Posts by sandman

Strange City

I had the pleasure (it genuinely was, great people and mostly a fun time) of working there for a few weeks. It's quite an interesting place, there's a strip extending right through the centre as far as the amazing art museum which is historic, beautiful in places and pretty safe. The only downside being a very large number of homeless people, some of whom are pretty aggressive. I was strongly advised not to go to some of the other bits under any conceivable circumstances. On my last day before flying home another of the hotel guests was murdered in their room, which was then set on fire. As I said, an interesting place...

Can be a laugh

I worked for one company that had a very simple-brained HR system. Because my role (Project Manager) was a standard one it gave me a charge-out rate of 2k a day. My boss was grandly titled "Head of Technology", a non-standard role, therefore the system gave him the minimum charge-out rate of 1k a day. Obviously I couldn't help but point out our respective worth ;-)

Been there, done that

"Even something as simple as allowing people to become familiar with hazardous environments before they enter them in the flesh".

Back in the 90's I had the "pleasure" of a taking part in a demo IBM ran at Hursley - escaping a fire on an oil rig. With immersive VR and an angry foreman with Scottish accent shouting at you it was pretty damned realistic.

Poor orphan

We have a street next to our house, part of which is an "orphan road". Essentially it doesn't belong to anyone - not even the council. For quite a few years this little stretch was left unrepaired until NASA could have asked the council if they could use it for Mars Rover trials. Now it's beautifully smooth and used by some drivers to see if they can exceed Mach 1.

Analysis and/or coding

Some good points raised here. Coding is great, but the ability to analyze a real world problem (yes, games included) and work out the steps needed to solve it is equally if not more important. There's little more frustrating for many people than learning something purely abstract. (Says the man who had to learn Latin at school and couldn't understand why at the time).

UI changes

Ah yes, my favourite occupation. Every time (this applies to everywhere I've worked) a new marketing manager/CEO/receptionist/etc comes in, it's ooh, we need to change the website. Even better, it's then - ooh, we need to change our application UI to reflect the new branding. Then of course, one customer will ask for a new feature, to which Sales will say, "Oh, that's not a problem". Cue another change to the UI. Then of course, every release will have new features (whether useful or not) and the UI design will be changed (whether necessary or not).

Of course, now everyone is all cloudy, the changes are pushed out to the unsuspecting users and they'll find their familiar UI has changed literally overnight, whether they want it or not. On the upside, I've got a job for eternity (well, it sure as hell seems like it).

Damn!

Unfortunately I'm going to miss this as I'll be studying (and singly-handedly trying to ameliorate) the economic plight of Athenian taverna owners on that date ;-)

It might well work

Common, how long have Ponzi schemes and 419 scams worked for? Despite the fact that the world and its canine companions should be aware of them by now. It's virtually impossible to lose money by promising the greedy yet gullible a glittering unicorn wearing the emperor's shiny new clothes.

Lighten up!

OFGS - why not? Windows has never been the same since Minesweeper and Solitaire, etc, stopped being bundled with it. Bring it on I say - that's the dull conference calls sorted. It's either that or read the Reg ;-)

No new Photoshop for me

I really don't need the full power of Photoshop, but do need a mixture of RAW editing, general photo manipulation and some vector/semi DTP work. So that's a mixture of Elements, Lightroom and Xara. (For those of you who haven't heard of Xara, you might want to look it up, it's a pretty damned good product).

Training?

As someone who has the dubious pleasure of producing some of our software company's training materials I was of course delighted when a "senior" product person said the following. "We don't need to bother with training, our software is so intuitive that anyone can understand it".

Strangely our customers (and internal staff) beg to differ. ;-)

Pah, amateurs

My computers are protected by an Elder Sign (one that eats the brains of passing teenagers).

Very popular here...

... in Surrey. This - "“yes, traffic calming is for poor people" - explains why ;-)

Star Trekkin

We come in peace - shoot to kill!

Friendly Americans

I've found the vast majority of Americans to be really friendly - and mean it. In the US the comment "you must come and visit" actually means what it says. In the UK it quite often means "I really hope I never see you again" ;-)

Happily resorting to dogmatism :-)

I'm going to get into the spirit. Tim can't be a "lackey dog capitalist running pig". As any Maoist knows the correct expression is "A Capitalist running dog* and a lackey of US Imperialism". He's pretty likely to also be a revisionist and a paper tiger.

* possibly of course a bloated one...

Well, since the 930 isn't affected...

But I still want to be counted as one of the four. In fact I have an old HTC Windows phone on the desk as well (no sim, and a cracked screen, but use it as a now free HERE Maps/Drive GPS device/music player, etc). So, am I two owners. The beautiful other half owns a 720, so that's three Win Phones in the house - that's theoretically all four of us then. Who owns these mythical 1020s?

"Really? But Google is the internet, surely"?

Oh, that's so last decade, do try and keep up! ;-)

Bunch of wheel lovers

Pah, personally I try and walk most places and regard ALL road users as dangerous vermin. (Except when in a car, or on a bike or a bus then all OTHER road users are as above, oh, and pedestrians).

The technology doesn't matter

Look, it could be run by HAL, powered by a tiny fusion engine and have unicorn leather seats. All this is irrelevant, it looks like it was designed by a three year old with a broken crayon. Even British Leyland never managed anything quite as ugly. Ask yourself, "Would I be seen, even as a week old mouldering corpse, in the non-drivers seat in THAT?"

"Old" works for me

As long as I'm on a plane I sort of like the idea of a tried and tested system controlling the airspace I'm in. New is only good if it offers extra functionality that is absolutely necessary. I'm going to suggest that the actual requirements for an air traffic control system don't change much (assuming there is spare capacity within the system). I'm also going to suggest that there seem to have been very few (if any?) fatal accidents caused by air traffic control problems in the UK (I don't know how many buttock-clenching near-misses have happened).

Evasion Tactics

I used to work for a company where the senior management were proud to never be off call and never take a real vacation, ever. Unfortunately they expected the entire workforce to behave the same way. My answer to the holiday problem was to take my Blackberry with me and lock it in the nice, metal, hotel safe. When asked on return why I hadn't responded to all the calls/emails/IMs/etc, I'd just say there was no phone coverage in the mountains of Crete/Sardinia/wherever. Being US based, they believed me.

OK so far...

We've been experiencing better than normal delivery times just using the standard free delivery. Two days has been the fastest, four the slowest.