I’ve suffered complete computer failure over the last few days, First the second power supply for my laptop has died. So I am no resorting to swapping between one broken power supply and the other, and the 50 or so minutes of battery life I get when (and if) the laptop is fully charged.

this is just another nail in my laptop’s coffin really, for the last 12 months, it’s being running incredibly hot, and as a result quite slow and the ‘end’ key is busted, and all wobbly. So I won’t be replacing the ?60 power supply, given how they are different makes of supply that have failed in almost the same way, I’m beginning to suspect the laptop, may be the root cause.

then one of our other ’servers’ has failed, the age old compaq we got for ?50 to act as our mail server (a while back when I was messing about with stuff) has died. We don’t really need that computer so no replacement there, the only things left working our Ruth’s computer (still has a dodgy network card though) and my Dell the first computer I ever owned.

We’ve recently recommended people we know to buy Dell PCs, they are quite cheap, nice and as my ancient Dell is testament to, very reliable. I however am not replacing my PC with a dell, I’m building my own, simply because I know how, and for the price of a low spec dell, I can get a slightly better spec homebrew PC with oodles of memory, and have two monitors building your own PC isn’t as big a saving as it use to be, and it’s really not worth it if you don’t have things you are planning to reuse, and the time to get it all talking together.

I’ve ordered the bits, and anyday now, I’m expecting two big boxes of stuff, and a fun night or two of sticking it all together, gosh I’m sad.

They don’t do a very good job of telling me exactly what the difference is, but the beeb are reporting (that’s what the do wee) that the sleep council (do they do that well?) are telling us that Lark’s should take it easy because the clocks have gone forward.

Larks should take it easy this Sunday and Monday, and not do anything that takes great concentration

so that’s me off the hook then :o)

Well it’s still not official, because paperwork can have a tendency to take it’s time, but one of the reasons I’ve not been posting much stuff to the blog, is because….. I’ve got a new job! yippe me.

If all goes quickly (and it is touch and go at the moment) I will be leaving the university at the end of April, and starting my new job as a Web Developer for Liverpool Direct (an offshoot of the council) in may.

I’ve already blogged about it a bit, but until now those posts haven’t been published, I’ve just published them all so they are dotted around the last month or so. For convenience here’s a list of the posts.

• Pastures Purple
• Telling the Boss
• Lets call the whole thing off
• It’s all quite scary (and a bit sad)
• publish and be dammed
• it’s all slighty more real now
• why are you leaving ?
• Interview Questions
• Monday Motivation

see quite a few post there it turns out.

Just to continue ‘harping’ on about light bulbs, the guardian yesterday had an article about changing everyone over to energy efficient lights, and they’ve got someone in the power industry to do the maths for them.

A clearer picture - and one that puts the “megawatts” value of CFLs into perspective - comes from Jonathan Smith of E.ON, Powergen’s parent company. “Changing every light fitting in all 20m households in the UK to energy-saver bulbs would result in a reduction on fuel bills of around 4.8bn - the cost of building 64 offshore wind farms, 53 biomass power stations, or 14 gas-fired power stations.”

that’s probably a lot more accurate than my maths about lightbulbs from a few weeks ago; but it’s also much much more saving than I estimated.

Following on from Ruth’s post about Daisy’s vocabulary development, it should be noted, that she is obviously very pleased with Mummy and Daddy’s development too. In recent weeks Daisy has moved to pointing to bits of her body (head, mouth, etc) and waiting for us to say the word. If we get it right (which we do most times) then we get a round of applause.

She must be so proud!

So somewhere along the line, our Car Tax Registration details where wrong between the us, the dealer and the DVLA. This means our car was registered on the DVLA database against the wrong house number and hence we didn’t get a renewal form, which because you don’t look at those sorts of things means the car tax slipped, and we got fined.

I’m quite annoyed, while at the same time in a typically British way resigned to the consequences.

It looks like from the form we have, the DVLA entered it wrong into there database, but they deny all culpability for these types of things, so we will still have to pay ?80. and ruth is now having to spend tommorow running to chester (because liverpool doesn’t have a DVLA office!) to get the new disc. That’s just so annoying!

Most people will agree that some Monday mornings can be difficult to motivate your self, and get into work mode, especially if you’ve had an extra long weekend. I can tell you it’s ten times worse, when you add the fact that you’re leaving your current job in 5 weeks.

maybe caffeine will help?

