Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
There’s always an occasion to break out the Coleridge!
…alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony,
One of my co-workers has just had a baby, and is working from home.
Another of my co-workers is off for his grandmother’s funeral.
The third co-worker had a migraine headache.
The accounts guy only comes in on Mondays and Thursdays.
The new sales guy works on the road.
The boss is out at meetings all day.
There’s several truckloads of work to do and I’m the only one in the office. Oh joy.
Now I know what that guy on the train yesterday felt like…
So, some time ago I built a rather complex system for a client. I gave it a name, a good solid, Latin derived name that sounds good and has done perfectly well for the last two or three years.
Recently the client has licensed the system to a much bigger company, and I’ve been working day and night to add in new features and generally neaten up the edges of the whole thing, which is fine. But then I come in this morning and and am informed that the client has unilaterally and without so much as a ‘by your leave’ changed the name of the system. Changed it from its good, solid Latin based name to a weak, insipid, non-memorable, three-times-as-long name that isn’t so much a name as a description of what the system does.
This is like renaming the Ford Thunderbird to the Ford ‘Rather Fast Car’ or Coca-Cola to ‘Fizzy Black Drink’. And to add insult to injury they’ve hooked the name up to a crappy ‘surf the internet!’ logo that looks like something from 1997.
Bastards.
If I’d been informed of this at the start of the project I would be annoyed. But to have it dropped on me halfway through (oh, on top of all the other stuff you’ve got to do, can you engage in a total rebranding with our shitty new logo? thanks!) makes me f’ing furious.
I’m going to continue with the programming work and give this all the attention it deserves (ie: none) until I’m got some time free – probably in about two weeks.
This really is my least favourite day of the year you know.
Well once again it’s Good Friday and rather than kneeling in the dark and starving myself like the good Catholic boy I was raised to be I’ve been in at the office for most of the day. This is mostly for two reasons – namely there are a number of projects that needed catching up on, and the old Catholic Guilt has such a hold on me that I wouldn’t enjoy whatever else I decided to do anyway, since it keeps telling me I should be kneeling in the dark and starving myself instead of having a good time. I do this most years and it generally works out fine. The bit of extra pay I get for working on a public holiday certainly doesn’t hurt either.
This year I also managed to get some exercise, as I just managed to miss the bus at Subiaco railway station and didn’t fancy sitting around for an hour waiting for the next one (public holiday bus schedule, what you gonna do?). So I walked the five or so kms to work instead. Only took me 45 minutes which isn’t bad for a pale keyboard monkey whose instinctive reaction to the outdoors is to cower in terror before the big burning thing in the sky.
In any case I’ve got a good four or five hours of work in, and now only have to wait half an hour for the bus home, which is why I’m busying myself with a blog entry.
Now, the eagle eyed blog reader may notice a few subtle differences about the blog from now on. I used my fairly generous lunch break to do some serious re-coding, and it’s now a leaner and faster beast run entirely in PHP rather than an unholy combination of PHP, JSP and Javascript. I’ve also added a small post counter to the lower right of every entry, so those involved in blog wars against me can see what they’re up against 🙂
Well, that’s pretty much it. Happy Easter to all, and to all a good night!
Change the world a little bit.
Anyone who visits this blog regularly (not that I necessarily believe such a curious beast to exist) will have noticed a lot of activity lately. This is because I am “Making an Effort”. I’m trying my best to write something every night just to keep my hand in, and to try and catch up to Helen who recently hit 600 posts despite her blog being younger than mine. Such a discrepancy cannot be allowed to stand! *grin*
That being said, I am extremely tired after a hard week’s work trying to interpret the heavily accented mumblings of a man who looks uncannily like the Vault Overseer from the original Fallout (I keep expecting him to ask me to find a water chip), and have very little stomach for writing. So this entry will be short, if not necessarily sweet.
I will say before going however that if you have any money spare (a rare occurrence in this time of economic crisis I know) or you just feel like being charitable, there are a lot worse causes to send your money to than that of Hollis Hawthorne. Rather than try and compose an explanation in my own words I shall liberally quote from the post on Whitechapel (by one Theremina) that alerted me and many others to her plight…
[Hollis Hawthorne] is a performer, cyclist, and activist who lives in SF. I only kinda sorta barely know her through mutual friends, but by all accounts, she’s just the most radiant, beautiful person. She moves in many of the same circles I do, and has donated her time to many of the same nonprofit events.
Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury.
According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’s mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”
Through a series of fortuitous connections, her case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world … All we need to do is get her there. The friends and family of Hollis are reaching out to everyone they can to raise funds to get her on an I.C.U. plane (aka air ambulance) to fly her back to California.
Before that can happen, Friends of Hollis must raise $150,000 dollars. They’ve already raised approximately $40,000, and more is pouring in all the time, mostly in small denominations. Can you spare a dollar, or five, or ten? It adds up more quickly than you’d think!
Yes, I know, life is risk, and life is uncertain. Life is also precious. If, in some small way, we can help someone in our community to come back from the brink, we really should. Click here to help, and please spread the word, if you can. This is what the internet is for.
Now yes, that all sounds like some kind of more creative than normal Nigerian mail scam, but it’s all on the level and – while her situation has improved with movement to a much better hospital and she’s starting to show signs of recovery – money to get her home is still desperately needed. So, if you feel like doing something good for the world and helping out a stranger – not to mention being part of a growing group of helpers and well-wishers scattered all around the world, click on the link above. If not, whatever.
That’s my good deed for the week. Denys sleep now.
