Mining, Reading, Working

Hello everyone,

What have I been up to for the week ? Feels like time is flying by still at the moment.

I've actually turned the Seti sums back on again, because it's cooled down enough here to be putting the jumpers back on.

Let's see. Work's been fairly intense lately and it really should have been a bit more intense. I should actually be in a different country at the moment under quarantine ahead of a little period away. But I'm not, partly due to physical condition, partly due to mental condition.

My head's ok now, my mental state picked up considerably after I was stood down from going away. But there is that nagging sense that I've let the mental issues win this time. Some of those issues come from the frustration I was having with arranging my end of the trip. (Arranging for me seemed to be much more of an unknown than the other people - can't go in to why here) A big one was the prospect of over a month away from home. I get anxiety when I'm away. Some of it was the conditions I'd be going into. Again, can't say why here.

What caused the decision to be made though was that the mental issues were causing tensions that were manifesting in physical conditions. My back has mostly repaired itself now from when it tried to decouple itself and I've been back in the internet spaceship piloting seat as well (more later). Mining has been a good activity there, feels productive. I haven't attempted a shooter or MMO style game for a good while though, if the spaceships are close to aggravating the wrist, then the shooter / MMO games are likely to activate that issue again.

Oh and I also needed to take a moment when I was picking up shopping last week and my hips were  getting crunchy ...

Things do feel a little like making excuses though and I'm not sure if I like that. That's one thing about mental issues, the person with them will feel as if they've let themselves down ... which just acts as negative reinforcement.

It's ok to talk about the mental issues. In fact, I'd heavily encourage it. In being able to express those issues with a few people, it's let me bounce back quite a bit from when they were affecting me so much that the tension was manifesting as the physical issues.

Reading ?

After abandoning David Brin's Existence after 100 tedious pages, I've been reading A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher. More to come about that in a later post (when I've finished reading it !) but I enjoyed its first 36 pages so much, I had to share part of why I was finding it a fun read :

It's been light hearted fun so far, very readable and the early parts quite happily drew me in to the story and I was wanting to continue despite it getting late.

Existence was a bit different. The first couple of chapters were ok ... and then we hit one with a travel journalist experiencing the Mixed Reality rich areas. That was tough to read, not for subject but for readability. I don't like the Wall of Text tendency that I can have, this was Wall of Text to the extreme. And then it goes into intermission sections between chapters, some of which were a talk show type set up that I was essentially just skipping over. There's a lot of self indulgent stuff in there, it was distracting heavily away from any semblance of plot and I gave up on it after 100 pages, perhaps 15/20 of which felt plot related.

Internet spaceships ? I've been mining again ...

Mining is a bit broken though, so fairly soon I'll be switching ship again. ZoomNarr is potentially next, although I'd like to open up a little more engineering first for weight savings ...

That'll be what Zoomnarr looks like and I'll be aiming at around 3 hours to get to the Galactic Core in this one. My record is 3 hours 6 minutes ...

I'm not switching ships due to a lithobraking incident though ... honest. (All the dents came out from this planetary approach).

Gotta say, the colour scheme of Hand of Caledorn was fitting in rather nicely with the surroundings she was mining in. However, mining has suffered a little lately in the metagame area. Low Temperature Diamonds were the main highly lucrative item, these are now scarcer than scarce. As a knock on to that, the Painite I've been mining has lessened in value as the market saturates. So ... time to test something new :

Mining with explosives ! Charges set ...

BOOM TODAY ! (Well. Yesterday.)

Hmm. More boom needed.

That's better. The idea is that you use the seismic charge launcher to embed explosives into the rock and then ...

Pick up the goodies exposed from the insides, find the high buyers and profit. I cut the session short a little because I was struggling to fill the hold ... and also because the wrist issues were threatening again. Still, it was a nice 128m credits from the session although that took 4 hours to get, rather than the 2 hours that a Painite session currently netting 121m would take.

So I think I'll leave the mining aside for a little bit. Next up will be a brief combat session again in a Mamba. Not the best ship but the only useful role I can see for it is mining. A Beluga Passenger Liner will happen at some point ... and also the Anaconda class explorer ship Searching For Dragons will go round the galaxy. That'll be all of the ships owned at the that point, although the Admiral Luperza hasn't been out of the hangar yet.

We'll see. Perhaps even a little FFXIV as well, although that was a catalyst for the wrist issues so I may have to just cold turkey drop that game.

We shall see ! Apart from that, Le Mans is coming up, having been moved to September. Nurburgring 24 hour is the week after. I'll be watching someone down the field and hoping they do well. It's boring to support the winners. Better to urge on the cars that have had terrible luck at some point and you can watch them battle back through the field after repairs. I was doing that with the Lexus cars last year, sadly they won't be at the Nurburgring even this year. But there's a custom sports car, several GT86s and some Aston Martins to keep an eye on.

Should be good.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Less Than Perfect

It's about me again today !

