Boring one today, and I should expect nothing more (probably nothing less either).  I was trawling through some code the other day and found this little chestnut, which has been in production code for months now (probably since the start of the year:

There’s obviously a new keyword in there I’d never heard of before, ture, which looks just like a dyslexic true.  Amazingly enough (it’s PHP), this has been in and working as expected (correctly), and gone unoticed for the better part of a year.

Madness.

I was reading my book on the train on the way to work today, Remote Control by the British author (and ex-SAS soldier) Andy McNab, and came across a line that made me laugh.  It wasn’t just any laugh though, but a sudden outburst, the kind that makes you look like the special autistic child or some kind of greasy pervert, the kind that directs eyes toward you.  Hundred’s of the beady little f$%kers.

I should prefix this with a bit of background, after about thirty or forty pages of the authors build up to an action scene, the main character, Nick Stone,  describes in detail how stealth is the key to any subtle operation.  He describes in full the surveillance required in the stake out, and how each part of the target (IRA headquarters) was broken into without extreme force.  This goes on, and on, and as you’d expect thing’s eventually go hay wire as Stone is discovered and is seconds away from death via handgun down his throat after being taken out by a fire extinguisher to the back of the head.

By this point, I’m engrossed, the build up was enormous, and I’m literally hanging off the end of my seat wondering what on Earth is going to happen next.  There’s a small scuffle and Stone jams the gun, temporarily disabling it and a scuffle breaks out eventually resulting in the enemy being shot in the head.

This was followed by:

“He was going to die soon.

Tough Shit.”

It’s a pillow, what a horrible prank!

In hindsight it doesn’t seem anywhere near as funny, but it blew me away at the time.  After such an enourmous build up with everything and every moment described in such precious detail, the climax was abrupt, like a kick in the guts.  I have to liken this to getting amazing sex, mind blowing passion with the ultimate build up:

"mmmm...."

"ah..."

"MMMMmmmmm yea!"

"Oh.  Job's done"

"Yea, would you like a cup of tea?"

I’d half expected another ten pages describing the blood as it made its passage from the chest driven by the last few beats of the heart, up the arteries, and out the convinient new escape vent in the head.  But no.. He was dead, and that was it.

Bloody good book though, both Andy McNab books I’ve read so far have been an excellent read, which makes them incredibly hard to put down.

At the office, we, the Web Services team form a team of four people who handle the core data storage and communications centre for the companies main application.  It’s by no means the most complex (it’s extremely simple in fact) or even the most important, but none the less, it forms the glue between each of the client applications and hosts the file/data store for all shared information used throughout the system.

As part of the build process we’ve done a recent refactor which improves performance and security and aims to generally make our service easier to consume by every device that uses it.  This process has taken the better part of six weeks next to full time work by four of us and at least two weeks work from a fifth person that left recently.  I don’t want to say I’ve poured my heart and soul into it, that would be lieing, but its definitely been something that we’ve become immensely proud of.

Anyway, today the decision was made to drop all the work completed toward the new version, and continue where we forked off on the previous release, which really is a huge shame.  Now I feel like we’ve taken a step backward, erasing a bunch of work that would have ultimately made the project a lot more stable and laid a few of the foundations for future-proofivity, if thats even a word.  I shouldn’t get too aread of myself though, in reality it was months away from the final goal, but at least there was move towards that goal.

I shouldn’t be surprised though, there seems to be many examples of this and far worse (mal)practices in the IT industry around the web, and it seems to me to often be the way the things work, especially in smaller Software Development situations.  I’ve even seen it before at previous jobs, and its never pretty.

The thing that gets me though, is the absolute waste of resources and man-hours that goes into a mistake such as this.  Assuming we worked two thirds of the week each, I’d put the time spent at:

4.5 staff x 27 hours x 6 weeks  = 729 man hours

By my crude calculations this is just about enough man hours to build a small skyscraper, or the Titanic if you will, but… That’s Life, after all!

Who knows, in another month, the project will probaly take another path altogether requiring a complete rewrite, refactor or perhaps disbanded altogether!

A weird question to start with, to be sure, and although I talk to myself an awful lot (possibly more than is healthy) I wouldn’t ever need to ask myself that question.  So now, I’m not suddenly suffereing from Gender disassociativeness nor have I become separted from my racial/special (is that a word?) roots like the mental/medical condition where people ‘disown’ parts of their body and occasionally even amptutate the alien part (I wish I could remember the name of it).  No, I’ll leave the body mutilation for another week, I really asked this question after a recent conversation with a work mate.