Updates
Spent a good deal of time today coding in data for a company who somehow think they’re going to corner the UK real estate market from here in Perth. I have no idea how this is supposed to work, but I now know more about the English County system than any sane human should (did you know there was a short lived Avon County? No? Did you need to know there was a short lived Avon County? No?).
I also discovered the Dragons page has been missing from the site for a while. Happily I have a backup, so it’s been restored. I have no idea what happened to it – maybe Games Workshop hacked into the server and deleted it? 🙂
Finally the FreakAngels Google Earth file has (again) been updated.
Venting
We’re building an absolutely beastly site for a client (who shall remain nameless) at the moment. They’ve made the mistake of hiring a graphic design company (who shall also remain nameless) to do the layout for them – a graphic design company who seemingly know absolutely nothing about web design. Their crimes against the net so far include…
They seem to think that they’re the high and mighty priests of design, and we should humbly bow and grovel at their feet, never daring to doubt their judgements on the rightness of things. Well, too bad people – we’re engineers, it’s our job to know what can and can’t be done, and we don’t stand for this kind of crap.
In addition to this, what text there is on the site is the most florid, ridiculous, over the top… look I’ll just include an example,
As simple as the beauty of the impassioned glow of a sunset, casting rosy light onto vines that stand in anticipation of promised fruit, such are our beliefs at [Company].
It’s like they’ve bought copywriting services from Edward Bulwer-Lytton!
Bah!!
Cheery details of a cheery client missive
From a support email yesterday…
…I have added 2 sections for hyperlinking (“bleeding wound” and “head injury”) and for some reason “bleeding wound’ has inserted under “injury to children’s teeth”…
Funnily enough we’re not building a site for the Manson family.
Television Redux
You know, I’m really enjoying Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which started its run here a few weeks back (it’s fair to say that it’s the closest we’re ever likely to get to River Tam Beats Up Everyone). Unfortunately however it’s already begun the slow slide towards the early hours of the morning suffered by all sci-fi on Australian TV. It began in a blaze of glory at 8:30pm Tuesday nights, stuck there for three episodes, went AWOL for a week, then came back at 9:30 this week. Before long it’ll drift to 10:30, then 11:25, and before long it’ll be on at 2:10am alternate Wednesdays and Tuesdays – when not bumped by repeats of the Red Shoe Diaries.
I’m also quite enjoying That Mitchell and Webb Look on the ABC (sorry! ABC 1!). Entertaining English sketch comedy with a touch of the surreal. There’s BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner, the Bad Vicar, the Lost Tribe of the Garden Center, and (best of all) the Surprising Adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar. I find the latter so amusing that I can hardly keep from bursting into gales of laughter every time I’m waiting to be served at Sumo Salad (which no doubt says much more about me than it does Mitchell and Webb).
Still on the subject of television, Channel Nine is rerunning Friends at 6:00 nightly. Sad to admit I was quite a fan of the show in its original run, so it’s nice to get home from work and turn it on in the background. For some reason though (probably to do with the earlier time slot) the powers that be at Nine are butchering the hell out of any even slightly risque content, leaving rather jarring jumps in its place…
Ross: What is the name of Chandler’s father’s all male drag review?
Rachel (leaping up): Viva Las!
(cut to Chandler looking disgruntled amongst uproarious audience laughter)
Chandler: Unfortunately that’s true.
…rather hard to follow I think.
On a more personal note I’m feeling rather disgruntled myself this week. Sam – who’s been doing a traineeship with up for the last 18 months or so – had decided to leave the company, tomorrow being her last day. This means that the office is going back to a dead-boring all male environment. In a previous entry moaning about the now-departed cute girl at the supermarket over the road I commented that starting the day with a smile from a pretty girl makes work a lot more bearable. It seems that that’s even more true when you’re actually working alongside said pretty girl. And in addition to any totally inappropriate pulchitrudinous aspects Sam is smart, efficient, a quick learner and generally pretty cool (not to mention that from the all important giant-personal-ego viewpoint she laughs at most of my jokes) so while I’m going to miss her on a personal level the company is going to miss her too. But hey, lunch on the company budget tomorrow, so it’s not all bad 🙂
Additionally on the upside, feeling sad about something real – as opposed to just being generally depressed – is actually quite refreshing.
Well, now I’ve potentially opened myself up to all kinds of sexual harassment suits I suppose I’d better go 🙂
PS: A quick web search suggests that while, strictly speaking, “pulchitrudinous” retains its meaning of “physical beauty” it has in the last few decades… taken on a connotation of, shall we say, a much earthier kind of appeal (thank you Wikipedia). For the sake of clarity I would like to state that in this particular instance I intended “pulchitrudinous” as a humerous, faux-pompous substitude for “attractiveness” and nothing more. You know, just to be perfectly clear 🙂
PPS: The missing word is “Gaygas”
Check out the bull while the DJ revolves it
I got into work today (it was meant to be my day off but we’ve got so much to do before the Christmas break that I went in) and discovered – much to my annoyance – that someone had stolen my Red Bull!
(I keep a sugar free Red Bull in the office fridge, each morning I drink it and replace it with another one.)
Now some people might stick a note on their new can of Red Bull – something along the lines of “Hands off you thieving Micromine bastards!”. But why be crude when you can interesting? So my new can of Red Bull is now adorned with the following epigram…
Extra hours each week I pull,
So cursed be he who takes my Bull,
(OK it’s not a very good epigram, but it should get the message across 🙂