Even though I know I am far from perfect, there's a big corner of me that absolutely hates being Less Than Perfect. I do get a lot of stuff right but it's those little errors and missing of things that bite at my soul.

Things like - we had one of those meetings today where we talk all day about the most important assumptions about all corners of our business. That's really important, as lots of decisions get made on those assumptions and it really helps if everyone is working off the same assumption ...

Why's that important ? If I'm going somewhere on a business trip with someone and we both make the assumption that the other is handling the transport, then both of us are in the poo because neither of us make arrangements. It's like that with these assumptions but on a much bigger scale.

I handled most of the arrangements today - for getting data to people who need to see it. It's sensitive data, which means we have to keep it away out of prying eyes (lol - management of information is a weird subject in our place, openness fights with confidentiality). That sensitivity means you have to react fast to get everyone looking at what they're supposed to. We sometimes don't get that right.

So why am I beating myself up over this ?

One of the workbooks was wrong. It contained a fraction of the information it should have. My fault, shoulda checked what got uploaded to make sure it was the right one. Dunno why the wrong one got uploaded actually. Fixed that yesterday (bit late) and it gave me the excuse to give a little info burst about today.

Silver lining. But ... less than perfect again. A more perfect me would have added another little snippet of info that would have helped a lot of people out. As well as the Proper Place, I put the info somewhere else (hidden) too so our team could see it. I coulda put the link in yesterday's info burst. Thought about it, didn't do it. Why ? I dunno - less than perfect.

Note taking too - we've got good capture of what was discussed but I know I miss stuff that I should catch.

And things like not thinking up the good ideas in the meeting but having them pop up after it's finished.

Enough about the meeting - I hope everyone else thought it went well. I'm always very tough on how I see how I do things, because I see all the little mistakes and mark myself down on them.

There's lots of other areas where that Less Than Perfect gets to me. It's a critical factor in why this skin condition isn't repaired yet. The worst area is still the back of my knees. It has improved to the point where it's smooth enough to run curling stones over (I've been waiting ages to use that analogy !) but they're sore again now. I could probably fix them right up by using treatment gunk but ... I want to be free of the need to use treatment gunk.

One of my flaws is that if I see an imperfection on me, I'll attack it. Which is one reason the skin problem got as bad as it did, because by worrying at it, I'd make it worse. I have to maintain the discipline to let it heal on its own. It's improving ... just still very slowly.

Actually - I shall stop being stubborn about avoiding use of the treatment gunk. I'll put some on in a minute. Honest.

My memory is Less Than Perfect too. It used to be near photographic, albeit not perfect. Damn near perfect recall but not complete. I can't trust it now, that's a lingering after effect of Nose Job 1. But ... I know about that flaw, accept it and manage it. It's acceptable to say "I can't recall but I'll take an action to check", even better to have anticipated the memory issue and brought supporting info. Today's supporting data involved having a live feed to the database we were reviewing. That worked better than anticipated. Perhaps I've sparked off a standard procedure for the next reviews ?

The memory thing is part of a deeper symptom, I'm definitely not as capable as I was before the Nose Job incident. Or is just that me thinking that and therefore making myself less capable. Self doubt can be crippling.

This psychological tendency gets me in the cricket too. Leaving the anger when dropping a catch aside, I'm a danger to myself when that happens as it normally leads to an anger fuelled power throw and then a scream of pain as my arm tries to follow the ball. Nah, it's more the slight fumble which means the difference between perfect fielding and average fielding. Doesn't matter if the batsman would have been safe anyway, I just aim for that perfection. And that self doubt slows you down and brings out the fumbling.


There's a certain purity to perfection. Although there's also a certain coldness to it.

Perhaps perfection is not the goal to aim for. Perhaps the aim should be a certain degree of perfection, leaving room for a little bit of clumsy randomness.

Think of music - with people like Bat For Lashes, the stage performance of Laura is far more powerful than the album performance. The imperfections add to its power. With Goldfrapp, I think their Seventh Tree album is their best because it sounds totally natural, Head First sounded forced and manufactured. Just compare Road To Somewhere (which is a thing of beauty and one of my favourites out of 12,000 in the library) and Head First which is also great but although closer to "perfectly made" ... I prefer Road To Somewhere. (notice how the crowd aren't getting involved in the Head First video)

Similarly - I'll avoid the manufactured pop we get bombarded with in favour of these more gifted artists with far more character. The charm in the character far outshines the perfection of the production.

Yeah - I get stuff wrong. But I hope I get a lot of other stuff right. And along the way, I'll have a lot of fun getting the most out of the imperfections. We own our flaws, as well as being a drawback we should see if we can turn them into assets.

And I'll close with something that actually isn't in that 12,000 song library - something Perfect. Oh look, their Very Best of is going for £3.99 on Amazon MP3. Uhoh ...

Ranty with a neat finish

There's a few things that I could get ranty about at the moment ...

