Odd Thomas Odd Blog

A year or so ago, I wrote a rather harsh review of the cappucinos made by a new smoothie bar that had opened in Tring, called Smooth ... and no, I'm not adding any links to that post as I am quite ashamed of how harsh I was! However, that didn't actually stop me from going there most lunchtimes to grab a smoothie and cookie for lunch: prior to M&S opening there, it was the only place to get anything reasonably healthy without hiking out of town to the little Tesco store. With the opening of M&S , all the good food options started appearing, so Smooth, Sandwich Plus and Tesco were all pushed to the back of my mind. Smooth re-opened after a short refurbishment period, but something seemed to be wrong. You couldn't guarantee from one day to the next that it would be open. Pretty much every other day, there would be a sign in the window stating that it was closed due to staff sickness, somewhate ironic considering the nature of the business! Then finally, during the...

In the previous post , I introduced you to what can only be termed the ultimate law of the IT Certainty Principle: For any piece of IT work, the chance of implementing that work is inversely proportional to the amount of effort involved. This is, essentially, a law that defines the likelihood of a project being shelved. However, there are a series of other laws that you need to get through before this ultimate law can define the final fate of the project. The penultimate of these is one that I see all too often on projects and jobs that have the dreaded 'NOW' deadline: For any piece of IT work, the closer the deadline and the higher the priority of the work, the greater the occurrence of system issues and general interruptions. You all know what I mean by this! You either have a project that is closing in on the deadline with lots still to do, or you have just been handed a piece of work that needs to be done 'NOW'. All of a sudden, your computer - which was running f...

With the LHC called to a halt for a short while, perhaps Brian Cox would like to consider measuring the impact of the collisions going off inside my head? Okay, there is no guarantee of catching sight of any Higgs Bosons but he may get to witness the IT Certainty Principle, the laws of which state that for any piece of IT work, the chance of implementing that work is inversely proportional to the amount of effort involved! I don't know about particle accelerators but I seem to be caught in a project accelerator, with everyone poised to see what kind of big bang I'll be generating ... hmmm, geeky intros are never a good sign!! I guess you could say that things are not going all that great right now. As the above suggests, I've been putting huge effort into projects that have then been canned and very little effort into projects that have actually seen the light of day. Currently, we are having to put a tremendous amount of effort into three major projects that are to be ...

When the Directorship position was first offered to me, I had a rough idea of what to expect, which is why I said no. Mostly, I wasn't keen on all the extra work for very little financial increase. However, at a time when I was completely zoned out from being on a high caused by diving in the Red Sea, I finally caved and took the first tentative steps into running a business. Today saw those tentative steps turn into a big stride into the unknown as we found ourselves in the culmination of a redundancy situation and the acceptance by one individual of a Compromise Agreement . With the recent cancellation of a major project and with the customer deciding to go elsewhere for the installation of off-the-shelf software, this means that it is my side of the company that has been hit. The consultation process started on Monday and, before our meeting with the guy this morning, The Boss and I had a little chat about the whole situation. I guess I was feeling uncomfortable but I couldn...

We've all seen close-up photographs of women's eyes that make you wish you could meet the girl with such a vivid colour, and yet we all know that these photographs have been enhanced to make the eyes stand out and grab your attention. This past week, however, I had the good fortune to meet a girl whose eyes needed no enhancement at all. On Tuesday, I had to head to Richmond for a work meeting with an IT provider who has been working on a project for our customer since January.  Until Monday, I had no involvement and was only vaguely aware of what was going on. Now I was to get into the thick of it in order to try and help rescue the project.  Great. Before heading into the meeting, we were to meet one of our customer's new marketing execs at the local Costa, in order to introduce ourselves and make sure we were all singing the same tune.  As we had never met the girl before, my first thoughts immediately turned to how attractive she might be.   Well, who wouldn't?!  Mee...

Okay, after that last little rant about work, you deserve a little funny by one of my favourite animators to cheer you up again ... especially if you actually made it to the end of the post!!! Enjoy!!

If there is one thing I really wanted to avoid with this blog, its posting about all the crud that happens ... another reason for intermittant posting. Sometimes, however, I just get so worked up that I can barely hold myself back from spraying the post with enough foul language to make even Vinny Jones blush. I shall try though... A couple of posts ago I hinted at some trouble we had been having with a customer, but glossed over it because I had some good news to report. Well, that trouble now seems to be going from bad to worse and everyone at work is reaching the end of their tether. Basically, we were working on a project, hitting all the deadlines, and having to write our own spec and get it approved because no-one else was willing to write it. We had meetings to make sure things were moving in the right direction and we had very frequent releases to test in order for the development to be highly visible. At no point did anyone suggest things were not well. Then on 26 August, o...

Blogging is good for you. Fact. Well, good for Bloggers, not necessarily for the readers! If this article in Scientific American is to be believed - and there's no reason it shouldn't - blogging can be quite therapeutic, helping patients recover from surgery, and improving sleep* and memory. I can certainly agree with the memory aspect as it is approaching two weeks since my last post and I attempted to log in with the wrong credentials, something I hadn't had a problem with before. I guess you could argue that blogging is like Regaine for those with rapidly diminishing follicles: you're fine while you use it on a regular basis, but stop for any period and it quickly disappears back to its natural state. Unfortunately, my natural state is dazed and confused ... so, back to the keyboard!! What with work, rehearsals and training, I haven't really had a lot of time to do anything: I haven't even had the opportunity to learn my lines for the play , let alone ta...