So Craig, what did you do last night then? Well, I spent just over four hours in a car, how about you….
And already a pattern begins….
So Craig, what did you do this evening then? Well, I spent just over four hours in a cupboard, how about you….
I really want to memorise a nice large sudoku puzzle then while sitting on the train going to work, proceed to fill it out really quickly in a seemingly random order just to annoy the hundreds of commuters who always do them every morning and evening.
I have now managed to build up such a level of fear around me that my door just opened as I walked up the stairs.
I like IT people. I like them for one great attribute that seems rare these days. It’s an attribute that anyone can have and it costs nothing. It even requires no work whatsoever to acquire. They are quiet. Simple as that. They do not feel the need to shout across the room to make sure everyone hears they have just come out of meeting that will change the business forever, stand in time as a revolutionary moment in the businesses life. They just get on with the job and talk at a required level. This is the problem with other people in the city. They are big, brash, loud in order to be heard and promoted. Interestingly and rather coincidently they are also all wankers. The sort of people you would meet in the street and be glad you don’t have to see them again. They don’t just get the job done like in IT, they talk about the job, decide how important it is, argue with their alpha male attributes how each part of the job should be done etc. Then out they come from their meeting still spewing business “buzz words”. This issue has never really existed in IT. If you are good at your job then let you keep doing it and just give you different titles to get you up the pay grades. If you are crap at IT they put you out of the way in management where you do the least management. Oh how I wish all industries would be like IT (without perhaps the painful speed it moves at).
I like digital cameras. I especially like mine. It allows me to take photograph after photograph without so much as a whisper of a cost. It runs off rechargeable batteries and requires no further investment past a computer for storage. Ok, so pictures can take up a fair bit of space after time and they do require backing up to prevent loss, but it’s not like I don’t have to do that anyway with my computer. As you might expect from me, the computer itself was not something I had to purchase for the job, I had one already. In fact, most people have one already and for those that don’t they can either buy one at the dirt cheap prices you can get them for nowadays or just use the facilties at the camera shops (that used to do film processing).
I think it would be fair to say that digital has a good number of advantages over its older film rival. Now that’s quite something coming from a camera user who had his first camera at age 4 and a half and was using an SLR at 8 and then by 11 had his own SLR (fully manual or course).
It seems though that this wonderful idea hasn’t just turned my head, it’s turned a lot of other peoples heads. You can’t go anywhere without seeing people snapping away with their minute bundles of silver joy suspended from a neck cord or wrist strap. Walk round London for the best part of 10 minutes and you will have seen more stereotypical Japanese tourists with cameras snapping than you can count on the fingers and toes of a gecko.
It is safe to say it’s here to stay. Surely this must be a good thing….right….?
Photography to me and most who have been doing it for any length of time is a form of art, the challenge is to capture and image no-one else has seen and no-one else will be able to see again. The photographer is hunting for that moment in time at a specific place because it holds some sort of significance (or because their finger slipped). Any decent photographer uses their eyes 99% of the time with their camera by their side ready for the other 1%. I wonder if the average tourist considers their photographs to this extent before they mindlessly snap away at an unsuspecting inanimate object. Now I’m not saying that your average tourist should aspire to be a photographer and think about the shots they take, carefully composing each one in advance, but it would be nice to see them put down their cameras and actually look first.
Now this is the point at which I hark back to the “good old days” because when you had film it cost money. The only time I would ever take two photos of the same thing was when I was 99% sure the photo I had just taken had not worked and it was still worth having. Such times include going over a bridge in Italy whilst on a train and just as I took the photo I was sure I had got one of the upright posts of the bridge in it. Thank god for instinct, as I took another shot and sure enough when I got home there was a picture with a huge great post in the middle of it followed by a stunning picture of a mountain lake. That said, that was just two pictures and I probably didn’t take more than about 100 images for the whole of those two weeks. Now I can and have taken over 100 in a day (record stands at just under 300). Now great as this is I often get the feeling I’m spending all my time desperately trying to capture the moment I’m missing.
