I get a bit fed up with “Happy Holidays”; it sounds so American and anyway I am a Christian and I’m celebrating Christmas - the birth of Christ. However, I appreciate there are plenty of people celebrating Hanuka or Winter Solstice or just celebrating each other or their new presents…

So here’s my compromise, Happy Holy Days (what “holiday” stems from). I expect some people will still be offended as they are atheist enough to believe nothing is “holy” but there you go, I think they are wrong. I may not have everything right and I don’t believe in anyone has a monopoly on the truth but if you can’t find anything holy I’m hoping that one day you can and I’m definitely wishing you can be (at some level) happy.

So I’m wishing you all “Happy Holy Days!”

And if life is too rubbish at the moment for you to manage that, then I hope you find some peace and rest for now and some happiness when you can.

Over at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/eds_mainframe/ you can read what happens when you count beans and think that is all that matters.

It appears that a crucial system at RBS went down because no one was looking after it. Why was no one looking after it? It was an EDS system, and when good old HP bought EDS they laid off all that dead wood, useless, engineery types. Hmmm, maybe they didn’t have lots of meetings with power point but perhaps they did have uses after all…

I’ve been listening to “Dear Granny Smith” (you can catch some at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pgm7r) a blog on the demise of the Royal Mail. One story really caught my attention,  management base route times on some software that simulates walking the routes (pegasus?). OK maybe you can walk the route but what about actually delivering letters? Walking up drives, filling in “you weren’t in” forms… Classic, management completely ignoring what the actual job function is.

You might as well figure out how long I should spend writing code by the amount of time it takes to type it. Or decide you don’t need support staff because nothing goes wrong - oo when they aren’t there things do go wrong, how did that happen?

Although it is the best time to sell things, Christmas is an irritating time to be an Amazon Marketplace Seller. I like amazon market place because you don’t have to take pictures and write long descriptions, if you have a book / CD / DVD / … to sell just look if Amazon list it and then just click “sell yours” and put in a one line description of the condition. Easy.

However, at this time of year, just as you breathe sigh that you’ll won’t see the inside of a post office until next year the usual “oo nice” reaction to the “You’ve sold something on Amazon” e-mail becomes a “oo ****”. Ungrateful? Indeed. If you really can’t face the PO again just click on your “holiday settings” and say you’re away. I, obviously, am too mean to turn down the odd £2 from a sale.

I’d be interested to hear from other Amazon sellers as in the last two weeks I have sold four items, unfortunately three of them were sold earlier in the year. For the first item I wasted hours looking for it before finally checking email history and finding it already sold. After that I was a bit quicker to check mails. I don’t know if I inadvertently listed them twice or if Amazon messed up (I suspect the latter!).  Anyway, I’ve had to send grovelling mails and cancel the sales - a pain for the buyer if they are ordering stuff to be delivered for Christmas. I know that because stuff I have ordered from amazon sellers came back with a “no inventory, order cancelled” and that was for something I need in time to deliver for Christmas.