Dan Q
From an article on the BBC:
SmartData UK aims to create software and database solutions.
Company spokesman Gareth Hopkins said: “The move to Technium Aberystwyth has facilitated an expansion of the company and we believe this opportunity will open up a whole range of possibilities.
“The package offered by the Technium will assist us in creating more jobs and expanding into the international market place.”
I’ve had a couple of moderately hectic days, and somehow haven’t found time to tell you all about them yet. Let’s see what I can remember:
The Tale Of Troma Night 50
Troma Night 50 was a success: a chance to re-watch some of the films that made Troma Night’s 1 and 2 so… bizarre. And it was
great to see folks like JTA, Andy, and Liz returning once more to the enlightened watchers of awful films (Liz reports favourably on Troma Night 50).
The Tale In Which Geek Night Returns
And just to make the weekend that little bit more fun, we had a (long-missed) Geek Night on Sunday night: two games of Chez Geek and one
of Carcassonne. Sadly, my copy of Munchkin hasn’t arrived yet.
The idiots who were supposed to be sending it to me addressed the package as follows:
Daniel Huntley
The Flat
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 XYZ
…completely missing the address line. And then they were surprised when the package was returned to them by the post office. Grr.
The Tale Of Kit And The “Awwww” Chain
It’s kind of sweet that Kit’s posted a declaration of love onto his blog. And now everybody’s posting a whole chain
of “Awwww” responses. Looks like I’m not the only one who found this a happy little uplifting post. It’s the little things,
really.
The Tale Of The Students Who Couldn’t Use A Bus
Yesterday, riding my usual bus to work (the 526 to Penryncoch) we stopped, as usual, as the bus stop on North Parade. At this time of year, all the students have returned and a lot of
them can be seen at this bus stop waiting for the morning ‘university service’ bus to take them up the hill. Obviously these particular students are unable to read, because events
unfolded a little like this:
First Student: Up to the university, please.
Bus Driver: This bus doesn’t go to the university.
<university service bus pulls up behind>
First Student: Oh. Can I just go up the hill then?
Bus Driver: No; this bus isn’t going up the hill. This bus is going to Penryncoch.
First Student: Oh.
<first student gets off bus again, making room for second student – stood behind first student – to step up to the driver. meanwhile, students are getting on the double-decker parked behind, which has the words “University Service” on the front. second student puts a ten pound note in the cash tray and stares at the driver>
Bus Driver: Where are you going?
<second student spends two or three seconds staring at the driver with a look on her face that implies that she’s never heard of buses going anywhere other than to her destination>
Second Student: To the university!
<the university service bus pulls out and overtakes us, and starts going up the hill>
Bus Driver: No. This bus does not go to the university. This bus does not go up Penglais Hill at all. This bus is going to Penryncoch. That’s why the large luminescent letters on the front of the bus say… Penryncoch.
How difficult can it be? You’re probably a second year or above, now (by the fact that you’re presumably living in town) – pull your finger out.
The Tale Of Claire Getting A Job
I found myself in Game a couple of days ago, where a student was applying for a position working for them in the run-up to Christmas. They turned
him down flat, of course, because he was planning to leave town as soon as term finished – 18th December, or thereabouts – which kind-of defeats of the object of Christmas staff. But
“a-ha”, I thought, and grabbed an application form for Claire, who applied and was subsequently snapped-up. So Claire’s got a job
again, which is nice.
The major side effect of this is that it’s very liklely that we’ll both be spending Christmas in Aberystwyth. Which is unusual and kind-of scary. Still; we’ve agreed that we’ll try and zip around the country and visit our respective families the following week, if we can’t manage to do so otherwise (Claire will be working on both Christmas Eve and Boxing Day). Hmm… Nothing more to add to that at the moment, so “Hmm” will do.
In other news, she’ll probably get a staff discount. Yay. =o)
The Tale That Involves The Technium
SmartData is moving by instalments. By this time week-after-next, we ought to be in our shiny new WDA-sponsored office in the newly-built Aber Technium, on the harbour’s edge. This is a win for several reasons:
Will keep you posted.
