30 Jul 2009 (Thursday) 

Just look at me now Because I'm tired of yelling Look at me now It's only me I'm selling I'm not willing to trade My life to make the sale You turn me around You put me down Look at me now I'm hanging out my heart to dry For the last time I'll tell you the reason why It's for the last time Laid-back uptown turnaround people - lie Laid-back uptown turnaround people - wear disguises Sorry, a word they only use too late Sorry is a word that only ever means forgive my yesterdays [ Sorry, from The Present, by The Moody Blues ]

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26 Jul 2009 (Sunday) 

One of the irritance of having 'fast' internet access is that if you start downloading something by accident then before you've realised what it's done you end up donwloading a lot of data. And when you've got a usage cap to stay within, that can be a problem. I started a download a couple of days ago with the intention of stopping it before it became large. Only... I've got a bad memory, so instead of remembering it was running I went to have tea and watch Monk. Came back to find that I'd downloaded 4.5 GB, which was a little over my daily expected usage (1.66 GB). Today, I did a similar thing and started a download - by the time I realised what was happening, I'd downloaded just short of 1 GB. That would be lovely if I'd meant to do it. As it is, I'm now going to end up cutting back my usage over the next week or so, in order that I don't exceed the limits (well, I've already passed them by my own calculations).

It's also not helped by other things I wasn't aware of. There was a lot of network usage on Friday, at about 11:15, which seems to coincide with the anti-virus software starting on the work laptop. That doesn't seem so good to me.

Let's see... otherwise how are things ? Well, we're a week and a half into Administration now and the feeling from the Administrators seems good. I certainly feel pretty well informed and understand most of 'how' stuffed we are . As employees of a company that they're trying to sell as a going concern, we might be ok, ending up with jobs and possibly even getting paid what we're owed. We can't assume that, but there's a possibility. Which is a little more than we can say for the previous management. As I work remotely, I tends to be most pessimistic about how well things will go - I feel it's more likely that people will not want to have a person in tools support who's working from home. It's not the buyer's fault that I'm in that situation, obviously.

Which means that I really should be sorting out CVs out to people, but I guess I'm still being lazy and/or optimistic that things will work out. Stupid might be a suitable term, as well.

On the plus side, we've been told that we'll get paid for the work during Administration, on Friday. Which is great. Being the first time this year that we'll have been paid at the end of the month that we worked, that'll be quite nice, albeit that it's only for the time from the 15th to the end of the month.

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21 Jul 2009 (Tuesday) 

If you're bored and stuck for something to do, why not Build an oil rig!.

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20 Jul 2009 (Monday) 

Well, it's been a while since I've written anything work related, and I don't think it's particularly unrealistic to do so now. We're in administration since Wednesday last week. It's all been pretty confusing, but there were redundancies on Friday. I wasn't one, which surprised me, but I'm not going to knock it, obviously.

The administrators are continuing to trade the company, whilst they try to sell it. So if you happen to know of anyone wanting to buy a company and some relatively neat technology (relative to what is a good question, but it's difficult to say because I don't know what is actually 'neat' - most of the things we have are pretty 'huh, yeah' because we're so used to them, but that's always the case with things you work with a lot) and some clever people. There's still quite a few clever people around here, 'cos we haven't all jumped ship early on, and had some real faith that things would turn around. That said, the faith was in spite of missed promises and other issues, so maybe we're not that bright, but... read into it what you will...

I think there were quite a few people who were relieved that our ex-CEO wouldn't be involved in the future. Certainly that's the impression that I got. I'm hoping (yeah, there's that faith again) that the sale of the company (if we can, in this climite), will include me. I'm reasonably clever, honest, and I'm not too bad at what I do.

Obviously I can't say much about specifics 'cos for a whole host of reasons, but, I guess the important thing here is that I'm pretty fed up in general at the situation, but trying to keep positive. I reckon I've done pretty well over the past 6 months or so that things have been going badly, so... we'll see how things continue.

