Working man's blues

Well, I've been back at work for two whole days and things aren't any easier yet. The bank account is bare and I won't get paid until the middle of next month. The code I'm working on is complex and there's noone there who understands it in detail as it was all written by a contractor who is long gone and nobody else there really understands Symbian code. I know I'll be able to get on top of it, but I'm not sure how long it'll take to truly master things and I want to try to show some progress as soon as possible, understandably. I fixed my first bug today, though! Shame it was in something that nobody else had noticed was broken, but it's still a fix!

Nice weather we've been having, too. A particularly ghastly billboard poster of Tom Cruise blew away in the amazingly stong winds yesterday, which is exactly the sort of weather-related mishap I can get behind.

Dietary Requirements

Today I went shopping for shirts. Thanks to a discretionary payment of thirty quid from the nice people at my Flexible New Deal provider, I am now the proud owner of a pair of office-style shirts; one in light blue and one in eye-watering maroon for added sassiness.

I shall, however, be going on a diet. Sitting around on my backside for twenty months hasn't helped my shapely physique any, so I'm going to make a proper effort to eat better and get some exercise done. There, I've told the Internet so now I have to live up to my words or I'll be letting the Internet down and Tim Berners-Lee will send round his goons to beat me up.

My trouble is that I wouldn't know a balanced diet if it fell on me. Wah wah not enough time to cook properly wah and so forth, but it's all excuses. What isn't an excuse is the cost of food on a limited budget, what with supermarket prices for decent (i.e. fresh food that isn't ninety-five percent filler products) grub having gone up something like fifty percent. Fortunately that shouldn't be an issue with the whole job thing, so in the future I'll be able to afford named meat and perhaps even vegetables of some description, as opposed to dehydrated hydrogenised vegetable pieces with enhanced colour, and now with actual flavour! ("vegetable" is a registered trademark of the Monsanto corporation, all rights reserved)

Superstitious Dread

Now I have a job offer, I'm in mortal fear of waking up and finding it was aaaaallll a dreeeaaam.  Despite my non-superstitious general cast of mind, I find myself unconsciously trying to Karmically balance myself out so that the pendulum of fate doesn't swing back into "bad luck" with a vengeance.

How do I do that? By watching Michael McKintyre's Comedy Roadshow. By forcing the terrible misfortune of Michael McKintyre on myself, I ought to have something really nice happen to me as recompense.


I bloody 'ate Michael McKintyre. How he has a TV show, I do not know.

Sneezing and Giggling

Today I am unusually cheerful, all the more so, since I seem to have developed a cold.

Earlier in the month I applied for a C# programming job and was asked in to take a technical test. The test itself turned out to be a general programming aptitude test with a made-up language, so the week of C#/.NET revision that I'd done wasn't particularly useful, although I thought it might be handy for any subsequent interview and kept at it as I was sort-of getting in to the whole C#/.NET thing, mostly because Visual Studio 2010 is an absolute joy to use compared to the tools I'd been used to in my old job.

Basically, I was getting carried away with the way autocomplete meant I only needed to type about a third of the code, but I digress.

At the beginning of this week, I got a call back saying that I'd done well on the test and that they would like me to come in for an interview. The strange thing was that when the email confirmation arrived for the interview, it was saying that I'd be interviewing for a Java role. I queried this, and was told that it was indeed a Java position, and was I okay with that?  I was, because I've done Java Micro Edition before (this isn't Micro Edition work, mind) and I was getting a little tired of the way a lot of C#'s keywords are in there not to help the compiler compile, but to prove to the compiler that the programmer isn't a complete idiot and actually understands what it is that their code is doing (for example having to explicitly add the override keyword to functions that override a virtual function in the base class. The compiler doesn't need it- C++ manages just fine without it- but it forces programmers to acknowledge that they're masking an inherited function by hitting them with compile errors if they leave it off).

The only problem with the sudden shift to Java was that I wouldn't have time to do any Java revision, and Java Micro Edition is a massively cut-down version of Java, especially in the CLDC/MIDP profiles used on phones. I was worried that any technical questions would deal with aspects of Java that I simply hadn't needed to deal with on mobiles, such as the collections framework. I know it's there on Real Java, I know what it does and how it uses generics, but I can't say I've ever written code with it. On a mobile, you have to use the rubbishy old Vector class and the like, which isn't type-safe and therefore makes baby Jesus cry.

Aaaanyway, I went to the interview without any massively high hopes and had a good long chat with the two chaps I'd be working with on a daily basis. I explained where I was at with Java, answered a couple of technical questions, and they said that with the amount of C++ experience I have, it won't be an issue. After an hour or so of that, they went outside "for a chat" and asked me if I wouldn't mind sitting another test, this being a language-and-number-skills fifty questions in fifteen minutes sort of thing. I didn't mind, sat the test and was then asked if I had time for a chat with the Boss of Bosses. I agreed and he talked me to death for an hour before they let me loose with the reassurance that I'd done "really well" on the second test and that I'd hear from them by Monday.

It wasn't until I got home until I remembered Monday is a bank holiday.

Friday afternoon, as I'm walking in through the front door after having gone out for some dog food for the idiot dogs, my mobile goes. It's the people I interviewed with and I immediately think they're ringing me up to tell me that they won't be proceeding etc, etc, etc. Instead, they offer me the job!

The paperwork is in the post and once it arrives, I'll be arranging a starting date. No more dole posts! (hopefully)

Idiot Detection, CERN-style.

So, I'm filling out a job application at the CERN website and I click on the drop-down box for "How did you learn about job or training opportunities at CERN?" and what do you suppose the first two options are?

• Angels and Demons - Book
• Angels and Demons - Film

 Oh, that wacky Dan Brown!

Button Man

Today, I have been putting new buttons on my trousers. With a hammer.

I've been economising on the clothing budget by not buying any, so the slow march of entropy (and being a fat pig) has taken its toll on my trouser buttons. After my trouser supply fell down to the critical threshold of one pair of trousers that don't fall down, I scraped together the cash for some new buttons.

In the past, I'd bought blister packs of sundry sewing supplies from supermarkets, a pointless exercise as the buttons in question are really meant for shirts and tend to break under eh... load. This time I went to a hobby superstore and bought a pack of proper "Jeans" buttons that you basically rivet into place; hence a happy few minutes this morning hitting my pants with a hammer.

It also seems that the Dole Diet is doing me some good as I had to rivet the new buttons a bit tighter to keep said pants in place.

It's a Gas

Today's latest Catch-22 situation is with regards to paying the gas and electricity, which I get from the one supplier. If I don't make a payment by the end of today, I get hit with late payment charges, so I ring to make a payment.

Their payment system is down.

Do I get until tomorrow to make a payment to avoid late charges? No, it has to be made today. But the payment system is down...

Coloured Rocks

Flicking through the late-night TV channels, I notice a teleshopping programme for typically shonky only-available-on-TV jewellery is actually called "Coloured Rocks".

Truth in Advertising.

Brewin' Beetles

I was making myself a nice cup of tea with the aid of my bog-standard spout-filling electric kettle today, when for reasons unknown I decided to open the lid and take a look inside.

Oh joy.

Floating about in the water were several tiny (and very dead) beetles. Biscuit Beetles, to be precise.

I've been drinking Beetle Broth for an indeterminate length of time. The mesh filter in the spout of the kettle was enough to stop their stewed carapaces showing up in my tea, but apparently not enough to keep them out of the blasted kettle in the first place.

Tomorrow, I shall be hunting high and low to find out where the buggers have come from. They're getting themselves a whole world of hoovering tomorrow..

The Fat Lady has Sung

Sorry, Opera, but today after a long love affair going back to oohhhhh I dunno, Opera 5.0, I have decided to switch browsers to Google Chrome. We'll still always be friends, though...

Fusion Power

The drippety-drip sound from the kitchen plumbing has now stopped. I finally got the pennies together for a roll of self-fusing silicone tape from my local Maplin and did some more scrambling about the counter-tops.

The tape is weird stuff. It doesn't have any glue and is only very slightly sticky in a sort of static cling way- at least to materials that aren't the tape itself, because once tape touches tape it is stuck together fast and there ain't no way you're peeling it apart again, especially if the tape was being stretched when it touched.

You have to wrap it around the pipe under repair quite tightly, stretching the tape out to about twice its relaxed length, and overlapping the tape on top of itself about half-way. If you keep it nice and taut at all times, it stays in place beautifully and so far there's been no sign of leakage.  The only problem was the aforementioned habit the tape has of sticking to itself when you don't want it to, which is an absolute pain when you're trying to wrap the tape around a pipe in a restricted area whilst maintaining proper tension.

Anyway, it's done now and with a bit of luck, the horrible fused mass of silicone (have I done a Pamela Anderson joke yet?) will keep water from leaking until such a time as I find myself back on my feet and can pay to have some proper plumbing done, or until I am thrown out onto the cold streets by an uncaring society, boo-hoo, a boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo.

Plumb Crazy

Great. The dripping has started up again and I couldn't afford amalgamating tape thanks to late payment of benefits. Time to go clambering about the kitchen cabinetry armed with a poxy roll of sticky tape.

