Dom Davis (The Blog)

Yesterday was a very exciting day for me at work in so far as the IT team closeted themselves in a meeting room and we officially launched what had been a black project as the underpinnings of a Two Year Plan. Now, I’ve been in IT for a long time and I know a project is nothing without a name and this one has many. Overall it’s project onyx which is a nod to it’s skunkworks roots. Internally phase one is nucleus. We’re off to a cracking start if you ask me. The names are cool and they’re lower case. Unlike previous projects I’ve spearheaded though this one involves designers. Oh yes, I have logos. We cannot fail

I was greeted last night as I crossed the threshold into the house by a not quite full bin bag containing assorted kitchen waste and the body of one ex-mouse. Said bag was unceremoniously dumped in the bin outside ready for collection by the bin men. Not quite the memorial I had in mind¹ but The Brain had at least picked the day before bin day to die.

It would also appear that bereavement leave doesn’t apply to small pets which is a shame, mainly because if I could swing a day off for a dead mouse then perhaps I could also blag days off for dead cockroaches. Not that we keep cockroaches as pets mind you. No, they are food for the spiders. As such they don’t really have names other than “no, not you” and “yes you!” as the great hand of doom looms over the box they call home to select one to it’s fate. Nor could we really argue any great sadness at their passing. I remain indifferent while The Zozo emits great squeals of delight as various arachnids attack and kill their prey with quite frightening speed. What we do have with the roaches is frequency of death. I could phone in several times a week with “boo hoo! Little Yes You the 26th passed away last night, I’m too upset to come in”. But no, they’re not buying it.

¹I wanted proper burial with headstone, 21 gun salute performed by the Royal Artillery while overhead a Lancaster and spitfires in missing man formation did a flyby. Perhaps a short speech by The Queen. Nothing fancy, just something fitting.

Programming is not brain surgery¹. There’s a complete lack of blood, gore and drilling into peoples skulls for starters, but if we stick with the analogy we shall see for why.

My current task is, in brain surgery terms, the equivalent of rewiring someones brain while they’re awake and talking to their relatives. One wrong move and we’re in trouble; tricky. I do have an advantage though. I can make copies of my patient (we’ll call him Bob) and test the procedure over and over again without the relatives until I get it right. Still tricky, but not as hard as having to go in, all guns blazing on attempt one (good thing really, we’d have a dead patient otherwise).

To make life more complicated I’m trying to do this while being interrupted to perform splenectomies, tonsillectomies and other spurious tasks at the same time. Damn near, if not very actually, impossible. The past week has seen the metaphorical hospital littered with dead copies of Bob.

Unlike a brain surgeon, however, I have an alternative. You see I don’t really care about Bob, I just know he needs brain surgery. What I can do is have the relatives say goodbye to him, have them leave the room for a bit, shoot Bob, replace him with someone that doesn’t need brain surgery and, when the relatives come back, tell them it’s Bob.

While we’re on the subject I wouldn’t get too attached to Sally either. She’s scheduled for her op next week.

¹ It’s not like rocket science either, but then again few things are. It’s one of the few professions where you can put some very expensive equipment (and possibly a handful of highly trained people) on top of, or strapped to one or more tubes of highly explosive material, set fire to the end and call it a good idea. We do have people do the equivalent in programming but we shun them because it’s rarely a good idea.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that when my procedure finally went ahead it ended up not bring needed. Seems they couldn’t find the stone anywhere which leads them to the conclusion I must have passed it. This is good in some respects and not so good in others.

Despite not actually finding the thing they did go have a good look for it. With more than the average amount of tubing to go hunting through this takes time, causing irritation, especially at the entry point. Suffice to say I was a bit sore when I woke up.

I am now pain free (although to be fair I don’t believe in pain management, I subscribe to pain eradication and just being bolloxed for a few days) and, more importantly for work, able to think my way out of a wet paper bag. This does, unfortunately mean I actually have to go in. Hey ho, at least it’s a short week

2011. International year of the forest. And chemistry, apparently. So says the UN anyway.

2011 started, as it does for all those near Cromer, with the fireworks on the pier. This is the third year I’ve seen these and, year on year, they seem to get better. One year I’ll get there early enough to stand head on to the pier. This year we just stood on the promenade away from the larger crowds. After all, it’s fireworks, you don’t need to be right next to them.

