Legalised

Posted: Tue 22 October, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Corbett, Cynicism, D4D™, Geeky, Legal, Marketing, Stupidity, Time | Leave a comment »

It’s now two years since my little spat with Ian Corbett (of Toyota Ireland) and his legal advisors was completed.  I said at the time that the way they’d requested things to work out wouldn’t actually get rid of the search engine results that annoyed him so much. But he’s a marketing manager, so one assumes he knows these things, and that I would be wrong.

On a random whim, I searched the other day on Google for said person – and lo, I was right. Even when searching for just name + company (with no mention of D4D™ at all) up comes D4D™ with a nice healthy 4th place in the search results. And now there’s also Google Images, I can also see what the glaikit bawbag looks like, too.

All told, I can’t deny, I do find this very amusing. And there’s nothing at all I can do about it, it’s all in the hands of That There Google.

Navigation

Posted: Thu 17 October, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Navigation, Travel | Leave a comment »

One of the things I’ve written about before is how I navigate through, and learn about, a place.  My spatial sense is pretty good, and in general if I know the main things about a place, I can navigate by effectively holding a three-dimensional model of it in my head. When I’m not sure where I am, I can look up, find some significant points, landmarks etc., and orient myself based off that model.  That’s not a perfect description, but it’s how I visualise things in general, so it works for me.

My map of London is generally pretty good – it’s ridiculously rare that I get lost at all there, even in the more outlying areas. Indeed, I think the last time I got seriously mislaid was when I was relying on shit satnav to get me across south London (which turns out to be May 2009) and even then, once I’d given up on the satnav, I navigated and found my way to where I needed to be pretty damn quickly. (And far faster than if I’d stayed reliant on shit-nav)

The other side of that is that sometimes I miss out on connections, or need to wander around to find those new connections that allow that map to improve.

Tuesday’s London trip was a perfect example of that. To get to CMH, I went to St James’ Park tube station (which I used to use daily while working with one of the agencies in London) but going to the other exit from the one I used when I was there last. I knew where I was going, but I hadn’t connected the two areas in my head – and it turned out that they were both ridiculously close, only I’d never realised. (It also turns out that CMH is also dead opposite the QE2 conference centre, where I attended one of the @Media conferences)

It also turns out that we walked back into Central London via St James’s Park, and went on a different route to the one I knew, so we also went through Horse Guard’s Parade, and past Downing Street without me knowing. Typical.

Anyway, as well as having a fantastic evening, it all meant I also got to add new bits to my map. Never a bad thing.

Legally Dead

Posted: Fri 11 October, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Ideas, Legal, News, People, Thoughts, Writing | 1 Comment »

The BBC today has a fantastic story about Donald Miller, an American man who had disappeared for 8 years, was declared legally dead in 1994, then reappeared in 2005, having been drifting and moving from place to place since 1986.

Because he’d been declared legally dead, his ‘widow’ was given his Social Security death benefits, so when he reappeared – and I’m reading between the lines a little – it looks like they’ve tried to claim that back.

However, because he’s been ‘dead’ so long, that decision can’t be resolved or overturned.  Apparently it can be within three years (which is pretty mind-boggling in itself) but not after 19 years – unsurprisingly.

What this means is that Donald Miller remains legally dead.

Of course, my mind went off on a tangent at that point, and thought about how cool this actually is. (in some ways) I wonder what would happen if (for example) he robbed a bank. Could a legally-dead person be charged with a crime? Could it go to court? I suspect not. Even fingerprint checks would – as I understand it – come back as being those of a dead person.   And what happens when he does actually die?

It’s all a very odd story, based around odd tenets of law. And I suspect we haven’t heard the last of it.

B-O-R-E-D

Posted: Wed 11 September, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Business, Geeky, People, Work-related | Leave a comment »

More and more I’m coming to the realisation that I am so not a data geek.  I use data and databases all the time, but I don’t usually deal in big data systems that need epic sizes of database and insanely complicated methods of getting that data in and out of those systems.