Good news is that I've had a couple of interviews this week and have a couple more in my diary. Bad news is that one of them is an actual programming position that pays minimum wage, but any port in a storm. Or even a Sauterne.

The old jokes are the best.

At least minimum-wage programming will look better on my CV than sitting around on my backside doing nowt. Plus I'd be able to offer exceptional value for money!

For once...

Plumbing the depths

Last night was fun. I've posted before about the shonky quality of the pipework in my house, but that was all winter freeze-associated, I don't know what triggered last night's water torture.

And water torture it was; it started out as the drip-drip-drip of the classic Chinese method but thanks to some help by yours truly, it rapidly graduated to out and out water-boarding.

Note to any "But water-boarding isn't torture" apologists reading this. Yes it is. It was certainly torture enough for the Americans to charge Japanese soldiers with war crimes for performing it on US servicemen during world war two, so what's changed since then? Don't give me that "post-9/11 world" nonsense either; it's all an excuse to do things in direct contradiction to our society's moral values whilst hiding the hypocrisy behind a fig-leaf of spin and weasel words. If you are going to torture people, at least have the moral courage to admit that's what you're doing, instead of sounding like a six-year old making excuses for why their baby sister has a black eye.

Aaanyway, plumbing.

Rock on

Today, the ESA space-probe Rosetta has made a close-ish approach to the asteroid Lutetia, the largest asteroid thus far approached by a (human) spacecraft. There's not much Science to report yet, but I'm sure a fascinating (to me) list of interesting (to me) facts will arise once the science bods have been able to crunch the numbers.  Rosetta has eleven key instruments including MIDAS- Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System, an atomic force microscope designed to look at well, bits of dust. This is a handy thing for Rosetta to be carrying as its primary mission objective is the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and comets are notorious for spitting out bits of dust, as the regular meteor showers we get to see are a result of the Earth passing through the dusty trails left by various periodic comets.

A dusty rock in space may not seem that remarkable, but here is something that has never been seen before by human eye... okay, technically it got saw by human eye at least as early as 1852 when Hermann Goldschmidt spotted it in his telescope on the balcony of his Paris flat, and technically we're not seeing it now, but a representation of it broadcast by our robot proxy, but it's the next best thing to being there without having to worry about all that inconvenient bone loss, muscle wastage and exposure to solar and cosmic radiation.

To me it's exciting. It's the sort of thing that makes life interesting and worthwhile.

Twilight Zone

Today, I am mostly angry about Twilight.

I was shopping at the weekend when some chubby goth chick flounced past me in the Biscuit Aisle, wearing a "TEAM EDWARD" t-shirt, although it read a bit more like "TEEEEAAAM EDDDWARRD" on account of her ample frontage. I shook my brain in dismay; nerd T-shirts weren't cool when they were Star Trek, they weren't cool when they were Red Dwarf and they definitely weren't cool when they were Buffy. T-shirts about boychick-bodied sparklepire borderline-paedophile cradle-robbers (face facts; she's a teen and he's hundreds of years old. I'm thirty-seven and I get creeped out by seeing eighteen-year old page three girls) and outright-paedophilic wolf-boys pass so far beyond "not cool", they cause an overflow error in the coolness registers of the universe.

Oh well, everyone to their own taste, thought I. Onwards and upwards, live and let live (except for Live and Let Die, which was the only cool post-Beatles thing Paul McCartney ever wrote, even with the horrible honky-tonk "what-does-it-matter-to-ya?" part that breaks my brain).

I go home with my pitiful haul of groceries and settle down for some telly. Next thing I know, I'm seeing a Twilight-themed advert for... for.. Volvo cars.

I cannot record with any exactitude my precise thoughts at this juncture as I am trying to keep the adult content to a minimum.

Apparently in the films, head glitter-fiend Edward Cullen (I have to look these names up, you know) drives a Volvo. A Volvo. That's how you know he's hundreds of years old, he drives a Volvo.

Acting on the often-disproved principle that there's no such thing as Bad Publicity, Volvo have actually got on board with the whole Twilight business and have branded marketing campaigns running, hence my thirty-second Outside-Context Experience.

Yes, that's how you know Vampires aren't cool any more; they drive Volvos.

And that's how you know you aren't cool any more; you like Twilight.

Man's best friend

I was getting ready to do my Sunday lunch (a barbecue-chickeny sort of thing you do in the oven) and had just put it down on the stack of storage boxes after peeling the plastic film lid off the foil tray. I turned around to check the oven and when I turn back, one of the dogs has appropriated my lunch for its own dark purposes and I am left to lunch upon a tin of sweetcorn.

Thanks, dog. Thog.

Misery loves company

New government figures show that Computing grads are less likely to find work  (17% unemployed) than Media Studies graduates (14%).

On the one hand, it's a shocking indictment at how the recession and outsourcing have affected computing and IT in this country, on the other hand, it's not just me who can't get a job. Yaaay!

Now I feel marginally better at having to apply for helldesk jobs at less than half my former salary. 

Thanks be to The Register who clued me in to this cheering news. 

Profoundly Helpful

I'm having bags of fun in my ongoing quest to find work. Due to my ongoing failure to find gainful employment thanks to (presumably; maybe I just generally suck) an extremely niche and slightly outdated skillset (nine years C++ for mobile phones running Symbian/S60 when 90% of the programming jobs market seems to be C# and Java for web development), it's been suggested that I try to consider other areas of employment I wouldn't mind working in.

What, like being an Astronaut? I've always wanted to be a spaceman.

No, something more realistic.  How about customer services?

How about you just go find a big old rock and hit me in the head with it until I stop thrashing? That'd be a lot less messy and painful in the long-term, trust me.

I've done customer services and I've done helldesk roles and I hated every single moment of it. I hated getting blamed for other people's problems when I'm there to help them fix it, I hated dealing with people who were congenitally incapable of following simple instructions and yet who still somehow managed to earn an order of magnitude more than me. I hated getting left to clean up the mess because some salesman completely misrepresented the product and the customer was finding out just how badly they'd been done over. Basically, I hated dealing on a day-to-day basis with people who made me feel miserable about my job and by extension, myself.

Ooo, poor baby Zinc has to face up to living in the Real World where life isn't all butterflies and sugarplums! Well, sod you. I was good at my job and I achieved real success and it didn't matter in the end because some suit-wearing turds decided that a few more percentage points of profit could be made by closing our offices and transferring all the work to somewhere where the cost of engineering slaves is lower, even though there's no experience in the kind of work that we do... did. The point is, I'm sick of always having to eat it when the suited classes start dishing it out. I'm sick of the fact that no matter how well I do, I'm still at the mercy of someone whose response to problems they themselves created is to fire all the people who do the actual work when in a just world, they'd be beheaded at the shareholder's AGM and their pitch-coated head would be stuck on a spike in reception as a warning to others.

Anyway, as the result of a promise to my useless-but-tries-hard employment advisor, I have been trying to see how my skills might be repurposed for other avenues of employment. One of the ways I did this was to do the online Skills assessment at Direct.gov's Skills Accounts website

After an hour or so of answering various on-line questionnaires and whatnot, I got some suggested jobs that someone with my skillset might be interested in. Top of the list?

Computer Programmer.

So very helpful.

Silence is golden; noisy is mostly copper

On Wednesday I took a big tupperware tub full of loose change to the Coinstar change-cashing machine at Tesco so I could buy some dog food for the idiot dogs, which was amusing since it involved using my inheritance (the change) to feed the rest of my inheritance (the dogs).

The machine seemed reasonably honest (it charged only the mildly depressing rate of 8.6% to avoid annoying bank clerks) but had one horrible drawback. It's noisy.

The feeling you get when everybody in a giant branch of Tesco turns to look at you because you're feeding a big ol' tub o' tuppences into a change sorter is horrible. You can sense all the middle-class yummy mummies abjuring their children to not stare at the poor person in case they catch poverty and have to sign up for free school meals.

I hate being poor, it's like being a shambling undead zombie that everyone is too polite to notice.

select * from skillset where skill = "what";

After passing a company's aptitude testing programme I had an actual interview with them today (EDIT: yesterday. That'll teach me to post near midnight). Unfortunately all sides waited until the actual technical test to discuss the nitty-gritty of skillsets.

The job specification made fairly vague reference to entry-level Java development, which can cover a multitude of sins. I rather foolishly assumed my J2ME experience would help, unfortunately none of it had anything to do with JDBC connectivity and JSP, which is what the tech test was all about. I admitted that I didn't know anything about the problem area but was willing to give it a go, so they let me try in case I got the horse to talk

End result? I think I managed to connect to the database and execute a query, so hooray! Unfortunately this represented about 5 percent of the overall task I wasn't allowed access to the documentation for the simple reason that the documentation examples would have made it an exercise in pressing ctrl-c and ctrl-v, so I was reduced to browsing type hierarchies and making edumacated guesses about how things might work.

I don't know whether to be mildly proud that I managed to get anything done given how widely it differed from my experience, or deeply embarrassed that I applied for a role with the wrong skillset. I can at least say I gave it a bash.

With my forehead. Against the keyboard.

