Month: July 2003

Got called to personnel on Friday. Breathy voice, urgent. Shouda known, they’re making the “post” of senior software developer redundant. You guessed it, it’s me. In fact the “post” was created so that they could head hunt me from Oracle.

Arseholes

I designed probably 30% of their flagship product and put the whole thing into the use cases that were used to build it originally. I worked with their not that good team from NZ building the “J2EE” (well it had Java in it) version (which was all web services and still doesn’t support transactions properly). Right up until the last second I was overdoing it trying to get things finished for an important deadline. Never mind, it’s not my problem any more.

I do find myself wondering how the deadline at the end of August will be met

I also understand why my manager cancelled my review and moved it to this week when she had seen everybody else a couple of weeks ago before she went on holiday. Coward, but I can understand her not wanting to waste her time.

I’m on gardening leave, getting 2 months salary. Not that bothered, to be honest the whole thing had gone shitty as soon as the suits started sacking people and not looking at what they did. I want to work for and with entrepreneurs, not suits, suits suck sick through a straw. Having a meeting on Friday to talk about “options”. What options? Interested to see what the package is, probably total shite, knowing this bunch of tight arses.

It also explains why the personnel director didn’t reply to an email of mine about taking people from the company bellboating. I thought she was just being rude.

About a year ago the IT director (who’s based in NZ, surprise!) employed 2 guys and had no work for them to do really. Ever since then he’s been throwing himself around the company nicking our development work for his buddies. Can’t say I blame him, he has his empire to support after all, but the other redundancies I mentioned earlier in this blog, and my own, are the direct result of his politicking and it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, I have to say. We are also the only people who might be able to effectively critique the work his happy band are doing. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king

I wanted to take my laptop for a few days while I copied of my music and stuff (all legit, just loads of it) but they wouldn’t let me take it for a week. My manager’s manager, an ineffectual unshaven geek with dyed spikes (yeah, I know), kept wittering at me about how it was so hard for him to sack me. Fuckin’ cheek! I went out of the door, handed him my key card, made a talk to the hand gesture and the door slammed in his face. Only the good dye blonde. I think he’ll probably soon follow me, as far as I can make out he hasn’t made a decision of any note in over a year.

Still got the car for a while. Will use Rosie’s to go to the meeting on Friday so the dicks can’t strand me.

Ah yes, come out of work and turn towards Chester.

First bend someone on the wrong side of the road overtaking who gets in OK, Iflashed headlights and got a load of sign language.

Next bend someone on the wrong side of the road overtaking with nowhere togo. I slam on the brakes and pull over as far as I can, probably miss by a footor so (120 MPH head on! Well maybe less ’cos I was braking hard)

Next bend you guessed it but this time there are 2 cars making the maneuver and we missedby inches.

What the fuckis wrong with people? In the rush hour out of Chester all that will happen isyou get stuck behind the next truck. Maybe they don’t care but I’ve got a lifeto lead.

Strings for 7-stringguitars

I have a7-string Peavy guitar and can’t get string sets with a low B in them. Gotrecommended <Ahref=“http://www.stringsdirect.co.uk/”>http://www.stringsdirect.co.uk/.Ordered some Ernie Ball’s late afternoon yesterday and they were here today. Ifyou buy more than 5 sets there’s no postage.

Just got an anonymous content-free email sourced from https://Word-of-Mouth.Org

 on my personal email (which isn’t visible anywhere). When I went to try to reply to whoever sent the mail they wanted 20 bux. Another spam rip-off.

Diary Stuff

Discovered that Smoothwall won’t work with by BT Voyager 100 modem. Buying an Alcatel one through Ebay. The Voyager only works properly with my windows 2k machine, not my iMac (itermittent and slow) or the smoothwall Linux (nothing). Pile of crap. If anyone wants it leave me a note here. Rosie thinks I should send it back to BT but I can’t face hours of listening to canned music while I argue with them. Maybe I’ll Ebay it. I’ve got some old ISDN and 10 MB hubs I’ll see if anyone’s interested in too.

3* Course

Got 5 out of my 6 candidates through the test. Very pleased with the result. The lad that didn’t make it was let down by his roll on the day. Interestingly I was teaching above the standard but that’s OK, I think. I thought only 3 of them had a decent chance. One of them had just joined us the week before for some training and sailed through, good for her. (Of course the coaching was excellent).

Tents and bike rides

We didn’t go to the OCA rally in south wales because I didn’t want weather hassles. Instead we went and tried John’s tent out at a hide away site near Delamere (sic). Went for a bike on the Sunday, still very tired. Poor Deb had to fall off but she got on again and showed some gumption, which was very good.

The dome tent was OK for me but Rosie (6’) just didn’t get on with it. I liked the site a lot (no URL, sorry don’t know where it is).

Lama Jampa’s CD

You can get a CD of one of his public talks on the way of Buddhism. Really good introduction and a reminder for the rest of us. His book is on http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0722540175/dechen-21/202-2170199-4270206. For the CD contact http://www.dechen.org/.

