Archives for: February 2007

Your upstairs neighbour puts in laminate flooring, but doesn't put in an underlay. Laminate flooring straight onto his concrete floor / your concrete ceiling. That's a nuisance. Now he seems to have got a girlfriend who wears heels around the flat. Well, I think it's his girlfriend ... I mean ... "her" footsteps are a bit heavy.

Oh well. Laminate flooring is so yesterday.

WTF?

Sunday morning at 6am I went down for a swim. The noise told me there was a party going on in the pool area. Often I'd turn around and come back later, but that morning I wanted to swim. I went in to find about ten yoots. Okay, they weren't pleased to see me and they were loud, but for most of the time we ignored each other.

Then one of them decided to try intimidating me. Just ignore him, that's the best response, right? Clearly not. The intimidation escalates until ... I won they lost. One of the benefits of being a grumpy old man is that virgin yoots are scared of you.

Oh, you shout abuse and turn the lights off as you leave? Oh, aren't you big and tough!

Allez-allez!

Monday morning saw me coming down to the pool area to find that night's party was over. The contents of the toilets had obviously been used for fun and games. WTF? Who would get pleasure out of throwing crap around? I mean, infants might enjoy it, but would anyone old enough to recognise their image in a mirror want to see their face knowing they've touched shit?

WTF?

Oh look, someone vandalised one of the cameras today. Oh look, someone wrote graffiti on the wall at the weekend.

WTF?

Wait for it ... wait for it ... you can hear the landlords preparing their complaints, "why is nothing done to prevent this abuse!"

I don't know. You tell me.

I work in amongst users on a Thursday and a Friday. Quite how I'm supposed to do development while sitting amongst people discussing tonight's episode of Coronation Street, their child's digestive tract problems, or (related?) the sausages they made last night. Regardless, one advantage of getting out of the IT room is that I don't have to listen to Robin "singing" to Barry White. (I'd rather listen to Gollum sing Barry White.)

The official line is that sitting in with the investment management back office allows me to work only on their problems. Practice proves this to be nonsense. I mean, I'm sitting in a room full of telephones and my computer has a mail client connected to the network. In themselves not reasons, but there's a behaviour at GBU that makes any kind of planning redundant. I'd been in the office less than an hour this morning when the first deadline hit my desk. Reading the e-mails JP forwarded, they'd known about today's deadline on 15 January, but only chose to tell me today.

The problem is that staff at GBU have found from experience that they can do this. In the past they've given the IT department un-meetable deadlines that've been met, so they don't feel any need change their behaviour. There lies the solution. Their behaviour works, so there's no need to change it. If they found that imposing artificially tight deadlines resulted in failure then they'd tell us about problems earlier rather than after it was already too late.

"In the past, we've told them on the day and they've done what we've asked. Why bother ourselves telling them earlier this time and having to keep on top of them?"

I stumbled across this comment I'd left in some source code in 2005:

What can I say. They've known for months that they'd need this data, but they only contact me when they need it "by the end of the day."

Shite program reflecting the lack of planning from above.

Whoever is maintaining this: have a nice day ... and get yourself a better job.

The Ubiquitous came to me soon after JP with a problem that didn't have an impending deadline. I spent today concentrating on her work. I'll be finished it by lunchtime tomorrow. Way, way before any deadline. Then I've got a small job for MAL. I reckon I'll be starting JP's job 36-hours after she brought it to me. That'll already be 12-hours past the deadline. If I do the work properly rather than rush then it'll be Tuesday before I'm finished. Is that the best way to change their behaviour by showing them that it doesn't work?

It seems to be difficult to get away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The situation's improving, but there are still web pages that don't work with alternative browsers like Firefox. Most can be ignored, the site's are rubbish, or I can access them at work where I still have access to IE. Unfortunately, GBU's own remote desktop requires you connect using Internet Explorer. Waiting until I'm next in the office to use the remote desktop kind of defeats the purpose of it being remote.

There are a number of options: dual-boot, and having a virtual PC being the obvious two. My home computer does have both SuSE Linux and Windows 98 (!) installed, but I'm too lazy to reboot out of Linux and into Windows. Having a virtual Windows box seemed like a perfect solution, but my computer's a little underpowered and changed from slow to grinding with Windows running inside Linux.

Sérgio Lopes comes to the rescue with IEs4Linux. In essence: download, run an installer, run another installer, and you've got a working copy of Internet Explorer available in Linux. Okay, I had to fiddle with file permissions and run the second installer again, but that doesn't sound so good.

I'm not against sitting in a darkened room feeling sorry for myself, but I can't tolerate it in others. You feel like the world's against you? Wow, it must be tough being so important. The building containing the flat you've bought as a second home isn't being serviced by the residents' association committee to the standard you expect? Wow, that must make you really angry.

Life is neither fair nor unfair. No-one owes you anything. Trying to get healthy doesn't mean you will get healthy.

A 419 e-mail arrived for me today. This one's got a funny twist. The money's being offered to me to use "for the good work of the lord, and also to help the motherless and less privilege and also for the assistance of the widows".

You have to laugh at that one.

I'd decided to eat something close to proper food tonight. The packet of Quorn fillets suggested browning the fillet then cooking it in a mix of vegetable stock and pesto before stirring in creme fraiche. It was okay. Given it took only 30-minutes: okay is good.