The last few weeks have been mental. What happens is that people offer you (me) work, and it never comes off so you have to accept every offer…and then a job will actually come into fruition. This time four came together at once. Oh my god, I haven’t been this busy for…ever.
Absolutely no time to myself. Every waking hour I’ve been working. It was beginning to kill me but each is moving nicely now so the pressure isn’t affecting me as much. The jobs are also totally different:

• a caption competition for a large travel agent’s website
• a microelectronics project that I’m not supposed to talk about
• a VoIP telephone system for a prison
• a wine-tasting website
• ..and of course my full time job…

But it’s feeling good at the moment. Mainly because today I’ve had a couple of good breakthroughs. Managed to upgrade a Linux server to 2.4.19/ext3 without breaking domino. Then I came home and stamped on a few bugs in the PIC microcotroller job which have been keeping me awake. 16F873s are cool 🙂

Now Michele is dancing around the room listening to musique de Limewire and I’m blogging for the first time in weeks.

Thursday and Friday nights were good too – spent the evenings in the HG with people I like. Michele was there both nights and it was fun.

This time last week we were at a party in Brighton for a friend of Ben. Nice weekend. Roland was nice enough to drive – made the whole experience more pleasant. Bloody nice chap. Really good to see Ben and tree too.

Sometimes I wonder what my brain is playing at. It’s tired, so I go to bed. Then it won’t sleep, and insists on me flipping from lying in one direction to the other all night. When I do get to sleep, it’s unsatisfying dream-sleep with slightly unsettling and even nasty dreams.
Every so often something wakes me up. Last night it was:

• A Fox screaming unnecessarily loudly
• Violently painful leg cramps
• An unnatural thirst
• Nothing at all

Being woken up for nothing at all is the worst. This is when my brain produces a list of things to worry about. For some reason, lying on ones back in the dark stimulates the brain’s worry-centres. Here is a list of “Top of the cack late-night-bed-worries”:

1. Money, and the lack of it
2. Tax assessment
3. Work
4. The things I told people I would do and then forgot about
5. I drink too much and will soon be dead
6. I’ve only eaten pizza all day and will soon be dead due to vegetable deficiency
7. Bills
8. The thought of having to move house ever again
9. Did I piss [insert name here] off in the pub tonight – I was a bit pissed

Why ? Why doesn’t it just let me sleep. Now I’m up at 8am typing this shit – tonight I’ll be even more knackered and will probably end up with even more late-night anxst..

Its hot, muggy, I’m sunburnt and all 5 channels are showing sport. There’s nothing else anymore, just Big Brother and Sport. And now BB is finished too so it’ll probably be replaced by more sport.
What do you mean turn off the telly ? Don’t be ridiculous.You’ll be suggesting I read a book next.

This is brilliant:http://www.zeppotron.com/romance/xmas_special.html
Charlie Brooker is surely an amusing chap.

Apple Computer: What drugs are you on ?

Sadly I suspect the answer is ‘coffee’. That can be the only explanation for the massive mood-swings from which you seem to be suffering. Perhaps a course of psychotropics would sort out your heads. Or perhaps some Lithium ?

One minute you’re a bunch of friendly, creative techies who just want to make their loyal users lives better. Then suddenly you’re a corporate monster that makes Microsoft look like Christain Aid.

Here are some examples:
Apple: Hey man, we’ve put an Open Source Unix variant in our new OS and anyone can download it work on it and play with it. We just want to make you happy.
Users: Nice one! This looks great! Powerful and Stable. I can’t wait to upgrade my OS9 machine.
Apple: Upgrade ? Fuck you there’s no upgrade – buy it you cheap fucks.
Users: Oh ok. Sorry. Well after all at least I’m not giving my money to Bill Gates – at least Apple is on our side.
Apple: Yeah man – Don’t follow the breadhead fascists at Redmond – they’re like the man. Come with us! Look, see how all of the buttons look like jellybeans ?
Users: Yeah they look cool. Oh hold on, this doesn’t work properly. Oh neither does this. Hmm, or this.
Apple: Tough shit! You think writing this sort of OS is easy ? You ungrateful bastards. Keep using 9 if that’s the way you feel. Oh by the way, we’re dropping support for that soon. HAH!
Users: but…but…but…
Apple: Hey, don’t panic! 10.1 has fixed most of those bugs and we’ve got all sorts of cool extras like LDAP support and SMB is working nicely! Loads of people have been carbonising their apps so that all your favourites will work natively!
Users: Yay! where do I sign up for the upgrade ?
Apple: Fuck you! You want it, you pay the full price. Oh and it’s gone up too. You people make us sick!

etc ad nauseam

Apple – your biggest asset is a massive, blikeredly loyal, customer base who would continue buying your products even if they didn’t work at all. Even they will get pissed off and go elsewhere if you carry on like this.

