previously known as [cold][wet][durham], [dirty][grimy][london],[busy][shiny][toon],[frantic][crowded][south]
Cocktails. I love making them, but I don’t really drink them (though I enjoy a good martini) but the white russian, and its grumpy teenage child the black russian, captive me at the moment. With their coffee tones, and warming goodness, even though they are cold, they are like a hug.
Image by Getty Images via Daylife The news is full of tales about the youth crime, gangs, “the break down of the family” and “the break down of society”. It’s very fashionable to blame drugs, schooling, teen parents, lone parents, teachers, drugdealers, politians and a hundred other people.
Well, I’m sitting watching Nick Broomfield’s film “Nobody Cares“, which was filmed in 1971, about the relocation to tower blocks of families from terraced housing in Liverpool. Its heartbreaking, moving, and everything that a documentary should be.
Nothing is new, there are no new problems, as I was once told by a manager at an IT firm, and maybe thats true.
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The UK really is the home of innovation, really it is. It’s not been a week since Twitter announced they are not going to be able to provide an SMS service in the UK (I’d not even finished my blog post about Orange missing a huge opertunity here) and already a small UK firm has stepped in to fill the gap.
Tweeteroo is run by those crazy kids at Senokian, and run a service whereby your Direct Messages from Twitter will be forwarded to your mobile for a few pence (probably just the service charge I think). As I only ever had DM’s directed to my mobile and each and every tweet (because that would be just silly), it replaces exactly the functionality that I lost, probably for less than a fiver a month (I’m not that popular).
To sign up you’ll need a code - but give “coldclimate” a go - there are 10 up for grabs.
Impressive work Jake and team.
Image via WikipediaI’m staying in a hotel this evening. It’s rather nice, with a great room and a lovely view. For £150 midweek it should be however, especially as there is little to no reason to stay here on business as far as I can tell. I don’t begrudge them the 150 notes, it is not an unreasonable price.
I do however begrudge the price of everything else. The hotel bar is charging nearly a fiver for a pint of Carling, inexpertly poured by a teenager. I used to be a senior member of staff at a very busy bar, and the “bar top price” of a pint of Carling (eg. the cost of it sitting in a glass, staff paid, rent paid, all in, everything else is profit, price) was around 60p, given or take. This is not so many years ago that this is not a relative point. I imagine it is about £1. I balk at paying over £3 for a glass of fizzy crap, but over a fiver is having a “giraffe” as the rhyming slang suggests.
Next daft price is the room service. I have absolutely no doubt that the pizza that is listed will be little more than cheese on toast. I’ll be lucky is it’s been in an oven not a microwave, and I’ll eat my own hat (probably a tastier option) if there is any sembalence of thin crispy crusty or finest buffalo mozzarella* as promised. Any American or Italian with even the slighted jingoistic national pride would hurl it in the face of the underpaid youth who will bring it to the door and demand a refund.
Why a refund? Because this tasty treat will set you back a full £15. It the fucker is bigger than 7″ across I would be staggered meaning that it is (PI*3.5^2)/15 = 2.5 square inches were pound or 50p for a postage stamp sized piece. This is before you find the footnote which politely informs you that ” All room service dishes incur a standing fee of £2″ meaning that this pizza is now £17!
So hotel owners, listen up. I have no problem with paying you for a room, that is after all what I’ve come for, and I’ll even stump up for food and beers, but not at prices which make me feel like I am being fucked with my pants still on. You know very well that I’m not going to pop out to get a takeaway**, or a 4 pack of beers, so you take the liberty of snatching my cash whilst I am hostage in your padded cell. Shame on you.
* All mozzarella is made from buffalo milk, or it is not mozzarella just gooey cheese. It one more fashionista foodie tells me about Buffalo Mozzarella, I shall scream and probably try to kill them with asparagus. Paddy, I am looking at you here (not that I think you’ll read this)
** I often work away form home in hotels, and often do go out for food because the hotel restaurant looks like a scene from a bad British comedy in the 1970s. One evening I brought an indian takeaway back to my room (I was up late coding) and as I passed through the reception the little man behind th desk informed me I could not bring my own food and drink onto the premises. he could not explain why - it was just “the rules”. I ignored him, went to my room, ate and slept. In the morning the manager demanded to know why I didn’t get room service. I explained (as loudly as possible in front of other guests) I had seen a rat in the corridor (a lie I admit) leading me to think the kitchens were not sanitary. Let this be a lesson all of you trumped up mini-Hitlers.
