Whingey time

I wasn't going to add in a post today because :

I'm super tired;
It was going to be a whinge;
And I hate doing whingey posts.

It was originally going to be a whinge about advertising but I read this post (Link) about the issues affecting my current Warcraft server and the words in there that said Blizzard were deleting negative posts kinda broke the straw.

Ok - 2 issues today and I'll save the gaming one until later.

First one is advertising ...

I had another one of those spam emails today. "Can we post on your website ?". No. I'm responsible for what goes here and I have to stand by what appears here. I posted years ago about taking my guild's website off the links list (when I was guild master at the time - this is the Mercenaries guild) because their website didn't have the basic tools added that stopped spam. And we had a massive amount of spam, most of it pointing people to porn sites.

I don't have a problem with people indulging in porn. It can be amusing, instructive? and occasionally hilarious. What I do have a problem with is the potential for my page to be flagged for adult content. I don't know what the consequences are but I doubt they're good ... On the interwebs, you're not just responsible for your own page, you're responsible for what you link people to.

Oh and there's also the tendency on places like Youtube for the adverts to be so much louder than the video you're wanting to be watching. I don't want people getting inflicted with annoying popups or offensive adverts. I definitely don't want people getting drive-by viruses from advertising, like how a certain national newspaper got caught (Register link).

I will mention people here, like Lexus (yey!), Ford (ok), Vauxhall (previously yey!, now very meh), Apple (cautious yey), Microsoft (may their UI designers burn in hell) and whichever supermarket I went to last. But that's just my opinion and I'm usually giving the bad as well as the good. I aim to give a balanced opinion, advertising is anything but. As I said on Facebook earlier, the prospect of adding unbalanced advertising lies here turns my stomach. And if you advertise, that gives someone editorial control over you ("we didn't like that post, take it down or no advert paycheck"). Not gonna happen.

(This is why I try not to post while tired !)

So no advertising - cos I hate it enough to want to avoid inflicting it on others. I don't need the paltry money it brings (although extra cash is always nice).

Gaming ?

I tried logging into the Warcraft servers last night (gave up immediately because of a very early start today) and had more of a go today. No joy. I play on the Draenor Europe server which is currently having a few issues. Over the last couple of weeks I've experienced enough disconnects to convince me that group work is a bad idea.

It's an online MULTIPLAYER game ! Group work is what you're supposed to do on it !

I'd consider starting off a character on another server but I'm honestly too tired tonight (more below). Tonight's attempt at Warcraft was abysmal - it took about 5 attempts to log in, I did one of those group work things (being disconnected before and after) but took the hint when it completely froze up (couldn't select a character to log in with) afterwards. Tonight would not be a Warcraft night.

This is another sign actually - addiction makes you more sensitive about these things. If you're tearing hair out about a game being unavailable, it's time to do something different. I'm half-watching the round of Youtube videos behind this post and after those, I'll be reading books while listening to music.

Wait - this post is mainly anti-censorship. The place people go to complain about their online service being unavailable is the forums for the service. Those forums are typically controlled by the providers and they don't like criticism, it tends to get deleted. So - this post is partly about giving those dissatisfied people a voice. We should get game credit for this current debacle but I doubt we will, Blizzard doesn't do that. CCP do with Eve but not Blizzard.

We have similar dissatisfaction at work with the IT. It goes down more often than it should (we should have >99% availability, we don't) and we're subject to stupid limits on the amount of data we can store. On top of that, we're forced to use Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server as our primary system. It's not fit for purpose as that and forces us to hold off on making new files. It prevents us being as efficient as we should be.

In both the case of Warcraft and work, we have the right to be highly annoyed because we're paying an inordinate amount of money for a service that isn't up to the job. It isn't delivering. We are not getting our value.

But that's enough about work. I try to keep the anti-work stuff at a minimum. I work with some great people but we are handicapped by the ultimate management, the support groups (aiming my rifle at the IT here) and idiots who inflict policy on people without understanding the implications.

Closing off now ...

Today was actually a really good day, I'm just overtired now because it was also a very long day. Up at about 6am, to get a bus at 6.30am to catch a coach at 7.30am. I live under 3 miles away from work, yet I have to allow an hour to get in due to policies inflicted upon us - that's silly.

Wait - good day. I saw shinies !

It is pretty good to see what we work on. We're a bit disconnected from the reality when we're stuck in the office. We deal with massive pieces of kit filled with complex machinery that all interconnects. We don't get an appreciation of how it all interweaves, with that being the most accurate term when you're looking at :
HVAC, network, power, low pressure water, high pressure water, chilled water and all the other services coming in too.

It's mindbending putting all that together and making it all work efficiently.

And quite possibly that's why I enjoy working with the big toys I work with. But it wouldn't be the same without the people who are part of the teams putting it all together and the people who use it after we hand it over to them.