Dial-A-Story with HG Zinc

Once upon a time there was a maaaaagical spell called the Telephone Protection Service. The TPS was a spell you could cast upon yourself so that the evil phone goblins wouldn't ring you all hours of the day and night trying to sell you things you couldn't afford and didn't want. The people of the land were happy with TPS and there was much rejoicing as the peasantry got to have a proper bath without having their souls tarnished by idiots trying to sell them double-glazing.

Money Laundering

You know that your life is really going well when you find yourself grubbing around the house for each and every bit of loose change (even the horribly crusty fused mass of coins and dead flies in a jar on the kitchen windowsill) so you can take it to Tesco and run it through the change counter in the hope it will magically turn into real money.

You know that pride is a rod for your own back when you find yourself chucking all the ghastly verdigrised copper into the sink so you can wash it all shiny-clean because heaven forbid someone see you using dirty money.

No Homeo

Today the British Medical Association voted to call for the NHS to stop funding Homeopathy.

In a word, Yessss! My natural indifference to seeing stupid people being defrauded of money via their stupidity tends to not quite work the same when the stupid people in question are civil servants or government ministers spending other people's money.

One could point out that homeopathy (a word my spellcheck quite rightly fails to recognise) offers some psychological benefits to some people via the placebo effect, and that just being able to play pretend doctors with someone who lends a sympathetic ear to their problems is of great benefit to many people, but I would argue that such people are stupid people who live in fairy make-believe land and evidence-based pain and suffering are deeply therapeutic for a case of the stupids.

Today, I am more bitter than Bitrex, a fine practical example of the use of negative re-enforcement in the treatment of stupidity.

Good Enough

It often amuses me when people talk of something being "second-rate", or if they're feeling especially venomous, "third-rate". They're referring back to the old Royal Navy "system of rating" that was used to classify ships back in the age of sail; very roughly, ships of a hundred guns upwards were classed as first-rate, ships of 90 to 98 were second-rate, ships of 60-80 were third-rate and so on down to the sixth rate 20-24 gunners.

The interesting thing is that bigger was not necessarily better. The backbone of the Royal Navy from the mid 18th to early 19th centuries was the third-rater, as it was for most other fleets- the French came up with the definitive third-rate in their "seventy-four", a number of which we made off with and liked so much that we built our own 74-gun ships to replace our less-seaworthy 70s. A third-rater had less firepower and durability than the larger first and second rates, but was more seaworthy, faster and gun-for-gun, significantly cheaper to build and operate. While you'd want your first and second rate ships for fleet engagements like Trafalgar, most of the day-to-day work of war at sea was performed by third rates.

The third rate was "Good Enough". You might need two third-raters to engage a first-rate, but for the cost of a first-rate, you might be able to build three third-raters, and for a navy maintaining a blockade of Napoleonic France and responsible for protecting a maritime Empire spread across the planet, the third-rater was the way to go.

So next time you're accusing your local football team of  being third-rate, you're accusing them of being exactly Good Enough.

Intelligent Agents

Note to recruitment agencies: Please don't ask if I sound tired and grumpy "on account of being hung-over after the football". There's so much wrong with that particular assumption, I don't know where to begin; oh wait, I do!

I DON'T WATCH THE SODDING FOOTBALL, AND I'M NOT SO PATHETIC THAT DEFEAT-BY-PROXY IN A GAME SEEMS LIKE A GOOD EXCUSE TO TIE ONE ON. IF I SOUND GRUMPY,  IT'S BECAUSE IT'S EIGHT IN THE MORNING AND I HAVE TO GET READY TO GO TO THAT LITTLE RAY OF SUNSHINE, THE JOBCENTRE.

I hate the Jobcentre, I hate unemployment and I hate you.  No, not you-the-reader, the Agent-you. You-the-reader, I love. I'll love you even more when I set up AdWords and you click on some of the links...

Graceful Degradation

Hooray for the latest, greatest indignity of being on t' dole:

• I am out of toilet paper.

• I cannot afford more toilet paper until the government pays me some more Jobseeker's allowance, which will happen on Monday.

• It will take until Wednesday at the earliest for the money to actually be cleared into my account.

What am I doing about it (aside from desperately trying to get a job)? Well, in the medium term, the fact I can't afford food either is helping somewhat. In the short term? I may have a solution for that too.

Parents, eh?

Back when I was only half-orphanned, I was watching a DVD of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with my mother, as she loved fantasy-themed stuff. It was the siege of Minas Tirith and the Orcish catapults are catapulting the crap out of the city in fine style:

"It must have been terrible living in those days..."

"What, when Orcs and Elves roamed the land?"

Apparently she meant back in the days of medieval sieges of walled cities, but I have my doubts.

International Man of Mystery

Today I have mostly been visiting other countries.

I had an interview north of the border so I found myself  visiting Scotland for the very first time. Almost exactly half-way between hither and yon, I drove past Gretna Green where I am reliably informed my father was born. No mysterious nostalgic feelings occurred, nor did any ghostly highland music play, although the latter may have been drowned out by KMFDM ripping the system, said system being the car stereo of my totally kicking Toyota Avensis (Diesel).

The fuel cost being what it was (and the train costs being about the same) I am now officially unable to buy any shopping until probably the middle of next week, which means that as my current supplies run out on Sunday, I'm going to lose some weight. Hooray!

It also turns out I am deeply confused by windmills. The new generation of wind-power generators are absolutely huuuuge. The problem is that modern material science and aerodynamics being what they are, the windmills actually look too spindly for their size, so my brain processes them as being smaller than they are.  The speed of the blades looks deceptively slow right up until you realise how big the blades actually are and then there's a moment of contextual confusion as the true size becomes apparent. It's all very odd.

And I am very tired. Sleepy-nappy-nap-nap-time is now.

EDIT: In the penultimate sentence of my penultimate paragraph,  what I meant to say was "the blades seem to be moving too slowly until your brain realises how big they are, at which point you also realise how fast they're moving", but fatigue was making me gibber more than usual. I should not be allowed to post when tired. Or when not tired.

Things to do Before an Interview

Everyone should know the 7 P's of Preparation- Prior Proper Planning Prevents P***-Poor Performance, so here are a couple of things to do before an interview to ensure things go well:

• Get a good night's sleep. The human body is still synchronized to the diurnal dance of day and night, so since it's summertime right now and the nights are short, a couple of hours sleep will do perfectly.

• Good communications are vital if you're travelling a long way for the interview, so make sure your phone is up to scratch by flashing the software to a new version the night before. It is certainly possible that the flashing process may fail part-way through, turning your handset into a shiny and expensive brick, but that hardly ever happens. I mean, you'd have to be using a somewhat ropey fossil laptop and some really terrible flashing software for anything like that to happen, wouldn't you?

Whoops...

Friendly AND Helpful

Today I have been to NextStep, a "friendly, face-to-face careers advice service". Very friendly.

Here is the friendly view from their friendly car park:

Yes. That is a US Prison-grade electric fence there. A very swish and expensive looking electric fence it is too.

The offices were similarly swish and expensive looking, being a relatively new purpose-built construction on the former site of some exceptionally bad early sixties flats, burying the failed social housing experiment of that era with a particularly mocking rejoinder to the largely jobless people who would once have lived there. Plenty of publicity and glory-shot marketing material covered the site in the particularly hideous puce that Salford council favour these days.

I show up for my appointment as promptly as one might expect given how much free time I have to be on time these days.

The young lady behind the inch-thick optically-perfect bulletproof lexan sneeze-guard asked me for my details which I in turn gave her. Some tapping of keys followed. Then a phone call. Then another phone call.

"I'm sorry, we've no record of you having an appointment."

"But I definitely made one. I have a confirmation letter."

"We don't have you down for an appointment. I'm sorry."

"But I have a letter!"

"I'm sorry."

"Is anyone available, perhaps?"

"I'm sorry, you need to make an appointment."

"Can we make an appointment then?"

"I'm sorry, you need to phone up to book an appointment."

As it turned out, the electric fence must only get switched on at night.

An end to progress

Stop it! Stop it right now!

Stop what?  

Going forwards.

I am sick to death of hearing people use the phrase "going forwards". They use it when one might say "in the future" or "from now on", but as a phrase it has a special taste to it derived from its origin in management-speak. Specifically, it means "Mistakes were made (by the speaker), but (despite the fact that if the listener had made a mistake even one-tenth as serious, they would be fired so fast, air friction would set them on fire) we are all going to pretend we have learned a special lesson from this experience AND NO-ONE IS TO EVER MENTION THIS EVER AGAIN, especially when we make the same exact mistake six months from now, which you can be sure that we will".

When you say "going forwards", you're basically showing the world what a horrible  piece of slime you are, so stop it.

Does he get a Blue Peter badge for that?

In pointless celebrity news, I've noticed that my favourite newspaper columnist Charlie Brooker is getting hitched to alarmingly attractive former Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq. This is good news both because I like it when people I like have nice things happen to them, but also for me as it boosts my belief that despite looking like a sack of particularly lumpy potatoes,  I too might yet lure in a beautiful female type using my sarcastic wit and charm.

If wit and charm fails, I shall try chocolate.

So Horny (Horny Horny Horny)

This week I have been listening to football fans weeping bitter tears over the Vuvuzela and how much it is spoiling their enjoyment of the world cup.