I’m wasting time and I have plenty to get on with, so that’s enough of an update for now. Kittens.
Last night I had a very odd dream, with references to previous (recurring) dreams, interspersed with appearances from people I’ve met since:
The dream begins in rough marshy ground. There is a dredger visible in the distance, but only one of it’s two pumps appears to be working. I’m there with Claire, and we’re trying to pick our way across the reducing land to escape from the marsh, as the waters rise. Claire seems concerned that we may be cut off and stuck out here. A fog begins to fall around us, and visibility is reduced. The sun can just be made out, close to the horizon.
I find my way to a road – unmarked and single-track, but with tarmac. I’ve lost Claire somewhere, but this doesn’t seem to be of any major concern. I make my way along the road to a village, somewhat reminiscent in architecture and surroundings to those in the Yorkshire moors. The fog is clearing somewhat as I make my way through it’s streets and enter a public house. There, I order a drink and sit down.
At this point I realise that these things are not actually happening, but that I am telling them as a story. I am in the office at SmartData, sat at the meeting table. With me is my friend Sandy (a.k.a. Kink), and it’s to her that I’m relating this bizarre tale. The story is, in itself, based upon a recurring dream I had in about 1999/2000, in which I was spending a reasonable amount of time with Sandy, but I had not yet met other people who appear in the dream, such as Claire and Paul – these have been ‘added’ later. The story continues:
I sit at a corner table in the pub and sip my drink. Later, it begins to get busy. Three women come and join me at my table, and strike up conversation. Meanwhile, Paul wanders in and sits at one of the centre tables. For some reason, I recognise him, but cannot remember who he is or from where. He looks very thoughtful.
I large man with black hair and pale, drawn-out features enters the bar. Suddenly I am very afraid, because this man wants to kill me. I hide underneath the table as he announces that he’s looking for me. I wait until he leaves, and then reappear. The ladies I’m sat with are, of course, curious, and so I explain that it is me that the man is looking for. I decide that I am not safe here, finish my drink, and leave. Once outside, I continue down the street, wondering what to do next.
I see the man, at the opposite end of the street, running my way. I turn down a side street, and, upon reaching the next crossroads, am struck by a revelation – I’ve dreamt this before. The memory of this dream is fragmented within itself, but I can remember it nonetheless. I am still not aware that this, too, is a dream, but it starts to make sense: I foresaw this when I dreamt it before, and it is this same precognition that is having me recognise people (like Paul) that I’ve never met. I think hard, and remember that in the dream I turned right at this crossroads, and was later caught, and so instead I turn left. As the man rounds the corner I duck into a toy shop.
No, that’s not right – I did that last time, too. Same toy shop, but I’d turned right last time. No: maybe I made a mistake… or maybe I really can’t escape. I hear the man approaching the shop, so I rush down into it’s basement floor (childrens’ clothes, by the looks of things) and hide under a pile of coats. The man enters, and I hold my breath. But my cover worked, and he leaves. Again I’m struck by the memory of my dream, and I realise that this is what happened there, too: is there no escape from the increasingly-inevitable finale?
The sales assistant seems pissed off at my intrusion, so I buy one of the coats. Somehow, it’s too big for me, and I conceal myself within it. Every step I take, I remember as having already done, in my previous dream, but never soon enough in advance to reconsider and take a different course. And so it goes on, step by step, as I return to the bar, each step preordained – yet still unanticipated – as it falls.
I pause in my storytelling in anticipation of the next bit – the bit I’d been looking forward to telling Sandy. In this ‘reality’, the occurrences in the village are not dreams – not any more than the action of telling them to her was, in any case. However, I talked of it as if the dream I was remembering was just that; a dream. Within this convoluted little nightmare she was fascinated by the story. As I came to this, a convenient break point, Claire and Paul appeared in the hallway outside. Paul was wearing exactly the same clothes as he had been in the story.
