T O T K a t - 2 0 0 6

Weekend

Some of the weekend was spent doing a little more de-cluttering and marvelling at the new carpet.

I'll say it again:- the lounge really does look so much better.

Sky goes green

Spotted in the field earlier today...

*

The long awaited Green Key promo. When one of these little fellas pops up on Sky over a trail for a programme, you can press green to add the programme (or series) to your planner. Neat.

[* - image courtesy of "mad loon in my office"]

A bit too far

Today we are exhorted to work our contracted hours. While the overall sentiment of not going nuts and killing yourself through over-work and finding a good work/life balance is good, a lot of people will take the idea too far.

My contract says I should work 5 days a week, 40 hours a week, including an hour each day for lunch AND when circumstances require it, extra hours are expected. This is because I am not an unskilled worker. There is no clocking-in and no overtime pay. So, I rarely take more than 10 minutes for lunch (including going out to buy my sandwich), I arrive at around 09:10 in the morning and rarely go home before 18:00 (sometimes later).

[You may notice that I have frequently complained about the number of hours I am out of the house on a working day but that is mostly down to the commuting time (2.5-3 hours per day), not the hours I work.]

Guys, this is normal (outside of the public sector where it's just pretty much a cushy life). This is how business gets done. This is how the country keeps going. If everyone worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and refused to work a minute before 9 and a minute beyond 5 it would be a total shambles. You may argue that if companies need people to do more work than their allotted hours, they should employ more people to do the work but it doesn't wash. That would result in lower productivity, lower salaries, higher running costs and pissed off clients.

Of course, the other end of the spectrum is equally bad - overstretched, overworked, stressed employees don't perform as well as ones who are less so - but the day is about "work(ing) your proper hours".

And there's always the people who don't even manage to make up their allotted hours. Hmm.

So yes, nice sentiment but things aren't necessarily that clear cut.

Good manners = good behaviour

It's not all that surprising that this pilot scheme has found that if you teach kids manners, they tend to behave better. The shame is that parents aren't doing it in sufficient numbers and it's that a lot of parents think the duty of teaching anything at all to children lies with the education system.

Winter Olympics Doodles

Google's Winter Olympics doodles. Pretty. I don't often see the full doodles as I use a browser search box; but at least there are mini ones in the results page now.

Google Web Page Creator

Google Pages (beta). Bringing easy web design (and content management) to the masses, maybe? Not had a chance to play with it yet, and I'm not sure about the deletion policy as I've not read it yet either.

Pink nano tie

From the "whatever next?" school... a tie with an iPod Nano pouch. Oh and they also start selling a shirt with a full-sized iPod pocket and a slot on the cuff for an Oyster card from next month.

Oosp

I hadn't been getting notifications of site comments, so there was a backlog of people with Typekey accounts who hadn't been approved to comment here. Sorry! Done it now though.

Firefox add-ons

There are a bunch of add-ons out there, and Forecastfox's a good one (for me). International weather forecasts, configurable to an impressive degree, which sit in space bits of browser furniture.

Little bit less blue now.

Well I like it anyway. And no <TABLE>s were harmed in the making of the style sheet. Just you try making a menu on the right hand side with free-flowing text on the left that is re-sizable and then tell me it's rubbish.

A bit too blue?

Maybe too low contrast too? (LJ syndication readers of this won't have a clue what I'm talking about unless they look at the source site TOTKat.org).

Woo!

Last year I was told, by the Inland Revenue, that I no longer need to submit my tax return. A fantastic piece of news in itself at the time; but this year The Revenue go one better and send me a refund for overpaid tax for 2004-2005. It came in the post this morning. Woot!

Snow!

But it isn't settling.

Double trouble litter fine

A guy got fined by two local councils for littering (what was wrong with the chips, one wonders) across the boundary between the two, right in front of a council worker. If only the authorities were less random with this kind of thing. OK, there's no way that every person who drops litter could be caught and fined but maybe more could be if Community Support Officers got in on the act and then it got into the media more that littering will be punished (because people who currently do it have maladjusted attitudes and no idea how anti-social it is) and then maaaaybe fewer people would do it. Maybe.

