Blame Culture

Chaos at work this morning. The official website was down, saying simply “Service Unavailable”. The CMS was fucked down, and so obviously a whole range of people were going orbital. Chief Execs, Department Heads, General Public, so forth, so fifth. Phone ringing off the hook with people wanting to know what was wrong, what was being done to fix it, and why it hadn’t been fixed already. The answers, in order, would be “Because the whizzy CMS we paid shedloads for has crashed”, “it’ll be fixed when the one person in the organisation who has access to that particular server comes in”, and “because nobody else has access to the systems”. I’ve not been quite so blunt (yet) but it’s coming close.

The situation is farcical. If that one person is off sick, we’re shafted. If Stinky® is off sick, no-one else has permissioin to make new webpages live. (if we know he’s going to be away there can be a permission change on my user so I can make pages live) After Christmas, once I’ve left, there’s only Stinky® who’ll have permission to do that – fuck only knows what they’ll do when he goes off on holiday, let alone should he go off ill for, say, a week or a fortnight.

Timetable

I know I’ve commented before on the shitness of one of the bus services I use every day. However, it’s worth doing so again on this occasion, out of pure comedy value. Until this week, the service was timetabled, and also a “Gold Service” where (in theory) there was supposed be at least one bus every ten minutes. This never really worked as a system, and I eventually figured out that it averaged to one bus every ten minutes. What this meant was that you could wait half an hour, and then three would come at once. Yes, the cliché was true.

Now, however, timetables have disappeared. Instead when you get on the bus there’s a poster with a little bit of PR Blurb on it.

Welcome to the 409 service. So regular you don’t even need to refer to a timetable!

What this actually means is “We’re so incompetent we couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone an efficient bus service. So instead of trying to improve it – which we know won’t work – we’ve decided to do away with the timetable and now you just get a bus when it arrives. That’ll make life much easier for you, won’t it?“

TiVo

Yes, in regard to the comment about TiVo, it did have plenty of space for while the TV was out of action.

It has a 40Gb drive, which holds about 20-30hours of medium-quality recording (my default setting) and there was space for all the things I was actually at all bothered about recording. And a few other things too. It’s still sometimes amazing the crap that it decides I might want to watch – but at least it’s learned most of the things I really despise.

I did find it interesting though, how little I missed having a TV at all. The real frustrations were that I couldn’t see stuff that TiVo had recorded, nor could I watch DVDs. But with regard to watching live TV, I wasn’t bothered at all.

Monday

You can just tell it’s a Monday sometimes. Today’s one of those days. Stinky® is back, and living up to his name – I wish I had a gas-mask.

The weather here is cold, grey, and damp – about as motivational as waking up and putting your feet in cold sick. The journey to work took 90 minutes this morning due to roadworks. Still, could be worse, I could be on the M25.

Anyway, it’s looking like another one of those days, so we’ll see what I find to waffle on about later.

Descriptive

Sometimes I love looking through TiVo’s Programme Guide descriptions – they can amuse me. For example today’s Britain vs. Australia rugby match is described as “Sporting Non-Event”. What they actually mean is that it’s not at the same level as, for example, the FA Cup or whatever – but “non-event” is still a bit unfair, I feel.

Gone Silent

You know, it’s just occurred to me today that this is the last weekend I’m going to be spending at home in Manchester on my own. (We’ll discount the housemate for now) As such, it’s actually been quite nice to spend most of my time this weekend doing very little. Some domestic stuff, shopping, sorting out the house and so on, as well as catching up on a little bit of the stuff that was stored on TiVo while the TV was out of action.

But it’s been a nice relaxing weekend, and much needed. As for the rest of it, well, we’ll see.

Visual

Due to certain technological failings (Yes, the TV broke) I found myself today having a look in the Godforsaken wastelands known as Comet and Currys for replacement items. And one thing struck me more than anything else – considering the price of the bloody things, isn’t the picture quality on plasma screen and LCD screen TVs utterly utterly shit?

So I’ve ended up with an “old” CRT screen. Much nicer. Now I just need a replacement spine, having killed the current one while lugging the Sony Trinitron beast out of the way…

UPDATED : For those who are interested, it’s a 28″ Widescreen with Virtual Dolby by Samsung. And so far, it’s proved to be a very nice bit of kit.