My Blog Posts

I have been dudded. Done. Tucked up like a kipper. Defrauded. I am not happy about it either. I broke out of the office to get some lunch. Feeling in need of a boost I decided some quality junk food was in order. I went to Burger King at the Macquare Centre and order a Bacon Deluxe, some regular fries (well, chips) and some tomato ketchup. I dragged the food back to my desk so that I could continue working whilst topping up my grease levels and opened the brown paper bag. Disaster! No tomato ketchup. Well, I thought to myself, I can deal with that disappointment. I removed the burger from the bag and thought “hmm, this looks a bit small for a bacon deluxe” I then actually bit into the burger and found that it was actually a fish burger! I was outraged, and of course couldn’t go back to complain because that is a fifteen minute round trip. So my only response was to post this entry to my diary.

Saturday morning and what am I doing? I’m at work. Bugger.

I thought the great stock market crash of last year had taken them all out, but people are still launching crap web sites. Take a quick look at DriverSMS. Never mind that we all know the business model won’t work, I’d like you to just look at the actual application and think how many people you know who would actually use it. Doomed, I tell you! Doomed! The clock is ticking, we will see how long they last.

My friend Ciaran has gone mad. Unlike me he isn’t rushed off his feet at work so he is surfing the web for amusement. Just to prove his lack of marbles I’m going to share some of the URLs he has sent me today with you. You have been warned ;-) http://www.tgu.org.uk/users/swfa/ http://www.modnews.com/ http://www.totalconversions.com http://www.dlvisions.net/~discworld/ http://www.classicgaming.com/ Proof, if proof was ever needed, that the internet is full of a load of old rubbish.

Another day, another bunch of problem reports. My job at the moment is an unalloyed joy as I wade through elliptic descriptions of supposed problems that may, or may not, have appeared when users have tested our system. To make matters even more interesting, we are still developing parts of the system as we approach that mythical ‘go live’. Expect to see me become more manic as we edge closer to having a working system which will go live (whether we like it or not) on the 19th of November.

Update on the techie tasks; The list of archive pages will not appear in the panel to the left anytime soon. For the curious amongst you this is because that section is populated by executing a javascript script in place which doesn’t work with my hosting company (http://free.prohosting.com/). They do funny things with my html to add the banner ad you can see at the top of the page and that stops the archive listing appearing. Until I can figure out a cunning plan we’re stuck with it I’m afraid.

Sorry to get all technical in my diary, but it has to be done every now and then. I’ve got two techie tasks on the boil which will affect your viewing pleasure. The first is to get the archive listing to the left of this page to work. It is generated automatically by the lovely people at Blogger but doesn’t want to render properly from this web server. It shall be fixed.

Silence is golden. More later …

You will be glad to know that I survived another birthday. It was rather a good one actually. I normally try and take the day off when it is my birthday but circumstances conspired against me this year. The good news about working on my birthday was that we had a ‘morning tea’. This is the custom of stopping work for ten minutes and having a cup of tea (or coffee in my case) and a slice of cake (or pies and sausage rolls yesterday) with your colleagues. A cross between a tea break and a tea party sums up the experience.

Found it. Check out the SPF-40 here. Oh, and Bobo bought me a Playstation 2 as well.

Tick, tick, tick … Birthday Boy!

The post I attempted to make yesterday has disappeared into the ether. This reminds me that although blogger.com is very, very cool it isn’t under my control. The original version of this diary was written in html and posted to this server by ‘me old mate’ ftp. That meant that whenever I had something to say I fired up my html editor (Vim usually) and ftp’ed the results to my hosting company. This version is written by pointing a web browser at http://www.blogger.com and using their application.

50 Minutes to go. Tick tock …

When I got home from work this evening I found a couple of surprises. The first was from that nice Mr Ruddock, inviting me to go and swear a lot and thus become an Australian on Thursday the 15th of November. The service is at 4:30pm at Manly Council Chambers, in case you were wondering. The second surprise was a box of six wines from the lovely people at Ivanhoe, the first of my members packs from their round table club which I have just joined. I get six bottles three times a year as tasters of the soon to be released wines. This pack contains two each of the 1999 Chardonnay, the 1999 Chambourcin and the 2000 Stephen Drayton Shiraz. The idea is that if we like any of these samplers we can invest in a case at knock down prices. As the Naked Chef would say - “Luvverly Jubbly”

Its time to start a count down - 2 days, 8 hours. Tick, tock.

Morning team. The fun starts here. Whilst perusing ntk I came across a great definition of why compromising strong encryption is bad. If you didn’t understand the previous sentence, don’t worry, the chaps at ntk have taken the play school pill; """ One: everyone has a legitimate use for encryption: heck, every time you pay by credit card, you’re doing it. Two: if you don’t have control of your keys, you have no guarantee that your communication is safe. Three: big pile of keys at police authority implies big place to go for fun terrorist hacking party. Four: here is the set of “organisations using encryption codes legitimately” and here is the set of terrorists. Observe the intersection. There is NONE. IT IS THE NULL SET. VENN DIAGRAM THAT LOOK LIKE TWO BIG CIRCLES EQUAL BAD PUBLIC POLICY. """ This still won’t stop a lot of bad laws being passed but there you go. If you are interested, read last week’s ntk here.

Happy Birthday Kevin Vaz. 21 again and absolutely no relation of the Labour member of parliament (allegedly). Most of my thinking today revolves around the rounding of floating point numbers, but that is covered elsewhere. Apart from that not a lot is happening around the blocks really. My joyous task for the weekend is to try and get my affairs in sufficient order to file a tax return. Wow, life on the edge.

The client I am currently working for has an IT department of 20 people. Amongst those are five highly paid professionals who focus solely on web technologies (intranet, internet, B2B, EDI, etc). They have just implemented a policy blocking the use of ‘free’ email and instant messengers via the company network. Which is their perogative. The sad thing is that when you try and access one of these services you are presented with a web page that is actually a Microsoft Word document. This company spends somewhere in the region of half a million dollars a year on internet people, hardware and software licenses and they can’t even produce an html file to serve up when inappropriate requests are made via the proxy server. Oh, and they run Microsoft Proxy server on Win2k, but that is an entirely different kettle of techie fish.

Bugger. According to Yahoo! (as spotted by NextDraft) Swedish researchers say that people who give up smoking and then restart damage their lungs even more than people who carry on smoking. Read all about it here. Just a good incentive not to start back on the demon weed I guess.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it blog. For your spiritual enligthenment today, read this. Its not about me, but I know what Mark is saying and I’ve been there too. I didn’t go cold turkey from the old coffin nails, I used nicotine patches. But it is still the hardest thing that I have ever done. Oh, and Mum, I wasn’t a dope fiend. I stuck to the legally available ciggies.