TEdALOG Lite II

Kangaroo Court, Too.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:03:30 -0500

The hugely beaten-up and over-hyped kangaroo cull. *sigh* What can I say?

I wish the poor bleeding heart nurturing caring activists would look at things from a slightly more realistic perspective. Every year in my growing up years, there would be a carload of tourists in the Northwest that had died, rolling their car to avoid kangaroos. As far as I'm concerned, if it comes down to one family losing their lives or 400 kangaroos being culled, hand me the rifle cos human life is precious.

I'd like for each of those protestors to have to drag one child's body out of a wrecked car along the roadside, and then tell me they still prefer to save the cute fluffy oversized bunnies.

I'd like for each of those protestors to go and see a decade of someone's hard work building up farm and grazing land, only to see it vanish under literally acres of kangaroos.

And I'm so glad they made total idiots of themselves distressing a pen full of kangaroos that were recovering after sedation following medical fertility treatments... In front of everyone in Australia, they showed themselves to be the ***wits I suspected they are.

They fight crime...

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:18:36 -0500

He's a sword-wielding amnesiac cat burglar haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a mistrustful French-Canadian museum curator from aristocratic European stock. They fight crime!

Perforated

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:22:12 -0500

Today I had a prick of a day - flu shot, blood sample for antibodies, blood sample for possible allergies, I feel like a pincushion.

The Acremaster Diplomat Strikes Again

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Thu, 15 May 2008 20:56:47 -0500

President GW "Diplomat" Bush is in his second home, Israel. Or so he'd have you believe. According to this article, the man I consider the most unsuited to ever be in charge of anything larger than an Acremaster has been saying he will broker peace between Israel and Palestine and see all the Middle Eastern countries united and at peace.

Look, I don't know what he's on, but come on - the Middle Eastern bloc has inter-religious wars within factions of the same religion. Like they are going to go peacefully and obediently when told to do so by a leader of a different religion? As with all such things, you have to let that kind of tension burn itself out, while making sure the edges are damped down to prevent it spreading. About another, ohhhh - about another 2000 years should just about do it...

Lastly George - a word about diplomacy. If you set yourself up as "Israel's closest ally" then you're by definition the rest of the Middle East's "most detested enemy" - it's how factions and diplomacy work.

Just saying....

Second Life gets Second Place

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:18:47 -0500

When Second Life goes down for the count, there's not a lot one can do. One's virtual life is just gone. As some of you know, I have an island in SL, and at some point when you do that, you realise you're spending way too much time online, but by then it's too late... hehehehe...

Those people who are in SL and WOW online and the other MMORPGs are a scouting party, a foretaste of what's to come. I know one person in SL who recently announced they were leaving because Real Life (RL) was making demands of them, we assumed a significant other had been applying a bit of pressure so we said goodbye to another person we'd gotten to know well, and moved on.

But a week later this person was back on. Apparently there's a draw to these VR worlds, a bit of an attraction. I could have told you that... %)

What this mainly makes me wonder though, is - what will happen when these VR sites become "homes" to some people. I can foresee when there will be a growing collection of people who can only live through VR (many people are disabled and use this as their primary therapy and social outlet) or even the first AI entities. Will this be the equivalent of the Cyclone in Burma, the tsunami in Banda Aceh?

Will such people have a right to sue the operator for breach of services? I'm waiting for the first person to succeed, because it's just a matter of time...

The Long Dark Teatime Of Your Soul

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:54:46 -0500

There's no doubt about it. Some sites seem like a really weak idea when you read the first article, and you think to yourself "I've seen enough sites like this, I'll just forget that URL and not bother."

Then you read another article, and the pure awfulness starts to sink in. You realise that in some deep, Twilight-Zone-esque way, you *know* these people and have dealt with them yourself...

http://www.clientcopia.com/ if you want to know.

Filmaka - dark dark short film

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:21:14 -0500

When this happens, what do you do? The shadiest among us draw their shade closer, the ideas people want to know that recipe, and the Matrix sends out another Agent software.

Rabbits In Da Zoo. Not Monkeys.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:46:27 -0500

One of the things which is always sad to watch, is a hidebound organisation trying to prevent the sun rising and setting without a signed release from the Secretary of The Manager For Sun Movements countersigned by the Officer For Resisting Changes. And it's even more sad that in this case I'm watching rigor mortis (or catatonia, it's always hard to tell those two apart in extreme cases) engulf two of my favourite things.

