Category: Work
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Did you get my meme-o?
So, somehow someone at work managed to send a routine system failure notification to a mailing list that included everyone who has access to that system. Like 26,000 people. Not a smart career move. I received the notification, saw it wasn’t really meant for me, deleted it, and moved on. But there’s always people who can’t just delete an email (maybe because it took them time to read it, which counts as work, so now they need to let everyone know they are working) and who decided to reply to it. And not just reply, but Reply All. To everyone… Read more
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New Adventures In Hi-Fi
Last week, my live-in lover became my live-out lover. After six wonderful months, followed by a couple of distinctly variable ones, we decided that all of us (me, her, my three kids) living together wasn’t in the best interests of our mental health and serenity, so we rolled back to the ‘last working version’, and started living apart again. Traumatic as this was, it did have one bright spot: I got the opportunity to put together a multi-room speaker system for her new house, which is a project I’ve always wanted to undertake (at least until I discovered Sonos and… Read more
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…Bullshit Walks
Last Wednesday was apparently National Walking Day (in America). At my work they’ve been championing personal health and wellness for a while now (having apparently all but eradicated accidents (save the idiot who tripped over a marginally raised flagstone a couple of weeks ago, resetting the “586 days without an accident” counter back to zero…)) so they were all over this. Participation was entirely ‘optional’, but you’d never know it by the seemingly endless stream of emails, calendar invites, and reminders that were sent out in the weeks leading up to National Walking Day. It also doesn’t help that my… Read more
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Fun With Servers – Part 1*
A couple of years ago, for the fun of it, I wrote a book on UPK 3.5. The latest version of UPK (11.1) has now been available for several months, and although my current client doesn’t have it yet, I keep getting asked for an update to my book. Also, in the spirit of being a true ‘consultant’, I thought I’d better stay at least one step ahead of my client, who are upgrading soon, and learn about UPK 11 before I need to teach them about it. UPK 11.1 can run as a stand-alone product on a single PC,… Read more
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Evacuation Desperation
At work, we are in the middle of a critical (to me…) stage in the project – training development. It’s now the training team’s time to shine, and because all of the prior activities (build, data loading, testing) have over-run their time, we’re being really squeezed on how much time we have left to deliver everything they made us promise we would have done by now. So it’s long hours, unrealistic deadlines, and frayed tempers. Luckily this is all old hat to a seasoned project resource such as myself, so this is the perfect time to put into play the… Read more