A while ago a young photographer from Brighton tried to have a day where people didn’t use their cameras. As far as I understand it was a bit of a damp squib. Seems times change faster than the click of a shutter.
I hate people who don’t indicate, I hate people who indicate at the wrong time, I hate people who don’t realise their indicating, I hate mopeds, I hate flowery curtains, I hate small mice, I hate people with loud ring-tones, I hate sandals and socks, I hate oil/moneydriven US presidents, I hate small dogs, I hate stereotypical tourists, I hate 6 year olds with mobiles, I hate Nissan Micra’s, I hate small monitors, I hate loud people in churches, I hate shelves above my head, I hate pens that don’t work, I hate table cloths, I hate Apple’s marketing, I hate silver cars, I hate go faster stripes (except on the 2005 model of the Dodge Viper in blue), I hate foam mattresses, I hate peach jam, I hate fones4u adverts, I hate fish, I hate cyclists who think they own the road, I hate road owners, I hate fluorescent lighting, I hate button cell batteries and I find chatty pensioners on buses mildly annoying.
As has always been the case I update my journal in blocks. Sometimes I go weeks at a time without a single entry, other times I have several in a single day. It would also be fair to say that this is not a diary. Although at time it resembles one as I write what is on my mind, it is not what I strive for it to be.
I came back from holiday several weeks ago and although I have had the physical time to update it, I didn’t have the mental energy. Suffice to say working in the real world is a lot harder than you might expect. Also take into account I have a job which requires me to sit on my arse all day. I still come home shattered. Myself I consider this a tribute to how overworked my poor little grey matter is.
Anyway, to the subject in hand. I decided to take my laptop with me to Austria so I could write down some of the thoughts I had while away in a format I find easier to read. Therefore I present the first that I wrote in mild frustration having just got back from an Austria restaurant.
The French have the best food my arse! Today I type from the reasonably cold country of Austria having spent the last 2 days travelling by road through England, France, Germany and finally Austria. We stayed the night in a French city and as is customary when hungry, ate a meal there that evening. I had like any bloody minded English person would (when presented with a curious and wholly inadequate menu) ordered steak, chips and salad. Armed with the knowledge that the French understanding of “medium” is distinctly not cooked I asked for well done. Perhaps next time I shall just ask for done. It seems for all their culinary prowess they are incapable of just simply cooking something. I don’t want it under cooked, I don’t want it burnt to a cinder (as was the case this time), I just want it cooked through. The chips were passable, but to be quite frank, it’s not like it takes skill to operate a deep fat fryer. Tonight we arrived in Austria, and being a Saturday evening no shops were open, so we went out. We found a stunning little hotel restaurant with a nice waiter who even spoke English to us when was our German was not quite up to scratch. The food we got was something else though, it really was. Myself I do not really eat pork; I normally find it to be tough, dry and tasteless. I could eat what they served me every day without complaint, it was truly very nice. So what I don’t understand is why are the French seen as the culinary masters when their far below the excellent standard set by all but the Germans?
Yes, I am back from 2 weeks of holiday in Austria and yes the only photo I have posted in my gallery so far is this one. As I know (by my spam to real email ratio) that not that many people care about me I shall not most the big juicy post I have lined up for my return, but more of a passing comment (given the late hour in the day).
I have been using solely my Powerbook for the last 2 weeks and one thing has occurred to me. Apple and almost every Mac user I have spoken to in the last few months is desperate to tell me that now Macs can run Windows too. I have yet however to see anything about people getting OSX to run under Windows or even on PC’s. Now perhaps it has been done, or perhaps I have missed these articles, but if either is the case then it is certainly being kept a big secret. So if OSX is such a great OS then why does no-one on a PC seem to want to make it work. Or to put it another way, if XP is so crap, why is everyone (including Apple) telling me I can now run it on their machines. There is no way on this earth that I would want to pay more and sacrifice so many options just so I could run Windows on Apple hardware, so why. And if OSX was so great then surly people would be desperate to make it work on PC’s so we could all have the benefits of OSX with PC cheap power and flexibility.
