rent is, supposedly “dead money” – you’re not getting anything for it (except another month living in your property of choice) and you’re just helping to pay off the landlord’s bills.
Finally, two years ago, I jumped off the bridge, and got a mortgage with Herself on this place. Since then we’ve been doing a lot of work on the place (as any vaguely regular reader of D4D™ will know) and that side of things is all going OK. Of course, the fact is that on that score rental is easier – if something needs doing, you call the landlord or letting agency, and it gets done.
For me though, while I’ll continue on with the mortgage, I’m discovering that it has a far more negative effect on me than I’d be happy with on the real long-term.
I find that the knowledge of the amount of the mortgage keeps coming back to me, that it’s kind of a mill-stone. I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to change it – but I’m constantly aware of it.
Maybe it’s that I’m a late-starter on the entire house-buying front, that if I’d been doing this since I was twenty-seven then I’d be used to the knowledge of the debt by now. (and I’d be nearly halfway through paying it off, which would help too!) Maybe over time the awareness of the debt faades a bit. I don’t know – I’ve only been doing this for two years, after all.
I don’t want to have the mortgage for the full term of it – the plan has always been to overpay whereever possible, and by as much as possible within the terms of the mortgage, although over the first two years we haven’t been able to do that at all (mainly due to me being a slack-ass, and not doing the necessary extra work through the aforementioned lack of motivation) but the intention is still there for the next mortgage period.
And that’s the balance I need to find, too – between the awareness of this (to me) sodding huge millstone of debt and the desire to reduce it as much as possible.
After all, there’s no money more “dead” than the interest I’m/we’re paying to the fucking bank. Paying back 2½ times the amount borrowed? That’s “dead money” indeed.
Posted: Mon 23 February, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Thoughts, Work-related |
Today, there’s supposed to be two places that I’m at. Only I’m not actually at either of them.
First of all, there’s the usual – I’m supposed to be at work.
Secondly, I’m supposed to be on a course in London betwen now and Wednesday. A course that’s utterly irrelevant to what I do, and that I don’t even understand (and no-one at work has been able to explain) why it’s deemed necessary to be on it.
The other part of it for the course is that, due to it being in London, I’m supposed to be staying in a hotel – I don’t fancy leaving home at 5.30am in order to get the train down there to be at the course for 9am, nor leaving at 6ish and not getting home ’til 8.30 or 9pm. Only work hasn’t been able to confirm that I’d be paid back for my expenses on staying in a hotel. Nothing from HR, from my department, or the manager. “Probably” was about the closest they’d come to an answer.
So in short, fuck that. I’ve got better things to do with my life that screwing about with possibly getting paid back for staying in a hotel in order to take part in a useless course with no relevance whatsoever to my work.
As for normal work – for once I got up and simply couldn’t be chuffed to go in. It’s not often I have days like that – but today is definitely one of them.
Posted: Tue 17 February, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Depression, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Own Business, The '09 Writing Project, Thoughts, Writing |
Yesterday, in a comment on the post about colour-schemes for D4D™, Gordon wrote :
Step back a minute.
Why do you have this blog? What do YOU want from it?
Which seemed like a pretty good starting point for a post, to be honest.
1. Why do you have this blog?
There’s a number of reasons, but the main one will always come out as “Because I wanted to see if I could“. Over the years, I’ve had many many projects that I’ve started up, got about 75-80% of the way through, or even all the way to launch, and then got bored and not completed them. (or not continued putting energy into them) There was always something new to try, something else to work on.
D4D™ was a way to combat that. It was an ongoing project, sure – but it’s been one I’ve kept on with now for six-and-a-bit years. Maybe it’ll fade out at some point – the odds are that it will – but it’s kept going, kept me going, and I haven’t just faded off with it. Sure, it’s nowhere even close to what I envisioned when I started – them’s the breaks – but it’s kept on happening.
Also, it was a way to get me back into regular writing. Not necessarily about anything – even a quick trawl through the archives will easily show there’s no consistent theme to any of this rubbish – but to be posting at least one piece per day, every day. Years back I’d written two book-length stories as well as an absolute shed-load of shorter/smaller stuff (some of which is utterly cringeworthy now, but some of it still works to one degree or other) but they were fuelled by depression and a need for catharsis on certain experiences. Between then – about 1995 or so – and 2002 when D4D™ came on the scene, I hadn’t written a damn thing. Since then, some 750,000 words – and it must be coming up to the 800,000 mark by now – have gone through D4D™.
Of course, at some point I want to be doing more “proper” writing, as I’ve mentioned before. So at that point, D4D™ will either mutate once more, or get put on hold. Or some weird bastard-child intersection of those two things. Or something else entirely.
2. What do YOU want from it?
Now that one’s a bit harder. I don’t really know what I want from D4D™ – other than to be a braindump space, where I can splurge out some of the things and thoughts that keep on happening. It’s a healthy venting spot for my more cynical moments, but it’s bugger-all use for the more creative stuff I want to be working on.
I suppose I could add a different section to D4D™ now that a lot of the other stuff has gone The Way Of The Bin, which deals with the bigger stuff, or even get back to doing a “Page” for a longer piece every so often. (That’s what I would do with the old rants etc. anyway, should they ever make a comeback) Or I could just have a different site for that writing stuff. I don’t know yet.
So I suppose what I want from D4D™ is to maintain a status quo, to allow me to keep on writing – with no aim of becoming BWABD (Blog With A Book Deal) or anything other than just that general dumping ground for whatever’s going on in my brain at the moment. Or at least whatever’s going on in my brain that is a) not related to other sites/writing and b) not related to the multitudinous other business ideas etc that are forever battering round the brain cells.
In fact, I think that’s what the aim will be for now – to let the site keep on going, to keep it doing the same kind of things it has for the last six years.
Of course, that means that I’ve got an open hand when it comes to colour schemes etc. – but for now that’s going to stay the same too, and the yellow will remain as a reminder of the reasons why D4D™ came into being at all…
Posted: Thu 12 February, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, House Work, Own Business, Thoughts |
Is it really geeky to be interested in getting one of these as and when they’re released in the UK?
Basically, it’s an extension of the cellular (mobile) network, connected through broadband, and allowing improved mobile access in phone blackspots. Like – well – our entire house/street.
Yes, geeky as all hell, but still I can see plenty of use for it just where we live…
Posted: Mon 9 February, 2009 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Weirdness, Work-related |
One of the things in the current workplace that drives me crackers is the total flakiness of the server/gateway that allows internet access through to the outside world.
It breaks down at least once a day, blocking everything with an “Access Denied” message. On occasion, the breakdown will be for a good couple of hours, minimum.
The only tiny silver lining on this particular cloud, though, is the even more stupid error message that comes up…
Type: content Name: Scenarios/Anti-Virus Scan Action: not-checked
Description: Error: ‘The operation completed successfully. ‘ reported by ‘F-Secure AntiVirus for MIMEsweeper’
Yes, the error is caused because “the operation completed successfully”. By inference, that means that when we have internet access, the operation is failing – so internet access is actually an error state.
Or something.