Angel is off

Sad day Today as Angel our Spanish Systems Administrator is off to pastures new. He's been a quite force keeping things together and all the project running smoothly. He knows where everything is and what all the passwords are.

UPDATE:

We been phoning him about once a day since he left needing to know one thing or another. He's in Spain so this must be getting quite expensive. Most things have been sorted out but for some reasons half the testing environments have gone MIA, but Angel didn't know about them. That's just what happens around Xmas when hardly anybody is in the office.

What's Spanish for C'est la vie?

Rage against X factor

Made my little contribution against low quality mass entertainment.

Hopefully Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine will be the Xmas number one. Suitablity enough after having seen them live last year.

Go buy it and stop the Cowell machine you know it makes sense.


UPDATE: WE DID IT YEAH!
Rage beat X factor by about 50,000 copies Merry Xmas

An online Xmas

Done it

I managed to get all my stuff ordered online for the first time. for a couple of years now I've run pretty close but this year I've bought all my pressies online.
Hopefully they all arrive at my parents' and then I can have a huge wrapping session.

Marilyn Manson and the Dry Ice

Not as good as I was hoping it would be.

Went to see the controversial one the other night, Marilyn Manson.

The support act Esoterica weren't too bad being maybe a bit like the Lost Prophets.

The main act started with the most dry ice I've ever seen in my entire life. So much so you couldn't really tell what was going on for the first 4 songs. He did a great effect like Edward Scissorhands with laser pens for fingers which looked great with all the dry ice.

The audience didn't seemed to really get into the swing of things as the show went on despite there being nothing really wrong with the set. They did get worked up for the song The Beatiful People which had some fire to it. However that was the last song so it was a bit late.

Rob and Me found a nice pub around the corner as we got out before last orders.

The last of the few

Another leaving do today.
Actually its worse than that as our only sys admin has just rang me to say he's resigned so working conditions are going to get bad as we will have to do all the systems bug fixes as well. But it's good for him as they where taking advantage of him something rotten. He should be going to something much more interesting and pays better.
One of the other developer and myself actually arranged to meet with our CTO yesterday to see if we could try and help the situation. I think the CTO was quite surprised as he must have been thinking everyone is against him. A bit too late I think but at least we tried.

You've got mail

Finally got my first bit of mail in my brand new mail box, apart of course from all the pizza and take-away menus.

Unfortunately it was just my phone bill :-(

Spooks

First episode of the new season last night. not bad, my flat, in fact all of London managed to get through the whole episode without being damaged at all.

100000 Hoppers

At 7:50pm UK time on 2nd November 2009 we had our 100,000th Hopper created, in Latvia of all places.

This means is this campaign has been quite successful

And that's alot of hoppers!

Trying out a new bit of Tech

I just downloaded a new app for the fashion victims brick (my iPhone) to write blog entries and this post is the result. Ok not that exiting but it's the future!

On the home front not much movement on the selling. However we have had our letterboxes upgraded. The new ones are much bigger and much less likely to bite your fingers. It's just a bit of a pity that i'm not getting any letters with all the postal strikes at the moment!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Live again

Phase 2 of the great hopper invasion is live.

After a mad rush on Friday doing multiple fixes and changes to the site, refusing to add stuff that there was just no time to do and getting the final deployment out at 7pm and then off to the pub for several pints of Guinness.

It was a combination of the client wanting lots of small changes and trying to convince people it is more important to have a stable site live than keep trying to add stuff.

But it finally went live in Australia 6pm EDT and everything seems to work fine. The Yahoo site showed the special adverts at the correct time and the main site stood up fine.

So now we are waiting for the statistics to come back and to see if the client will say thank you.

By way of celebration I did get one gift, from my Mum, appropriately enough for this project it is a stress ball shaped like a space hopper.

Arraggh it's been released to the public

In a typical half asleep moment on the way to work the other week I was ambushed by my own work on the tube.

I was travelling on one of the escalators watching those new TV advert boards that they have started to install everywhere when an advert for the current web advertisement campaign I'm working came on. It's based a around a famous bouncing children's toy and we have done a site that lets you pick and personalise one to have on your PC.

My first reaction (and this was the same for some of the others on the team) as oh sh*t! I hope its working.

But it seems fine and the project is still just about on target (if a little stressful due to a dithering client constantly changing her mind). When it is finished it will be available in over 30 different languages (including ones that don't read left to right) and will be quite a complicated a mix of technologies.

So something to be proud of so long as it doesn't crash!

Bonus or a Bung

We all got an envelope at work today.

Mine contained a thank you note and a 50 quid note.

This I believe is in lieu of any bonus or pay rise for this year!
They still manages to do things here that surprises me. Most people seem have taken it as a bit of an insult.

Nobody leaving this week I think...

Leaving Fatigue

Three last week, one on Wednesday and three more today on Friday.
It's a good job its payday as all these leaving collections and drinks night are getting a bit too much.

