Category: Uncategorized

A couple of years ago Mac-Sys got a commendation for their working practises with regards to work/life balance and teleworking. We did bend over backwards to assist employees who had children and also in some cases were able to allow people to work from home. It’s something that I valued when I was at Nortel and something I miss a lot now. $BIG_COMPANY has positively archaic policies when it comes to home-working, teleworking and catering (technology as well as in terms of human resources) for people who work the 9-5 and are also expected to pick up the telephone when it rings.

From The Times:

“You think that just because you have lovely babies or terrible teenagers you have a God-given right to leave the office any time you like, to go to their nativity plays or their parents’ days, while the rest of us do your work for you and keep your lovely job warm for you, without any thanks, until you see fit to come back from your blissful maternity leave or your half-term holidays.”

It’s a fair point but can equally extend to just about anyone who’s not in the office every second from 9 am to 5:30 pm. It’s easy to start with the parents – people who need to work but also want to spend quality time with their kids. Attack their insistence on a good work-life balance. Question their dedication to the job when their ex-wife dumps the kids on them early in the day and they have to leave work early. And when little Jimmy needs to go to the hospital, then again complain in muted tones about how you have to do all of this extra work.

Downing Street announced last week an inquiry into extending the right to flexible working (currently restricted to parents of children under six) to parents of children under nine, 12 or even 17. About 6.25m parents have the right to request conditions such as flexitime or working at home; if all parents of schoolchildren were included, 4.5m more would have this right. This would include the right to time off to help teenagers with their exams.

When done with the parents, turn your baleful eye to coffee breakers and extended lunchers. Better to be sitting at your desk and be unproductive than actually having time to enjoy your food. Or is it better just to resent the fuck out of people who seem to be getting more out of life?

While we’re haranguing people, spare a thought for the social leper that is the smoker. Relegated to hanging outside your building fulfilling a crippling addiction that is slowly killing them. They’re laughing it up of course because they’re working less and they won’t have to worry about the shit company pension plan going tits-up.com because they’ll be long dead of something pink, grey and heinous. Worry more about the growing heap of fag butts that end up piled outside your building because it’s a proven fact that someone who doesn’t mind inhaling tar into their lungs wouldn’t think twice about littering with the scrag ends of their disgusting habit. At least they should have the decency to die rather than clogging up hospitals with their addiction-induced illnesses whether these be cancer, punctured lungs, bronchitis or any other shit. Oh, no, that’s right – they expect the same care as the rest of us. It becomes obvious that they’d spit on you, they’d litter on you and given the chance they’d force you to breathe their smoke and justify themselves with nonchalant phrases like “Oh, I was outside” or “Sure it’s just a little bit”. Stick it up your ass you sanctimonious bastard.

A Florida company has just banned smoking amongst its employees whether they are on the clock or not.

“If you are too stupid to understand that smoking is going to kill you, then we are going to tell you that if you want to work for our company, you will not smoke,” Seigel said.
…
Seigel said when the non-smoking policy initially went into effect he gave employees a year to stop smoking and opportunities to receive counseling, patches and other smoking cessation programs.

Right on. It’s one thing to take time out of work to eat or spend time with children and another thing entirely to indulge a stupid addiction.

% defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
% killall Dock

[This is a hint to take away the daft reflections in the Leopard Dock]

John Welch writes (in his Oc 27th entries) about people who upgrade to Leopard and then whine about how their software, which they need to do their jobs, stops working.

Boo, fucking, hoo.

While the rest of us are either waiting for the updates or finding workarounds (and considering small companies who manage to get their updates out in time), Mister Upgrade Moron is sitting outside playing with his poo-poo.

[I’d add a feed link but he’s moving to MT4 and I can’t find one!)

A rather stupid young woman in a red VW Polo (OXI 3333) clipped my rear wing and mirror and then drove off.

Grrrr.

In mere hours now, people all over the world will be cracking open cases of Leopard and drinking deep of the experience.