It was one morning this week and said colleague had been asked by the big wigs over at Ché Le Corporate to get a list of all employees and their accompanying Job Titles from the Nike Wallet Processing Plant (that is, my office).  The conversation went a little like this:

“Hey, what do you want your job title to be, I’ve been asked to get a list of everyone and their job titles.  I’ve put down System Administrator for you for the time being”

Hearing this stopped me dead in my tracks, “System Administrator I thought, What have I got myself into?”.  By no fault of my colleague at all, he’d pointed out something that was now blatently clear to me.  My recent change in jobs has changed me from a budding developer (working on a relatively deadend project, but still a developer nonetheless), to kind of a Network/Tech/Administrator guy.

Now, the Network and Tech part of that, I don’t mind, the server hardware & network and linux setup part of the computer world is something I’ve always been interested in.  But the Systems and Administrator part is what scares me, for no one worth their grain of salt (I hope thats me) aspires to be a System Administrator, it really is a glorified helpdesk position, and now I have to watch my step carefully, so as not to fall into the role that is the scorn of the whole IT profession.  I continue down this parth, and soon enough, I’ll be the general office go to guy:

• the guy who handles helpdesk and support requests
• the guy who manages such petty things as network and email accounts
• the guy who answers the phone… often; and worst of all
• the guy who is expected to order stationary, water and toilet paper

Thankfully, none of these things can or will ever apply to me, I’d sooner quit my job, move back to Australia and hammer my tongue/foot/penis flat enough to fit into a standard paper shredder if only for the joy of it.

So now everyone, I am on a journey of rediscovery, to make sure I still continue on the path to greatness, despite my sudden change in job descriptions.  Thus, once again, I’ll ask:

Who/What Am I?

This has me really thinking about exactly what I want from career, as even though I’m still relatively new in this game, I can already see that what I wanted 5 years ago (a job…) is far different than the goal I have now.  But thats the way life should be, if I’d had it the way I wanted it when I was 5 I’d be a cop, an astronaut or a gynaecoligist (ech…) right now, and all three I am not.

But really, whats in a title? It’s what you make of it, and if I don’t want to be the Bastard Operator From Hell, I won’t be, despite how much fun it could be.  So I’ll make what I can of this period, see how it goes.

Changing Situations

Today (April 1st) marks the day that I start at my company as a permanent employee, and also that day that I cease to be a full-time contractor, at least for the time being, anyway.  It’s brought about an aura of uncertainty, not because I’m unsure of what I’m doing, but because of that fact that taking a paycut is often hard to justify.

I’ve had the choice though, to stay on contracting and miss out on possible bonus’s, promotions, as well as all the normal benifits like holidays, sick pay (hooray, I can take a day off again) and private health care.  I’m hanging on to the thoguth that whilst I was getting better money contracting (by no means, fantastic money, mind you), with the holiday and sick pay, I’m not that much worse off.  And I found about a fantastic little nasty called Employer’s Natiional Insurance Tax, which for some reason I was stupid enough to have been paying myself, missing out on the grand total of almost £1,000 cleared cash in hand per month.

This is what I’ll be expected to wear to the office, now that I’m permanent

Renewed Motivation

But the worry at the change in career path has renewed my motivation to pursue out of work projects and whilst I’ve had a couple of fairly unproductive months, I think I’m well back on track down the path of success. At least I hope so, anyway.  So far I’ve:

• 75% completed the first of the ShanCo projects, an experiment in collaboration, team work and fighting the good (SEO) fight to thrive for a win in this web world.  I can’t say too much because not only would that ruin the surprise, I’d be sure to dissapoint as well.
• started to draw up plans with an old mate from University;
• and done the same with some friends from work, thinking about a couple of huge ideas one of the guys came up with that could quite likely revolutionise the London Texas Hold’em scene as well as a couple of other ideas as well.  If I can help, that is!

Budgeting & Finance

Another thing I did, whilst fretting about the incoming financial situation was draw up a quick budget for the next few years.  I’m amazed time and time again, just how much money we waste, and how easy it would be to save a fair chunk if you put your mind to it and watch out on the frivilous bar rounds (£36 on five drinks on Saturday night!).  I’ve found in the past if I’ve had something that i’ve needed to save up for, drawing out a budget and clearly working out exactly much we needed to save, and exactly how much we can save if we stick to the money we intend to live on each week.

It’s probably a no brainer for most, and a sign of immaturity, but sticking to my money guide, which took me about 20 minutes to knock up in Excel should help in this matter, especially when I consider all the things we’re going to have to pay for in the next few months, such as the Big Event and the nicely priced Holiday to Russia in July.  Hell I’m going to enjoy my holiday pay though!

