Posted: Sun 26 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Work-related |
And lo, the weekend is upon us once more.
Not that it’s of real interest to anyone, my to-do list looks something like this…
ShoppingSort out Herself’s main Birthday Pressie (having sorted out the other one today)- Complete the application for [interesting job]
- Continue to work on [site that shall be named soon] – not long til that bugger goes live now
- Sort out computer hardware, and figure out sniffing the wireless network key, so I can get all that shit sorted
- Do some major research into some AJAX ideas I’ve got
General Domestic Gubbins- Write and send out some spec letters to get some more website work in
- Write out minutes for the charity meeting of two weekends ago, and post them out too
I’m sure there’s at least one thing I’ve forgotten, but I’ll figure it out before long. I hope.
Posted: Sat 25 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Weirdness |
One thing that struck me as very odd when I came to Bracknell was the sirens. Every Monday at about 10am (but rarely on a completely regular/punctual basis – I suspect it has to be set off by hand, and is thus reliant on people not doing other stuff) the area is covered by a wailing two-note siren, eventually followed by a one-note ‘all clear’ siren. It took me ages to find out (OK, ask) what it was, and it turns out that because we’re close to Broadmoor (BBC Profile here and WikiPaedia here) and it’s a siren that gets sounded should anyone escape from there.
What surprises me more now about the entire thing is how little anyone reacts to it. Yes, OK, it’s a regular test signal, but for the most part people don’t seem to react to it at all, not even looking round to see what the hell it is, or anything. To me it always sounds like the cliched “Three Minute Warning” siren, so you know, if I heard it and didn’t know what it was, I’d at least ask, or try to find out where it was coming from. (Oh yeah, I did, didn’t I?)
Maybe it’s yet another instance of “it won’t happen to me” or “it’s not happening” syndrome. I don’t know.
Posted: Fri 24 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Work-related |
Ah, wonderful. (Note, there’s major sarcasm in that sentence)
Our resurrected boss, The Arsehole, has decreed that we must all be in constant contact in the office. (bearing in mind that the great majority of us work in the same office, so it’s easier to wander over to the desks and talk…)
So they’ve invested in a bundle of headsets so we can use Google Talk and Voice over IP (AKA ‘phone over the internet’) – no fuckin’ use whatsoever for the most part, and just makes us all look like we work in a BT call centre. Frankly, chuff that.
My aim now is to keep the headset in the box for as long as possible, and to never use it at all. How successful this will be, only time will tell.
Posted: Fri 24 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky |
As yet I’m still undecided about this one. I don’t know if it’s a) really, really sad, or b) no bad thing to be able to do it.
Anyway – on Wednesday, Gordon sent me a piece of PHP code he couldn’t get working, and asked if I could help. Bear in mind that the first mail I got was at half eleven at night, and Gordon got a response within about 10-15 minutes, and you’ll begin to realise just how sad I actually am on occasion…
However, the first fix didn’t work. Well, it did, but not in the way Gordon wanted. So another idea came to me, and got sent off, and that didn’t work either – but gave me some more information on what needed doing.
And lo, Fix The Third worked perfectly. So everyone’s happy.
I do find, though, that I actually enjoy fixing this kind of thing though – it’s something I’m good at, and – and this is the sad bit – get quite a sense of satisfaction out of. So, is it sad, or no bad thing?
Posted: Fri 24 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related |
Gah, sometimes I swear I’m my own worst client.
On The Other Site (and I promise I’ll be letting it out into the wild soon – promise.) I’ve been working out how to get the necessary information into the bloody thing, and it was becoming more and more complex. Countries, Regions, Towns, and at least two other bits of information before we got to the crux of the matter, and so the page was hellish.
Mainly this was because I was trying to do it all in a way that makes sense for the long-term, and minimises the amount of data that’s repeated in the database. For instance, if you’ve got an address table, you don’t really want a buttload of records with the same town, county, and country – you’d want to have a “location” table that will hold those, so you can say in the address table “location=10”, and then in the location table, record ten has “town, county, country” in it. Makes sense.
Anyway, the way I’d done this was becoming incredibly complex, and so this morning I’ve been looking at it again, and figuring out better ways to do it. Well, by “better” I mean, of course, “simpler”- both from a coding point of view, and a usability one. All the same, it’s enough to make my head ache quite a lot.
The annoying bit is that I’d got it all to a point where it was actually pretty much working. It just took too long to get anything done, so the re-plan was necessary. And maybe when I develop things a bit more, I’ll come back to this way, and do it all with AJAX or something to make it nice to use. But I’m not convinced…
Posted: Thu 23 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Work-related |
Right about now, Herself is going in to an interview for a job she really wants. It would mean moving away from Bracknell, (And I can’t see that as anything other than a good point, to be honest) which has been part of our plan for a while anyway.
I just hope it all goes well – I’m sure that we’ll know soon enough either way.
And at the same time a job that I really fancy has come up in the same area. So the application for it will go in this weekend. Yes, you can tell I’m interested in it, because I’m not just dashing it off straight away, but will take some time to think about it.
It certainly makes for an interesting time…
Posted: Thu 23 March, 2006 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: News |
Yick, yick, yick
Seriously, One in 10 people wear their underwear for three days in a row? And 5% of the population also admitted wearing their briefs inside out to get an extra day’s wear? I so didn’t need to know those things.