First Viewing

For some strange reason I tidied the flat this morning. Made sure the junk was tidied away and the dishes had been washed.

Fortunate really as the Estate agent rang me at lunchtime to say could he do a view at 4pm.

OK I laid the ground work for this last week as I met up with the estate agent, this time called Neil and I agreed to drop the price another 17K to get the price in line with the current market that makes the whole drop about 13%. so hopefully the people will be back to view

no news yet on how today's viewing went, but I'm starting to have a little fun looking at the sort of property I may be able to get in this current depressed market.

A slight obsession

I find myself checking the ad breaks on the BBC more and more, for news of a new series of 'Spooks'.
I'm beginning to think its that time of year again to watch the fictional version my flat and where I live get gassed/flooded/bombed for dramatic effect on the TV.

The Offspring

Popped to another gig on Tuesday night thanks to a last minute Facebook message from my friend Nils. This time it was the Offspring supported by Broadway Calls and Rival Schools.

It was a good little night and it got suitably wild with great versions of 'self esteem', 'pretty fly for a white guy' and 'get a job'.

A department of one

It the time of year again for the company staff survey. we had a little competition in the tech department to see who could put the most truthful negative comment.

The morale is a bit low in the department although the boss seems to be in denial.
we lost 3 out of 4 of our flash developers in the last couple of weeks. So now the last guy is now the entire flash department!

With no pay rises due to the recession and not much in the way of career development most of them have decided that its not worth putting up with some of the silly stuff management try and get us to do.

From the recruitment agents who ring me up I would probably be 5-7K better off if I move at the moment and at least for IT, the job market in London is quite good.
I would seriously think about it if I wasn't trying to sort out other things in my life at the moment.

Well I figure that there'll be more people to leave in the next few weeks. I there may be more news to follow.

15 months on the Market

OK that surprised me too

I just got around to checking and my flat has been on the market for 15 months!

I hadn’t realised it had been quite as long as that. There are several reasons for this long period. The main one being the whole market crashing thing and me waiting for things to pick up again
I've not dropped my price enough and so haven’t had any interest in the property for months. Rather than take the flat off the market because nothing was happening, I've kept it on at a too high a price so I don't have to pay again for all the selling documentation to be set up.

According to mousePrices.com they think I should drop the price by another 6% to be competitive. I’d already cut the price by 5% back at the start of the crash before I decided to pause.

But I got a bit of news this week telling me the market may be up and running again and that it’s time to get selling again.

My friends Colin and Clare who live in the next postcode over have just managed to market and sell their property and put an offer on a new place all in the space of a couple of weeks. All this they managed and had time for a week’s holiday abroad!

So I guess its time to get on with it and drop the price again. Oh and contact my agents and see if they are still in business.

More free music

And this time its Kasabian

I actually knew quite a few of the tracks. according to one of the guys at work it's 'cos they'd been used on nearly every ep of Top Gear recently'
Rob at work managed to get the tickets and gave me one as I had managed to sort him a ticket to NIN

I got quite carried away a fun night

Surf and Shoes

Holiday time again and this year I'm mixing it up with a family hols in the Forest of Dean and a couple of days down in Newquay trying out surfing.

The Forest of Dean is the bit between wales and the rest of the UK and is as you can guess full of trees. I had a nice week with my Parents and One of my Sister and her family. We did various touristy activities such as butterfly houses and miniature steam railways and of course a BBQ in the rain. I was all quite relaxing in a hectic
kids and Thomas the tank engine sort of a way.

Newquay was a completely different proposition. I had a couple of goes at surfing and a quite Sunday morning coasteering.

I surfing a strange sport or at least it is for a beginner.

It mostly seems to consist of getting battered to bit by the waves/board/random other surfer as you try to fight your way out a suitable distance. Once there you try not to drown while gauging the moment the bigger waves come rolling in. Then at the right moment you drag yourself onto the board (you're knacker at this point from getting out from the beach) point towards land and madly thrash your arms to propel you forward.

If you time it right the wave picks you up and you go like a rocket straight through the rest of your group and back to the shore. Now at the point you get picked up by the wave you are meant to use some style and get yourself standing.

So far I've managed to be so surprised I actual caught a wave that all I managed to do was hang on and yell incoherently.

However I can sort of see the appeal of this sport and will more than likely try it again. A wet suit purchase maybe in my future, as being in the sea in the UK is a chilly affair.

Coasteering is an odd sport, it's a mix of swimming in the sea, climbing on wet rocks and then jumping off (small, fortunately for me) cliffs. It's weird if quite fun way to send a Sunday morning.

So all in all it was a good mix of stuff and by the time I got to work it felt like I had been away for a long time.

oh and 'Shoes', that comes from my niece Edie. 'Shoes' seemed to be her favourite word on the holiday. She would come up to you look up at you very seriously and say 'Shoes' then she would look to her right and left and then go on a hunt for her shoes. Once found she would take great delight in stomping around the place with her shoes on, hopefully on the right feet.