One is an little simulator (a "sim" in SL terminology) on a computing Grid called Second Life running a little island called ABC Island, the other is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or "Aunty" as the national broadcaster is known to us.

At the moment there is a lot happening on those fronts, unfortunately it's not the ABC doing the running but a bunch of unconnected people (including, now, me...) who are all trying to achieve the same thing but with wildly different approaches. Here goes my approach...

ABC Island was one of the first places I landed in SL, due partly to my searching for sandboxes to build on. See, you don't automatically get your own land in SL, and letting anyone build just anywhere would be chaos and anarchy. So you need tokens in world to "buy" land and "pay" the monthly rates, and of course you generally get those tokens either by buying them or earning them.

Since everything in SL is made by someone, one way to get Lindens is to build something and trade it for Lindens. But in order to have something to build, you have to build it, and that would need you to own land - you see the problem here?

So sandboxes are a place almost every resident of SL visits at least once in their time inworld. I found a few dozen, and saw that one was Australian. The rest is history. (But see at the end of the article...)

Once I got to ABC Island's sandbox, I was struck by the multifaceted community of people there who socialised, exchanged tips, and generally made the place feel like home. And crikey! - there were a lot of Aussies on the island. Strange that...

But over time, things changed, and things stagnated. Displays that had been meant to be temporary and replaced by newer ones, were still there. Directions from on high (somewhere in the folds of Aunty's voluminous Skirt Of Authority) failed to materialise to change the exhibits and displays. And worse, it seems that someone almost brought the island to a halt by placing so many scripts and CPU chewing things that over night, the place turned from somewhere where one could move with relative ease, to a hell that any players of Quake or UT online would recognise, the dreaded vomit-inducing shuddering nauseating phenomenon known as lag.

I registered a complaint with the Friend Admins (for a huge "corporation" there seemed to be an extreme paucity of real ABC staff around) and they did their best to try and attract the attention of someone in Aunty's organisational chart with enough clout to get this investigated and fixed. It's now almost six months later and that person still hasn't been found.

With the irritation of the lag problems, and the hands-off approach taken by ABC staff who were supposed to be managing this asset, cracks began to appear and if you've read the two articles I've linked and followed the comments then you know exactly where this all stands as of about a few hours ago.

Most of the cohesive force that the Friend Admins represented has been lost to resignations of many of the people who (against the odds and against all the apathy and lack of support by the ABC) never the less managed to create a community and hold it together in the year that ABC Island has been running.

To see what has otherwise been a very progressive organisation wallowing and floundering in slo-mo has been enlightening and distressing. Rather than forge ahead and make changes, the people in charge have been sitting like rabbits caught in the headlights, hoping that by doing nothing, maybe they could avoid that most evil of evils, Change. I'd suggest to the upper management of the ABC that they need to put these rabbits back into safe hutches and find themselves a few new killer bunnies to take the job on.

Honestly - I have rarely seen any of the ABC administrative team who are supposedly managing the island in SL. In fact, I have to say that in eight months of being a daily visitor to SL, I have seen one of them, once. How is someone like that able to make a decision on anything related to SL? That would be like asking a deaf person to create radio commercials, a shipping clerk to manage a salvage dive.

So my thought and approach is that the ABC needs to find suitable people or train the existing ones appropriately. Either find people who take an active interest in inworld presence, or recruit your people from those who already are inworld, because what's there now is not optimal...

The sandbox isn't a zoo, and the monkeys aren't running it they are just over-running it. And I am now a regular at another sandbox, where there's less community but also a lot better management.

Death! By Blogging! With A Herri... ahem

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:02:54 -0500

Death by blogging! Overwerked jerks! OMG dont blog, leave news to the professionals!

The amount of pure schmitt-schtirring in this article is mind boggling, never mind blogging. It's not so much the good shit as pure.

"Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind."

Yeah yeah. I write for Helium occasionally, also for several other pay per piece blogs, write on my own blogs, and keep up with a fairly full life in Second Life - which is blogging in 3D once you get a sim of your own. (Like my little island of Catsylvania...) The sim costs me $75/month, and the blogs, well none of them have gone over the point where a payment would be triggered. Big deal.

You want blogs, you support them. Click the damn links, follow a Google ad. It's that simple. It's like clapping someone on the shoulder and saying "good job!" One clap on the shoulder is just that - but if everyone does it, you end up with a concrete confidence boost for the blogger.

And bloggers - if you want to blog, don't expect to get paid for it. I only know a tiny handful of diarists of the last few centuries who got published. (And some of them, only posthumously. Don't let that be you...) You're keeping a diary. An extremely valuable (no doubt) and incisive (obviously) and relevant (of course) diary, but that's what a blog is. A diary.

