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.