During this break in the storytelling, I produced a hardback lined A4 pad, reminiscent of the ones in which I kept a diary during the years that I was at college, and for a little while afterwards. In the dream, I had kept several separate books, one for each of several friends who I saw less frequently than I would like, and whenever I’d had the chance to meet with them, I’d had them write a page or so in their book with an update of their life since their last entry. Sandy obliged, looking over some of her previous entries and reminiscing awhile, before adding a new entry. Then, I continued my story (again, feeling as if I am ‘acting it out’ at the time):
Re-entering the bar I am immediately confronted by my pursuer. I hide underneath the hood of my coat, and affect an accent when I talk in order to conceal my identity. It works, and, thrown off by my disguise, the man turns away, giving me a chance to escape. I retreat to the street, where I leap onto the back of a passing bus, and hang on as it drives off. The village disappears behind me.
At about this point, my alarm clock went off, bringing an end to the dream. Interpretations and comments welcome.
…the client calls up and says, “I’m not sure if this is a bug… or a feature… but -”
Bovini is fucking scary these days.
How frustrating is it to write 5 CDs for clients, only to discover an error in some SQL scripts on them that mean that they won’t work outside of the development LAN… <grr>
It’s the world rebalancing the good and bad things, I guess. Making up for last night’s wild rampant sex tour of the flat (starting on the couch, finishing on the bed… without need for re-entry). Damn, we were horny.
I’d better fix these SQL scripts. Ooh: office Christmas dinner this evening! That’s something to look forward to.
I’m at the office. It’s almost 5pm. So far today I’ve achieved what should be estimated as approximately 7 days work. Some days the code just flows. I like being me.
On the other hand, it may be that I’ve just written the wrong 7 days worth of code – as in; the 7 days worth of code I should be starting next week. Despite having achieved the entirety of my work schedule for the next month, I haven’t yet finished what I was supposed to be doing this morning.
My boss is pretty level-headed and appreciates the way I work, though – that if he doesn’t expect me to do things in the order he asks, and he doesn’t mind that some days I achieve nothing but surfing the web and posting to my blog, and that other days are like this one, with immense productivity. I’m an outlier even by software engineering standards. I’m a bit of a loose cannon. But in any case; I’m worth more than he’s paying me and we both know it, and neither of us care terribly, so everything’s pretty damn sweet.
Got my assignment in on time. Think I’ve done it quite well (actually went to the library and read old journals and books and things – very scary and academic and cool at the same time: after all; it’s just about possible to pass a comp. sci degree with Google as your primary reference). Time will tell.
Chez Geek night tonight at the Ship. Looking forward to it.
Yesterday was a long day. After nine hours at work, had two and a half hours of First Aid refresher training at Aberystwyth ambulance station.
On the upside, I’d forgotten how subtly dark paramedics’ sense of humour can be… when one particularly overmoral woman expressed concern at a particular element of the training: “But they could die!”, one of the ‘medics responded, deadpan, with: “No; they’re already a corpse. They’re dead. They’re just lying there, being completely useless.” I like paramedics.
I have a lot of work to do this week – my final week full-time before starting again as a part-timer while I put some work towards graduating – and I’m getting bogged down in other people’s bureaucracy. I can’t get my client’s clients’ computers to connect to my client’s computer because my client’s network administrator has put a particularly secure firewall in the way, and he needs a list of IP addresses (unique identifiers for computers on TCP/IP networks, like the Internet) of all the servers on my client’s clients’ networks, but everybody’s got meetings at stupid times and I can never get hold of the people I need when I need them and… aarrgghh!!!
It’ll all be fine.
Alex, my incompetent co-worker, came up with the following gem in today’s meeting when talking about a product that would aid employers in securely tracking how long their employees actually spend working:
“It’s not going to have any of that… security… nonsense.”
I shall have to beat him to death later.
P.S. told you that this thing was going to get big, quick. The Register reports “All your Web typos are belong to us”, and I quote: “Already a backlash is building, with Net admins being urged to block Verisign’s catch-all domain. This could get very messy.”
I came second in the Cymru Prosper Wales “Enterprising Student” competition, which earned me £100, this morning. Pretty much made my late night and early morning worthwhile. Now I’m back at the office. Needed to come in this afternoon to deploy a new version of a piece of software to a client.
