OK, I’m going to have to work hard to keep this positive, but I’ve gone a bit bonkers today. Maybe it’s the combined effect of decorating, having the windows done, having a new carpet laid, rearranging the office, and having two calls to Microsoft Support all causing me grief, or maybe it’s because I had my hair cut last week.

Having my hair cut does occasionally send me loop-the-loop, and I can often be seen stroking my very short hair repeatedly while rocking slowly forwards and backwards. This time however it’s more likely all the things going on at once, the week before Christmas.

No one really to blame but ourselves, but it’s lots of work on the house and stupid calls to Microsoft at work, meaning that my days have been very long over the last few weeks, still staying positive, the windows are now finished¹, the room is decorated², and at least one of my support calls to Microsoft looks like it has a solution³, so it should all be plain sailing from her until the new year!

^{1, Ventrolla have done their stuff, all windows now open, close and are draft free, they just need painting.
2, the room is decorated, it has no furniture, or curtain rails.
3, Microsoft have ‘admitted’ the problem and are going to fix it (sometime next month)}

Yeah, I’ve been quite quiet this week. Mainly because I’ve been frantic busy at work;

Over the last two years now, there’s being this project, nothing dead exciting, it’s all to do writing something to provide a way of managing the university’s computers, anyway around three years ago i wrote something for this. it was a rush job, but it worked, just. Like i said it was a rush job, then in a moment of work openness “I said it was the worst thing i had written and was surprised it worked on a daily basis” which is all true, that being said it was and is a bad bit of code (for me) but it works and is still working to this day.

Anyway, it turns out that when you say things like that people insist that you re-write it all, even if the bad code is OK. Because hey you’ve said it’s bad so it mustn’t work, right? well i think that’s the logic. So since then this project has been off-on-off-on-suspended-and back on now for what is approaching two years?

I’ve dug my heals in a bit i admit, I’ve said it would take three months to write, which is true, it will, especially when you take into account the amount of interruptions i get in an average week, without the interruptions it’s about three weeks work. you see the sad fact is, a weeks solid coding takes a month, because of the office environment i work in, and you wonder why i get downhearted?

Anyway you would think three months is a ice age, projects usually get around two weeks or 6 years, and no where in-between, I often say if a project scheduled for more than 6 weeks it’s doomed because 5 weeks in someone will move the goal posts, and your back to square one.

This week, project leaders have been away, and the office is unseasonably quiet (training courses I think) so I’ve been getting my head down, after all I’m nearly two months into a three month project, sooner or later someone is going to ask to see some results aren’t they? It’s not that i haven’t done a lot, there’s’ a lot of ground work in this one, with most of the clever stuff happening at the back where there is very little to show for it. So this week has been a fleshing out week.

No one else seemed willing so I’ve given my self a deadline, the end of the month for what I’m give the rather pompous title of Equivalent Functionality Release. That is to say the re-written ground up all bells and whistles project will by the end of the month match the one week, knocked up as quickly as possible version for what it does. Not that impressed? No this is my worry too, you see as I’ve said it’s all in the background, and it’s a bit like building a house, it takes forever to get the foundations in but once that’s done the building just shoots up. I’m just worried that this isn’t something people are use to.

In work, In order to get any ideas accepted you usually have to produce working prototypes which often are then taken as working copies and thrust into production, so the concept of lots of time and nothing to show could be a hard one for people to accept, still I’ve been quite productive this week, but it has meant that I’ve been a bit pottered out (both in work and at home) So I’ve been a bit quiet.

I got all dressed up for work today, It’s been a while since I bothered with a shirt and tie to work. Being locked in the tower with no out side contact, I didn’t really see the point (oh and I was depressed about ‘that’ Job). Anyway, today I felt the need to dress up, it was big meeting in the Roscoe board room, I’ve very little idea who Roscoe was one thing I am sure of is that it’s not the Sheriff Rosco of Dukes and Hazard fame.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of the meeting, it was just about stuff, including DES (the thing I work on). The format of the meeting followed most I’ve been to at this level: post-it notes.

I think there was a course or something that senior management got sent on, where the post-it note meeting technique was taught. For us non top-level management types this is the drill, you have two colour of post-it’s one one you write things that work and on the others you put problems (coincidently it’s always yellow for good things and pink for problems), I think the “things that worked” post-it’s are just to prevent it from becoming a moan-fest really, because we are all there to complain otherwise we wouldn’t be motivated enough to turn up.