One is the tendency of people at work to ignore instructions like "Don't use aerosols!", which occasionally results in our buildings getting evacuated as the fire alarm goes off. Yep. We had another unscheduled 30 minute fresh air break today.

Yep - I'm a little ranty.

Online trolls ! Why are they there ? We're hearing about these more and more these days. The phenomenon (yep - I said that out loud to make sure I got the right number of syllables) is getting more widespread. It's emerging from the gaming world and infesting the various overt and underground social media sites. It used to be on usenet newsgroups (an ancient precursor that's faded away now), where people gave bad advice or just plain abuse.

Twitter seems especially bad for it, from what I see on the Uksnowmap. The UK news is highlighting another social media site right now because comments put there directly led to the suicide of a young lady.

I have only one piece of advice there - if you're being bullied online, walk away. It's not like bullies at school who can chase you down. Trouble is, it can be hard to do that as the bullies not only have access to you, they likely have access to your friends too. In Warcraft, I had a few incidents where I ended up targeted (decisions like kicking idiots out of the guild). I could ignore the player, which meant anything they sent me got a generic "player is ignoring you" response and I didn't see the hateful thing they sent. But it didn't stop them blabbing my name all over the game's capital city saying "Iceangel is leaving WoW and is giving all his money away". Which leads you to getting spammed by beggars. This actually happened once.

So yeah - be careful who it is that is asking you to accept that friend request. Watch your privacy settings. Be aware that what you put on the net can be broadcast instantly by someone else. If you wouldn't want that to happen, don't put it online. I'm always very careful what I put here. I've only mentioned exactly what my work has been once and I refer to work people with codenames.

Codenames which the Snow Queen always guesses instantly. I think I need better codenames. Or someone just knows how my head works, which should scare her - lol :-)

(This was going to be a ranty post wasn't it ? Time to have a go at Microsoft ...)

I'm still shopping for laptops ... But. I don't want a Windows 8 laptop. Microsoft have driven their software into the ground lately. They've gone down very strange design routes. The latest Office is an abomination of unusability. It's an obscenity. And Windows 8 is going a similar route. They tried to inflict similar atrocities on future owners of the Xbox One (a Kinect camera always live, always online ? no thanks no stalking please) but the user base quickly rebelled and the announcements got reversed.

How come business doesn't behave in a similar fashion ? I guess we can't. We're locked into a cycle which we're scared to break because it would mean being incompatible with the organisations we work with. And if we're incompatible, we can't do business.

The perfect thing for business computers would be to have Windows XP, tightened up and made properly secure. Keep it compatible with new hardware. Call it Windows for Business and sell it on an annual licence model. Every time the machine looks for a security update, check the product ID against a database and if the licence isn't valid, lock out the machine. That business model would work.

It's all about the business model. The current model is that you'd pay a one time licence fee to use the software forever. Trouble is, if it's as good as XP originally was, this means you have no reason to buy XP+1. So Microsoft broke XP (noticed how you wait for the hard disc more ?) and refused to make New Shiny Graphics (Directx 10) features introduced in Vista available to XP users. They introduced a hurdle forcing you into buying new software. And new hardware, because the new version has massively higher requirements.

We don't need the shininess that's in Vista or Windows 7. We certainly don't need the hostility which is the Windows 8 interface.

Wait - why don't we ditch Windows and go back to Linux ? Maybe we should.

Another thing about office PCs - we're getting upgraded (and the spec is a "you're missing the point" spec) and one thing we're getting is widescreen format monitors. Ok, I like the Shiny. But. We work on A4 portrait most of the time, not landscape. We'll work with what we're given but it's a bit daft that the requirement has been messed up again :

Desktops with normal hard discs - pointless because all our data is on servers. Give the machines SSDs instead for the same cost and massively higher productivity.
4:3 format (old type) monitors - work well for business use because they have the extra height.
16:9 format (widescreen) monitors - tellies switched to this because it's good for entertainment.

What are these machines for ? Work or entertainment ? Honestly - give me a work machine that lets me get the job done without annoying slowdowns every lunchtime (when they run the virus checker on our machines that don't hold data) and keep the entertainment stuff away - it slows the machines down.

I think that's enough ranting for today. I'm still tempted by a laptop and I know I'm going to end up being forced into Windows 8 territory (unless I spend more than I need to at PcSpecialist or Novatech) but it's a Want Upgrade at the moment, not a Need Upgrade.

Neat finish ?

I've been invited to an event in a hotel in Birmingham in a couple of months. The person inviting me is a beautiful woman. Why am I hesitating ? I could say that it's because there's chance for a trip to Amsterdam with one of the gaming crews. It clashes. But it's more a comfort zone thing.

I think I will head to that event in Birmingham and see if I can break out of that comfort zone. That's been one insidious effect of the skin problem, it's put iron fencing around that comfort zone. Like bars.