I got into work yesterday after my week long holiday and by 9:00am I was back over at the old office (the <insert exploited minority here> Wallet making Sweatshop, aka Casa Bolton) working on a couple of things for another of the company’s projects. Within two hours I’d been told to grab my PC and all the contents of my desk and move back to that office (Casa Bolton).  I knew it had been coming for a while, as I was never permanently placed there in the first place, but it was all very sudden anyway.

The weird thing is within the time span of that morning I’d gone from Shannon, C# extraordinare (not really) to a completey different role, that being to build/commission a group of Redhat/Oracle servers for the new production environment.  I’m not sure if its a step forward, or a step back, but its definitely something new and breaks up the monotony of the last few months work.  The good thing is, it’ll give me an extra insentive to get this ShanCo work up and running, as I feel much more inclined to put in the required hours to get said projects up and running, especially as I don’t want to get rusty.

This afternoon, office politics took over, and the wrath of an over zealous trigger happy manager got a little tacky and crackheaded on my ass.  but thats a story for another day.

I still don’t know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I’d got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I’ve never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I’m much too fast to take that test

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)

- Changes

I know, before I say anything, its been a long time between posts, and before my last it was a fair while between those. I’m in a definite state of limbo recently, in regards to pretty much everything and I’ve just let a few things slip. Like my bear for instance:

… Only Kiddin, it doesn’t look near this bad.

Anyway, I just worked out, within the last week that the British Home Office was in the process of tightening up their immigration laws, and as of March 1st 2008, its not going to be so easy to get the Highly Skilled Migrant Visa (HSMP) anymore. This sucks for me, as after July 1st this year, I’ll have used up my allowed employment time (12 months out of the 24 month holiday Visa).

I have earned enough, however to apply for the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, which allows me to work pretty much anywhere, and 5 years in the UK without restriction, and best of all the time counts toward residency. The rules change slightly after Leap Year Day Day (29th Feb, 2008) though, the main causes for concern being that the cost now rises by £400 pounds (from the already expensive £750), and you need to go back to your home country to apply for it. There are many other changes to, like the fact having an MBA doesn’t automatically qualify you for the Visa now, and some of the points for various skills have been reduced somewhat.

But then the story gets worse….

Not only will I have to go back to Australia (if I chose this path after the cut off date), I’ll have to wait 4 months killing time back home until my visa request is processed so I can come back again! So, on current flight costs I’ve worked out the total cost of getting a new visa at:

Cost Of Visa: £1150

Cost of return Flight: £900

Lost income in work time: ~£16,000 (minus £ lost to tax)

Time spent saving up now so I’ve paid my share of the rent and food, and general bills/expenses: at least 2 months

That hurts, it really does. So I’m in a mad rush now, to try and organise all the paper work and cash required for the visa application (I’m willing to pay the £200 person to person interview fee for obvious reasons) by the 28th of February. It just depends how quickly my university can send me over the Proof of Completion of Studies form. I have my degree, and my transcript, I even have my high school transcript. But to the British Commission, that’s just not good enough. You need a letter from the chancellor of your university stating that at the majority of your course work was taught in English.

The fact I went to an Australian university (and have a degree to show for it) doesn’t cut it. They need proof, and solid proof at that.

I will do whatever I can to avoid making the trip back home though, not that i woudn’t mind seeing friends and family, on the contrary. I’d love to, just it is a huge drain on time and money.

Visa time it is….

Yes, so I was bored the other day at work, and what do we do when we’re bored, unproductive and not doing something creative like inventing weekly drinking days? We waste time on the internetz, and the flavour of the day was taking pointless online medical tests, because in this age of hypochondriacal madness who better to diagnose my mental state than a two-bit test on the internet? The first of the two was the ADHD Test at PhsycCentral.com, and the second was the quirky and manic inducing OCD Test on the ADAA’s website.

PsychCentral.com’s ADHD Test

In this day and age where every kid has some form of this elusive condition, and care-free doctor’s are giving away far too many prescription pills to worry-ridden over-bearing mother’s (or at least to crafty teenage entrepeneurs) it seemed like a good idea to take this test, to guage where one might stand, you know, in the scheme of things. I’m of the opinion that my rapidly declining memory and cognitive ability, which I was once quite proud of, is due to the effect of age, decreased mental stimulation and alcohol abuse. But I’m open to interpretation, and there I thought there might be a slight chance that the reason my attention span, and general attention to detail is so poor may have something to do with with this magical phenomenon.