And just as some people's musings turned into newspapers and magazines and books, so perhaps your blog might pupate and turn into a multimedia butterfly. But by then you're out of the territory of diaries and into the world of publishing. And I can't even begin to count the number of newspaper, magazine, and publishing people who have died of stress and/or one of the many other perils of their particular lines of work. And THEY had a whole organisation backing them.

So let's get it straight Mr MATT RICHTEL (his all-capitalisation, not mine...) of the New York Times - it's not *bloggers* who are dying of stress, they're your fellows in journalism and publishing. They are no longer a diarist sitting at their blog, they are journalists and publishers and editors. If it walks like a duck quacks like a duck and floats, it's a duck. And don't let it stress you too much...

Tetris the musical

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:17:51 -0500

Apparently I've never owned a game of Tetris that has sound, or I'd have recognised this theme.

And I can tell you Tetris has never interested me so I've definitely never pwned at it either...

Social Networking Beggars

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:35:39 -0500

Here's something I've scrubbed friends out of my buddy lists, my Facebook, my social networking contats, and my life for: (Facebook notification in this case but it applies to a few other social ntworks as well)

"Xxxx Xxxxxx joined the group 'Social networking makes even more money for you. Too good to miss!' "

There's a good reason for the scrubbing you'll get if you hit me with one solicitation using one of these sites. One of my early longtime (and presumed until recently to be) friends joined this "social networks are your cash cow" things and since then all I ever get from him are "Xxxx Xxxxxx has just put new stuff their PayMeYouBastard site" and when I go there it's a thinly (or indeed not at all) veiled soliciting letter asking me to pay towards his "son's second tooth, putting on a pasteboard and sticking to the fridge" fund.

No longer fun. Or Iget told that "Xxxx Xxxxxx has published their new e-book, "Ripping Off Your Social Network For Profit And Profit!" and I'm supposed to make the book a self-fulfilling prophecy by paying for the damn thing. As a friend, you understand.

Things that strike me about all this are that 1)- Xxxx Xxxxxx doesn't actually send me that spam so he feels quite chuffed about it. When I say "please stop spamming me" I get told it's he way that site works.

2)- I also asked Xxxx Xxxxxx about that cargo cult attitude towards money.

"Don't you realise," I asked, "that this money has to come from *somewhere*? And in general since these sites target your friends, you're just taking money off people you claim are your friends?"

It was his answer though that convinced me there's just no way to proceed with these sites, no way that I could bring myself to use them. He said

"Well it's not like I make all the money off you, it's all my friends, little by little, that it all adds up."

In other words, he's prepared to screw all his friends "little by little" - and from there it's only a relatively small step to a full scale bend-over shafting...

I'd rather keep my friends I think.

Broke Toe Memory

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:04:00 -0500

Just remembering that in late 2004 I was just getting over a broken (as in, snapped almost clean off) toe and how easily the pin had come out despite all the horror stories people told me. What sticks most in my mind to this day is the plaster room tech's lousy job.

See, when I went into hopsital to have my toe sewn back on and the boken bone pinned, the surgeon's staff put a hasty old school plaster stabiliser on the calf and foot, to make sure things didn't move too much.

That plaster was comfortable, and as it was just plaster of paris and stuff and crumbling fast, I was looking forward to a lightweight fibreglass cast. So a week after I was discharged I was invited back to have my new cast.

The technician removed the old cast and made some disparaging remark, cleaned up the leg and foot, and started to lay up padding. I asked if it had to be quite so tight and he grunted but - yeah well, the padding would take up slack y'see and it would all come out fine, trust him.

It felt a bit different going home, I had this feeling my ankle wasn't quite straight, but then again I'd gone from a halfway around cast to fully enclosed so I wasn't too worried. Until that evening, when the ankle ached all the time and my toes were not quite the healthy colour I was used to.

By the next evening Iwas about ready to amputate. So that evening I sat down with a pair of garden secateurs and a lot of determination and chopped right down the left and right sides of the cast, a job that took me over an hour of straining and nicking myself and ouchies. But in the end I had the thing off, and you can't imagine the pins and needles I experienced.

Which was nothing compared to how my ankle felt when I tried to place it normally again. The cast had put my ankle about 1/2 an inch rolled-in at the bottom, and had I left the cast on for the whole five or six weeks I would have probably had a defect that would need surgery to cure.

