Our project office has moved and for the better. We are now in a much larger open plan office with a lot of other IT people so if nothing else it does stop some of the juvenile behaviour.

We’ve just had 3 days to regression test the system and the part I was responsible for was by far the largest, functionalty wise. I did get some help and we actually managed to pass about 97% of the tests which was a miracle. Lots of happy management around right now. Some of the developers were involved and though they wrote the system a lot of them had a devil of a job proving stuff worked. Odd but true.  

I didn’t realise there was so much dislike of contractors by permies till recently but without us they wouldn’t get anything working.

I have a recurring problem with my Internet radio. Sometimes when I want to listen to English soccer on it I get a canned message saying how they can’t broadcast it for some legal reasons. I know what the problem is. When the radio connects to the BBC radio site it thinks I’m listening from outside of the UK and therefore due to the quaint licenses the BBC manage to get us to pay for it can only broadcast to the UK, hence the canned ‘we can’t broadcast to you’ message.  Now why does it think I am trying to listen outside of the UK when I am not. I assume there are some proxy servers in Yerp somewhere generating a bit of confusion.

A couple of months ago I phoned my ISP’s 24 hour helpdesk and explained to them this situation and the support person said that they didn’t have that sort of information to which I responded ‘you don’t know where your servers are?’. Obviously something happened after that as a couple of days later I could listen to live soccer on the internet radio.

The problem has now returned. No doubt there is one tiny little tweek somebody needs to make so that the outside of UK servers appear to be in the UK. I assume something fell over and when it was restarted the said tweek was not reapplied. This could go on for ages unless more people understand this problem and start phoning BT’s support desk and giving them an earfull.

An agent contacted me the other day about some contracts and he really did know what he was talking about, refreshing.

He was obviously involved in development once as we had a yak about UNIX and other stuff. I spoke to another agent earlier in the week and he was positively slimy. He had a requirement for someone to start in the next week and the client was obviously very desperate for someone, and I would have fitted the bill OK. But the creepy agent was trying to get some serious commitment out of me without him actually divulging much about the company. OK, he was keeping his cards close to his chest and all that, but I wasn’t getting much information on the position at all. Eventually he mentioned money and it was hopeless. Got a feeling the contractor rate was about half the company’s budget i.e. the slimy agent was probably keeping the difference. I just said ‘no way’. Oddly he appeared to appreciate my immediate no response.

I felt like asking to be removed from their database, not that they would actually remove you. They’d probably say you have been removed but how do I know. Heaven knows how many cruddy little databases I am stored on around the world. If they ever try and rationalise all of this data on all of these crumby little databases all over the net the result would be worthless.

The good agent mentioned a couple of positions which fitted me perfectly, though that has happened several times recently and I have got nowhere. Think my resume scares the bejesus out of some companies. Or I have more experience than the person hiring and they think I am overkill or even might take over their job.

Internet radio

The Internet radio is great. As there are so many radio stations it’s almost a pain finding one you like but the manufacturer has a web page where you can choose radio stations and add them to a ‘My stuff’ list. This is obviously some kind of text file of the URL’s of the radio stations you have decided you want added to your My Stuff list. Then when you switch on the Internet radio, at boot up time, and that involves unplugging and plugging back into the mains, the little critter looks for the My Stuff text file on the server, or whatever it is, reads the URL’s and displays those stations on the radio, for selection.