But - beautiful lady wants me to go to a hotel to meet up (there will be lots of other people going and her permanent bloke will be joining the throng). How cool is that ? Not had that for a while.

PS If it was the Warcraft gaming crew - I'd be a lot more conflicted. They have the Hot Swedish Girls who sing on the voice comms.

Snowyventure

Snow's hit today.

It's actually worse than I can remember for a while, there's more come down than there has been for years and I think it's actually worse than the period a few years ago when barely anyone got into work.

Here's the BBC take on it ... (link)

Lots of cancellations - schools, buses, trains and the airports. For me, Plan A was to come in on the bus today because I didn't know how the car would handle the uncertain grip. I'd have been ok with walking the 3.6 miles home but not to do that both ways (We're expected to walk up to 3 miles). One problem - buses are cancelled. I can understand that too because the roads were somewhat treacherous this morning.

(It's not that bad, I've experienced worse)

After a little bit of um and arr, I headed in anyway in the car. I'd not driven the hybrid on ice before ... It behaves a bit differently to a conventional car :

It is driven by motor and/or engine, so it doesn't need a clutch
Therefore there's no matching of engine speed to road speed which is one source of wheelspin on ice
But, the motor is very powerful when it's at low speeds.

In my car, the motor and engine are all brought together in the one axle, without the driver needing to worry about matching them up. But, there's a very active traction control system looking after it all. The traction control is where the concern comes, as reports say that it can totally stop the car from moving if you attempt to start on ice.

Ok, what did that actually mean for the drive in today ?

Car actually handled it quite well. The traction control was only obvious with flashing its light twice and one of those saw the car slipping sideways. I'll allow traction control interference there :-). The automatic gearbox helps out a lot as you can start off more gently and more controlled than trying to match engine speed to low road speed with a clutch.

The traction control behaves differently with the motor. When it fired a second time, I could hear lots of ticking from the front. With an engine, traction control works through either applying the brakes on the slipping wheel or by making the engine give less power. I think I was getting that power limiting happening as well today, although the car wasn't letting. Could have been my boots :-)

Roads actually weren't too bad and they'd cleared up by lunchtime too. What happens is that the grit that's laid down will clear little pockets which then refreeze but the road won't clear until cars drive over it. This morning, the roads were a mix of ice and slush, with them clearing to wet tarmac in the afternoon.

What was surprising was the amount of respect the drivers were showing the conditions. At 35 on a 40mph limit, I was one of the faster cars on the road. I suspect the idiots had stayed at home.

I wasn't really surprised that I was one of the few who made it in. And I made the trip partly cos I wanted to experience the conditions. Yep, I'm one of those people who when given a "do not travel, it isn't safe", I'll think about heading out anyway just to see what it's like. And seeing as I didn't know how that car would handle the ice ? ;-)

Oh - I've also picked up a laptop and a few documents as well in case I get stuck at home on Monday. If the snow does continue and the buses don't run on Monday, I will not be taken the car. I'm banned from the car park except for on Fridays ...

So yeah - conditions = quite poor. We've only had about 3 inches of snow but it's enough to shut down a lot of the infrastructure and to keep many people at home.

PS Next time I take the car out when covered in snow, I'll clear the parking sensors ;-)

On the buses

I wrote something yesterday about being forced out of the car and on to the buses ...

To be honest, I didn't like yesterday's post. Too much whinging.

And to be honest again, this isn't the first time I've been forced out of the car for an extended period. There was a period a couple of years ago where broken bits on my last car led to 3 weeks on the bus. Oh - if you're in the market for another car, don't go to Carcraft. As well as insanely high interest rates, I got suckered into buying one of those warranties that doesn't actually cover anything. That 3 weeks was due to Carcraft incompetence at fixing the poorly car.

So - bus this morning saw me getting out of the house a little earlier (10 minutes or so) than usual, although I'd like to be a little earlier than that still. After a little wait for the bus, I was in work at about usual time (my pattern is 9 to 5, although I can vary that as need be). So I didn't actually lose much time.

I object to the cost though, £4 for an all day ticket, which works out to just over 50p a mile (3.6miles door to office by the bus route). That's only slightly less than my current car costs to run all in and that car is almost new. It's a ridiculous amount of money and that's before you think of the lack of freedom and convenience that comes with being tied to the bus.

The affordability question goes further with public transport in general. Not only does that bus trip cost 4x per mile than my (admittedly economical) car does on petrol alone, other public transport is also excessive on cost. The last time I took the train for a London work trip, it cost the organisation £200. We have to get clearance from team leaders for that level of travel expense. In my car, it costs the organisation £60 on 25p a mile. Incidentally, we've been on 25p a mile for the past 15 years with no consideration for exponentially rising petrol/diesel cost but that's another point entirely.

So yeah - my main objection to public transport is the excessive cost.

The convenience for me isn't too bad. I live very close to one of the bus routes which has 3 buses I can use. And they come reasonably often.