Two points:

1. Go watch some newsreel footage of any British football match  up to the sixties. Every time there's a crowd shot, you'll notice that everyone in the crowd has a very large wooden football rattle (and a wooly bobble-hat, but that's beside the point). No doubt contemporary newsreel audiences in South Africa and then-Rhodesia were cursing those idiots with the rattly things for ruining the atmosphere and giving them headaches. The point is that football culture varies from time to time and place to place, so perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise when you see some of those differences at the World Cup.

2. The Vuvuzela is the very embodiment of the sound of football. Seriously. Whenever people start talking about football,  to me it sounds exactly like someone blowing a Vuvuzela for hours on end. HOW DO YOU LIKE IT, EHHHH?

Adventures in interviewing; also, locks.

Today has not been a good day.

I was supposed to be interviewing for a position up in County Durham today, but a lack of properly defined processes got in the way.

At least that's my excuse.

What happened? Well, for a start, the JobCentre failed to meet a defined constraint by paying my Jobseeker's Allowance on time, meaning I didn't have any money for travel. At the moment, thanks to the Flexible New Deal, I have to pay travel expenses out of my own pocket and then give receipts in order to get reimbursed, which is assuming the FND provider in question has any money in petty cash, because if they don't, well they won't.

This led to a failed early GO/NOGO decision gate and caused an unplanned mission hold prior to FINAL COMMIT until I scrounged up enough pennies for Diesel, with the decision gate only being passed quite literally at the last possible minute. Unfortunately in the mad panic, a critical flaw in the whole procedure arose.

When changing into my interview attire, I neglected to pick up my keys.

Locking yourself out of the house is never good. It is doubly not good when you need to be somewhere else in order to secure your financial future, whose present parlous state means you can't afford a locksmith or replacement glass for a punched-out window.

End solution: Rapid application of Human Resources to Technical Problem. I shoulder-barged the door.

Springing the door was surprisingly easy. Worryingly so, in fact. Remarkably little damage was done to the door frame; a couple of longer screws should fix things right up, along with some no-more-nails or Polyfilla, perhaps.

I wonder if I should add "Intrusion Specialist" to my CV and go for a job in Internet Security?

Nuts and Gum, together at last

Latest in the big list of surprising things that have surprised me is news that two of my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter are working on a collaboration.

I would never in a million years have expected a collaboration between these two particular authors. I was going to write a post about how to Baxter, the universe is a cold, dark place that cares nothing for humanity and its interests because it *cannot* care, whilst to Pratchett uh...

Actually, to Pratchett the universe is also a cold, dark place that cares nothing blah blah blah; he says as much repeatedly, especially in the books with Death as a major character. To him, people are what create the islands of warmth and light in an uncaring universe, even if "warmth" and "light" are just concepts we make up to feel better about ourselves.

And whilst Baxter's universes are generally bleak and uncaring backdrops against which we labour for naught in the face of oblivion, even his characters manage changes for the better; they end a futile ten-thousand year long war that has consumed tens of trillions of human lives, or they may manage to help build a defence against a galaxy-spanning catastrophe that will extinguish all intelligent life, even if they can't stop the more immediate catastrophe that's going to kill off all the intelligent life in the Orion Arm, including Homo Sap.

So really, both Pratchett and Baxter are deep-down optimists in a realist world.

Suddenly, It's all about the Revision Control

Nerd Time is NOW, so normal folk should go grab some beers and get drunk, or alternately read the post and play "Guess-When-Zinc-forgot-the-point-he-was-going-to-make"

Aaannyway, this week I have been playing around with a Revision Control System on my laptop, a pleasing exercise in avoiding writing actual code.

When you're part of a team writing software, it's nice if everybody can see the code that is being worked on. In Olden Times (1992) at my very first job with computers, we just whacked all the source code into a shared directory on the network so everyone could see it, and that was that.

This lead to problems.

The biggest set of problems it causes are to do with Concurrency, or what happens when two many cooks are working on the same pan of broth.  One cook decides that the broth needs some salt and goes to get the fancy salt cellar from the bread bin (which is a perfectly sensible place to keep salt, I don't care what you think). While he's away at the other end of the kitchen, one of the other cooks also decides that the broth needs salt and wanders off to find wherever it is that his idiot co-workers (none of whom ever talk to each other) have hidden it. In the meantime, first cook comes back and adds salt. Delicious! However, second cook is still out there looking for the salt and eventually (after he either finds the salt or goes out to buy more) comes back and adds some more. Now it is too salty and all this sodium makes the customer's heart sad :(

Actually that was a terrible analogy but I'm leaving it in because I like soup. In programming terms, what can happen is that both programmers start out with a copy of the same file (version 1) and make their changes. Programmer A finishes his changes and saves the file, which is now Version 1.1A. Eventually, programmer B finishes his changes, but is unaware that Programmer A has changed the file already, so when he saves his changes, he overwrites Programmer A's changes and replaces Version 1.1A with his own version 1.1B.

You could fix this by implementing a file "locking" mechanism so that when programmer A starts making his changes, he locks the file under edit so that no-one else can touch it (or at least get lots of whiny prompts about the file being locked and read-only when they try). This still leaves you with a couple of problems, one new and one old.

The first problem with this is that it can lead to a situation where half your programmers are sat around being forced to search the internet for nude pictures of Karen Gillan because they all want to make changes to the same file. It rather makes having a central copy of the source a waste of time if it limits the numbers of programmers who can use it at any given time. The next thing you know, everyone's making local copies of the source "to work on" and things get  very bad very quickly.

The second problem is what happens when say two programmers are making changes to separate files, File A and File 2...  er, File B. Great, no problem! Except that the changes in the new version of File A are dependant on File B, and specifically they were dependant on the old version of file B, which just got changed. No-one's changes have been lost, but the central copy of the source is now in an uncompilable state if you're lucky (at least that way tracing the problem is relatively straightforwards) or worse still, crashes at runtime and you're going to have to do a boatload of debugging to find out what's going on.

How do you solve these problems? Well, hopefully you install a Revision Control System like Subversion. It won't exactly prevent these problems, but it helps you fix them when they show up.

How's it manage that then? Well, basically files stored in a Revision Control System are stored as a set of changes to the repository. Create an empty repository, that's revision 1, add a file to the repository, that's revision 2, make some edits to the file for revision 3 and add another file for revision 4. Note that file versions differ from repository revisions; version 1.0 and 1.1 of a file might be revisions 56 and 1441 respectively if a lot of other files were changed between the two versions .

Users don't work directly on the repository, they work on local copies of the files stored in the repository,  copied by the Revison Control System at a given revision level which is usually the "latest" or head revision at the time the local copy is requested or "checked out". The programmer can then edit their local copy and then submit their changes back to the repository as a new revision (a given revision can potentially affect multiple files in the repository). This gets rid of the first problem with locking as everyone can work quite freely on their local copy.

So what about the concurrency issues that locking was supposed to stop? Well, with a Revision Control System, the magic happens when the user submits their changes. The system looks at what is being changed and checks if it has had any other changes to those files since you took your local copy. If it has, the user has to go through a merge process where they inspect both sets of changes and combine them into one good working set. This may be as simple as spotting that neither set of changes conflicts and adding them both to the same file automatically, or it may require rather more complex editing. Once you've done, you can check in your merged changes.

In the case of changes to two separate files whose interdependency is only going to show up at compile time, chances are that the Revision Control System won't spot any potential problem itself, but will give the developers the tools to spot potential problems and to deal with them much more effectively when they do arise. The Revision Control System can show you if your local copy is still out-of-step with the actual repository after you've made a submission, indicating that the potential exists for a dependency conflict. A reasonable developer will then check out the latest head revision of the code and do a quick build to make sure everything's all right.

A better developer might do an update-and-build smoketest before they submit their changes to the repository in an attempt to not check in code that won't compile. I say that as a fan of Continuous Integration, who tried to instil in my colleagues a terrible fear of breaking the nightly build.

If something does slip through, the Revision Control System offers help. You can browse through all the submissions since the last good revision to see if any of them look problematic, which can help speed the fix along. You can also check out earlier revisions than the bad one if you need to keep working on something else while other developers work on fixing the problem.

All in all, Revision Control Systems are an absolutely vital  part of modern software development, to the point that I use one on projects where I'm the only person working on them, as the ability to track development history and easily manage branches and releases are just as vital as preventing concurrency issues on a shared codebase. The funny thing is that even now, new programmers are managing to come straight out of college/university with no experience in these vital tools, or much of any experience in working as part of a development team. It's a conflict between the need to train good developers who are going to have to be good team-workers a lot of the time, and the need for the college to be able to individually assess the progress and ability of their students.

Is it safe?

Today saw a visit to the dentist for some root canal work. It was horrible.

Not because of the dentistry, you understand. Because of the huge widescreen telly in reception, pumping out the Chart Show. It looks like these days the number of songs that don't feature horribly aggressive use of autotune-style processing for maximum blandness is about one in five.

Specifically, I'm thinking Ke$ha should be dragged out into the street and shot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but I listen to music where the singer's voice is processed to hell with ring modulators and whatnot with the whole idea being to add to the style of the piece, whereas autotuning just seems to be there to mask the fact that somebody's manufactured music sensation can't actually sing a note.

