Odd Thomas Odd Blog

When Amazon introduced the Echo in the UK, it was the first time in a very long time I had been eager to try out some new technology; I had been waiting for the Google Home , but Amazon got there first so ended up with my money . My own personal feeling is that consumer technology seems to have stagnated over the past 5 years, with only incremental instead of revolutionary advances, so nothing really piqued my interest until affordable home control came into being, something that was finally within my budget.  Being able to combine it with the Philips Hue system was great; though trying to find answers to questions proved ... interesting. Then, back in June, I decided to try and build my first Alexa skill.  Nothing major, just a feed from this blog as a daily flash briefing.  It worked, but I decided not to publish it as I would hardly consider the content of this blog to be frequent or interesting enough to warrant it joining the likes of CNN, BBC, Sky, and the re...

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 ...