For our part we’ve been developing using the developer seeds from Apple’s Developer Connection and then testing on Tiger for compatibility. Why? There’s several reasons:

• 2 Million Macs sold last quarter.
• 1 million iPhones sold last quarter
• Untold numbers of iPod touch and Apple TV models sold

and these will all, from tomorrow, run Leopard (truth be told iPhone/iPod touch are already there).

We’ve been enjoying working with Interface Builder 3 and the rest of the new tools and we’ll be over at Mac-Sys on Friday to see if their copies of Leopard have arrived….

I have it.

Someone attacked me anonymously on one of my other blogs, denounced my writing, said bad things about me and hurt my feelings. I have a feeling I know them – (they’re in the UK, they seem to know enough about me, they use my first name with other people they know).

Ouch.

WTB says “Reads to me like they’re jealous.”

BestMan says “Has to be someone who knows you. With a bit of a chip. Could be any number of bottom feeders”

Yeah.

I know it’s an odd diversion but I was reading “A Walk on the Wild Side of New Age Finance from Financial Armageddon this morning.

They detailed the concept of Level 3 Assets:

Level 3 assets are those that trade so infrequently that there is virtually no reliable market price for them, and valuations for these assets are based on management assumptions.

So, these are things the bank owns but has no idea how much they are worth in any real sense so….they just make them up.

In other words, the value of 55 percent of Goldman’s assets depends on “internal models” or “management assumptions,” rather than market prices. I wonder if that played a role in the much better-than-expected quarterly results they reported recently?

Is it only investment banks which are allowed to play this game? I own a few pieces of crap which I’d possibly be able to sell on eBay because they’re pretty rare. Can I value them at £194 million and therefore laugh all the way to the bank? I think not. It’s a scam.

But there’s more.

…from 2004 to 2006, when conventional lending slowed and subprime lending accelerated, more than 2,500 banks, thrifts, credit unions and mortgage companies made a combined $1.5 trillion in high-interest-rate loans. Most subprime loans, which are extended to borrowers with sketchy credit, fall into this basket.

Makes it hard to be sorry for banks who are reporting losses and instability when they frankly were lying and cheating their way to insane profits over the last couple of years. Ethics, it seems, is always secondary to profit. Makes you wonder what sort of scam they’re running to make the balance books look better in future? Oh, yes, we spoke about that earlier – they’ll just revalue crap in their garage based on internal models.

I guess in today’s financial world small means big and prudence means shoveling scads of money to borrowers with reckless abandon.

Whether the borrowers can really afford it or not.

My entrepreneurial policy was always: there’s no shame in making a mistake or taking a risk, even if it doesn’t always pay out.

However there is shame in hawking loans to low-income families which have low introductory rates at the start and which then increase rates dramatically in order to milk every last penny from people who can’t afford to keep a financial advisor in their retinue.

Shame on you. Every one.

CalConnect.org

This is for my reference.

I seem to be running a link blog here. I guess it’s because I write at 4 other blogs and none of them are link blogs. Anyway, I digress.

16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn makes me laugh out loud.

Excerpts:

3. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”

15. Your true friends love you, anyway.

One of the biggest problems with being involved in several things at once, is that there comes a time when everything just piles up and you end up with a Gridlock Day. This is different to a Groundhog Day 🙂

I’m having one of those days today.

The clutch went on my car yesterday afternoon and I spent the afternoon doing two things.

1. Cursing that I didn’t go for the All-you-can-eat-as-long-as-it’s-less-than-1-GB-per-month data service.
2. Playing mini-Golf on my new phone.

This was because I needed to wait for my car to be recovered and brought to the garage. To their credit, the garage was very prompt, provided a courtesy car and I’m now road-worthy again. They also managed to give it a full service (though I have to pop back Monday for a new radiator). If I hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere I might have spent more time getting my mail but I kept myself busy enough. Some of those mini-golf holes are really quite ingenious.

Anyway, that was yesterday.

Today I’m playing catchup.

Seeing clients (WiFi network installation, image server crashing), working on web sites, discussing designs, finding two new graphic designers and chasing down advertisers for one of the web sites has been the majority of my day.

And tomorrow I will do today’s work….
Continue reading “I make bees look idle.”