The old joke about lost screws and dad spending Christmas morning assembling the kids toys is getting a bit  out dated. These days it’s installing and configuring the kids (and grandparents and neighbours and uncle Tom Cobly’s (who happens to have rung to wish me a Happy Christmas & while I’m on the phone do I know anything about digital cameras / MP3 players / networking Vista…)) IT kit.

 I know it’ll happen because I’ve bought various bits that will take some setting up myself (can’t say what in case my family break the rule of a life time & read this); so I’ve made a rod for my own back even if no one else has. Hopefully there’s enough other stuff to keep them occupied so that I won’t have to Google instructions until after lunch.

Anyway, let me wish you a very Merry & IT Support Free Christmas!

The Manchester Evening News is to stop carrying “Personal Services” ads. 

 News: MEN axes sex ads - Marketing Week

Will MEN Media’s ban on sex adverts lead to all papers refusing …

A brave move when so much revenue comes from them. Harriet Harman said that so much of the “sex industry” is linked to people trafficking and kidnap that the government is considering making the “oldest profession” illegal. Certainly that women and children are forced into it in brutal ways makes what at best is an unpalatable area into an intolerable one.

Will web sites be doing the same? So much of the “free” web is paid for by advertising and so much of the “paid” web is devoted to porn that it will be a significant factor in how the web continues to develop. Nothing I have ever worked on is likely to be involved in such activities even down to web sites funded by advertising for porn / sexual services and I would be most uncomfortable if it was. Can we as employees have much say in this kind of thing? I know journalists have expressed their unhappiness at their  news papers carrying these kind of ads.

Anyway, on a lighter note I wondered what Harriet Harman was going to say when she prefaced a comment with “my experience as solicitor general” :-O

I went away for the weekend and stayed in a rather nice hotel. This is a major rarity for me as for holidays we usually camp or for short breaks stay in Travel Lodge type family rooms. I’ve always rated breakfast as the best meal of the day (indeed the only one we Brits are rated for) and prefer a big breakfast and light lunch (tho’ I will do big breakfast and big lunch if pushed to it). I also don’t really believe in “life before breakfast” and find the whole concept of showering and shaving before eating a major evil of being away from home.

Now normally the only time I’m in half way posh places is with business with everything on expenses and it therefore came as a bit of a shock when I was expected to reach into my own pocket at hotel prices. Having said I eat a big breakfast I would expect more than the human frame can contain for the £15 the they were charging. I made do with a piece of fruit until I’d walked into town where I had a seriously good meal for seriously less money.

My point is (yes there is one - of a sort) is that travel not only gives you a chance to try different things it sometimes forces different things onto you which can be good. Leaving the house without a major calorie intake is not something I would ever have done un-coerced and I actually found it quite helpful. Keeping a balanced energy level through the day is a problem to me (just read some code I churn out during a low blood sugar phase) and maybe my eat lots approach is not helping.

So there we are - problems are just new opportunities when we think outside of the box (which is the correct font for irony?Arial BS?).

Guitarists today don’t know they’re born! Not only can you buy pretty good instruments for £100 or so you can get digital effects that are stupidly cheap for what they do and most importantly of all - tuners. What would I have given for something to help me tune the damn thing 30 years ago?!

On top of all that there’s tutorial DVD’s and online stuff. With the
publicity about the Led Zep re-union I dug out my Led Zeppelin songbook I had for Christmas back in the 70’s. Some of the stuff was in tab (written to show where to fret each string etc), some was just in standard lines and dots. Black Dog was not only in lines and dots the guitar part was in the bass clef. If you not familiar with musical notation let me explain the lines indicate the pitch of the note, bottom line E, space F, next line G etc. That’s for the treble clef, for the bass clef there’s still 5 lines but they mean different things - bottom line is G or something. Why is it different? To make life difficult is the only reason I can think of.

Anyway, I struggled for years trying to play the thing as a kid then the other day I thought I’d have another go and see if there was some online tab (huge web sites are devoted to showing tablature diagrams of how to play popular songs). A quick google showed better than that. UTube has a whole raft of people playing it in slow motion. It might not sound as good as Jimmy but at least people can now figure out what it is I’m trying to play!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRpj5VmyS6E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te2U-BO2YYY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSwZeAjghHk&feature=related

So if you’re buying someone a guitar first for Christmas :

a) buy them a tuner / effect unit with built in tuner (it should be illegal to seller starter guitars without a tuner)

b) get them online to find some lessons

I always wanted to work for small companies & apart from my first job which was in a hospital (the NHS being the largest employer outside the red army) I have managed to do so. Accordingly I have always reported to the MD or at most one down from him (or her it would be nice to say, but they were all him’s).

However my most recent small company was bought by smallish US company a couple of years back. As of this month I am now part of 150,000 employees as we have been acquired again.

The facelessness & pointlessness of it is terrifying. I’ve been “onboarded” in a session aimed at the sales team of company that acquired us before & that I never felt a part of, given a new pc totally inappropriate for the work I do & most galling told the office will close so I must become a home worker (without any consultation).

To work from home I need to do some conversion work to my house - about £15,000 worth. Do I get any assistance? No - they won’t even pay for a separate phone line! The thing is, money can’t really be an issue as I do have to have an approved ergonomic desk & chair costing around £1000!

In the same insane way I am no longer to contact customers directly but I now I shouldn’t need to travel I am getting a car allowance. I guess it’s all swings & roundabouts & I have to learn to take the rough with the smooth. Unfortunately the smooth of car allowance will take a while to pay off the rough of the building work.

The thing is, I’m used to my employer having some idea of who I am & what I do & so arranging things in ways that make some sort of sense.

Not having a good day, so far I have :