If I were being optimistic I would say it hasn’t been done because people recognise that the idea behind Apples kit is that it’s proprietary so it all works together. But to be realistic, I don’t think it has been done because no one thinks it’s that great an OS.
And my wasn’t that a garbled mess words…
Racing your shadow is one thing, discovering yourself to be winning is something entirely different.
Commuters are great for advertisers. There are millions of them, they are predictable and they have money. This makes them a prime target to get a new product rolling. For this reason I have been attacked everyday with some form of free version of a new product since I started work. The funny thing is I get of the train at London Bridge station and from there I have a 5min walk at most. During this time I get presented without fail some for of food or drink, 2 newspapers, 3-4 leaflets and normally some form of card holder.
Yesterday (well, Thursday) there were lots of people standing outside the station doors handing out loads and loads of mini cans of the new product “Coke Zero”. This is just a sugar free version of coke with supposedly the same taste. o be fair it isn’t bad, but you can still tell. Plus, its loaded up with aspartame. The really funny thing though was that along the main commuter route that I walk (over London Bridge) there were absolutely thousands of these little cans, empty and on the side. Obviously there are no bins in the city of London thanks to the IRA. There was maybe 200 on each post-box, pillar, box, van, railing…well, pretty much any static object. I wish I had a photo, I really do.
Ok, so that was funny enough, but just to prove they watch what’s going on, today (Friday) there were more people with little drink cans. This time however it was not Coke, this time it was Pepsi showing of their new product, “Pepsi One” which is basically the same as idea (i.e. no sugar). Yet again thousands of cans lines London Bridge for the second time that week.
I bet the city council was annoyed…..
Ok, time to move onto work stuff.
It seems so far I spend a lot of my time working on applications that don’t work. I find this quite cool because I enjoy working out what’s wrong and taking things to bits. The one I’m working on is a particular challenge. First it is a VB6 application designed to run on NT4 in a manor which emulates a service. It has been in use for years now and apart from one bug fix in early 2004 it seems fine.
My task was to take it apart, work it does (so reverse engineer it) and then rewrite it in C# as a real service. Now there are a few problems. The first is that I don’t read VB6 so a day was lost to me learning a fair bit of that. I have now been pulling apart this app for about 3 days. Its one of those things that the more you uncover the more you realise you have left to uncover.
It has now been decided that I’m going to take this back all the way to initial spec, then technical spec, then design and then finally code it. This is not the simple re-code it started as off. You see, the code was written by someone who really was no good, its just it seemed to work so they left it (“it ain’t broke so don’t fix it”….). As a measure of how bad parts of it are I know how bad they are and its not my language!
I have been talking bits over with the guys at work as I find them. I spent an hour on a guy in the states who looks after the server and I pulled a log file from it too. Monday will be spent researching some very important little quirks of SQL server 2000. Basically, the app works, but they are so lucky it does. The error checking is so bad that it may as well not be there in many cases. To prove this point (and how bad the app is) I opened the log file. It was a 118MB text file (txt). It takes a while to open in word and when it did it was over 28,000pages. It has been generating 2 errors every 20seconds for the last 6months!
One of the developers did point out that at least I can really screw my version up and still be an improvement!
Why is we have to censor whatever we say just incase someone else might be stupid enough to not understand or do something silly with our ideas? For example, how many times do you hear the phrase “it’s just a suggestion, take it or leave it, it’s up to you”? It seems for every idea, every thought every spark of imagination there is a clause to make sure we are not at fault. Is this just part of us as people or is this a feature built-in over time given the shocking misuse of ideas in the past? I suppose it relates a bit to my points on Beta. People need to understand that not everything is correct, not every idea will work first time. After all we are all only human. If people are too stupid to grasp this concept then I propose natural selection should run its course and be done with them. Why prolong the agony and the pain for everyone else?