Posted against http://www.freeroller.net/page/ktorn/20030713

I learned a lot from the old standards Java Examples in a Nutshell and Java Enterprise in a Nutshell. I also liked Darwin’s Java Cookbook, he has some useful stuff about common gotchas and using the collections classes properly. There is a debate about his typesafe enums because they will not serialise properly.

I can only echo all of the points made earlier about making your code easy to understand so that when you come back to it you can easily see what was important.

Also try using the Code Coach in JDeveloper (free to use), remember lint from the old days? You need a decent IDE, I personally use Eclipse and JDeveloper depending upon whether it is pure Java or needs some wizards to do the hand cranking for me. Being lazy I prefer to get on with the job and not have to write all of the EJB or whatever code from scratch.

Added Later :  Got Java Cookbook mixed up with Effective Java (Bloch)

Well, the utility is misnamed. I found myself looking at three identical panes and could not resolve which I wanted. It just doesn’t work. Got a copy of Winmerge from Source Forge http://download.sourceforge.net/winmerge/WinMergeSetup.exe

 and explicitly giving it two different files. Not perfect ‘cos I wanted to append a change from one file onto another but at least I managed to do the merge. I want to go to CVS, despite the buggy NT interface it’s got to be better.

Got my wireless kit today downloaded the 64MB upgrade which went on the card fine. Need to spend some time getting the base station to upgrade. Not sure why when I only have a 512k broadband connection but what the hell, has to be done.

Off to Puja now, mantras at the ready.

Blessings all.

The spammers seem to have got my private email address. Very annoying. Received a particularly disgusting one with a piccie of someone allegedly giving her dog a BJ. I do not want to see this kind of thing, it makes me sick and sad to see how someone will degrade themselves (and their poor dog) for money. Do you really want the whole world to know you have done such a thing? Your picture (and name) on a thousand emails? How could you walk down the street ever again? And no, I’m not putting the URL in here.

I’m still waiting for my networking kit to arrive from Scan, the firewall will be on its way soon. I will then switch to my friend’s IMAP service with any luck.

Went to see REM at the Old Trafford Criket ground on Sunday. They were headlining the final day of the Move festival.

Oranger.

Pretty predictable stuff from the USA. The Foos have already done this and done it better.

Athlete. An English Steely Dan (or a new incarnation of the Jam). Eclectic and competent. Listeneable but I’m not sure I could be arsed buying their album.

John Squier. Ex Stone Roses guitar player. Really good, did some old SR stuff, heavy R&B/Stones feel but still sounded original. Has influences but not a slave to them.

Idewild. Dull stuff played well. Sounded like a poor man’s REM at times (Stipe said he liked them). Other times just thrash.

Badly Drawn Boy. Interesting and has a brain. It’s a shame that he had to light a ciggie every number. I liked his stuff and will probably buy some.

REM. Well, one of the best bands in the world and it shows. Did the old favorites and the new stuff had plenty of juice. Supposed to be a best of coming out soon which I will probly buy because I’ve got most of their stuff on tape or vinyl which I can’t cope with these days.

Struggling to test stuff because things are buried very deep in the database. Very excited because broadband getting installed tomorrow (well ISDN ceased).

Roger recommended that we use an old box as a firewall http://www.smoothwall.org/

, wire it to the ADSL modem with a network card and then wire that out to my home network. Smoothwall will do the DNS/MAC firewall crap. They have a (highly recommended) version that runs for the corporate market. Roger is very kindly going to set me up a machine with the GPL on, me not having any old kit to reconfigure.

Going to set up a wireless network, recommended USRobotics, apparently you can just get a firmware upgrade and go straight to 802.11g! UK bods have a look on scan http://www.scan.co.uk/products/wireless.htm, LN4501 etc.

Had to fill in a half year review form, expressing my goals and wants for the next six months. Very worried to discover that I just don’t give a toss and don’t want anything either.

Just discovered Rage Against the Machine – like it, but then I always was a metal kid and still have a lot of my own anger to work through anyway.

Onward and backward.

Really

How little it all matters

The petty pains and frustrations of the day

Your little micro world measured against the macro

The machine suffering of millions

Against your angst or love’s distress

How little you matter

We get ground like corn

Dust between the stones of circumstance

Each a little micro

How would we ever know or understand the macro

The general hidden in the particular

Riffing outwards into others’ pain

How could we ever love

Each drop that falls

A thousand lives

Or none

Nothing ever satisfies

Like the princess and her pea

Always something

Let go the micro, the particular, yourself

Freedom lies in losing other and self

Melting the ice of me

Just got a list of names from a fellow ex-Oracle bod. About 15 or so, most of whom I knew. It’s rumoured that they’re going to quarterly reviews of staffing levels.

So much for vision. I’m glad I jumped when I did.

Just to rub salt in, Oracle skills were placed on the UK work permit list when there is no shortage. I wish we had an opposition in this country.