Think I pissed Claire off by trying to bum a lift into the office. Gave up and hoofed it in the end (tried to get the bike fixed – something’s gone wrong with the gears – but the bike shop didn’t have enough hands-on to get it done ‘while I waited’).
Knackered. But full of creamcakes, which is good.
In the absence of this work deadline and CPW, things should return to normal tomorrow. Then I can get back to some much-needed Three Rings code.
I need to get a t-shirt printed with “I’m blogging this” on it. Yes, I know ThinkGeek do one, but it’d be cheaper to have The Don here in Aberystwyth print one for me than to pay international shipping charges, considering it’s only a one-colour print.
Like Kit, I woke up surprisingly early. Then decided to go back to sleep and as such will now be late for work. Ah well.
Need to get ready for a presentation I have to give at the Park Hall Hotel tomorrow as my contribution to the Cymru Prosper Wales scheme, which funds small businesses in rural areas for employing undergraduates, and has been slipping my boss a few to give me a summer job, which I’d have had anyway. Hmm…
Paul left his shoes here. Does that mean he walked home barefoot last night?
Anyway, off to work…
It’s been a busy week. I’ve spent a lot of my time at the office, trying to get the replication model for Bovini working – causing much stress as it failed time and time again. For those of you without a grounding in computer science theory, replication is the art of making data be identical (and editable) in several places at once without the fundamental problems that this goes on to cause, such as data identity conflicts.
In this particular case, we have two master copies of a database, and five smaller copies of a particular one-fifth of the data each (plus a little shared data), split around seven UK sites, and who’s computers can only be made to talk to one another between the hours of midnight and 4am each weekday. So: not only does the program I’ve been writing (and sweating on, crying over, and shouting at, this week) have to pull all the data back together and spread it out, it also has to detect whether two users at different sites edit the same piece of data during the same day, work out who’s most likely to be ‘right’, and ‘fix’ the data accordingly. Or, if it’s not sure, know who to ask for assistance. It’s a clever program.
And now it seems to be done. And working. Great!
Unfortunately, working like a dog on this little project has only taken time (and energy) away from my preferred software project – Three Rings – a program I’m writing for free for National Nightline. I’m likely to have a busy weekend catching up!
Regardless, tonight… will be a night for relaxing – Bryn, Claire, Paul, Kit and I are going to spend the evening in the Ship & Castle, drinking Real Ale and playing Chez Geek. A perfect way to end a week.
Working late. I’ve got Club 977 (best 80’s cheese on the ‘net!) playing as loud as this computer goes, slamming out code at a rate more productive than I’ve been all week. Finally got past a bug that’d been troubling me for days. Phew! Just in time for a meeting tomorrow!
I’ve been getting a lot of concerned attention after my post, “Stress!”, earlier (I didn’t think I had so many avid readers). Thanks, all of you; you concern means a lot, but really – I’ll be okay: I land on my feet, remember! Just need to get my head down and get on with some stuff, that’s all, and a little bit of de-stressing onto the web was good, too.
A few more lines of code, methinks, before Claire arrives (she’s kindly giving me lifts to and from work while I’m being a lazy bugger and not sorting out my bike, the star).
Take care, y’all;
Things that are causing me excess stress and reduced sleep:
WORK
HOME
But, above it all – the killer:
End of rant.
Wouldn’t the world be so much better a place if Brits had to go through some kind of vetting procedure – a test of sorts – before they were permitted to go on holiday to Ibiza?
An example extract from an interview might be:
Interviewer : Question twelve: if you were to be granted passage to go to Ibiza, how would you spend your time there?
Applicant : I’d dress up as a girl, go out with my mates, get completely wrecked, make unwanted advances towards women, and take the piss out of the locals.
Interviewer : Okay… I’m afraid we’re going to have to decline your application. Have you considered Antarctica?
I’m writing this from the (badly-protected: just had to go to a page with a particularly funky JavaScript to break out of their front-end browser) BBC Wales bus at the Royal Welsh Show, where Alex and I are working on behalf of SmartData.
Suppose I’d better get back to work and let these kiddies have the ‘net connection back…