I hate Autotune. It adds to the blandness of modern life.

Red Dead Corrections

I've played a lot more Red Dead Redemption lately and it's time to make some corrections to my Saturday post.

1. Horses can actually be ridden off cliffs in a survivable manner, so long as the cliffs in question are more sort of really, really steep hills and you skid your horse down sideways.

2. Jews are also persecuted unmercifully by shopkeepers who refuse to stock Jewish or foreign products, which is presumably why their store is full of completely useless junk that I never bother to use. Coyotes will attack anyone on foot, not just skinny men in derby hats with strong New York Jewish accents, so good for Coyotes, I suppose.

3. Close not only counts in horseshoes, but in fire bottles and dynamite sticks.

My Weekend, by HG Zinc (age 37)

This weekend I've been engaging in all manner of gun battles, horse riding, lassoing and card game chicanery as well as an encounter with a man in a top hat who may well have been the devil himself.

Okay, before you call the police and/or mental health on me, I have been playing Red Dead Redemption, a cowboy sandbox game from the publishers of Grand Theft Auto.

While like GTA it's an open world sandbox sort of game with a mission-led storyline, it's unlike GTA in one very important way: GTA is all about being a generally horrible criminal who thinks nothing about running through the streets in his underwear, beating strangers with a disturbing purple sex toy found in the local police department locker room (note to those who never played GTA San Andreas: You can actually do this and it is hilariously funny no matter what grown-ups say). Red Dead Redemption, on the other hand, deliberately puts you in situations where you can choose to be nasty or nice. Do you save the passing stagecoach from the banditos, or do you shoot out the driver yourself and split the loot? Decisions, decisions...

Except that for me, there is no decision. I don't know what it is about games where you're given a choice to be nasty or nice, but I always wind up being horribly, sickeningly nice (if you ignore the fact that in video games "being nice" generally means "Only slaughter bad guys"). The strange thing is I do it begrudgingly. I don't enjoy being nice to all and sundry, solving the problems of a million whining digital losers. When someone comes rushing out of nowhere begging me to get back their wagon that some so-and-so has ligged off with, in real life I'm going "Oh for pity's sake! Do I have to do everything around here! I was going to ride into town and play blackjack!", but sure enough I go racing out there after the wagon and bring it back to the wagonless whiner, although it should be pointed out that I don't even bother to disarm the wagon thief. They'd hang you for stealing a horse in the Old West, so stealing two horses and a bit of wood with wheels on is definitely punishable by arbitrary numbers of gunshot wounds upside the head.

Worse still, the evil, evil games designers have added a feature that passers-by will often greet you with a cheery hello. This wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't added a button command to let you say hello back. Imagine what that does to someone who only manages to not say thank-you to vending machines through sheer effort of will! I'm racing along the road and some simp says "Hi there, Mr badass gunslinger, sir!" and I find myself having to slap on the horse-brakes, spin round and chase them down just so I don't seem rude to software!

Anyway, that's what's been eating up my weekend: Being the reluctant hero in computer games that'd let me be the villain if I wanted.

Red Dead Upside The Head

Today, I have mostly been playing Red Dead Redemption (and taking dogs to vets to get their skin fungus treated, but you didn't want to know that). I'm still at the early learning stages, but here are some things I've learned.

1. Horses are fitted with poor shock absorbers, do not ride them off cliffs.

2. In the Wild West, Jews still got the blame from conspiracy theorists and were persecuted quite unmercifully by coyotes.

3. Medical science cannot save you.

4. Early 20th-century cartoons involved a lot more drug abuse, tree rape, rectal impalement by stalagtite and toddler matricide than you might expect.

5. Since the Bouchon fuse has yet to be invented, close only counts in  Horseshoes.

Feedback; it's not just for Heavy Metal anymore

Yesterday's interview went surprisingly well, they've asked me to come in again for a second interview with their King of all Programming. Either they didn't hold my ink-smeared lip against me, or they want me to come back so's their boss can have a laugh too.

"Seriously, you have to see this guy, shows up to an interview with a face full of pen!"

EDIT: By the end of the day, I realised that there was something very odd about this interview. The interviewers were a pair of "consultants" working for the company, determining their IT strategy. Neither the job spec nor the interview itself made any reference to any specific technical skillsets like programming languages or platforms. Aside from a brief interview-sequence where they dug into my background and experience, the majority of the interview dealt with the interviewers explaining the current IT setup mentioning exceptionally vague mobile device projects and then asking me what sort of things I thought the company should be looking at within the IT space.

By the end of the week, I got a callback saying that they were still very interested in my technical background, but that the funds for the project were "on hold". The project that they had nothing at all to say about, other than "we're looking into mobile projects- no, no platform or target device. Or idea as to what we want to do.. What do you think we should be doing?".

Either they found someone with better skills (Unlikely. I am awesome and people should employ me RIGHT NOW for lots of money and biscuits- Also what skills? Remember they never even mentioned any technical skillsets in the job spec), or I got suckered into a couple of hours of free consulting.

Techniques 2: Interview Boogaloo

I'm ba-aaack, and I've got a couple of extra interview ideas straight from the Pentagon's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques checklist:

1. Your time as an interviewer is important; feel free to reschedule interviews as little as twenty minutes before they were due to take place, even though the interviewee may already have spent the last forty minutes thundering down the motorway at breakneck speed. Never give any reason for the postponement as the fact that you felt like a nap or went to play golf with the CEO is probably company confidential. Feel free to phone the candidate at odd hours of the night, asking them if they can attend a new interview first thing tomorrow morning, then phone them up again at seven o'clock the next morning, asking to reschedule for later that week. Perhaps you might like to forget to phone the candidate for a scheduled telephone interview after you've rescheduled it three times already. Remember, since you already have a job and the candidate presumably doesn't, their time is worthless and they can't possibly have any important family commitments or other business to attend to. Constant rescheduling will show the candidate what an important, dynamic organisation they are trying to join and at no point will they get completely sick of your nonsense and stop taking your calls.

2. As an interviewee, making a good first impression is essential, so a good tip is to not notice that you managed to somehow get ink on your upper lip prior to the interview. This conveys an attitude of eager hard-work and absolutely does not make you look like a pen-sniffing lunatic.

3. One fun trick for interviewers is to work in pairs and sit round a table at such angles that the interviewee cannot keep both of you in their field of view at the same time unless they're Marty Feldman . This will induce a sense of increasing paranoia, along with violent head or neck pains as they desperately flail their heads back and forth to maintain eye-contact.

5. If you are given specific instructions to send the interviewer a text message on arriving at their offices, ensure your mobile phone has credit if it is pay-as-you-go and is properly charged, ideally by leaving it behind, still hooked up to the charger.

Interview Techniques

I'm off for another job interview in a wee while, so I thought it might be helpful to list some of my more useful interview tips both for the interviewee and the interviewer:

1. Have the agency send you the wrong address for the interview, as showing up late and panicked always kicks things off to a good start.

2. If possible, make sure that your potential employers forget that they were supposed to be interviewing someone today. This is especially successful if the person who has to conduct the interview has decided to work from home.

3. The best place for an interview is in an industrial estate so new, no-one has it on their sat-navs. Try not to provide any directions on your website as that would be cheating.

4. Try to get so worked up about an interview that you forget any technical skills you may possess, up to and including how to spell your own name.

5. Technical interviews are best conducted in as confrontational manner as possible, with the interviewer deliberately going out of their way to ask questions about technical issues that quite literally cannot happen in the kind of programming the job is for. The interviewer should  pitch the questions at a level that will start a fist-fight.

6. Interview panels should always contain one member who has no reason to be there but still feels the need to make a contribution. This person should be as senior as possible to ensure that people hang on their every word.

7. Never, ever get a correct job description from the agency as that will spoil the pleasant surprise when you find you've travelled two and a half hours for a job that doesn't match any of your skills. The ideal job description for example would say something like "WANTED: Mobile application developers for Symbian/S60 platform with plenty of UI development experience!" whilst the job in question would actually be mine clearance in Cambodia.

8. Body language is important, so make yours shout out by eating plenty of starchy foods the night before.

9. If conducting a telephone interview, make sure to pick the noisiest place possible and check beforehand that your phone is properly charged by making lots of calls and playing that stupid 3D snakes game you like so much for a couple of hours.

10. Psychometric tests!

Brian Cox II: Cox Harder.

Dammit all.

I hate it when people I've taken an irrational dislike to suddenly redeem themselves totally and utterly because it shows how totally arbitrary all my likes and dislikes are. Brian Cox was on Channel 4's alternative election coverage doing a bit about "things that we should actually be worried about", i.e. Supernovas, Supervolcanoes and Supermarket Sweep. Since he wasn't reading from an overwrought script, he was a lot more personable and his voice wasn't nearly annoying.  Also he showed the same...

Oh wait, David Mitchell just proposed killing all politicians and putting Mandelson's head on a pike. I have proposed this self same course of action for years (along with lopping Hazel Blears in half with a shovel) and people laughed at me. Now all it takes is one comedian to say it on TV and er... um... people laugh at him too. Yeah.

Anyway, I was about to say that Brian Cox showed exactly the same dismay with politicians' disengagement from science and technology and basically evidence-based reality that I have, so Brian's all right with me, even if he does have a job playing with the largest and most advanced particle accelerator on earth and I don't.