This current role is now my third over the years where I work with exactly those types of system. Crapco back in Bracknell/Wokingham – and in a weird coincidence that’s also where I last did any intensive cycling – were the first. A duller bunch of people you couldn’t want to meet, and I hated it.  The second was about 2, 2½ years ago, an educational company in Cambridge. And now a tech company in Cambridge.

The thing is, they’re all very similar – as are the people who work in them. In all three cases, the people involved were (in my eyes) ineffably dull – all had been with the company for at least five years – and deeply insular about their work. They didn’t want to teach anyone else how to do stuff on ‘their’ system, primarily (it seemed) because they thought their own jobs would be at risk if they told someone else how to do things, or were in any way helpful at all.  It’s just a mindset I simply don’t understand.  After all, if you’re swamped enough that you can justify an extra person, surely it makes sense to then get that person up to speed so you can reduce that work pressure. But no. And it’s all so “This is *my* section!” and cliquey that it just does my head in.  No-one wants to teach how to figure out where things are going wrong, it’s like a “oh, figure it out yourself” type thing. And don’t get me wrong, most of the time I can evaluate how things are working, and where things are going wrong.  In environments like these though, you can’t do that. It’s been made so insanely complex over the years, anyone coming in new is effectively fucked from the start.   And that’s the position I find myself in. (Again)

Couple that with one simple fact from my side – which is that when it comes to these kind of companies, I simply don’t care enough about their data to want to work with it and worry about its accuracy.   “Oh, but it’s 0.001% out on those figures.” And?

All told, it’s a lesson I need to learn, I type of place I no longer wish to work in.  I’ll be OK here for the remaining five months of the contract – but I won’t be renewing after that.  I’ll probably keep my options open too, by keeping on looking for other roles…

Data Migration – Kindle

Posted: Mon 10 June, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

By contrast to the ease of migrating data to the new laptop, resyncing a new Kindle is an absolutely shite experience.

The actual purchase/delivery of it is great – ordered on Friday, arrived today.  But synchronising it is crap.

Rather than a simple “download everything” option – or even having a “download everything on this page” – you have to choose to download each eBook individually. Even on the website, it’s a list with individual controls. Not even a checkbox against each item and a ‘download all’.

Why? I’ve no idea.  But it means that what should be a simple “connect this device to my Amazon account” to download everything becomes a nightmare of (in my case) roughly 1,000 mouse-clicks. That’s no exaggeration. I’ve got 260 books on my Kindle. For each one you’ve got to click on “Actions”, then “Download”, then Select the device (there’s only one device – at least fucking auto-select it!) . For each book.

It’s a truly painful and shit experience, and there’s an email going to Amazon to explain that.

More Broken

Posted: Fri 7 June, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Stupidity, Technology, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

It’s obviously the month for tech stuff to break.

Following on from the laptop, the iPhone battery pack, and the iPhone cable, the Kindle’s just died.  (I know, I know, “That doesn’t happen with books”, blah blah)  My own fault, out with friends last night, had the Kindle (in a case) in my pocket all night, and somewhere along the line it’s got squished, and the screen has cracked in the way eInk ones do, so it’s no damn use to anyone.

I *should* have left it in the car, but forgot.  That’s the way of things sometimes. No idea exactly when it happened, although it was probably when five of us crammed into a taxi, which was fairly tight.

Ah well, live and learn.

Impetus

Posted: Wed 5 June, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Writing | Leave a comment »

One interesting side-effect (currently) of the new laptop is that it seems to have caused a resurgence in writing, or at least the desire to write.

I don’t know why though – although I guess some of it is down to having a nice new clean (and reliable) keyboard that makes things a bit easier.

I’ve also installed a couple of bits of writing software – Scrivener, and my old fallback, CeltX – as well as the LibreOffice package. (an open-source version of Microsoft Office, and much better in my opinion)

We’ll see how things go with a potential writing resurgence, but at least it’s starting off pretty well.

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