I thought on the way back that a Kindle or similar device could be handy, although the trip isn't actually that long. That thought came from seeing someone else use a Kindle for the entire 5 minutes he was on the bus. (There was worse, another couple were on the bus for precisely 2 stops - why not walk ?)

Home time trip was good - After clocking out from work at just about 5.05, I was home just before 6pm. And that's with a Sainsburys and chippie run on the way back.

Just in time to have the "will I, won't I ?" temptation again for the Total War games !

Steam Sale at the moment. Which means lots of games with lots of insane discounts.

I've been reasonably reserved so far. I've not bought as many games as I could have done. The latest games are :

Endless Space - space grand strategy. Early look = promising but big learning curve
Star Wars KOTOR 2 - loved KOTOR 1, avoided KOTOR 2 due to bugs. But those have been sorted out by fans.
Transformers War For Cybertron - curious about this one, courtesy of Totalbiscuit videos. I was also a Transformers nut before the Michael Bay abominations came out.
Trine - which I'm a little annoyed about because it advertised a soundtrack with it. It does have the soundtrack ... but it's awkward to get to.
F1 2012 arrived before the sale. I had a look last night and ... my joystick isn't really suited to it. The stiffness around the centre point is a bit too high and the flightstick configuration doesn't have the precision of a wheel.

I have been fairly restrained :-) Other games on the list were : Borderlands 2, Total War series (I'm wary due to the developer not really finishing any of their games), Torchlight 2 and a couple of others.

But - I'm not playing games nearly as much as I used to, so getting them on speculation or because they have a reputation for being an awesome game is a bit of a waste.

Closing time ! Spotted this story on BBC : "Seeing someone scratch an itch makes you itchy too". That puts me in trouble if I see anyone scratching !

PS The bus will have hidden benefits. I benefit from natural fitness which sees me get away with not much preparation for cricket. But the walking to and from the bus will have great benefit in getting my legs conditioned again.

Withdrawal symptoms

I did pretty well on Monday at work with the withdrawal symptoms ...

My actual boss and I are both sport nuts, so we tend to swap latest score info between us and natter on analysis too. She's got a keen analytical mind that's very into cricket, so you can probably imagine how in depth we can go on that.

(As a lunchtime conversation of course!)

Anyway - those swapping of Stuff Has Happened, plus the typical First Day Back From Leave hecticness let me avoid thinking too much of Olympics. That didn't really hit until Tuesday, when I was really missing the Olympic TV combined with watching several streams via the desktop.

What's been the salvation ? The London2012 Android app is pretty darn good. I can't remember what the info feeds were like from Beijing in 2008 but for this Olympics, the dissemination of information has been incredible. Top notch. And I don't think that's from improvement in technology (cricinfo has been doing ball by ball commentary at a similar level for many years), it's just been done in a simple, seamless way.

Check it out while it's there : www.london2012.com

It's simple, yet efficient and remembers what web pages should be - lean & clean. I wonder if the rise of the smartphone has something to do with that ? Are they making web designers go away from cluttered pages and back to simpler ones ? Not a bad thing. It's backed up by the Android app, which has up to the minute live score info for all events plus there's a Voice Of The Games which gives short paragraph updates for events that have just completed.

What they seem to have got cracked now is the process of pulling the information in and distributing it to the web, in near real time.

So some of the sting of that withdrawal has been taken away by Just Enough info being available via the Android app. Plus with the explosion of social media, more and more updates are coming across that way.

I do get another type of withdrawal symptom though from a leave period. I thrive on interaction with other people. I get horribly bored when I'm on my own. Things like games are too predictable, stuff on telly is often a repeat, memory means I'm struggling to keep the music library fresh.

Being around people is completely different. The interactions around an office defy prediction. Especially in larger offices like the floorplates at our work. (The buildings are Big). We keep a good sense of humour going too. Offices that keep a sense of humour get more done, even if that humour is sometimes very dark ...

Oh and if someone smiles at me in the office, I know that it's because of something I've done rather than some scripted thing that would happen anyway. Even better if someone chuckles at something I say. Oh and games don't randomly award you with real cake for no good reason.

Cake is life.

Oh and it's a huge bonus when the Cake attracts more smiles. We had a visitation from the BM mob from the old team. Talking of interactions that defy prediction - lol :-) That mob was always just one half comment away from breaking into something : Silly, Scary, Outrageously Amusing. I only tended to pick up on it halfway through and it tended to be way past my understanding (think caveman!), which is where the scariness comes in.

Oh was I talking about withdrawal symptoms ?

Olympics - I'll definitely miss the games when they're over
Cake - diets are evil but cake brings smiles
Old team people - scary ! And awesome to see them come up for the cake

PS I devoured my donut so fast this morning that it appeared to have been inhaled.
PS2 Scary can be wonderful too. Especially when it is that special brand of female scary where you have no clue whatsoever as to what they're going to be getting up to next.