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18 Jul 2009 (Saturday) 

It looks like Picsel's network is offline this morning. Since we don't have an offsite mail exchange, that means that all mail to Picsel will, very shortly, be bouncing, if not already.

Oh, looks like it's back again now. It was certainly offline for a while earlier.

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17 Jul 2009 (Friday) 

Well, I survived a round of redundancies today. Really fed up and nobody around this evening.

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16 Jul 2009 (Thursday) 

Well, Picsel's in Administration now... which is a bit irritating really. Not really sure whether I'll be working come tomorrow, but... we keep on going .

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8 Jul 2009 (Wednesday) 

Nothing exciting today. My right arm's been twinging all evening; top muscle, below the shoulder. Little irritating, it is.

I've been watching Torchwood this week; it's actually been very enjoyable. Today's episode did feel like it had a little filler, but that may have been because the prior 2 were very action-y.

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7 Jul 2009 (Tuesday) 

Quite a busy day today; mainly from catching up on what happened on Saturday to Tuesday morning - normally I'd at least look at the work stuff over the weekend, but I took a break and didn't, and then had Monday off. Whilst it was very relaxing in some respects, coming back to a couple of hours of catch up was less fun. I'm still behind on reading CVS logs of what's been committed over the last few days, but usually there's nothing too important there for me to worry about. Strictly I don't need to read those, but I like to stay on top of what we're doing so that if things come up I understand them.

Surprised today that Miah popped along to the talker. A pleasant change to have a new-old face on there! I also went shopping today and got caught in the heavy rain on the way back - oh well.

Spoke to Caroline on the phone this evening, too which was nice and surprising. Always have a problem spelling 'surprising'. There's too many 'r's in it.

And another message from S. as well. She seems nice and wants to help. She asked a few things about me as well, partly to give me something to think about. It's difficult to think about sometimes; I feel I know what sort of things I want but can't put them into words. Maybe that's just 'cos I don't think enough. My interests outside of work have been pretty limited of late. I've been watching telly and chatting to friends - mostly about computer stuff. Although the recent discussions about tools.mozilla.com was amusing - it boils down to 'WTF? insane spacey themed tools for yet another open directory ?!'... although to be fair in response to our comments there's now a simple version of the page, which is far less fancy, but actually useable).

We were also talking about the UK citizenship test. Let's set aside for a moment the fact that the entire website is flash (everything - you can't actually use it without Flash) which is a huge talking point in itself. The actual sample questions seem pretty... weird to me. Maybe I'm not able to be a UK citizen... I dunno. I don't know when women got the rights to divorce their husbands. Maybe I'm too happy in my belief that that's the case to care... isn't it only reasonable to know that they can ? Do I need to know that the schools are open 200 days a year ? (or whatever the figure was). Isn't it enough to know that there's "600 or so" constituencies in the UK without giving the exact figure ? The knowing the names of the Church of England is actually a criteria for being a citizen ? And what's with the question about muslims ?

I have a thing about keeping religion and government separate. I'm not going to rant about it or tell people their wrong or anything, but I just don't understand it at times... I know that this country has a church of england and it's a multi-ethnic culture, but isn't that about it ? Why is knowing the proportion of people with a particular belief in the country a criteria for being a citizen ? We're meant to be multi-ethnic and tolerant of different races and religions... so why include a question that explicitly says "what proportion of people say they're different to the rest of the people ?" I might be missing something here...

Simon suggested it's maybe because these sorts of questions show that you've put the effort in to being a part of our culture. I can see that, I really can, but... in how many parts of our day to day life is it relevant ? Even in exceptional circumstances I don't see it being useful or necessary. I would have thought that questions about your rights and privileges as a citizen would make up more of the test. Things like "which of these things do you need a license for ? a,b,c,d". There's a nice question actually, which says something like "if you have a problem at work you can talk to ? a,b,c,d". Unfortunately, as Simon pointed out to me, although 'CAB' and 'ACAS' are good answers (and the answers it accepts) the answer of 'your employer' was not acceptable - which is very strange as clearly they're the first group you should talk to. Indeed, you cannot get ACAS involved unless you have first raised the issue with your employer and attempted to sort it out through their internal channels. So... anyhow...