Tim evicted! Sadly he appears to be too stupid to realise why everyone hates him…and it’s not because he’s “older than his years”…COMPRAAAAWNDEZ ?

It’s the little things…
Sitting in a nice flat, watching some really superb telly and drinking a cheap bottle of red wine. Sometimes life is good.
Always recognise when you are enjoying yourself, otherwise you’ll miss it…what a waste. It’s an excellent feeling when you realise that actually life can be enjoyable. Even if it’s just because you ate a good pizza.

Tonight, BBC2 had the second part of their series ‘the secret life of the office’. It looked like a brilliant piece of hard-hitting satire by Ken Loach. But it was real. I’ve never seen a more perfect microcosm of capitalist society. Sadly, my lack of skill with the English language prevents me going into further detail about the content of the programme. Borrow a video, hassle the beeb for a DVD release, do anything you can but watch it. Watch the opressed working classes cry and become ill with stress as their self-esteem is sapped forever. Watch the ruling classes complain about the wobble in their custom made rare rainforst furniture and then piss about with brainstorming sessions while they earn 4 or 5 times as much as the people doing the actual work. Watch the middle classes succumb to pressure from their superiors and pass it on to the proles with threats and worthless rewards.
It’s all there.

Anyone reading this who is contemplating suicide, please consider this: If you have given up on life then you are in a unique position – you have nothing to lose and can do whatever you like. Every fantasy you’ve ever had about killing your boss, pissing in the ‘PowWow Water’ storage tank or murdering the next person you see dropping litter, you can fulfill! The worst that can happen to you is not as bad as you’d planned for yourself.
Take some of them with you!
Don’t take an overdose! Force your way into the board-room of Cap Gemini with a bucket of weed-killer, a bag of sugar and a lighter! Go on! Enjoy yourself!

Goodnight campers.

Nice weekend. Not only did the sun come out but I got to spend some time out in it, in the park, with friends.
Dave, a very good friend who I hardly ever see, was in London after going on his first spanish package holiday. He was with his girlfriend, Sharon, whom I’d never met before – and she’s great. She taught me a new word, dreich,which means “English Weather”. I’d put money on those two ending up together forever…

Dave, Sharon, Andy ( another good friend I haven’t spoken to for far too long) and I met up in Greenwhich park and sat down in the sun a lot.
Then we wandered over Blackheath and had a pint in the Princess, after which we went to the Thai restarant and pigged out on nice thai food…damn..mixed seafood in thai chilli sauce is good. In fact we had to go to O’neills first because the thai place was choca but that was cool – haven’t been there since Dircon and it brought back some really dodgy drunken memories 🙂
Funnily enough on sunday I had another Dircon moment; Andy and I went to Hilly fieilds for a walk and bumped into Mark, a guy from Dircon. Andy stayed the night after we spent everal hours discussing things of great importance the previous night :).

It’s been over 48 hous since I took my last Lustral and I’m feeling it badly. Michele being away is really rough. It feels like I’m only half here. Hopefully this is the worst I’m going to feel until I get the new prescription. Bad as it is, I can deal with it in the knowledge that the repeat script should be ready tuesday.

Another real bastard is tha AudioGalaxy has gone. I don’t care what anyone says – fo…
oooh…michele just rang – I feel a lot better!

Time for bed.

OK, I know you’re supposed to blog daily but…well to be honest the lack of cash is beginning to drain any sort of creative thoughts from me.
Since the last bolog Michele has aged a year, and we’ve celebrated another anniversary – 5 years! Wooden. Very odd, especially as I’m only 12.