The Zozo and I topped this off with a nice meal at one of the posher eateries nearby. Getting out of Cromer when half of North Norfolk is trying the same is fun. Next time we’ll cut through the Zoo.

2011 also bought respite from my burning temperature and feelings of death. I just have a slight cold now, although that may change as I’ve forgotten my pills. D’oh!

Today also brings a return to work. Only for 3 days, but it’s going to be a shock to the system. Hey ho.

So, annoyingly, having not undergone a general anaesthetic yesterday and, therefore, not having had my insides poked about a bit, I can no longer claim I’m unfit for work¹. The upshot of this being that I’m now on a train to Norwich after having not had a lie-in with The Zozo. I shall then be spending the day at a desk and not with The Zozo, who had planned her days off round this little adventure.

While the fact that they didn’t ram a telescope, laser, and God knows what else where they have no right to ram anything isn’t something that upsets me greatly, there are knock on problems. Its going to have to happen at some point so time off needs to be rescheduled (again, this bring the second cancellation); this isn’t as easy for The Zozo as it is for me due to the nature of the work. I’ve now got 3 days of stuff I was going to do Wednesday-Friday while convalescing which I need to cram in elsewhere. Worst of all, I miss a day off with my wife. Our next day off tomorrow, resplendent with lie-in, isn’t until Boxing Day

¹At least no more than usual.

Like many other parts of the country Norwich was covered in quite a good layer of snow. It was only an inch or so deep (what London would classify as a category 4 disaster rather than a full blown category 5) but it made the river walk to work quite pleasant in a fairly cold type of way. I even took some pictures which, depending on whether or not my blogging software plays ball, I may share with you below.

Of course yesterday was a Monday and we all know that Mondays exist purely to be evil. A picturesque walk into work is not Mondays style. No, it had something planned.

Work sucked as only work can on a Monday, but that wasn’t it. Work always sucks on a Monday. For everyone. It’s one if those universal constants. No, there was something else.

As I left work there it was, Mondays plan laid out in all its glory. The snow, so pretty and white in the early morning sun had been transformed. Throughout the day Monday had directed other unfortunates to go receive whatever punishment it had in store for them causing them to walk on and compact the snow. Meanwhile the sun, sapped of warmth by Monday, melted this compacted snow ever so slightly. Come home time and the sun had given up and buggered off. Temperatures plummeted and everything froze. Thus my walk home was to be made gingerly over great tracts of uneven ice which was poised, ready to send my feet out from under me at the slightest mistake. A truly diabolical plan and one that could still be affecting me days down the line. Only Monday can turn a nice walk into a booby trap for the rest of the week. Thankfully Tuesday is a benign day.

Technology is a marvellous thing. 10 years ago my mobile phone could do voice and SMS. If did so on a two line monochrome LCD display with chunky big pixels.

Today my mobile phone can, completely wirelessly, log onto a secure network from anywhere in the country that has phone signal and remotely log into and control my computer in a completely different part of the country, or indeed world. This is done on an ultra high resolution full colour touchscreen display. It can so this while playing tunes from a vast library stored in it’s memory and allowing me to seamlessly switch back to my game when I’m done. This is just one of a million functions it can perform.

…

Technology is a bitch. 10 years ago if work contacted me in the morning (assuming they even could as I was often underground on the tube) all I could do is offer a ‘few top of my head’ suggestions and tell them I’d fix it when I got in. Entertainment was via a newspaper but at least it was free

Today, when work contact me in the morning, it interrupts my game and involves me spending more of my precious data allowance logging in remotely and trying to fix the problem on a screen that’s 6 times smaller than my screen at work and also has to double as mouse and keyboard (effectively making it 12 times smaller during input).

You’ll have to excuse me for a moment and indulge me while I blow my own trumpet. I am very good at my job. The last time I was looking for work in London I regularly tested in the top 5% of my field. I’ve pioneered new ways of doing things and solved problems no one has ever solved before. When I was working in London I had the pleasure of working with some of the finest developers around and together we did some amazing things.

Since most of career has been at a bank the majority of the software I have written has been financial software. There is code I have written running today that handles billions of dollars every month. Systems I have designed will cope with throughputs of trillions and trillions of dollars in their lifetime. The figures are staggering. This is Big Business on a scale that is hard to understand, even when you’re in that business. I’ve worked on systems where $50,000 is a rounding error (go and read that again, let it sink in). I’ve worked on a system called Groundhog (Guaranteed Routing of Orders Unless Denied by the Hand Of God – seriously), with levels of redundancy that border on the insane.