Upon taking the test, I was greeted by the usual standard questions, “I say things without thinking, and later regret having said them.”, “In conversations, I start to answer questions before the questions have been fully asked.”, “Even when sitting quietly, I am usually moving my hands or feet.”, “I am distressed by the disorganized way my brain works.” Check, Yes, Very much so.  Cool, I thought, I’m a total and utter head case.  Nope, I rated in the Low to Mild ADHD category, falling far short of the target Moderate Level ADHD, or indeed the coveted trophy prize Adult ADHD.

First test a failure (or success, depending on which way you look at it), seemingly I’d wasted 5 minutes.  This got me thinking though, I’m only 24, which would is considered young by most standards.  Is it out of the ordinary that I’m noticing myself getting old (never thought I’d say that), or am I artificially accelerating this to a point that I’m noticing it early?? Bah!

ADAA.org’s OCD Test

For my next short term time waster I chose the OCD test, for those not in the know that’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and really I think there’s a little in everyone of us.  From the simple need to alphabetically sort a DVD or Book collection, clean the house, or line the pegs up on the clothes line in Colour/Size order (yes, I’ve been guilty of all three, though not compulsively) through to obsessive cleaning of ones hands, OCD is a very real beast that affects… people.  Errr.

I’m not completely sure if the writers of this test were having a laugh (is he ‘avin a laff??) when they wrote this page, or if they’re just down right mean, but a certain element that is missing would send even the most sane of people into a manic episode.  They left out the Submit button.  Ha!

Just imagine it, x number of OCD suspects want a semi-professional opinion so before sectioning themselves for good, they consult the doctor in a box, and proceed to type in parts of their innermost thoughts and secrets.  When crunch time occurs, and they’ve completed the entry section they look forward to recieveing the answer and solving the problem once and for all, so they search for the Submit/Upload/OK button.  No button!  So what do they do?? Do exactly what I did, I suspect, assume its part of the test and click like a mad mescaline munching donkey until the answer could be found.

Only it couldn’t, because it wasn’t there, and there was no form, only inputs, radio’s and some random links that went nowhere!  That’ll fuck em, least that’s what I bet the ADAA were thinking.

So anyway, Shannon 1, work day 0.

I’ve never had to worry much about page ranking, search engine listings and other SEO terms and techniques.  This was mainly because I’d either developed intranet applications that remain unseen to the web, or for other reasons like private web applications or the owner really just wasn’t concerned.  It wasn’t until the last few months when I experienced the Digg effect (on a very small scale, mind you), and subsequently being site linked to another page that I really got to thinking about how Pagerank actually works and how to go about increasing it.

We had two companies come in for meetings this week in regards to SEO and web marketing, and it was a definite eye opener.  I’ll be truthful here and say that I’ve always scoffed at the amounts these company’s expect for the work they do, and whilst I still believe its not worth as much as they ask, they definitely now what they”re talking about.  Luckily, the site we’re working on I Can Have It, wasn’t too bad and shouldn’t require much work (on our side) in the coding, content placement, keyword and back end areas.  Most of them are superficial changes which wouldn’t take any longer than half a day t implement which is good.  Of course there’s a lot of work over the coming months thats going to be put into Ad placement, Search keyword/Pagerank inflation and the like, so it’ll be interesting to see how much we get from our £x,000 bill.

I’ve also been watching this site, and its related reports on Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, and have been blown away by how many weeks I’ve been ranked #1 for weird search terms such as double plugger, weird thong, ‘Love all the pain away’ and the sheer amount of hits I’m still getting with the terms Perth Mall, Murray St Mall Webcam, Perth Webcam and many more.

So eventually when Shanco comes online and it’s wares are launched (when this happens, you’ll be the first to know), I’ll be paying close attention to SEO, Search engine friendly URL’s, link placement and affiliate programs/cross promotion.  Hopefully the bits I’ve learnt so far with HD911 will help with this.

I got a nice surprise in my inbox this afternoon, a quick message from the staff at Google Offices in the UK wanting to talk about a possible job offer and relocation in the Sydney Office in Google.  I can’t even remember when I sent my resume in to Google (I think it was just after I got to the UK), but it was nice to get a message anyway.  If I had have been in Perth, I would have jumped at the chance, but I’m not even going to think about relocating back to Australia, as we all know, I’m enjoying the UK too damn much.

I might give them a phone call tomorrow and see if they have any positions for work going in London, as I’d imagine out of all the companies there are to choose from, for the work I’m doing, that would have to be an awesome oppurtunity.  Time will tell!