Why the world is broken

Part 2 – Microsoft Powerpoint

Microsoft Powerpoint is perhaps the best demonstration of the dangers in choosing to ignore the wise addage “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.
There was a time when corporate seminars were simply tedious, dry events lacking any sort of soul or joy.
To lighten the mood, some foolhardy souls attempted to make jokes during the seminars; Putting a slide of something inappropriate, like a naked woman, amidst the others for example. The joyless half-hearted murmer of laughter that would follow was enough to convince the joker never to try anything like it again.

Someone must have realised this, and thought to themselves “Jesus these events are tedious as hell….but I can’t help feeling they could be made even worse. So bad that people would rather stick pins in their eyes than attend them.”.
This flash of genius led to the development of Satan’s deadliest tool yet…Powerpoint.

Today I witnessed something that truly scared me. The speaker attempted to make the “inappropriate slide” joke…but with Powerpoint. Even with real slides, where the idea of a dodgy one getting in the batch is at least feasibile, this joke usually falls flat. With powerpoint it reaches new levels of desperation and despair…

No-one can just stand up and talk anymore. They have to set up the video projector, reboot their laptop several times to get the resolution/settings right, load up their powerpoint presentation and then go through every tortous, vaccuuous, slide, one by one. As each meaningless sentence appears on the screen behind them, they have to try and come up with a monologue that captures the interest of the audience, whom by now have, at best, fallen asleep, at worst, hanged themselves. Of course to get even this far they must have already spent a surprisingly long time tinkering with it, changing fonts, colours, patterns, clip-art and animations without once enhancing the actual content.

You see, nowadays, content just doesn’t matter. Style outwieghs substance every time, and everyone is fiercely proud of how stylish they really are.

To ensure the next generation don’t start getting clever ideas about…well anything really…the government has taken drastic action. They’ve put powerpoint in the schools. Sheer brilliance.

By the time you child is old enough to read they will already be starting to wonder why the pages of the book don’t have “themes”. “Why is the whole book in the same font ?”. “They haven’t even put any clip-art in – duh!”.
Give year-6 (4th year/10yr old) kids a project on the Tudors and they’ll spend 10 minutes looking stuff up on the net and a week getting the powerpoint presentation right. Who cares if they even know about Henry VIII at the end, as long as they have demonstrated “good IT skills” by picking the right graphics and colours, they can put their names down for the MBA and uncle Tony will be happy.

Why the world is broken

Part 1 – Miss Management

Who is Miss Management ?
She is the godess of incompetence, superfluity, and prodigality.

Originally, the idea of “management” was to oversee, plan, and ultimately take responsibility for something. It’s quite a good idea in many ways and good managers were often able to take something sick and weak, and turn it into something strong and useful.

Nowadays the meaning of “management” has changed. It now refers to a seemingly mandatory layer of staff in an organisation whose job it is to have meetings, discuss things that they don’t understand, draw pictures and find ways of disposing of company cash and assets.
Here’s a true story to illustrate:

A while ago I was doing some contract work for a very large media/technology company (TV, telecoms, networks etc etc etc). This company had an excellent set of IT staff, who all appeared to be keen and competent, and so I was curious about why they felt the need to hire me to do what was a very simple job.
Being a contractor I didn’t have a desk of my own, and so was shuffled around to desks of the ill, deceased or fired.
One day I was positioned near a bunch of right managers, one of whom had just come back from an outdoorsy management training weekend; lots of climbing, canoeing and team-building type activities by the sound of it. Group hugs. Emotions. Workshops. Role-playing…. that sort of thing. She was saying how much she was looking forward to getting back to work so that she could put her newly developed skills into action.

She, and her suited colleagues, then spent the entire morning on the phones to various people arranging meetings to discuss “compliance”. As if this wasn’t irritating enough, I overheard them saying that Cap Gemini were being brought in for a meeting. Why ? I thought. Why bring in vastly overpriced consultants when you have such a good team of *genuinely* skilled teccies ?

Later that day the entire IT department was taken into a meeting and told that the company was downsizing and 50% of them were being fired! Perhaps they needed to fund the hours-worth of consultancy with cap-gemini ?

Since then the company has announced even greater losses and is in even more trouble. I just love the idea of management sitting in their massivel expsnsive offices wringing their hands saying “But we’ve spent 100s of millions on consultants and strategy groups and we’re still loosing money! How ? Quick, hire more accountants!”