Hot

Someone's hit that light bulb switch again and it's made the sun come out :-)

It's about time too cos this "summer", a lot of records have been broken on rainfall. It says something for climate change being far more subtle than just "it's getting hotter" because what we've seen this summer is more a change in pattern. Britain is at similar latitudes to Canada, which is considerably colder than Britain. What makes Britain warmer is the Gulfstream, a band of warm air that circles the Atlantic. It's part of a pattern called the Trade Winds, which is a naturally occurring phenomenon which happens as a result of the Earth spinning.

But when that natural current of air shifts ... that's when strange things start happening with the weather.

Right now, it's shifted back to how late July should be - 28 degrees C heat and scorchy bum in the car.

About the car - climate control is awesome :-) I'll step into a hot car after finishing up at work. I'll turn the car on and a few seconds later the climate control will do its best to get the internal temperature down to something manageable. It's sooooo good having a fully working air conditioning system again, it's one of the things I needed to spend money on with my Focus. In fact, it worked so well that when I got home and opened the car door, the first thought was "bloody hell it's warm out here".

However, one comment about the air con is that I need to find out how to redirect airflow when I have pizza. Let's just say - hot air going to the footwell is far better than icey cold air going to the footwell. (That's where I put the pizza box on the way home - pizza on white seats = bad idea).

Another comment - the perforated leather seats work really well. I've had one previous car with full leather seats and they really didn't work well in hot conditions. Definite scorchy bum syndrome. Dotty perforated leather helps the seat breathe, making it much cooler.

Last car comment - one thing the Lexus afficionados think should be in every Lexus is a heated steering wheel. (We're used to lots of toys). I respectfully disagree. In cold conditions, I'll put my leather driving gloves on to keep my fingers working. Sorted. However, in hot conditions, I don't want to be wearing Volcano Gauntlets to be able to touch the steering wheel. I'd much prefer a steering wheel with a chiller to one with a heater.

What am I doing now ?

Oh - right now it's watching Sussex gives a huge bashing to Gloucestershire bowlers in the Twenty20 quarter finals. The average score this season has been 140 off 20 overs, Sussex have 204 already with 9 balls to go. Erm - make that 210. SIX RUNS !

Gloucestershire are my most local team but you could call me an Anti-Supporter because of how they treated our work side. We did net practice there one season but when we tried to go back, all calls were unanswered, all messages were ignored. So I support the other guy.

Music wise - I'm getting near to having listened to all the stuff in the library again. Of the soundtracks, Beyond Good & Evil has some awesome stuff in there alongside incidental music. Trine 2 is "interesting" while the Deus Ex and Machinarium soundtracks can only be described as awesome.

Off work next week, which I'm heavily looking forward to. Been feeling very stretched lately, which is understandable because I've effectively been doing 2 separate jobs for the past few weeks. That takes its toll eventually but I'm happier now than I was then. I've scoped out the major task for next few months in my head and have a mental plan. Now I just need to put that plan on paper to keep my bosses happy.

I will miss a few people in that week off for sure. I'm enjoying working in the new team. The old team didn't have a great atmosphere, with some elements of it actively working against other elements of it. That's not a recipe for getting things done. It's pretty silly. I'm not catching that in the new team, in fact I've had a hell of a lot of help from the finance, commercial and business management people.

But who will I really miss :
Finance Angels E, K and L (yep - new finance angel)
Miss Meerkat
The Apprentice who actually works downstairs (trying to pass on as much as possible in as short a time as possible!)
The Boss (who's just moved teams - must grab a coffee opportunity)
And the new Business Management people who seem highly amused (bemused?) by my antics

And there's a bunch more in the new team who I need to get inspiration for codenames. Despite not knowing what we were being parachuted into, I think our team reshuffle has worked pretty well. We're cracking on with work as a together group of people.

And that's always worth smiling about. Especially when you get smiles from people walking by your desk spotting you do the Meerkat "who dat?" thing :-)

Right - half time in the cricket, Sussex reached a massive 230 and it's time to put the popcorn on before the second half. Enjoy your evenings !

Take my credit cards ... please

Uhoh.

Steam Summer Sale time ...

Every summer and winter, the most popular (cos they got in first) online software distributor does a massive sale. Huge discounts, daily deals and all that. I'll keep my eye on it for a while in case any good deals appear. So far I have my eye on Beyond Good & Evil, although I've not bought that yet. I'm also interested in Sins of a Solar Empire (not discounted) and a couple of others.

I'll occasionally have a mad moment or two when the sales come around. I'll see something and think "ooo - shiny, always wanted that" and then when I've got it, I'll leave it in the games library unplayed like :

SWTOR - got boring very quickly
Battlefield 3 - criminally unstable
TitanQuest - bought it when my last machine broke its Windows
Moo3 - very, very poor

And there's a bunch more like that. I've improved my record lately with games, just by buying less of them. I ignore the magazine reviews which don't tell you about unfinished code and believe the online reviews more. It's trusting where the money is coming from. Online reviewers tend to be unaffected by commercial interest. They get their cash from you watching their videos and they'll make enough ad revenue to let them buy their own copies of the games. A magazine has far higher production cost and is dependent on the publishers feeding them early stuff so they meet their deadlines.

