The occasional scrivener

I start my new job on Nov 2.

Thanks to all who’ve contacted me with congratulations!

Last October, the mothership decided that having two separate price comparison platforms was a bit unnecessary and said that the Smarter was the one to go with.

Most members of the tech team were let go, but me and some others were made the offer to stay on for a year to help with the transition.

It’s now almost time to leave, and well past time to get a new gig. So I’m officially stating I’m looking for work! so as to make me compose a new CV, soonest. It will be linked from here when it’s ready. Update: CV is done, if you’re interested, drop me a line.

Update 2009-09-18: Today I signed on as a support engineer for a company that develops resource management software. I’m starting right after the migration ends.

Thanks for all those who have tipped me about gigs, offered encouragement and congratulated me via Twitter and IRC!

We have a big fridge containing soda in the office. Latest news is that this is to be removed. Instead we’re going to get “fizzy water” from a cooler.

It’s a small thing, but it’s intensely irritating. It’s not as if we’re such a great company in other respects. Pay’s average, we work cheek by jowl in a bloody cellar, and now we don’t get free soda. Great decision.

Update: the hue and cry was enough to stop the plans. But the discussion has revealed a hidden strata of health Nazis in the office.

We had to call Dell server support the other day as a SATA RAID array was failing in a devel box. The box was still under service, and Dell sent out three replacement drives as the ones we had have reliability issues.

All in all, excellent service.

I got an email from Dell a few days later, asking me to fill in a survey about my experience. I have a lot to do, and didn’t have the time to fill in the survey. So I ignored the mail.

Yesterday I got a reminder to fill in the survey. Excuse me? Reminders are for invoices and things like that, tasks you are obligated to fulfill as part of a business transaction. Dell fulfilled their part of the contract to my full satisfaction, yet they’re bugging me about some random survey about their customer support.

The tone of the email is curt, peremptory. Very “you have not paid your bill” in content. I don’t need that kind of emails from a vendor. They’re getting our money, they should be less intrusive, or at least more polite.

OK, so that’s one day at work after my vacation. I’m a bit shell-shocked, in addition to all the urgent things that have to be fixed yesterday we have a backlog of stuff that had to be fixed yesterday a month ago.

Depressingly enough much of this is the same old issues we’ve been having since before the summer, but on the plus side this means we can glom it all into a few bugzilla requests and toss it over the fence to the system guys and the developers.

I’m feeling a hint of twinges in my wrists already and will try to alternate between input devices. I now have 3, a mouse to the left, a mousetrapper in the centre, and a trackball to the right.

Here’s to the weekend!

It’s now lunch hour in my last day before three weeks of vacation. I’m feeling pretty mellow, planning my Out of Office message and looking forward to catching the Germany — Argentina game later today.

Expect blogging to be even lighter than usual, I’m going to try to stay as far away from computers as possible.

Today was a day like the ones before my PFY started work. He’s on vacation, and an unbelievable amount of shit came down. Two computers reinstalled from scratch. One workplace set up, which entailed kludgily adding another 8-port switch to the networking cabinet because the Ciscos are full up. Three boxes delivered, me hauling them through the meeting room (with meeting in progress) that some idiot decided should be right inside the loading bay doors. I couldn’t just leave 30K SEK worth of computers lying around outside. On top of that two people from the London office with network connectivity problems to the home office, and a heap of other stuff.

But I still managed to end just under 20 issues in the queue, which is pretty good. We had around 80 on Monday.

My coworker and I will be in London on Friday to meet with the other EU minions of the mothership. The guys in the US are great people and they really try hard to make it work for us, but too often we feel a bit sidetracked when it comes to project planning and so on. Having all people in the same general timezone is a great advantage for problem solving. As we overlap only slightly with the US (a few hours every evening) it’s hard to keep track of stuff. Email only goes so far.

So we’re hoping to get some consensus from our part so we speak with one voice.

Sean in the UK office has promised us Guinness later (St. Patrick’s day!), and we will be staying in London on our own dime Saturday—Sunday. If you want to hook up, call or text me.

By the way, I’m looking forward to 3 days away from a computer, and I think both me and my family could use a break from each other.

We had a discussion at work today regarding some people’s work times. We agreed that everyone should be in the office between 10:00 and 17:00, even though I personally feel that 9:00—16:00 would be better. I was also informed that working from home is not allowed except under special circumstances, which makes me even less inclined to help the US team while I’m at home. If I can’t be able to get credit for it, why should I do it for free?

One good thing is that there won’t be time-clocks or other paraphernalia of fascist oppression, but I’d still like to have some kind of check of how much I’m working. So I’d like to find a web-based (AJAXy?) time-tracker/scheduler that could allow me to keep tabs on what I’m doing. Especially since the support of the fugly hack that is our online questionnaire system was just dumped in our lap as a kind of reverse gift. A white, leprous, incontinent elephant that will suck up even more of our copious free time.