Anyway, you write your post-it notes, stick them on the wall, and then people discuss them (why did you write that? You fool?) then we have a cup of tea, then we write some more post it notes on how to fix things (a lot less of these, we didn’t come to fix things, we came to moan). Then we talk about them (that will never work! You fool!). And then we go home. The post-it notes are then collected together then binned sorted through and a document is produced with outcomes.

We all go home, with a nice sense of having vented our problems, and the senior management, get to connect with the people.

I am being a bit cynical really, it wasn’t all that bad there were bourbon biscuits.

i’m a bit down today, and I’m not quite sure why? Maybe it’s the incessant rain out the window, or the fact that I’ve been writing documentation none stop for the last 5 days. Who knows ?

Still at least tonight is treat night in the Jump house. A Nice bottle of Wine and Some Chocolate Cake should cheer me up.

I was doing well with the workload today, but as I said yesterday, it wasn’t going to last. Within 10 minutes of each other three separate problems all landed on my desk, taking most of today, and a large chunk of tomorrow with them, oh well, it was to good to last.

News that may come to a shock to a few of you, I had a productive day today at work, almost the whole way though, It’s mainly the curse of the open office, and the fact that after *cough* 6 *cough* years working at one place you tend to become responsible and know about quite a few things, so interruptions and questions are all part of the daily life.

Programming however, is not a process that can be easily interrupted, not the way I do it anyway.

My Desk, on a tidy day

It has been suggested that it takes, around 15 minutes to get into the ‘Zone’ where you head is in the right place and filled with all the right bits of salient information for you to be able to piece what you are doing together efficiently, effectually and not least correctly. No I work in an office where, when it’s full 15 minutes of interruptions time is rare. So I’m just getting my head around something when…..Kevin?’ and it all falls out of my head, and tumbles on the floor - a lot like my finishing move when juggling. I dutifully answer the query, because I’m genuinely a nice guy, honest. And then I try to pick up the pieces again, and this continues through out the day.

There are strategies to deal with this in an open office, head phones is a favorite, but to be honest it doesn’t work, I’m considering a big sign that says, “I am Holding several interrelated concepts in my head at once please do not disturb” but one I think that’s a bit to long winded, and the size of the text will have to be small to fit it on the sign, and then people will have to come close to read it! And then they will ask me about it! The coding stare is one I haven’t quite mastered, mainly because I have my back to a lot of people, so they wouldn’t get the benefit of it anyway, and then there is the working away from your desk, which is all well and good, except my desk has all my computers on it, set up the way I like them, so it would probably defeat the exercise.

Anyway, today wasn’t like that I got some work done, with hardly any interruptions, I don’t know maybe I was more awake than is the norm for a Monday in the office, or maybe I just struck it lucky, I don’t for a second expect this working streak to last, that’s why I have a project that if I could get my head down and do, would be 3-4 weeks work, ear-marked as 3 months! I expect it will take that too, because around 6 weeks into something like this, the political world shifts underneath you and something far less significant has suddenly become the most important thing the world.

M,

You we’re right, I’ve read that post on this website (it’s gone now), and it very easy to read it totally the other way to what I meant to say. When I wrote it last night I was worried that if I carried on I would let my emotions get the better of me and say things I didn’t mean, when in reality, stopping when I did left it open to far to much interpretation.

I don’t for a moment doubt that you worked hard for the job, and I have total faith in the fact that it was a fair interview process. When I say I expected you to get the job, I did, but not because of any other reason that you have been doing it well for the past twelve months, I think it would be unfair to you if that wasn’t counted in the interview, and if I was in Normans position I would appoint the person with the most experience without question.

My anger isn’t towards you or the interview processed at all, if anything I was just angry that I wasn’t given an opportunity to apply for the post in the first instance, I felt that the decision twelve months ago to ring fence the maternity cover to cwis never gave me the opportunity to apply under different circumstances (not that I’m saying I would have got it then either, or infact that Kevin would have let me move, as we know when I then tried)

As I said, I didn’t think for a moment it wouldn’t be a fair interview process. to be honest, I am of the option that if you do a good enough job covering, they shouldn’t have to put the job out to interview, as the last 12 months for you will have been more rigorous than any interview could be.

In the end I went for the job mainly because I’ve always wanted it, and deep down I knew that, but deep down I think I always knew that you had the experience and qualities to take it, I was trying to talk my self down as not to get to upset at the end. I’m not sure that worked but hey ho.

Again I am sorry if I gave the impression that in any way you don’t deserve the job, it wasn’t my intention.

with your permission I would like to put this reply on the web site in place of that ‘post’, as I don’t want to leave it hanging in the balance and look like I just took off the comments because you asked me to, and people interpret that as any implicit belief in anything they thought it said.

- Kevin.