I'd far rather trust an independent than magazines which time and time again prove themselves to be in the pocket of publishers who persist in peddling stuff that's unfit for sale.

I guess I'm getting a bit cynical about the gaming, although I'm not actually gaming that much at the moment anyway. Doesn't seem enough time in the evenings to bury myself in a game.

I have had time tonight though to indulge in a bluray (Three Musketeers - silly but fun film). Not done that for months. I needed the popcorn. (Getting tired - leave is booked for a fortnight's time, just spookily coinciding with Olympics!)

Still raining. I was thinking about saying "Hey! Not busy, I can play tonight" for cricket after missing potential games on Tuesday and Wednesday due to the Glasgow trip. However, I'd have had to fight my way through traffic to go home to fetch my kit before heading to SW Bristol to the game. Bristol roads are bad news at that time of evening. The decision became academic at about 3pm when the heavens opened ... and I think there's still stuff up there because it's still raining.

Wanted to say something about a work colleague.

He hurt his hand quite badly on Monday evening, bad enough that he needed to go in for an operation on Tuesday morning. We hadn't got much information coming through to the team so we didn't quite know what the implications would be. I figured he'd be demanding his work laptop as soon as he was coherent enough to remember the password. Back on Communicator by 11.30am after the op. That's commitment.

Some people will take the mickey for doing things like that. There's a few who are a bit too much into "I've been signed off work - yippee! Free time". We're not like that though. We feel an obligation to get things done. Last time I had off sick (I don't notice bugs) was bugs but the time before that was my 2 nose jobs 9 years ago. And I only had about 4 days off total for that. We''d get horribly bored anyway if we had that kind of time away from getting stuff done.

We'll miss our guy's actual presence for a little while but with the way we've shifted how we work over the past few years, he'll still be able to make his mark through remote log in and teleconferencing.

It used to be that we'd have people visiting the outstations far more regularly. That expended a lot in terms of time and air tickets. We're hopefully more efficient now with us reaching for the spiderphones at the slightest excuse. We probably get more meetings in and more stuff done that way, although I have to say it was great yesterday to say hello personally again to people I've only talked to over the phone over the last couple of years.

That's enough about work though. Friday tomorrow. Bacon day. And I'm hoping to get away early enough to not lose any of the flexi credit I've built up :-)

PS I think my fingers have come out in sympathy. I've cracked the bones in most of my fingers through cricket and they occasionally like to remind me ... The latest are two fingers on my left hand which feel cracked again. They still support typing pressure and holding stuff but are still ... distracting. I'm either getting old or they're rain sensitive !

Random stuff

Felt like there's a blog post bursting to come out but what to write ... what to write ...

Found a new artist to get hooked on, courtesy of Craziequeen. Just listen to "I Do Adore" and try not to sing along. You will fail. I've had the chorus bouncing around in my head all day, which kinda balanced a horror day otherwise. Someone ... decided to implement a change which forced every user on the system to download their full inbox. The network actually survived. But almost no-one had their inbox available and doing things with stuff outside email was incredibly slow due to all the inbox downloading traffic.

I suspect that whoever decided to implement that unnecessary change is currently being skinned by the boss. And there's a baying mob with pitchforks gathering.

Diet - this is still going ok.

The average weight is still steadily reducing at a sensible and sustainable rate. I'm getting less issues with cramping up which hopefully means I'm getting that mineral balance better. I have problems when I've not had enough salt (like everyone) but I also have issues with too much salt.

At school age, after getting home from a day's cricket I'd typically have :
Coke/Diet Coke in the pub after the game (it's a diuretic)
Dinner with lots of salt

And I'd usually be lucky to not get cramp so bad I'd tear a leg muscle. I call it the Salt Bomb now ... Chippie dinners are bad for it as well. The lesson is to make sure that salt intake is balanced, i.e. drink lots of water to replace sweat or to offset the salt. And coke is bad because it does funny things to that salt/water balance.

Anyway. Diet is getting the calorie intake discipline going better, although I'm not exactly being scientific with it. I'm just sticking with "don't eat if not hungry". Can't remember last time I ate a dinner on a Friday night, as bacon sarnie + late lunch baguette means I don't need dinner.

Been stiff & sore lately, enough to go "ow" when people aren't looking ... But I still have full power available in the legs. Actually more than full power, as I'm a stone lighter now compared to when I started the diet. And that lower weight means I can start moving quicker and adjust quicker. Because of the way my legs are set up, it takes time for them to start moving but when they do, I can move extremely quickly. And less weight means less reaction time.