Things Can't Only Get Better

I 'ate that Brian Cox.

Not only is he smarter and better-looking than I am and have my dream job; not only does he host TV programmes about science that I would really like to watch except his annoying voice annoys me to the point I have to go punch bricks instead (in all fairness, my own voice makes me feel the same way); not only is he married to some woman off t' telly, but he was a pop music star too, being the keyboardist for D:Ream, which most aggravatingly issued forth the pop abomination "Things Can Only Get Better", which to give you some idea of how evil this song is, was used by New Labour during their drive to get Tony Blair elected. This means that everything from having to see Tony Blair's smug grin everyday, the betrayal of the traditional Labour electorate by New Labour, the growth of PFI, Reality Television, the global credit crunch and the Iraq War is all Brian Cox's fault. All of it.

The notion that things can only get better is such a lie. Things can always get worse, always.

You want proof? Look at the forthcoming election; what an absolute shower of morons, monsters and mickey-mousers and that's only counting the main parties, let alone the freaks and weirdos in things like UKIP; I wouldn't trust any of them to organise a binge-drinking session in a brewery, let along vote for any of them. If it is true that in a democracy, we get the leaders we deserve, then frankly I don't know what it is you lot did, but you all belong in prison.

I know what it is I did, of course, and I shall be appealing to the ECHR over the unfairness of the sentence.

My grandmother is ill. It's not the sort of ill you get better from.

Laddish Lager Louts Leg it in Lead Ledge Larceny

Late Thursday night (technically at quarter past two on Friday morning), I'm sat downstairs with the lights off, as one does, when I hear some very strange noises from outside. I go to the window and look out to see three young men giving it the excessively casual walk whilst looking in at the house. I hear another odd noise and look round to see two other lads running down the path and across the road into the park, carrying what looks like a small roll of carpet between them.

Since five-to-one odds are what we in Salford call "a recipe for getting your head kicked in", I call t' fuzz and spend the rest of the night playing video games with the lights on and my trusty Spear and Jackson Combat Spade in easy reach. What? No, it's your bog-standard gardening implement, except I don't really do any gardening and have only ever used it once to dig a post-hole for a washing line. It's handy and would probably hurt an awful lot if you get smacked in the face with it, so that's that.

Come the morning, and I stick my head outdoors. There's no sign of them having been round the back of the house, which is what I'd originally thought they'd been doing, perhaps having robbed one of the houses behind mine. Closer inspection reveals a lovely pair of footprints on the bonnet of my car and more on the set of multicoloured wheelie bins that the local council insisted on giving me, despite me not producing enough recyclable waste to justify anything but a small blog and a plastic recycle-your-other-plastics box.

I look up and notice that the porch over the front door looks a bit odd. The bathroom window overlooks the porch, so I go up and take a look out. The reason the porch looks odd is that the so-ons have stolen the lead sheeting that covered it.

Now what am I supposed to do when I rediscover the Philosopher's Stone? I'm not made of base metals, you know!

Thanks, Orange; Thorange.

A couple of months back, I asked Orange to switch my contract SIM to pay-as-you-go. I can't help but notice I AM STILL ON CONTRACT, BUT NOW WITH A NEW 12-MONTH LOCK IN, THANKYOUVERYMUCH.

Earlier in the week I had a visit from a very pushy NPower salesman who wouldn't take no for an answer and did my favourite sales technique ever, which is to be utterly baffled that anyone could possibly be so stupid as to not want anything to do with his amazing savings offer that may or may not save me some money at an unspecified time in the future, if the stars align in a favourable condition and stuff. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the spade that's been knocking around the hallway for months, meaning I was unable to dig a hole in his head to see why he was so easily baffled.

There is of course no point to this post other than to complain about the injustice of the world, especially with regards to those parts of it involved in the hilariously misnamed trade of "customer services" and door-to-door sales. I find it decidedly unreasonable that I be prevented by law from shooting such curs in the face with a bow and arrow.

Sunshine

The changing seasons have a very different effect on you when you're unemployed.  When I was in a job, the only two times of year I paid any attention to were the few weeks of Winter when it might snow, making travel to and from work difficult, and the high spot of Summer when I'd have to spend too much time stuck in traffic in a car without any air conditioning.

Now I pay a lot more attention to the weather.  Cold weather means the house will be freezing as I can't afford to keep the heating running.  I'll need to wear more clothes to keep warm and the cost of laundry will go up as I'll have to use the tumble dryer, since a house full of wet laundry won't dry out what with the heating not being on.

Especially cold weather is the worst.  It means I have to put on the heating to stop the pipes freezing up again, but the heating won't be on enough to keep the house feeling warm.

Today is a good day from the weather point of view.  It's been the first day of the year where I thought that laundry left on the washing line might actually dry out a bit, saving me a few quid in tumble drying costs.  

Next thing you know, I'll be keeping an eye out for the right time to sow onions.

Return to Rapture, via Liberty City

If there's one upside to being unemployed, I've been able to revisit some of the games that I never actually finished back when I was working. Since I can't afford to waste money on Bioshock 2, I have been playing Bioshock instead.

I don't think I "get" Bioshock. I spend too much time looking at the Art Deco furnishings and wondering why they'd be present on a city under the sea apparently built after the second world war. There should be more horrible nylon drapes in burnt orange and various shades of mucus. In a game where I use magical genetic engineering to shoot wasps at people, I stand around in corridors looking at leaks and thinking "At this depth, a pencil-sized leak would fill at around a ton of water per second, filling this infeasibly vast corridor inside of eh, a minute and a half."

Frankly, the sole draw of the game is the ability to hit objectivists upside th' haid with a big adjustable wrench and light them on fire without the concomitant aggro from the police who insist on enforcing the law regardless of the horrible philosophy of the victim. Even then, the combat's rather poor, especially as the game progresses and you need to empty hundreds of rounds into the victim in order to kill them (presumably by crushing them under the sheer weight of bullets), all the while giving it the simultaneous "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" to stop them from setting you on fire.

Personally, I would be happier with some sort of beat-em-up; Philosophers of the 20th century vs Capcom, for example. Chomsky versus Ryu, who will win? Better still, Ayn Rand versus Simone De Beauvoir catfight!

I've also restarted GTA 4, which I gave up on due to work pressures and the insistent ringing of my in-game mobile phone as my idiot cousin asked me to take him to a strip club every five minutes. Since then, I've discovered that the in-game phone has a "silent" mode (why yes, I did just spend the past ten years developing mobile phone software, why do you ask?) and have decided to give it another bash.

There's no denying that GTA 4 is a masterpiece of videogaming.  It presents a rich, realistic world for the user to play in, but to me it lacks some of the charm of earlier GTAs, especially San Andreas, along with a loss of fun. I miss being able to tool around in a jetpack or eating so much I become the fattest gangster on the block.  GTA 4 has a depressing sense of gritty realism and even the massively improved physics engine robs you of the sheer joy of handbraking it around every single corner at a hundred miles per hour. Saint's Row 2 for all its bugginess and immaturity was more fun.  

Especially if you picked the English accent for your gangster and made 'em look like a fat Vinnie Jones.

Note to potential employers: This week, I have also been learning about SOAP and REST with regards to web services and am thinking of doing something RESTful to Twitter, but all work and no play blah blah blah.

Yes, I'm acutely aware that at the moment I'm technically in a state of no work, but that's the problem with Aphorisms; they're only approximately correct.

Down South

Thanks to a deeply confusing set of circumstances, yesterday I went down to London for what I thought was a permanent C++ developer's position only to find that it was actually a three month contract for a build manager, no programming involved. Perversely, I'd be happy doing the job especially because it's a short-term role, but it would have helped rather a lot if I'd actually known these things in advance so I wouldn't have looked quite so gormless.

Nice to see the underground looking even more sci-fi dystopian with loads of the station advertising billboards replaced with flatscreen panels. That and the constant PA announcement ordering "INSPECTOR SANDS TO THE SECURITY ROOM" really adds to the atmosphere.

Whatever coded announcement "INSPECTOR SANDS" is about doesn't seem to involve scary exploding terrorists, worse luck. I was strangely looking forwards to being blown to mince and had to take great care to sit on the stainless-steel cripple seats at the back of the platform to reduce the risk of any impulsive one-under incidents on my part.

It's also entertainingly true what people say about no-one in London acknowledging the existence of anyone else when commuting, as my automatic response to say "sorry" when bumping into or being bumped by people got me some very surprised looks.

Had a big long chat with a random stranger at Euston station, though. On the other hand, it turned out that we both live a couple of miles apart and shop at the same branch of Tescos, so this cannot be used to prove/disprove the alleged unfriendliness of Londoners.

Question: Who at Virgin Trains thought "Virgin Invader" was a good name for a rather phallic high-speed pendolino train? Was it a case of inspired awesomeness or abject stupidity?

Word to all students, especially girls: When travelling on a train, everyone else on the carriage will hear every word you say and will want the train to crash just so the horrible voices stop.