Carpet

The house looks almost completely different now. Changing the manky, crumbling, patchy, dark green stuff for some bright, cream, soft, new carpet has made a world of difference. The hall is much much brighter and the lounge looks bigger. By an accident of packing, I even got brass bars which look a lot better than the aluminium ones I was supposed to get, so that's extra niceness. The down side is that there are three doors which need cutting a bit so as they will close, but that's pretty trivial and will be fixed tomorrow.

Photos may follow in time, but certainly not right now.

The non-stop question

...of women in technology. Interesting.

This bodes well

...for the Olympics here in 2012. Wembley stadium, the new one, is being abandoned for the FA Cup Final because it won't be ready in time. And I'm going to be expected to pay £60 more in Council Tax for the Olympics?

Dear Ken,

I never wanted the Olympics here and I still think you're crazy to even try to stage them here. In the light of this, I won't be paying the extra £60 you want for building stuff that won't be finished on time, work properly or be any use to any normal people after the whole fiasco.

Not so much love,
Kate

More MEMEage...

Personality types galore.

Apparently I'm a "Faithful Leader". Which is nice. And a definite change since the last time I took a similar test around 10 years ago. It's interesting how experience changes people.

# Your solid grounding in the practicalities of life, along with your self-assuredness and your willingness to appreciate new things make you a LEADER.
# You're in touch with what is going on around you and adept at remaining down-to-earth and logical.
# Although you're detail-oriented, this doesn't mean that you lose the big picture.
# You tend to find beauty in form and efficiency, as opposed to finding it in broad-based, abstract concepts.
# Never one to pass on an adventure, you're consistently seeking and finding new things, even in your immediate surroundings.
# Because of this eagerness to pursue new experiences, you've learned a lot; your attention to detail means that you gain a great deal from your adventures.
# The intellectual curiosity that drives you leads you to seek out causes of and reasons behind things.
# Your confidence gives you the potential to take your general awareness and channel it into leadership.
# You're not set on one way of doing things, and you often have the skills and persistence to find innovative ways of facing challenges.
# You are well-attuned to your talents, and can deal with most problems that you face.
# Your independent streak allows you to make decisions efficiently and to trust your instincts
# You do your own thing when it comes to clothing, guided more by practical concerns than by other people's notions of style.

# Your trust in others, respect for tradition, and caring nature make you FAITHFUL.
# Maintaining a few intimate relationships is more important to you than knowing a lot of people, and you share a lot with your close friends.
# Those who have managed to get close to you value your camaraderie, and they know that they can trust you with anything; you're a good listener
# While you can usually see several sides of an argument, you often have a strong opinion as to which side is correct—the order of things is usually clear to you.
# Your perspective on the world is based on careful observation, and you know a lot about how people feel in—and react to—many situations.
# Your exploration of others' feelings has led you to believe that although people generally act appropriately, having clear social rules is very important to a functional society.
# Time alone for reflection is important to you—you are introspective and aware of your own feelings.
# Faithful is as faithful does—you expect those with whom you are close to be loyal to you, and you take betrayal of your trust very seriously.

The full picture.

I wish I'd seen this years ago

Go to "portfolio", "before/after" and look. Some of the changes, mostly ones on page 2, but the first one on page 3 is... they're... well, I wish I'd seen this a while ago.

Filthy habit anyway

Hear hear!

It continues to piss me off that smokers seem to think that fag ends aren't litter. The oft raised reply of "oh fuck off, they're bio-degradable anyway!" is risible at best. Even if they took only a week or so to degrade they would still pile up outside buildings, where smokers are "banished" to huddle in the rain, making the place look hideous.

It's vile.

Stop it.