So one of the things that’s being going around my mind, based on my recent experiences is. Just what makes a good interview question to ask developer?

I’m a firm believer that asking technical ‘quiz’ questions, doesn’t really work, it doesn’t separate out the good programmers, from those who’ve read the documentation before they’ve walked into the room, for example you may ask, what is polymorphism? (clue it’s not that episode of morph, where Chas* cloned him). Now I’m a quite decent programmer if I don’t say so myself, can have a go at describing this of the top of my head, but in reality, the person who swallowed the book just before they went in to the interview could give you a better answer without really understanding it (the lesson here would be, if someone reels of a textbook answer, they got it from a textbook).

So just what can you ask to separate the 1’s from the 0’s?

Well before we start, let me just point out, I’ve not been on the interviewing course, so I have no idea if you can ask these types of questions, without going against all fair interview techniques, but if it was totally up to me.

What books do you read?
When I told Ruth she said, “what like terry pratchet”, and initially I thought no, it’s more “what books relating to the field do you read”, but then I thought a bit more, and yes, if somebody answered, “I’ve read every terry pratchet novel twice, and I am the owner of the terry pratchet fan fiction site, where I’ve written several noveleet’s about disc world” then that gives you a good incite into somebody’s persona.

The problem is that there is of course no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to this one, it’s far to subjective, but I think if the right person came to interview, this would be the question to make them stand out. (for me the answer, C++ Hackbook & learn yourself perl in 24 hours are the ‘wrong’ answer)

Anymore good questions?
I think the point here is that the best questions aren’t necessarily about the subject you’re interviewing for, the beeb have some nightmare interview questions, which if nothing else, make you glad they’ve never happened to you. (a jaffa cake is a biscuit by the way), of course we could just look to Microsoft, who after all have at least a few good developers working for them. they have a range of interview questions with some scarrly technical and also more of the wall questions.

It turns out I agree with Bram Cohen (inventor of bittorrent):
“Interviews are practically worthless for screening candidates. In an interview you can tell if a person is a pleasant conversationalist, and you can give some technical questions to rule out the truly inept, but beyond that you might as well be rolling dice.”

I have to say, I absolutely despise where do you see yourself in five years? It’s the most thinly veiled, do you have ambition and drive question I’ve ever seen, I mean who answers “duh I don’t know, I thought I would just bum about in this job for a bit”

*I’ve checked and Tony Hart’s website says it’s chas (pronounced Chaz)

it’s the hardest question you can get from someone you currently work with.

• because i didn’t want to get stuck in the same boring job for the rest of my life
• because there are no job propects
• becasue in five years, we will still be working on the same thing, and it won’t have moved on
• because the politics is everywhere and just grinds you down

All of these tend to leave the impression that you are saying, “you’re life sucks, and i’m better than that” which isn’t why i’m leaving, although all those reasons are part of why i’m leaving.

The paper works arrived for the job, so it’s all a bit more official. It’s still not official official, because it’s dependent on references, and medical information being passed back and forth. But I now have a piece of paper telling me I got the job and how much they are going to pay me (although I’m due for a cost of living rise in April, before I even start!).

I still haven’t told everybody in work yet, mainly because it’s a Saturday, but also because I wanted to wait for the piece of paper. Mondays going to be fun though, almost first thing we have a project meeting, so I think I will use that as the opportunity to tell people. Stuart already knows so he will be prepared, and hopefully he has some ideas as to who will take over what.

I spent all of last week writing documentation. And I suspect I will spend most of the next 5 weeks doing the same, with all my holidays taken into account I should finish in around 5 weeks, get a fortnight off, and then start my new job beginning of May.

I’ve gotten over most of the initial shock and now I’m really looking forward to it and no doubt I will be chomping at the bit by may,

It’s funny how memorable moments come about, the famous Accrington Stanley milk advert was meant to be Tottenham Hotspur but they objected.

Anyway, Accrington now heading back to the league, are honoring the bloke who started in the advert, “Exacly”

I went for a wonder into town for lunch today. I needed some fresh air, a little break from the hum of the computers.

On my walk I popped into Waterstones; for a while now I’ve been thinking I need something interesting to read, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell, basically it’s a book about how little things push something from just doing ok to being huge. Apparently this book is a good example because it’s now a world wide best seller, and load of people are talking about it. I heard about it, because Malcom Gladwell now has a new book out called Blink which is about thinking without thinking, which some people say is good but not as good. Still you have to read the first one I suppose.