So my question is: Why was that technician getting paid a good salary to make such a total botch-up of the cast? I'd actually said something to him and he ignored that. He was not a newbie, in fact he said he was several years in the job. Plaster room was NOT overworked (I waited two hours to get in and in that time they dealt with three other cases between two or three techs.

Spoke to my GP about it and demonstrated where my ankle (which was undamaged before the cast) had been placed and he agreed that a few weeks of that would have left me with long term problems.

I actually phoned that particular hospital and spoke to the technician and asked him if the surgeons paid him a spotter's fee fro bringing extra work their way, explained what had happened and how my ankle had amost fused after just two days. And he basically said get stuffd he knew better than me what that cats would do or not do. Anyhow - what I'm trying to say is not that I was right doing what I did - but if you ever have a medical procedure and something doesn't feel right then definitely make noise and get it attended to.

How NOT to report a shark attack.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:21:10 -0500

It ranks amongst my most disliked journalistic misrepresentations of the truth. Imprecise terminology that conveys an initial impression which is wildly different from what is actually going on. Case in point: "Authorities used baited hooks to catch sharks " - if you read the rest of that article, there is no mention of these authorities wading out into the surf in top hats and regalia muttering "Right! You have killed a man and I will bring you to justice, shark!"

In fact, a Naval COmmander issued an order, which was relayed down a chain of command to probably a seaman who did the actual hook and line setting. Even the headline is bullshit: "Mexico hunts sharks after attack" is NOT what has happened. The land itself hasn't risen up in a mighty protest against shark's inhumanity to man, nor has the entire population (not even a majority, unless the majority of Mexicans happen to be "authorities" who all hit the beach with fishing line and hooks in their hand, causing South America to tilt) risen up against the tyranny of the cruel sea.

Nope. Someone gave an order which was passed down several rungs of the command chain and then some poor sod got the job of catching a shark that can be suitably dragged through the town square behind that authority's horse. Or destroyer. Or whatever other fact the journalist forgot to actually report on.

"Getting It" Followup

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:33:00 -0500

Really, the article I wrote on Friday is open to far more analysis than I gave it. When Dad was a boy, crystal sets were the acme of technology. By the time he passed on, shooting the schematic for an entire radio station around the world in under three seconds was commonplace.

We are more connected than anyone else has ever been, outside of the Omnipotent God. We have new words to, for this brave new world. You will be familiar with the following:

networked, personal computer, jetlagged, Mars Rover, PDA, mobile phone, laptop, MP3.

None of those words existed or meant what they now mean, fifty years ago.

For the Internet-and-SMS-savvy, you would know LOL and THX and AFK and a whole slew of acronyms and shortcuts. And any Second Lifers would understand what the words rezzed, poofer, griefer, prims, and avatar mean.

When Gutenberg created the printing press, he not only produced a way for the Bible to be placed in the hands of the masses, he also produced the end of the Englyshe Language as it was known, because now language as free to evolve with each new book authored and published. The lettered upper crust sniffed disdainfully that it was the end of language as we know it - but as we know, the language has evolved to fit our needs and unlike our predecessors, we no longer need to cling to archaic uses of language and instead embrace the new language which is emerging.

In those ancestors' day, reading some books was something you only did secretly and at night for fear of being discovered absorbing this heathenish uneducated patois. Some books could get you executed, and indeed some people were executed for authoring or owning such books. It's an attitude that should have stayed in the Middle Ages - but (sadly) didn't.

Language is always changing to reflect what is happening in our lives. It would be a poor tool for us if it wasn't reactive and responsive. Our habits and daily routines must react and respond to our technology. We would be remiss not to adapt to our environment.

And if the language is changing, we should adjust our lives around this fact. Ask our educators to embrace and disseminate rather than condemn and isolate.

Can you remember ever having to use Shakespearean English or Chaucerian English? Yes it's good to learn about those forms of English but now we just don't have a use for them.

Can you remember what it was like before you had a PC with an always-on Internet connection? You went to bed early or watched TV or read or studied, but now you can get your reading and news and movies and amusement online and does that mean you should grieve that it's the "end of The Bold & The Beautiful" as we know it or perhaps reach out and embrace that we can now watch it online?

And for people like my father whose lives spanned a whole gamut of inventions, he can remember when there was no TV and you read books secretly under your covers with a candle for fear of being discovered by Mother...

Teh Caek Is A Lie!

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 05:25:06 -0500

Teh Caek Is A Lie!