People also avoid making decisions to ensure they can’t be blamed. This makes for rather meaningless people, as what are we without the choices we make. That’s sounds like something out of the Matrix…
I stumbled upon this article on the BBC news section today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/5195580.stm
The bit that really got me was “There remains an economic need for more graduates, and to achieve this we need a more representative student population”. Now last time I looked to call someone a student is like saying I’m tall. It has no bearing on how smart I am and what my skills are (bar maybe high jump). It also gives no indication to how I would survive outside the education system in this countries increasingly tertiary, quaternary and even quinary businesses. For some strange reason many moons ago the government noticed that all the people with degrees made all the money. Now this is back in the day when maybe 2% o the countries population had degrees. This is because these people worked at the top end of the profitable companies and had to be very smart to get there. So the government though “why not get everyone to have a degree, then they would all earn lots of money”. Now here we have an issue. If everyone has a degree, unless everyone in that country is smarter than the rest of the world (which they aren’t) then there is still no more money to share around. All it achieves is it devalues the degree as its standards have to be lowered to get everyone into the Universities and requires it as a standard qualification for most jobs.
Now to me this is a bit of a stupid idea, but who am I to judge the all mighty decisions of governments, I am merely a minion to make them money…
If people were allowed to do qualifications and training based on aptitude then perhaps we would have more workers to drive the trains, recycle the rubbish, build the houses and so on. Then everyone could be paid the same because each it working to the best of their abilities, whether that be with money of rubbish. That would be one big step forward to a utopian society.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are that of the author (unless having such views is illegal, in which case they are the views of some unknown source). The author (whoever they may be) takes no responsibility for any harm that may or may not come to the reader (including occasional browsers) of this blog (or text if blog becomes patented). Such harm may or may not include broken teeth and varicose veins.
Yeeeash is hot in here, must be in hell. No, wait, no Nissan Micras or Smart cars, can’t be hell. Ah, heat wave, I knew it was something like that.
Hottest July day since 1911 apparently. This was made very apparent when I left the cool of the office air conditioning for the dash to the train. It hit me like a wall of rather hot air and it wasn’t overly pleasant.
London is never a nice place to be when i’ts hot. Any geographer will tell you that cities are always hotter than the country because of the sheer volume of concrete which radiates heat all day. I was mildly relived though safe in the knowledge that my train would have air con also. Getting to my train however was quite a task.
The British rail network is a strange beast brought up through years of neglect and with old half-baked technology which not makes up the core structure. Perhaps it was this core that was to blame for the platform number finally appearing for my train 40 seconds after it had left the station. I bet that train left a bit empty. Always, like any good commuter I have several backup trains times in my head. This time I decided to take a guess at the platform as apposed to wait for the all singing, all dancing (fucking useless) sign to tell me. Off I dashed along with the thousands of others all cramped into the same small square that is London bridge station.
Why is it people just have to stop mid stride, put down their bags and look up aimlessly WHEN THERE ARE FIFTY PEOPLE BEHIND THEM. So after eating the bastard that didn’t that I moved on. I was correct about platform number (human brain: 1, computer 0) and did at least make that train. Obviously the other train only my journey was delayed by 15mins or so. They did announce why, but I don’t care, they seem to have a message (excuse) for every eventuality.
Thinking about it the trains pissed me off even before that today. This Friday coming there was going to be a big rail strike. Our team at worked had already put plans together and we had already worked out how we were all going to work from home (bar two who were having the company pay for a taxi to get them home). It was going to be a good day and I was looking forward to it. It was going to mean a 2 hour lie in and unfiltered internet. Typical bloody unions, they averted the strike didn’t they.
Internet explorer showed yet another facet of its lunacy today. I opened a 3000 line XML file in it and it told me there was an error on line 2362. It was close, the error was in fact 300ish lines on from that, I will let you guess how long that took me to find. The error was there was an “Ž” when it should have been an “Z”.