Did go into a little bit of a rant there... oh well. It's possible that I just don't 'get' the whole point of it, or that I take what I have for granted. And of course, as I actively shun news, I probably shouldn't say all that much.

Also, something that S. said bothered me... I don't have that vast a following, which I think means that some of the 'friends' or the about page is outdated and could do with an overhaul.

It's a little later than I intended (yet again) tonight, but I shall now try to sleep and have some pleasant dreams. There's definitely some stuff I've not done this evening but I'm sure I can do it tomorrow .

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6 Jul 2009 (Monday) 

My patches for IMDB::Film have gone in, and I notice from looking at the ChangeLog that Vincent Leferve also got some fix in there as well. There really are only a few thousand people in the world.

Chris pointed out that the charts are swamped with Michael Jackson now. Scarily, 13 of the top 40 singles are Michael Jackson. It's amazing how popular you are when you're dead.

I've just seen a lovelly comment about the diary from 'S.' who wanted to encourage me after reading my diary 'cos I seem like she was - upset, having bad dreams, very lonely and work driven. It's really sweet and I'm trying a bit - it's hard, but I am trying. It's harder due to the current work situation being a constant distraction and frustration. Not one that trumps the rest, but it makes it a little harder to be positive. I'm glad that she and her husband got together - obviously because they're happy, but selfishly as well, because it means that there's a little hope for me. Maybe there's a light out there, even if I just can't see it now.

Thank you, S. It's lovely to have some encouragement even if it's a note given anonymously. It makes up for some of the abuse I've had anonymously over the years!

And someone's actually stuck a chunk of my 'sort albums properly' patch in their SqueezeCenter to make it work sanely. Yay.

My network connection's been upgraded and I now (allegedly) get 16895kbps downstream, 1020kbps upstream. Although in tests I can't seem to get more than about 580K/s out of it. That might just be general contention on the line anyhow and isn't much better than it was at the old rate. I'm not going to complain as it means that they've actually done the upgrade and things are now working (hopefully!) as they should.

All in all, today's not been that bad. Despite not getting much done myself. Now why do I still feel sad ?

There are plusses and minuses about having a bad memory. One of the pluses is that in general you don't remember when you're annoyed at things. One of the minuses is that don't remember when you're happy at things. More likely those it's half of one of those. You know that you're annoyed or happy but you don't know why. The other way around is that you have to sometimes remind yourself that you're annoyed, otherwise you'll forget and 'people will get away with it'. That's not vindictive or anything, it's just that otherwise you can feel you're being taken advantage of.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been (obviously) very frustrated with work and not really felt like doing much. Which extends to things that I've also wanted to do. I had some really cute ideas of things I could do, but never had the energy to do them. I don't usually do the whole 'vapourware' thing - I usually at least start things. But oh well.

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5 Jul 2009 (Sunday) 

Kid: Do you have any kids? Man: No Kid: Does your wife want to have kids ? Man: I don't have a wife. Kid: Oh. Why not ? Man: Well, I used to think it was because I'm a bad person. Man: But that is only one of many reasosn. [ Be open to the possibility...; John Campbell; Pictures For Sad Children ]

Finished catching up on last season's Torchwood yesterday. It's... well, it's not as fun as Primeval. Primeval's been canned, Torchwood starts again tomorrow. That said, Torchwood was a lot better this season than last - less gratuitous after-the-watershed bits, and more story. Whoever wrote Countycide for the first season just needs to be... well, told off, because it was quite awful - that was the worst of them, but there were others that were not to great.

Our Apple court case drags on, I see from looking at the court filings - there's an extension until the 7th August.

Had more bad dreams last night, but I don't remember them now.

I've been very lax at replying to emails recently. I just haven't really had the energy to put in to them, despite them being quite obviously important and things I should reply to.

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