Shiny new monitoring box

Solaris 10 in and on a Dell PowerEdge 850. Nagios 2.0(stable) and perfparse in and graphing. Monitoring 903 services on 111 hosts so far. By my calculations, we'll have over 2,000 services once we've migrated from the non-open-source monitoring, but that involves writing a job lot of plugins that won't be any use to anyone other than us. I guess I'm feeling good about it because I get few and far between blocks of time long enough to do stuff like this. I know there are plenty of installations which eclipse my effort by a long shot, but it's the win of moving away from expensive, clunky, closed monitoring to open-source, modifiable, agile monitoring that I was after really.

I'd also been wanting to get a look at Solaris 10 on x86 as I've read that there are a few large-scale installations that are going well so far. It was a tiny bit of a pain on the PE850, but that's because of a graphics driver problem and as it's a server I don't need a GUI anyway. I'm not even vaguely thinking that Solaris on commodity hardware by the truckload can compete in the same arena as Solaris on heavyweight Sun kit; that'd be like comparing apples with pears. But, given that Sun are behind x86 Solaris properly again I was interested to see how it would go. There's no way on earth I'd want to put it on a desktop machine (for various reasons I do believe that Windows and MacOS covers that more than well enough by comparison with Linux so Solaris on a desktop is a risible idea to me), but how does it fare on sufficiently vanilla x86 servers is a question that interests me. It's not a question that I'll get much of an answer from a single scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel Dell, but it'll be the beginnings of one. Plus, servers like our monitoring server are the only ones we get to determine things like the OS with any certainty, there's no way any of our current clients will move to Solaris 10 on the kit we support for them because the live web front-end isn't there yet for a start and as for the telly stuff... that's all going RHEL anyway I think.

I guess I could do with revamping my Nagios documentation (yeah yeah I keep saying that), but given that it took ages to get the installation done (what with being a manager and all, I don't get a lot of geek time any more) I'm not so sure the documentation will be coming all that soon.

Hm

There's definitely something fishy going on with the District Line at the moment. The signal trouble at Wimbledon from Monday is still ongoing. On top of that, there was another failure yesterday affecting Olympia trains and yet another this morning causing the line to be suspended east-bound from Tower Hill and severe delays in both directions to all destinations. What's going on TFL?

*sigh*

This is the third consecutive day with serious signal failure on the District Line now. It's just so frustrating.

Amazing

Thanks LUL and happy Valentine's day to you too. More than 24 hours after the original signal failure at Wimbledon, there are still severe delays on the Wimbledon branch of the District Line. The signals are still buggered, only two platforms in use at Wimbledon - though I guess that's an improvement on yesterday's one platform - and no travel alert about it this morning. Thanks again LUL for getting it so wrong yesterday, saying that there were minor delays when in fact there were barely any trains running at all, and again in the evening yesterday, and again this morning for having failed to actually fix the problem.

Happy St. Valentines Day

Caveat lector.

"And paper Valentine's cards are increasingly under assault from their electronic counterparts.

Research from BT suggests one in six in the UK, and a third of over-30s, have considered sending a text instead of a card."

This is one of the things for which technology ought to take a back seat. Text is easy and in this case, pretty naff. If you want to show someone that you love them, make the effort.

memeage

I did kinda post this once already, but it was late and dropped off a lot of people's radar already and... and...

The Johari Window:- go here to pick words you think describe me and here to see the results.

Noise limiters?

I thought there was an EU ruling on the allowed noise output level on portable devices designed to be used with headphones. But today, right now, I'm not so sure. There's a guy on the train with his headphones up so loudly that the surrounding seat occupants can clearly hear the plastic casing rattling with each of the bass noises, never mind the full lyrics and usual tinny top end white noise. Amazing stuff. I guess there goes another candidate for premature deafness. Ah. Either his 'music' collection has just run out, or the battery. Yay.

Get over it and stop being hypocritical

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4684652.stm

and

The Religious Policeman is well worth a read on the subject.

Horsie!

Oo. I was just about to cancel my subscription to Dark Age of Camelot, due to playing so little now, and then Darkness Rising came along. And now I have my very own horse:-

OK, so the stirrups are a bit long for a dwarf, but I'm not fussy.

(Oh and that's my house in the background. House! Not cottage! I'm posh, me.)