I used to work in a team which took all of it’s work from tickets raised in a queuing system. It was a simple way for people around the world to raise requests to us and for the team to manage their work load.
Each ticket has an area of work (so the right people could pick it up), a description, and a priority rating. Exactly as you would expect. People were really good as being vague in the description (”server down”, oh really? which of the 47 server are you talking about kid?), and the area of work (UNIX Systems Administrators are not Oracle DataBase Admins) but these sort of problems were easily dealt with, and gave me a daily chance to tell some poor tetsing newbie they were an idiot.
Priority rating was a problem that we never cracked however. The original software had three priority ratings, which were pickable from a drop-down menu, Low, Medium and High. Of course, everybody considers their problem to be the most important thing in the world and they pick High. With a huge queue of jobs all labelled as High it gets difficult for people to spot the genuinely high priority job (”The entire test suite is unaccessable”) from the very-important-to-one-person problem (”my password has expired”).
After a while things got so bad that a real “Us and Them” mentality had developed, with people raisng tickets automatically picking High (because it turned out that their management staff were compiling graphs showing how bad our teams response times were) and the technical teams working in a strickly “first come first served” method (”Well they’re all labelled High so we’ve no way to tell them apart”). Something had to be done.
I had 2 possible solutions, adding a new priority rating and splitting the priority ratings into 2 parts.
Firstly - adding a new rating. I suggested we have a “Zero” priority rating. Many of the things raised were routine, and thus did not demand an immediate responce. For example a request to ” Please backup the Environment One database from cold next Tuesday” raised a week in advance could have a zero rating. The backup team will take 5 minutes to slot it into the schedule, and they have a week to do it. Sadly this solution was not adopted.
Secondly - splitting the Priority. Having a single variable of “priority” doesn’t distinguish how damaging this situation is. I suggested we break it into two options: Urgency and Impact. The Urgency gives a level of immediate, so by example, “Environment One is unaccessible” is of High level of Urgency. “My backup needs doing next week” would have a low level of Urgency.
Impact ratings give a view of how damaging this issue is. The backup example has a high level of Impact, as does the inaccessible environment (if people are actively using it). A user who has locked their password out has a high level of Urgency, but a low level of Impact.
Of course, all of these ratings systems need simple guidelines to help people judge how to rate their problems, and people will always pick one rating higher than they really should, but maybe methodologies like this can help.
As for my old team and the escalating wars between Us and Them, well, a solution was found in the end. A new Priority was added, “Critical”, and everybody started using it instead. Words were exchanged, tempers raised, blood pressure raised, and I engineered my way out of the team and off to a different job. When the frantic levels of work dropped off aparently the system works again, but I can’t help thinking that it still has a fatal flaw.
I’ve written, and written about, 6 word stories, several times in the past, but finally today I got my arse in gear any made … 6 Word Stories. You can read the last ten stories submitted, and submit your own.
Go, read, write, enjoy, etc etc.
In the last week I must have driven nearly a thousand miles, which given the current price of petrol*, and the size of the UK is not bad going. Something made me think of a game my ex used to play (or that she told me about anyway) called Car Flirting. It seemed an idea too good to only be stuck in my head (which cannot sleep at present) and hers (and I suspect she no longer plays).
The idea is simple: by regulating your speed, you try and flirt with other drivers.
You pick a “target”, that being a car which you think is likely to contain somebody you fancy. As a student this meant spotting a Golf or other small affordable car. You then siddle up to them, and overtake, so you get to have a look at them. If it’s a hottie, then give them a smile as you go past, if you’ve mis-selected, then simply get your foot down and head for the next target.
Should you have selected well and the car you passed contained a boy/girl whom you wished to play with, pull in in front of them, or possibly a car or to in front of them. After a while, long enough for them to have dwelled on you a bit, slow down enough such that they end up having to pass you. etc etc.
I’ve no idea if she ever had any luck with the technique (I doubt it was really a valid method of meeting a life partner), or where or not it was just a way to pass the time on long motorway journeys (she lived at one end of the country, university was at the other), but until today the idea hadn’t re-occured to me. I gave it a quick go, but to be absolutely honest, I spend more time avoiding middle lane sitters, speed cameras, BMW drivers and Vans Who Move Lanes Without Indicating to make enough spare brain cycles to devote to trying the make nice with other drivers. Such is life.
* Dearest American cousins, if I hear one more of you on our news grumbling about $4 a gallon for “gas” I shall explode. Try $2.50 a litre, what is what it roughly is in the UK.