TEdONOMICS 101

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 02:52:55 -0500

Our petrol prices have surged. Many people are now having to curtail their movements because they can't afford it. We're paying more and more to move less and less for shorter and shorter distances...

In our Eastern States, rice crops are failing due to drought, which is most likely caused by the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The price of living in Asia is going up because of it.

This means that a range of goods produced in Asia, many of them cars that consume the expensive petrol, will increase in price. The flow-on effects will carry to other world economies which depend on those Asian goods being at a lower price point, so the cost of European cars will increase.

And we all know that the biggest buyers of European luxury cars are the Arab people - with whom the price hike started in the first place.

Ah the economy is a wonderful self-levelling thing...

Do You "Get" It?

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:32:09 -0500

If my father were still alive today, he would have an opinion on this article that goes something like "and the problem with this is?"

Dad was born into a very simple world where news was what was swapped around the town fountain. My grandparents, on coming to visit my mother and their son-in-law in Vienna, made the warding sign of the cross when Dad flipped a switch and the electric light came on. They were to make that sign again several times as he turned on the radio, and as they learned to flush a toilet for the first time. There were even automobiles in the streets!

When my father passed away a few years ago he'd been a longtime (more than five years) user of a PC and the Internet and had friends he would email and IM all over the world, and he'd had several mobile phones and his eye on one of "them newfangled GPS things."

My generation, right on the edge of the Baby Boomer generation, has seen more things change in a year than many generations saw in their whole lives. So do we prove to be better than my father's generation at "getting it?"

Sadly, it seems that the answer is "no..."

The Vegemite Culture

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:42:28 -0500

Watched Good News Week on Monday night and episode 9 just killed me. If you watch that, scroll forward to the last fifth of the show, the segment where the Vegemite Buttocks Japanese (this makes heaps more sense if you just look at the video, trust me) is happening.

In particular watch the two American guests' faces as the entire audience puts up a pretty much perfect rendition of the Vegemite jingle. It's not what their faces are showing but what they're struggling to conceal that makes this probably one of the most significant indications of our culture having come of age.

I doubt there is one other country in the world where you can sit a random audience down, prime them with the first line of a jingle that was first coined, what? - 40 or more years ago? - and have them ALL remember the words.

More than kangaroos, more than Uluru, more than opera houses and famous musicians, that moment showed that we do have a culture, and that culture thrives best in yeast...

What Kind Of WiFi Are You?

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:39:00 -0500

On a recent afternoon I got to have a bit of a revelation.

Turns out I'm the sneaky kind of WiFi. The kind that has the SSID turned on saying "come and get me!" - and then some kind of third party security after the access point. In my case, a remote access server that need authentication and is on a two network addresses, one for the WiFi one for the LAN. It's a dead simple thing that prevents anyone casually sniffing around the machines at home, and all runs on one PC along with a heap of other functions so the only thing it cost me was a second network card.

And I'm in a minority, at least in Perth anyway.

We drove home from an afternoon out, down the freeway, through Perth, and then snuck into South Perth/Como. I had my laptop with me and thought a quick snoop of the ether would be appropriate. (I still haven't had time to install netstumbler on it so it was just the Windows wireless networking, but that was enough for my rough survey.)

Of the CBD as we flashed past at freeway speed, about 30 signals popped up on the WiFi (without any external antenna or anything) and of those, five appeared to be deliberately left open (metromesh, cafe access points, etc) and only about seven of the remainder were secured.

So about 70% of businesses near the freeway are operating in fully open mode, unless, like me, they have a sneaky routing box behind the access point. I didn't bother to actually log onto each one as I literally had two minutes to take note of the number of acess points as we zipped past, no time to find out if there were open LANs behind the access points.

But it shows that something seems to be not getting through, a lot of basic security is being overlooked.

About three years ago, a WiFi survey I did along St Georges/Adelaide Tce revealed about 50 access points, and that number is bound to have increased by now. If numbers have doubled in three years as they are likely to have, then that means there would be about 60 - 70 open access points on networks just along one main street of the CBD.

What's even more scary is that on the drive through the residential Como - Bentley - Parkwood areas, I noticed about another 60 access points, the majority of which appear to be privately operated home systems - and 90% of those are secured.

That means that businesses in Perth are far less secure than people at home. A bonanza for black hat hackers, definitely. I'm hoping a few businesses or their IT managers read this and then contact me to lock down access, because that was quite frankly an eye-opener for me.

LOLCAT Format?

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:52:35 -0500

Funniest tee shirt slogan ever, was a very exclusive design (i.e. I only had one made for myself) but now I've put it on my Cafepress shop site. Geeks will get it right away, everyone else it will take a few seconds for the penny to drop.