I'm not sylph like (never will be) but I've dodged out of the way when ever someone's come running around the corner.

Hmm. That means I've missed being run into by pretty ladies. (They seem to be the ones rushing around a lot at work)

I may have to rethink that dodging out the way thing.

Oh - diet stuff. I've got to a point where I can play around with what I eat a little more, while keeping within that discipline. So like today, Mini Eggs in the afternoon let me blast through work frustration enough to get stuff done late. But that's balanced by me not having a teacake for breakfast this morning. And the pizza will be balanced by me resisting cookies for as long as possible tonight.

It's not so much looking at packets and adding up calories, it's more keeping to a discipline. Like not knowing how long it is since I had a dessert ... It's been a while.

Still a little sore though. I vaguely remember that getting poked by strong fingers was awesome for relieving stress and tension. With the vaguely showing how long it is since I knew someone willing to do that for me. Last expert I knew was Mad Alyse from uni, who worked wonders with the back injury I picked up at school.

Where to next ?

Work's going through one of those spells at the moment where it gets picked up by the short n curlies and shaken about a bit ...

Which means that the people who actually do the work are getting a fair bit of disruption. Basically, the powers-that-be want to move people from jobs that they don't think can be afforded any more into jobs that are Top Urgent Must Do Yesterday type work. You've got people who will stay as they are, people who will have to fight for the same post as it's duplicated with someone else's and the people who need to find another project to work in.

I'm in the group that has to find somewhere else. Feelings ? Initial - shock, disbelief. I handle a few functions for our group that will still need to be done, so my work is going to need to be redistributed amongst the other guys. (1st "what the hell?" thing here - note the work still has to be done, yet the post is marked "no longer required").

However, that initial shock and disbelief (shared by my boss and his boss) is passing into a more Philosophical mode. I've been in the project for almost 10 years now, which is a Very Long Time where I work. It's been a good run but it probably needed a kick like this to dislodge me. It's a fun project filled with great people but knowing I'll be out of there soon has come as some kind of relief. Plus I had a glimpse of what was around the corner and wasn't particularly impressed.

And what's been highly amusing is seeing a few senior people in multiple organisations start waving "What are you doing????" flags after hearing I'll be on the way out :-). I grabbed a task a couple of months ago, shook it up and turned it into a process that was coordinated, controlled and was working. Now that process will have to be taken on by other people. I've done that in a few other areas as well. I'll do what I did in graduate days, which is to tidy up as best I can when I move but there's always legacy differences.

It's the Knowledge factor that's most serious though. The post duplication and post cancelling means a lot of Knowledge will escape from a lot of projects and it's often there that the loss is most felt. I'll still have a few contacts left in where I am now, so I'll keep checking in to see how things are going. The sad thing will be that some of them will also want to escape but will be locked in because people in my position will get grabbed first.

Not gone yet though, it'll take another couple of months for the escape tunnel to get dug. One of my contrasts though is in how I deal with Change. I'm not great at initiating Change, in fact I have a lot of personal "inertia" that makes me resistant to doing things differently. Sure, I'll happily make things up as I go along and refine a process until it's Shiny but changing the way I do things, lot of resistance there. However the contrast is that when I need to Change, I like to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. (Lol - so I can settle into a new rut ? :-)

It'll be a very strange place over the next couple of months though, as the organisation settles into a new look.

What helps when heaped with uncertainty like this is how the various people react to it. It's kinda like a Gallows Humour, where the ones on the way have greeted the news with good humour. We're thinking of having a little Support Group, suggesting that it would be the Millwall club after their "No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us, we don't care" football chant drew a chuckle :-) There's definitely a bit of a "we're all in the same boat", which reflects how close knit the workerbee level in my team has been over the years.

So we're all wondering where we will be in a few months. Hopefully I'll land in somewhere that gives an interesting technical challenge.

Thought I'd save the last word for someone who has helped more than she realises over the last day or so. One of the things I'll be remembered for is an infectious inane grin that tends to get even people in really dark moods smiling. Today and yesterday it's been me in the dark mood, with it being lifted by another person with an infectious (but not inane!) grin :-) I'm quite jumpy, I'll look around to see who's walking up the corridor and then I try to look away quick as to not stare. It's tough to look away though when you see a face light up with a big grin, you can't help but respond in kind :-) And a smile is always good for the soul.

Actually - that last para could refer to a few people I know at work but I'm thinking of one particular little Angel there :-)

Time to get back to listening to music and maybe a bit of the Internet SpaceShip Game too ...

PS I'll also be remembered for the PowerSneeze. Wonder how long it'll take my next project to get used to that ! A remark from earlier was "Oh, that was a big series", with my response being "Nah - that was light sneezes, I didn't see stars that time"

Additional - blog admin comment : I've removed the Daily Puppy as I've noticed it had grown advertising. I'm getting nuffin for that ad so it's GONE !!!!