Oh, while on the train I happened to read one of the headlines on someone newspaper. It read “wealthy children more prone to cancer”. Now is it me or is shit a load of shite. Last time I looked there were so many reasons for cancer that there is no way you can rationalise them into statements like that. Similarly to the time a few years ago when one week we were told fatty foods could increase your chance of getting cancer, and the following week were told salads could increase your chance of getting cancer. What they really mean is that of the minute sample of the population we have used to get these figures, they showed that 1% of the people who got cancer had 3p more than everyone else. Oh aren’t scientists good at producing number that done help to a population that doesn’t care.
In other news, I have passed my second year at Uni. Grades were spread about how I expected them to be (straight A’s in web application development and a D for systems analysis and design etc. The rest were mainly at the top end of that spectrum.). This at least means I don’t have to think about that anymore as that’s 2 down, 1 to go. Not that they matter anyway, they are worth something like 5% of my total degree (or maybe it was 10%).
Ah, one last thing. How do teenage girls between the age of 14 and 18 make it any further? I know I’m generalising, I don’t care, I have to to make it all fit in my head. I suppose I am specifically talking about girls of that age in collective groups (i.e. more than 1 of them). I watched as I got of the train a girl of about 16 run across right in front of a car (which should would have seen) to her friend whilst giggling and screaming like she was surprised it was still moving. How fucking thick do you have to be to do this. It not the first time I have seen this and it will not be the last. It almost seemed like the giggling was almost a defence mechanism.
Another example of this level of stupidity was when I was on a residential weekend 3 years ago. The boy were on the ground floor and the girls on the 1st floor. The fire bell when off (falsely, but unknown at the time) at 1 in the morning. Within 60seconds (I kid you not) every boy was outside, almost all had managed to put a reasonable number had put some clothes on and many had phones, keys and other valuables on them.
After about 5 minutes one girl crept down (fire bell still going) in her dressing gown. It turned out they had been having a little discussion up there about if they should come down. It’s a fucking fire bell, you don’t wait, you move. Especially when that is the first night you have stayed there and you don’t know of any odd systems.
I know boys do things like this too, but I still find that boys have a considerably better grasp of self perseveration than most girls.
You almost think fate should take its course with the people. If you are like that ages 16-17 here is no hope for you.
Although this is written with children in mind, given the right attitude it can be used on any age group and any levels of the social hierarchy.
Keep instructions short and simple:
The purpose of shouting is to get stress the importance of the instruction being given. Any instruction that requires adherence also requires transparency. For example, “Go away” does not set a boundary for how far “away” is. A clearer instruction would be “Go to the hall”.
Although short instructions are best, avoid single word instructions, especial single word shouts. For example, “Sit” may be met with laughter from many children between about 6 and 10. If a single word instruction is to be used, it is important to follow it up promptly with some further instruction or threat. For example “Sit, or you shall now be allowed to play out this evening”.
The shout must come from low down:
I deep voice can carry a very long way which is excellent for controlling vast numbers of children over a large area. When I say “deep” I do mean this in moderation. Too deep and the shout will loose its ability to project any great distance. This level comes around the tone sergeant major style “bark”. Equality, a voice that is too high will loose authority almost instantly.
Obviously for many people the depth of the shout will need to be forced, this can have effects on how long you can last before you start to loose your voice to a comical croak. Its important to take into account that at the end of an event more shouting is normally required than at the start. Therefore it is important to “save yourself”.
Maintain eye contact:
When shouting (especially at a single child) you must maintain eye contact. This has several benefits. First it ensures you know they are listening. Even young children have an ability to cut out shouting. Next it forces on them the seriousness of their predicament by making it more “personal” to them. The final effect is it scares the shit out of them. This is always good for impressing on them why they should not do whatever they have done again.
Be swift to reprimand:
If a child has done something worthy of being shouted at such as run across a road without looking then they should be shouted at immediately, irrelevant of onlookers etc. The speed at which they are dealt with relates to how they then misbehave in the future. If you wait a considerable length of time it works in effect as a dog lead. They discover they can get away with a lot before something happens. This is then serves s an incentive for them to push that mark. If they are dealt with immediately then in future they understand that there is no point “pushing the boundaries” because they don’t move, they are the same each time.