I like the site, I think I might collect a few more bits and put other things online. It's actually a good idea, from what I've seen so far.

Modelling Random Falling Events

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 05:46:22 -0500

BEST. PRATFALLS. EVVVVAAAHHHH!

That is all.

Bet you thought this was going to be some dry chaos physics post dincha?

Using IT or losing IT.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 21:26:22 -0500

Working freelance again is exhilarating. Jump into a job, say hi to the people, fix their problem, and never see those people again for a few months. Ideal way to have it actually.

One thing that is less than ideal is one company phoning to book me while I'm working at another's job, or finding two emails in my inbox for the same timeslot. That involves choosing, acrimony on the part of the person whose job I had to decline, and all sorts of play nice required to soothe things.

So recently and rather cheekily I made a booking sheet on Google Pages that refers the potential hirer to one Google calendar where I am putting all the things that chew into my work day, so: illness, other appointments, days I want off, etc.

Most of the companies that provide me with work have been enthusiastic. After all, they now have a clear preview of where I am and at what times, and they don't need to email or phone to find out if I'm available. So cheek has paid off, and the only thing that amazes me is that these companies haven't used Google's ubiquity and shareability themselves to form a resource scheduling system where the resources can book themselves out.

Strangest thing has been one reaction I've gotten. One contract manager has expressed that they don't think they should need to check a booking sheet every time they want a job done. I guess they are out of luck then, because with itinerant IT resources being scarce on the ground as we currently are, they've just missed out on using the very stuff they're supporting to make it easier to support it...

I guess they think I should just maintain myself at standby readiness for two - three weeks at a time so they can send me on the one job they have in that time of re-installing a printer driver or whatever.

Actually, what I reckon I should work on is a bidding system for my time so that I get more well paid hours and less of the almost "love job" hours. (Not that I'd abandon either just for the money, mind you, I like the freelance/contract work too much - but it would be nice to earn a bit more doing it... %)

It never rains

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:59:55 -0500

. . . but it pours.

I've noticed that with a certain IT company I contract to from time to time, that every second job has taken place in rainy or cold weather. But it's been interesting work so far so I'm prepared to put up with the occasional drenching.

I did notice though that my consultants are all in a shark feeding frenzy, they must be short of resources out here in the West. It's already led to several attempted double bookings, and I've had to start a Google calendar for the consultants to refer to before they phone and try and book me as I'm sitting in another client's office...

Makes me wonder why they can't institute something that simple amongst themselves internally. Because in the last seven jobs I've had, this has happened six times. You'd think they'd learn. But maybe there's something about a dispersed and horizontalised organisation that just makes that kind of organisation impossible.

Anyway - I shouldn't complain because it makes my work days "interesting" in all senses of the word including the Ancient Chinese Curse sense, and of course it's good to keep my hand in at the general IT support and engineering areas.

And it's getting me out of the house and doing things, which can't be a bad thing. I've dealt with some of the biggest businesses in Perth thanks to this company, also a good thing, and I've managed to have more long blacks in the CBD and Freo in the last month than I think I have in almost a year. And that's a definite Good Thing.

... or learn to breathe through yer ears sonny!

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:28:50 -0500

Pages surrounding this NSFW. ZOMG, nuff said....

Teh War On Spamz, Escalated to Level Two Alert...

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:17:30 -0500

Just admirable, that the people who run botnets and trojans are now getting hacked back. This is the next step in what will end up in another elevating arms race.

I wonder if the big virus protection companies companies will now rush out a signature and fix for Joel's brilliant counterhack... %)

TEdALOG Lite II

Kangaroo Court, Too.

They fight crime...

Perforated

The Acremaster Diplomat Strikes Again

Second Life gets Second Place

The Long Dark Teatime Of Your Soul

Filmaka - dark dark short film

Rabbits In Da Zoo. Not Monkeys.

Death! By Blogging! With A Herri... *ahem*

Tetris the musical

Social Networking Beggars

Broke Toe Memory

How NOT to report a shark attack.

"Getting It" Followup

Teh Caek Is A Lie!

TEdONOMICS 101

Do You "Get" It?

The Vegemite Culture

What Kind Of WiFi Are You?

LOLCAT Format?

Modelling Random Falling Events

Using IT or losing IT.

It never rains

... or learn to breathe through yer ears sonny!

Teh War On Spamz, Escalated to Level Two Alert...

Death! By Blogging! With A Herri... ahem