Year: 2006
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Nu kan ik Nederlands spreken
For the past year I’ve been studying Flemish (a.k.a. Dutch) at night school. I’ve just had my end-of-year exams, and thankfully I passed (and quite comfortably, with 84%). For my efforts, I’ve been awarded an offical certificate, which felt oddly like the Straw Man in the Wizard of Oz receiving his diploma, as I didn’t really study that hard, and relied largely on my (basic) knowledge of German, which is fairly similar to Flemish. Overall, the course was fun. We started out with about 22 students in the class (although this was whittled down to around eight by the end of the year)… Read more
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The Seven Swear-words of Successful Managers
We had a bit of a sketch at work, recently. The developers had made some code changes to add new functionality that our users desperately wanted. The change went in the night before a public holiday, which in retrospect wasn’t a great idea (especially as the programmer who made the change had flown back to Poland for the long weekend). On the off chance that there might be problems, I went into work the next day anyway. When I got in (at 7:00 am), I found out that the implementation hadn’t gone in cleanly, and now none of our retail sites… Read more
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I Hate Lynne Truss
My wife is the Events Coordinator for the Parents’ Association of our childrens’ school. This means that I’m effectively involved too, doing anything that involves touching a PC instead of the ‘phone. This week I had to deisgn and print some tickets for their Summer Ball. Being short on both time and patience (and unpaid) I cut/pasted the text from somewhere else, threw in some clipart, and hit Print. Unfortunately I committed the cardinal sin of not proofreading, and the tickets went out on general release with the title “Parent’s Association Summer Ball”. [*] (For the less-eagle-eyed, the apostrophe is in the wrong place – it… Read more
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Belgium is Driving Me Crazy
OK, I’ve now been in Belgium for over a year, so I think I’m qualified to make a few comments without being dismissed as a ‘newbie’ who needs to learn to adapt. There are some aspects of driving in Belgium that I just can’t adapt to. Three of them, in fact: (1) Giving way to the right. The rule is that if you’re driving along a main road, and a car is joining the road from a side-road on the right, you need to give way. Unless of course there is a solid white line or a series of tiny… Read more
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Fear and More Fear in Central America
I’m in Honduras. Ostensibly to deliver a training course I developed, but I’m also taking advantage of the opportunity to witness the implementation of our new system at one of our convenience stores. What initial visions I had of seeing a bit of the country rapidly disappeared when my contact over here advised me (before I’d even set off on my 36-hour 4-flight trip to get here) that under no circumstances should I get a taxi from the airport to the hotel, and that a named driver (whose ID I sholuld check), holding a sign with a pre-defined codeword on… Read more