Word to all evil lawyer/business-types: The above goes double for you, and your constant telephone conversations about selling white South African farmers land to White Zimbabweans and ideas for insuring at usurious rates the equipment of NGOs operating in war-zones for the sole idea of making a boat-load of profit out of the suffering of people half the world away will induce a murderous rage in the fat guy sat opposite you, your life only being spared because fatty had to do some walking today and is now very sleepy.

What goes around comes around

When I first started my decade-long career in mobile phones, I was lured into the business by the prospect of working on an amazing piece of technology known as the Seiko-Epson Locatio, a Japan-only gadget now lost to the mists of time.  

The Locatio was an amazing piece of kit for 1999; it was comprised of a pen-based PDA computer with a tiny i-mode phone module attached to the bottom with thumbscrews, a QVGA-resolution camera module on the top of the PDA and a GPS unit screwed to the back of the unit with the same sort of thumbscrews as the phone module. Assuming you lived in Tokyo and could read Japanese, you could use the GPS and PDA to do a location-based search for nearby restaurants, browse their web-pages for menus, use the phone module to phone up and book a table and then the GPS again to navigate your way to the restaurant.  The camera module could be used to take photos of you drunkenly vomiting in the gutter outside and then you could email said photos to all your colleagues.

For comparison, in 1999 Western phones had text messaging. Except in America.

In 2006, I was working on camera UI software for a large Finnish phone manufacturer (rhymes with blockier). I was the lead engineer on the camera application for the N95, a highly spiffy smartphone with a 5-megapixel camera and gps built in. With this phone you could use the mapping application to navigate you to a local restaurant, phone up to book with the phone functionality and use the frankly excellent camera software and hardware to take unsettlingly high-resolution photographs of all your drunken antics, suitable for MMS messaging to all your mates. Truly my career had come full circle, with me finally implementing the same features on a Western market phone as I had on the very first mobile device I'd ever worked on. Only smaller, smarter, higher resolution and without the touchscreen because I hate those. The N95 was the best phone I ever worked on and I was a proud owner of one from the launch.

Now in 2010 it's one step worse. I had to cancel my mobile phone contract and switch to a pay-as-you-go SIM. Orange rather kindly sent me a new phone as well as the SIM, a Nokia 6700 classic.

The Nokia 6700 is a Series 40 type phone, which doesn't use Symbian as the base OS.  When I worked with Nokia, Series 40 was the platform for the lower-to-midrange phones with the Symbian-based Series 60 phones being reserved for the high end Smartphones with all the shiny features.  I worked almost exclusively on S60 devices except for Nokia's brief dalliance with Series 80 as used in the super-high-end 9210, 9300 and 9500 smartphones, all of which I worked on.

Anyway, series 40, non-Symbian mass market phones, right?  Well my new 6700 is feature-for-feature a match for my old N95.  GPS? Check. Navigation software? Check.  5-megapixel digital camera with DVD-resolution video recording? Check.  

It's also smaller and slightly more elegant.

The only two downsides seem to be battery life (which is unsettlingly poor compared to the already-poor battery performance of the N95) and the camera software which just isn't anything like as nice as that on the N95, even if it shares most of the features.

So, what's the problem? Nothing really, it's just that it feels like having all that functionality on a Non-Smartphone non-Symbian phone (the Locatio was non-Symbian, but my employers had written the OS it used)  is like the phone industry is saying "Bye, Zinc; we don't need yous no more!"

They don't really, but I would like to pretend that they do. :(

Things to do on a limited budget

Hey kids, try parking your car on single yellow lines when visiting the dole office, because you can't afford the £4.50-an-hour that the closest car park charges.  If fortune favours you, you'll get the heady rush of adrenaline that you used to get from stealing all the jaffa cakes from the biscuit jar at work; if fortune forsakes you, you'll lose half your week's dole money in parking fines (assuming you pay within the 1/2-price discount period) and have something to blog about that doesn't involve scripting languages.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...

Today's episode of Dole Cuisine brings you Spamcetta Bolognese with wholewheat fusili.

You will need the following ingredients:

• 1x 200g can of Spam (actually 250g as they have a 25 percent extra free deal at the mo)
• 150g of wholewheat fusili (if it's been open in the cupboard for a while, be sure to pick out any biscuit weevils)
• 1 jar Bolognese Sauce (Tesco often do 2 for £1 deals on Ragu or what-have you)

Serves 2, but let's face it, it serves just you over two consecutive nights, you sad loser.

Put a big pan of salted water on to boil for the pasta, then while that's doing, cut the Spam into little rectangles about 1cm by 0.5cm.  

Sautee the Spam in a frying pan with the fat from the weekend's fried egg-and-ketchup sandwich. You're aiming for the Spam to start turning crispy and yum, as well as for some of the fat in it to drain out.  When done, leave on some kitchen towel to drain some of the fat off.

Once the water is boiling, throw in the pasta and bring back to the boil for about 10-12 minutes (eleven minutes is a good aimpoint)

Four minutes or so from the end of the pasta cooking time, chuck the bolognese sauce in another pan and add the spam.  Set the heat to "eh, that looks sort of moderate" and heat without letting it boil.  Be sure to stir regularly to stop it burning and to bring the spam-sauce mixture to a state of maximum entropy.

Drain the pasta, mix in the sauce/spam and serve.  Goes well with red wine, white wine, vodka, gin, buckfast, methylated spirits and that big bottle of Tia Maria that mum used for her New Year's Black Russian.  All mixed up in a big jug.

Actually, Spamcetta Bolognese is really nice.  Far nicer than it has any right to be.

Tomorrow's recipe: Spam and Super Noodles.

Ruby Newbie

I've just started looking at Ruby and I'm rather liking what I'm seeing, at least from a grammar-and-syntax point of view. This is probably partly due to me being an old C++ head and the object-orientation features of Ruby are quite close to those of C++ and Java.   Python is less strict about certain features like private inheritance, data hiding and encapsulation, which it doesn't really support, assuming that you the programmer are sensible enough not to stick your fingers into the whirring machinery of an object's gleaming guts.

At the moment, there's only two annoyances.  One is the performance, which for Ruby 1.8 is rather poor even compared to other dynamic languages like Python (Ruby 1.9 has a different runtime environment and is supposed to be quite an improvement over 1.8).  The other more subjective complaint is that constants are denoted as such by capitalising the first letter of their name. This strikes me as a rather easy-to-forget convention.

More (and less vague) Ruby talk if and when I learn new things.  I also have to learn how to program iPhones this weekend.

De-feeted

Ow.

I made a horrible mistake on Friday night by falling asleep on the sofa.  Waking up with the dogs snuggling up to me was sort of sweet, but this was offset late on Saturday when I made a horrible discovery.

No, it wasn't dog-hair related, nor was it a repeat of an incident in the early nineties when a famous and very talented programmer (and alcoholic) that I worked with came to work with a dried cat-turd stuck to his back after spending the night passed out on his kitchen floor.  No, this horrible discovery happened when I took off my shoes and socks.

Regular readers (heh) will remember that on Friday I went out and about in the big bad world after a week being snowed-in by er, snow.  What regular readers won't know is that thanks to a combination of unemployment making me poor and the peculiarly male habit of having as few pairs of shoes as possible, I was wearing deeply unsuitable footwear.  Instead of my preferred Doc Marten's eight-hole ankle boots, size ten, I was wearing a pair of Tesco's value trainers, price five pounds.  Oh, and a pair of Tesco's value sports socks.

Now don't get me wrong; it turns out that whatever third-world exploited labour it is that manages to produce a pair of shoes that sells for less than a tenner actually produces a surprisingly good pair of shoes. The problem is that they're not even slightly waterproof and once wet will in fact stay wet until put in front of the radiator or some such heaty thing.

Thanks to me traipsing about in the snow for several hours on Friday, my feet were thoroughly wet with the shoes and sports socks combo keeping them good and wet until I took my shoes off on Saturday night.

End result: I have trench foot of the left big toe (okay, immersion foot). Hurts like crazy as the skin has cracked and split as it dried out.

What can I say? I was very busy all Friday and Saturday and once my feet had warmed the wet shoes and socks to body temperature, I simply didn't notice how soggy my footwear was.  Now I'm walking around in bare (and chilly) feet hoping frostbite doesn't strike.  Although if I do lose my toes, perhaps it'll take me down to a cheaper size of shoe.

Horrible Insights, also lots of Television

I hate it when I finally put two and two together and come up with a horrible insight into how my mind works, A.K.A. four.

Last weekend I was watching 30 Rock for the first time ever, it being about the only programme that didn't involve talentless dribblers vying to become Britain's latest America's Top Got Talent Model in the Kitchen.  After a couple of episodes I was deeply in love with Liz Lemon.

Smart, thirtysomething, geeky glasses-wearing brunette, what's not to love? Nothing really, except that I also have an embarrassing telly crush on Lisa Cuddy from House, M.D.

So, I have a thing for smart, successful brunettes (who in real life would never touch me with a ten-foot bargepole, unfortunately. C'est la vie), what's the problem with that?  It's got to be better than when I was in my teens and was magnetically attracted to any female with red hair, dyed or not. Everyone knows red-heads are craaaazy, man.