I’m a bit disappointed that we had to have this meeting at all. It would seem to me pretty clear that if you’re part of a team you should try to be in the premises at least from 9:30 in the morning, even if you work late as a result of coming in late. “Lone hacker” just doesn’t cut it anymore at work.

Then there’s the case of the mothership foisting their email naming scheme on us without our consent or agreement. I personally feel that this is an issue that’s so unimportant that it’s barely worth mentioning. Lets hope we can defuse the situation before it gets out of hand and kicked upstairs for “arbitration”.

Kenneth Starr of Monicagate fame is going after the PCAOB (paywall warning). This is the regulating authority set up by the SOX act. If he and his “free-enterprise” cronies could get it declared unconstitutional, SOX could be history.

As someone who has suffered the death of a thousand cuts that is a SOX audit, I wish them the best of luck. I’m sure that US business needed chastisement after Enron, but SOX goes way too far in the other direction. It’s like a farce, a parody of bureaucratic interference in business practices.

To whom it may concern: my workday begins at 09:00 CET today.

Marc Eisenstadt:

We’re entering an era in which something that Stowe has often written about is going to become an essential skill: “continuous partial attention”. I thought I was pretty good at it, but I am slowly-but-surely observing everyone around me slipping into a kind of cognitive quicksand, getting increasingly grumpy and stressed out, and I don’t like it.

Can we go on like this? Or will the knowledge worker of the future be perpetually 17 years old, capable of handling the continous partial attention that modern worklife demands? Where’s the time needed for reflection, plotting the strategy for the next big thing?

I had to whale on (some of) my co-workers for sending email messages with empty subjects. For my sins, I have to use Outlook, and the only feature that redeems this piece of crap is the “Conversation” grouping, which gathers messages with the same subject in one place. Of course, an empty subject is not only devoid of content, it gets stuffed into the previous conversation with empty subjects, thus getting lost in the noise.

As far as I’m concerned, you get what you deserve if you don’t write a subject — any subject. And what you deserve is that we ignore your email until you bother us about it. In which case we will honestly say that we can’t bloody find it.

But if you’re feeling chastened, get more cool email-writing tips from this entry at the 43folders blog. Lots of good stuff there.

… where I should have stayed in bed.

I made the fundamental mistake of not eating before getting to work with a guy from the mothership in CA, thereby probably making a pretty stupid mistake (jury’s still out on whether it’s fixable — I’m hoping for recent backups).

Los Angeles — Stockholm is pretty pessimal timezone-wise. There’s a tiny overlap (9 am in the US, 6 pm in Sweden) that makes it theoretically possible to work together and have conferences, but while one part is bright and early, the other is tired and wants to go home. Or hungry.

Lesson for next time: eat before working.

Update: by “pessimal” above, I didn’t mean that the overlap prevented working: rather, it encourages people to try to work by meetings and phone calls instead of recognizing the futility of this and trying something else, like email.

That said, sometimes you just have to talk to someone to sort things out… sigh.

Must implement the dev parts soonest.

If the spec is unclear, don’t ask the PM about it, just interpret it in a way that is the easiest for you, even if it makes no sense.

Joel describes the five software worlds

This description of “internal software” rang a lot of ( warning ) bells:

Internal software only has to work in one situation on one company’s computers. This makes it a lot easier to develop. You can make lots of assumptions about the environment under which it will run. You can require a particular version of Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Office, or Windows. If you need a graph, let Excel build it for you; everybody in our department has Excel. (But try that with a shrinkwrap package and you eliminate half of your potential customers.)

Here usability is a lower priority, because a limited number of people need to use the software, and they don’t have any choice in the matter, and they will just have to deal with it. Speed of development is more important. Because the value of the development effort is spread over only one company, the amount of development resources that can be justified is significantly less. Microsoft can afford to spend $500,000,000 developing an operating system that’s only worth about $80 to the average person. But when Detroit Edison develops an energy trading platform, that investment must make sense for a single company. To get a reasonable ROI you can’t spend as much as you would on shrinkwrap. So sadly lots of internal software sucks pretty badly.

( emphasis added )

My day basically looks like this.

Time for a new category, I think: work.

I was looking at the comments in Russ’ blog and found a comment by a guy named Ian Landsman. Apparently his company is developing a helpdesk package.

Let’s face it, I’m a one-person helpdesk. That’s not too much fun, I’d rather be a developer. But if I can find some software that makes that part of the job easier, I’m going for it.

We have a little perl hack that keeps track of all emails to the support box, and allows us to post comments, cancel, and close tickets. But the knowledge behind solving issues is buried in the email conversations relating to that ticket. It’s not very integrated, but then, not many things at work are.

So a package that can take a request from a mail message, plonk it in a DB, and track each and every response and annotation to the ticket would be a big help.

Some other packages referenced:

• MyHelpdesk — no incoming mail interface
• OpenIT — Same here

Well, my job may not be the must fun one in the world, but at least I’m not working in the gaming industry.