Anyway, that’s all a quite long winded given I didn’t find the book, but I did see several others that all followed a certain trend. A lot of the management/Selfhelp books have silly titles, while in the book shop I saw Purple Cow (Be Remarkable), Who Moved My Cheese (Embrace Change), Fish! (be energetic and enthusiastic), and How Full is your Bucket? (work life Balance).

I think Purple Cow sums it up, these books have silly names so they stand out, people read them, and management can look all trendy by saying they’ve read who moved my cheese, and are embracing the principles of FISH!

So I’m bringing my own corporate self help statement to the world, “Think Pencil”, it’s all about how a pencil is useful for so many things but you have to keep it sharp, and the rubber is great for changing things, but it always leaves a mark.

Kevin, is currently in a bit of a funny mood

It’s all very well having freedom of speech, but you do have to think about the consequences.

One of the questions that have been floating around in my mind since I got this new job, is do I back publish all those blog posts where I rant about things at work? To give you a summary most of these are just me venting my frustrations, product X was a stupid mistake; we are wasting money on product Y because person Q has dodgy morals.

At the time, I decided not to publish these rants because they would no doubt land me in trouble, and they had already served there purpose getting it out of my system, but now I am free of the shackles of worrying about what people think (although references are still pending) do I publish and be dammed?

Well I’ve thought about it and while I’m free to publish, I’m not going to. Firstly why upset people? It’s all in the past now, me ranting about it won’t change that, it may bring things back in to peoples minds, it may even give people who didn’t already know some of the facts, something to get upset about, but overall it will upset people.

Secondly; what message does this send to my new bosses? Don’t tell me anything because I will remember it, write it down, and at sometime in the future, I will tell the world and it’s wife.

So on the whole I don’t think I will thank you.

like with all these things, change can be scary, and I would be lying if I wasn’t a bit daunted by changing jobs. Currently it’s the fear of the unknown that is the greatest.

I’m not scared that I’ll be ‘found out to be stupid’, because I’m quietly confident in my technical abilities, after all I’ve worked in quite a large IT department for over 6 years, it would be shocking if everybody else was stupid.

No I’m worried that the people there won’t like me, or that my desk will be horrible, and that I will be in a basement store cupboard, with nothing for company but the Steam Pipe distribution system.

Just what does this say?

Well firstly let me tell you what it is.

This is my great, great, great grandfather’s occupation, at the time of the marriage of his daughter (my great,great grandmother) to my great, great grandfather.

Know I have no idea what that says, all I know is that they lived in the vauxhall area of Liverpool in 1874, at the time almost everybody who worked, worked on the docks, so I am (maybe incorrectly) assuming it has something to do with that, but still, what is a Hordeshoeen ?

answers in the comments please.

Update:
The favorite theory so far, is that this says horseshoeer and that the Priest couldn’t spell so that’s why it’s got so many e’s in it.

So the conversation with Ruth goes something like this

“you do realize one thing about this new job and Microsoft outlook don’t you?”

look of extreme horror, as the realization dawns, that our installation of Microsoft office is tied to the university’s academic licenses.

“Oh, Kevin, call them back, and take it all back!”

Ruth lives by outlook, so it’s no surprise she’s a bit upset. Still I have been tasked with finding a suitable replacement. We’ve ruled out actually buying Microsoft office, it’s far to expensive (we could just wave goodbye to any pay increase), replacing word and the like should be easy enough. It’s just outlook and it’s calendar

Still Ruth pushed me to go for the job, so she can’t really blame me.

So, I’m leaving; first thing to do, tell the boss. Not officially mind, You don’t want to go around giving up one job before you know for sure that you’ve got another one to go to. But it seemed polite only to given him a heads up, about it all.

“I’ve got some news”

“Is it good news or bad news?”

“Well it’s bad news for you, it’s quite good news for me. I’ve been offered at job a Liverpool Direct working as a web developer”

“You’ve not accepted it have you?”

“Yes”

All in all I think he took it well. It’s not like it wasn’t on the cards, we’ve talked about how I was getting to the point where I couldn’t progress any further, with no posts above me becoming vacant, and how I was ‘Ambitious’ although where he got that from I have no idea.

We’ve decided that around two months, what with all the work I have to hand over and the fact I have 10′ish days holiday to take, means that I will be leaving work mid April and starting my new job first week of may. Only 29 more working days to go!

Gosh this is happening fast.