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Christmas and the skeleton staff

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Posted in General, Technology on December 24, 2007 at 12:04 pm

So thinksecret.com will no longer be published according to their post Apple, Think Secret settle lawsuit. An amicable settlement? Is this a win for the big Apple or for the lowly Blogger – may be will never know. John Naughton from the Observer talks about this short but sweet statement in his article User-friendly Apple shows a blogger its ruthless core. For something like a Blog to really catch the attention of a huge corporate only re-inforces my point that Blogging is a worthwhile activity and not, as some naysayers might have you believe, a complete waste of time. Personally I find Blogging a great addition to my everyday activities and it has certainly improved my life in a number of areas, both at work and socially. If you are thinking of starting a Blog yourself, but have reservations, you should read Why Blogging is not a waste of time.

Doing the job I do - sometimes I get sent some odd things but imagine my surprise when A missile launcher arrived in the post this morning. Mind you, on the flip side, I am still waiting for my prize to arrive from the Adobe Creative License Tour ‘Prize Draw’ back in November but as the months slowly tick by I am running out of people to contact at Adobe as well as any enthusiasm I had for the prize at the beginning – I just hope the book arrives before the next major release of Creative Suite otherwise the book is going to be out of date – and there was I hoping to give it a good read over the Christmas break. Now I may have to try and re-install Windows Vista instead!

While we’re all tucking into our turkey dinner this year and snoozing after the Christmas pud, spare a thought for all those heroes whose work and efforts often go unrecognised. The skeleton staff’ support staff, call centre staff, field engineers, shop staff, petrol pump attendants, media people (especially the writers), emergency services, and public servants who are all there trying to make our lives a little bit easier while we lay around on the sofa waiting for the Queens big speech. Talking of those public servants who have been taking a hammering recently: I missed the post on Saturday and the Postman left a missed delivery card - this was an important present that I had been working on for ages (courtesy of Snapfish who managed to get my late order out before the big day) but to my surprise the Postman redelivered the package on Sunday morning. If someone you know falls ill over Christmas or New Year, or has one too many ales, and ends up in the waiting area of a hospital somewhere think of all the people that are making that happen - the ones you see and the ones you don’t. There is all this ubiquitous technology around us that is put to great use and that we take for granted every single day - but behind that technology are people - people who are working hard and whose work is often also taken for granted.

So to all those who may be at work on Christmas day and those whose work often goes unacknowledged but is so important especially at this time year - thank you for making my Christmas merry.

Best wishes to you all and Merry Christmas.

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Sex, Drugs and the Spam Patrol

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Posted in General, E-mail on December 13, 2007 at 6:30 pm

Sex, Drugs and the Spam Patrol - How many plasters until the next loophole?

I imagine that some genuine hard working companies must really struggle to ply their trade online due to Spam. Replica watch manufacturers, legal pharmaceutical vendors, Bling (whatever that may be) vendors, electronic postcard providers and financial institutions must get a really hard time online, oh and don’t even get me started on honest lottery providers or online game developers. Since I wrote the last two sentences 53 emails have been stopped by our Spam filter and are awaiting further analysis. But what exactly qualifies as Spam? Spam, at least in our business, is becoming a universal word to describe pretty much any undesirable incoming email - but the term undesirable is somewhat indefinable and used very loosely to cover a multitude of different things that can, and frequently do, arrive at our mail gateway.

I have no idea whether any of these ‘Spam’ mails are genuine online retailers who simply wish to electronically ‘drop a leaflet through the door’ to make us aware of their products or whether they are villainous rogues with dark intentions. This is primarily because our email filter has automatically picked up certain trigger words (amongst other scenarios) and stopped the stuff at the border so we can all rest easy. As for their ultimate fate at the border patrol, these emails are destined for the big ‘waste of bandwidth’ cyber-land-fill somewhere in the ether.

I feel really sorry for the budding entrepreneur who steps into the dragons den with their great new idea of making medicinal aids available for purchase online or who have great plans to start a new kind of Euro sweepstakes service via the Internet; because these people’s communications are (hopefully) never going to make it into our business.

That said, the trickiest Spam we have to deal with at the moment are those that arrive with non-english language content. Up until recently it has been fairly easy to analyse emails that arrive in my native language, but some emails have recently starting appearing in different languages - something that even the Spam patrol is struggling to deal with. How long before we have to include ‘must be multi-lingual’ in the IT security job specification? Or are we heading for a time when we can no longer keep the door, le porte, die Tür, orドア secure?

I even wonder if this Blog post will ever see light of day due to some of the words used within, oh and by the way, the 53 is now 124. 

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Am I the only person in the world who likes Mondays?

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Posted in General on December 3, 2007 at 4:53 pm

Am I the only person in the world who likes Mondays?

Most people I talk to can’t wait until Friday - personally I can’t wait until Monday. Does that really sound so strange? People often look at me in horror when I tell them about my love of Mondays. But. there is something fresh about Mondays, something new and something optimistic. On Mondays I draw a line under all those outstanding jobs and set my schedule for the week ahead. Key data backups occur over the weekend and are checked on Mondays and I often visit our off-site storage facility with the weekly IT archive box. My user base also seems a lot quieter on Mondays, maybe something they did at the weekend?

On Mondays I find time to check the budgets, do the paperwork and scan upcoming schedules for maintenance renewals and even get some time to check some of those email newsletters that seem to come through the email system with an ever increasing ferocity. Catching up with technical Blogs also happens regularly on Mondays and software development also comes a lot easier earlier in the week (on Monday afternoons in particular) and I am often at my best coding away in Cobol or C# (or whatever else I happening to be working on – at the moment it’s Java with MIDP). I also get a lot less support calls on Monday than any other day of the week.

By Friday however I have a snowy mountain of requests on my desk, a phone full of voice mails and a full email box; I can often be found early on a Sunday morning either at home remotely logged in or (more often than not) at work sorting through outstanding requests and prioritising new requests – did I say that I was a one man IT band with a userbase of almost 200? I wonder what the biggest ratio of support people to users is?

So, my questions are:

• What is is about Fridays that everyone likes?
• And am I the only one who likes Mondays?