Those of you who know me will know why this makes sense coming from me.
– Craig (Holder of 3 CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) forms…)
I’m conscious that all I have been talking about is computers. Ok, to be fair I do now work in IT so stuff like that happens.
What I have been neglecting more is that I also work in an office, now that is an odd place.
During today I had notepad open and I just typed a few things that I noticed around me:
- Those who think they are busy are running around, those who are busy are sitting at their desks.
- The guy with the most feature filled phone finds making a simple call hard enough.
- Every time I feel I want a break, in the back of my mind there is this niggling little feeling reminding me that I’m being paid a fair bit to work. The really strange part is that quite often I know full well that getting up and wandering around (i.e taking a break from the screen) will help me to think a great deal, but still it doesn’t seem to move me (maybe it’s the chair).
- Office work is all about image and impression. Today a work experience kid came in for a bit. He would have seen me sitting at my huge desk, on my fully adjusted chair, sitting in front of a very impressive looking computer with more screens than I expect he has seen before. My desk is covered in papers, lines of code and expensive looking pens. On my screen is yet more lines of the most complicated SQL he could ever have seen (he probably doesn’t even know what SQL is). How is he to know that I don’t know what I’m doing?
Ok, now for the more IT stuff….
I now know what it means to deal with other peoples code. Today’s task was to take a block of about 350 lines of SQL and fix two bugs in it. One being that the results weren’t ordered as they should have been, and the other being that some percentages went past 100.
Now the most SQL I have even tacked it about 30 lines, and that was quite bad enough. This however was written in India by a man who really didn’t know much about what he was doing (although annoyingly, enough to make people think he did). This man has since been sacked if that gives you an idea of the code. It was slow, inefficient, wrongly formatted and more insightful comments could have been written by deaf monkey in a darkened room with nothing more than litmus paper and a cows anus to write with.
The worst was to come. I spent about 2 hours on the servers picking my way through it, going through the 7 or so (unnecessary) temporary tables it created, reverse engineering it as best I could. It just didn’t make sense, I could not get the number to add up, I could not get thing to be recognised that should have been.
After a while I started to realise that there was something that was more than just wrong. I went of to my college who gave it to me and we poured over it for about 40mins.
We came to the conclusion that there was a lot more wrong with it than people had first thought. Not only did the things I mentioned above not work, but almost all the numbers were wrong.
Now for something to be used as a report, that’s not a good way to go about getting ahead of the competition.
I have now been given the task of rewriting it. We think it can be done in under 100 lines, not 350….
Ok, some of you will be somewhat surprised to head that I don’t live inside a computer> nor do I spend my who day sitting in front of one.
On Sunday I went to a little “party” for a charity I have been helping with since July 2004. They are called PAGEANT (Projects Aiding Gambian Education And Natural Talent). Now I normally help them by packing lots of heavy items into truck, lorries and even 40ft shipping containers. This was a party for one of the Gambian school headmasters who had been flown over and was attending all sorts of courses etc.
As this party I was surrounded by loads of supports of the charity, many of whom had been to the Gambia on trips etc.
I am now toying with the idea of joining their ranks by making a visit myself. You see I got on very well with this Gambian headmaster, he runs a scout troop out there so we instantly had something in common. I am considering making a trip next summer (nice and hot) so I have a week when the schools are still open s o I can visit a few of them, and then a further few weeks so I can go camping with their scout group as they go after school finishes.
The idea is very much in the “tentative” stage, but thoughts are gathering pace in my head. I think it would be a really excellent learning experience for me, and a good opportunity to teach a few Gambian scouts some new tricks.
The idea of going alone is a little bit much for me, but I have a few people in mind I’m thinking of suggesting it to to see if they what to join me.
Watch this space…….
(no, the other one)