The problem is with the characters they both play.  They act as enablers, allowing their male counterparts to run around being idiots and horrible to people whilst protecting them from the results of their behaviour.  It seems that what I really look for in a woman is someone who will let me do my idiot nerd thang and rescue me when I get myself in trouble whilst giving me all the glory for my successes.

It's probably a good thing I'm single.

Out and About

Dear blog, today I went outside.

Running critically low of dog food, I finally plucked up the courage to travel the Arctic wastes in search of supplies.  

First came digging out the car. This took half an hour as I had to dig out the driveway and half the road, where passing cars had squished the snow into huge ruts that had frozen overnight into concrete-hard tank-traps.  I rapidly regretted my long standing glove-boycott when I lost all sensation in my delicate pink fingertips.  I regretted it a hell of a lot more when the feeling started to come back.

Next came getting into the car.  This turned out to be a problem as the locks were frozen solid. I couldn't remember whether or not pouring hot water all over the locks was listed in the manual under "ways to make your car not work anymore", so I compromised by using warm water instead.

Anyway, I eventually got in and started 'er up. Reversing off the drive was fine until I got to the icy pavements of wheelspin city.  I managed to creep back onto the drive and then reverse with a bit of momentum across the pavement and onto the road where I blocked the non-existent traffic for a while until I wheel-spun my way out of perpendicular with the road and into parallel.

My first port of call was the local DIY superstore for some Compression-fit Stop End plumbing goodness, along with plenty of Teflon tape. As I rumbled onto the car park, I passed a huge sign saying "NO GRIT, SALT OR SHOVELS!"

Next came some proper shopping. Plenty of dog food for the idiot dogs, plenty of idiot food for the resident idiot, some shampoo, some deodorant (Old Spice, because I was feeling sassy) and a big bundle of socks.  

I got home just in time for a sit-down and a cup of tea before a Telephone Interview with a potential employer, which went quite well.  Next came the plumbing.

A couple of minute's wrestling with an adjustable spanner and some pliers, and I had the burst pipe for the garden tap all fixed!  Well, fixed if you just count "not leaking" as fixed. The tap itself no longer works, but now I don't have to fill the kettle from upstairs and the washing machine works, so tomorrow should be Clean Clothes Day!

And that was that.  The only notable thing to report is that the BBC and other news sources keep blathering on about how last night was colder than at the South Pole, without pointing out that it's the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere. Seasons are wacky like that.

On the plus side, BBC 24's Wilds-of-Scotland correspondent is exactly the sort of lassie I'd be wantin' to curl up with on a winter's evening.

Big Fat Liar

The job hunting continues apace.  Today, I got all excited for ten seconds after receiving an email inviting me to a meeting with a company to discuss career opportunities.  Then I realised that generally, top-rank software engineering companies don't use AOL email accounts.

A few moments Googling revealed that the company in question is one of those silly multi-level marketing schemes, this particular one being based around the sale of Aloe Vera.  Now, aside from it being a miracle ingredient in hair care and skin products about ten years back (since replaced by Boswelox, Fraudulin and anything Nano-flavoured) and a way for me to annoy the hell out of a perky little test-lady called Vera back when I ran the Y2K test environment for North West Water, I have no idea what Aloe Vera is about, how to compile software for it, or if it tastes nice on Malt Loaf.  Why I'd want to sell it to other people is a mystery.

Actually, why I'd want to sell anything to anyone is a mystery.  When I was a kid, I used to make stuff up all the time, writing in my schoolbooks about how I'd had to parachute out of a burning plane that weekend, but I was all right now, how I was going to America for my summer holidays to visit NASA and fly the space shuttle for them because all their astronauts had the AIDS from being bitten by space-monkeys and so on.  This continued up into my teens when I finally found a legitimate use for my unbridled creativity (i.e. really unbelievable lies) in the form of the Pen-And-Paper Role Playing Game.

Yeah, computer nerd what played Dungeons and Dragons. What a surprise!

Surprisingly, I didn't play Dungeons and Dragons that much.  Mostly we played more modern or SF games as Fantasy games have Elves and Hobbits in them and Elves and Hobbits  (sorry, Halflings) are about the worst, most la-di-da hippy flowers-and-fairies nonsense ever; a teenaged me would probably have accused them of being gay, but I was an obnoxious little sod who hadn't actually met any gay people yet and have since matured considerably.  Anyway, the long and short of it is we preferred things with manly guns and rocket-ships which aren't at all Freudian symbols for anything, no-sir.

With all this healthy sublimation of my hitherto-uncontrolled creativity, I made a conscious effort not to go around telling lies any more, no matter how harmless. This turned out to be a wildly successful strategy for someone in a field that values accurate information above everything else and one I've stuck to ever since, honest.

It's a deeply ingrained part of my personality these days and frankly it's not without problems. Relationships are a nightmare, as you might imagine.  "Hey there, how about coming round to my place for a thoroughly unremarkable night that you're probably too drunk to be overly disappointed by?" is not the best chat up line ever.  Even assuming that a relationship gets past the first awkward encounters, any variation of the classic "Does my bum look big in this?" is basically Doomsday waiting to happen, although if I ever do find a woman who laughs at "Not compared to the Death Star, no" or "Why, are you seeing Sir Mixalot on the side?", I am probably going to marry her. Assuming she can cook.

One of the problems I'm having with honesty is in the jobs market.  No, it's not about my CV (which I think is ace, even if employers have yet to agree), it's to do with me looking for a temporary job in the meantime to pay for some C# or Java certification courses to help with the ol' prospects, since C++ for Symbian seems to be a dead end outside of India.  You see, most of the temp jobs round here involve sales, a career path noted for its reliance on a certain flexibility with the truth.  

Note to the hypothetical reader who is a salesman, outraged at my attack on his personal honesty: I don't think all salespeople are bare-faced liars; some will be, but the best presumably are able to use the truth as their main weapon with a little creative editing around areas concerning how much owning a slap-chop will really change your life.  

My problem is excessive honesty.  If I become a computer salesperson, for example, I would try to find out the person's needs, how much price was an issue and then sell them the computer that met those criteria.  Fair enough, but there's the concept of upselling, where you induce the customer to buy a more expensive item than they strictly need, or want.  Plus 3-year warranties and extra cables with gold-plated connectors.

Now me, I couldn't do that.  Half the time, I'd wind up talking people out of buying pointless and expensive things.  Or I'd be telling people the truth about how useful I think a 3-year warranty is on an bottom of the range, end-of-line graphics card.  Employers really don't like it if you're going out of your way to do the opposite of your job title.  "But they asked my opinion!" doesn't really seem to be an adequate excuse.

It never is.  Most people with opinions should keep them to themselves; at least, that's my opinion.

SNOW CRISIS 2010: SNOW HOPE

Someone out there likes me.  I can't think of any other reason that the weather pixies would send me so much snow last night; they want me to be happy and go outside to frolic in the winter wonderland which they have created.

Basically, I woke up to find the world covered in snow. Lots of snow.

Okay, not that much snow if you live in Greenland or Alaska or some such place, but if you live in the suburban jungles of Greater Manchester, six inches of snow falling overnight is more than enough to shut down the airport, the roads, the pavements and worst of all, my satellite TV.  

Seriously, how am I supposed to cope with being snowed in if I can't watch telly?  I can just taste the snow madness coming on.

My biggest fear about the current state of emergency has to do with the phone lines.  Somehow the snow has managed to stick to the damn wires and they're hanging precariously low.  Any moment now, there's going to be a horrible snapping noise and I'll lose my precious internet too.

Anyway, I've taken some pictures with my cellphone.  If they're any good I might post some of them.

Welcome to 2010

Four days in to the new year and I can tell that my run of terrible luck that lasted all through 2009 hasn't broken yet.  It's been achingly cold the last few days and last night I heard a horrible dripping noise in the kitchen.  A few minute's probing under the cabinets and I find that water is slowly dripping down past a pair of mysterious copper pipes that run from upstairs.  

This morning, I'm getting dressed in the kitchen (that's where Mr Tumbly-dryer lives and he has all my clothes) when I suddenly hear a horrible noise like the washing machine filling up, only from under the cabinets near where the dripping was.

Investigation shows that the dripping has stopped and that there isn't any obvious flooding, but that the strange noise seems to be coming from through the other side of the wall.  I hate to admit how long it took me to remember that there's a tap on the outside wall for running a garden hose.

Sure enough, the outside pipe for the tap has frozen up and burst.  Perfectly in time to make me late for going out.  Well, last night I spotted a pair of mysterious stopcocks under the cabinets, so I try turning them off for the sheer hell of it.  Happily, one of them turns off the outside tap, so the patio stops flooding and I can go out.

When I get back, I take a look at the pipe.  After digging through layers of bubble-wrap and lagging, I find that instead of the pipe splitting (which happened a few years back), the solder joint has failed in a way that looks like I might be able to fix it.

Assuming, that is, I find a way to afford pipe-soldering gear.  

Oh, and my car was a solid block of ice- the door seals had frozen up and it took me ten minutes to even get in.  I'm beginning to dislike winter.

Edit: The stopcock that turned off the garden tap also turned off all the cold water in the kitchen, which I found out when I tried to make a cup of tea.  I definitely dislike winter.

Duly Noted

From the small print on a car air freshener: "Air fresheners are not a substitute for proper hygiene practices".