I mention this because I’m used to working on things that, when they break, you fix. NOW! No ifs, no buts, you do whatever it takes, whatever time of day or night it is. OK, no one is going to die if it’s not fixed, but people can, and do, get fired for cock ups and the higher ups really don’t care what they’re interruption when they call you. All the care about is the hole your system is putting in their bottom line for every second it’s down. There is a reason I used to get paid insane amounts of money.

These days I work for an Internet retail outlet. Yes, it’s bad for the bottom line if things break, but, at 3am I’m asleep and so are our customers so it can wait until I wake up. Anything short of “we cannot process orders” falls into the fix it when I get into work category.

One of the things that had me so flat yesterday was the immense amount of running about and panic over an update that I considered minor and not particularly well thought out. Still, I pulled out all the stops and had the update written, tested and poised ready for release in record time. Then, as I knew would happen, people thought it through some more, didn’t like some of the implications and decided to hang fire. Since my definition of critical involves fistfuls of cash being thrown out of the door, or something that is causing massive repetitional damage (which basically equates to fistfuls of cash being thrown out the door) deciding to hang fire isn’t an option. Hanging fire costs money. No, what we have here is, at best, something urgent and therefore something that can dealt with when I’m in the office. Suffice to say I left yesterday with everything still poised for release and no decisions made.

In order to cheer myself up from my work-induced misery I took The Zozo out for a nice meal last night. Poor old Zo had to put up with a down in the dumps me with sad eyes that put her in mind of Hatchi¹, but we both had a good time, some nice food and some pleasant wine and I was left feeling that, with a good nights sleep, all would be right with the world.

Work, it would seem, were not happy with this state of affairs and, as I was paying the bill my phone rang. The world, it appeared was coming to an end and small children would die unless my update went out now.

This is not the first time I’ve been here. For every multi-million pound outage I’ve fixed in banking there have been hundreds of much less severe problems that I’ve dealt with which have, nonetheless found themselves elevated to world ending status. As I’d left work I’d left everything in a state that meant that the world could be rescued and the small children saved at the click of a button (two clicks actually, but you get the point). I had rather hoped that it could be done this morning, but apparently not. Anyway, it’s done now. I didn’t check if it worked. I figure the world is still here so it must have done. I had much more important things to deal with. Things that work had needlessly interrupted. Today will involve long, ranty emails on the subject of planning. I don’t like having my dinner interrupted.

¹ The saddest film ever. Ladies, bring tissues, gents, be prepared to spend the last part of the film Concentrating Very Hard On Manly Things Which Require Your Urgent Cogitation.

So the school holidays are over and the trains are fuller in the mornings. Getting a table seat is no longer guaranteed and I run the risk of not being able to easily use my laptop in the mornings which reduces my already limited time to do things. There really isn’t enough time in the day.

Work could easily eat up 12 hours a day just keeping up with stuff if I let it (I don’t, I view it as a failure of the project planning rather than a failure on my part as the deadlines zoom past and recede into the distance).

There’s a further 8 hours per day worth of stuff that I’d like to get done to improve things at work which gets crammed into my morning commute, but really requires a table and takes 3 weeks to do a single days work due to the time and setup constraints.

I’m also editing a book for a friend which would only take a week, if that, full time, which I’m also doing during my commute and evenings while The Zozo watches her soaps.

My home time commute is reserved for a few games or watching a little telly. Blogging gets crammed into the walk to and from the station.

Realistically it’s 7:30 by the time I’ve got home and eaten leaving about 2 hours to spend with The Zozo on weekdays otherwise it eats into sleepy times and leaves me tired.

Weekends I quite often get a day to myself which is good for a bit of downtime but means I don’t get to see The Zozo as much as is like. While she is at work I try to go to the gym, play games, sort the house, shop, sort out my websites, go out and take photographs, organise my existing photographs, edit a load of video, work on some personal projects and catch up on my TV. Many of these tasks fall by the wayside, usually starting with sorting the house :S

When we both have a day off The Zozo and I like to go out, do something, see a film, have a meal out and relax at home. We’ve also got lots of places further afield we’d like to visit that require 2 contiguous days off.

I, therefore, propose a plan involving 100 hour long days and 10 days to a week with 5 day long weekends. I’ll still miss my deadlines but I’ll get to see The Zozo more and get my own stuff done