IT Werkz Sometimes

I’ve started to make sense of Facebook at last, well kinda. There are some apps you can install that allow you to create lists of favorite films, books, owned CD’s and games. You can also write reviews if you wanna get lippy.

What is quite good is that once you have started listing items then these apps suggest additional items for you to add to your lists, based on information you have already supplied i.e. what you have already uploaded. Manually selecting one Foo Fighters CD means that eventually the app will suggest all of the other Foo Fighters CD’s, which saves you from having to search for them. Having cottoned on to that I started searching for as many different artist cd’s as I could so that other cd’s by those artists will be suggested sooner or later by the app. Just to throw a spanner in the works I added as broad a spectrum of artists as I could. So we have the already mentioned Foo Fighters, Miles Davis and Neil Young. Confusing enough.

Saw a couple of friends of mine yesterday and do they play computer games. They have 2 PC’s, 1 laptop, an Xbox 360, a PS2 and 2 old Xbox’s and they have 2 wide screen TV’s in their room side by side. They should be reviewing games and getting paid for it.

They are pretty quick at playing the games as well. They have signed up with Blockbuster which allows them to borrow 3 games at a time. They will play a game for up to 10 hours and have completed Call Of Duty 4 in 5 hours. These guys are not kids either. I think they are both in their forties and don’t even work in IT. Shame on me as I got stuck in a situation CoD4 a month ago and haven’t looked at it since. But then I am buried in WoW.

We have access to our Consultant companies email through Outlook via the web, which is a bit flaky as opposed to our client companies email system which is via Lotus Notes and works OK. When I have needed to access my Consultant companies email from home then obviously that is done over the web. I have just been sent a document that hopefully will allow me to access that email system directly from Outlook. The documents called ‘Configuring the Outlook 2003 Client to use RPC over HTTP’ and I’ll give that a go from home tonight. What chance is there of that working? Either it’ll fail at the first fence or it’ll work OK I reckon.

A cousin of mine has found me on Facebook and was she underwhelmed by my page.

She found no pictures and one friend. A bit pathetic. I stumbled around my Facebook page and uploaded a couple of pictures, both of which were probably too small. I don’t really get the Facebook thing. It does seem very open. Seems that you publish everything about yourself for everyone to see. Hmmm…

Talking about stumbling, I’ve managed to get to level 27 on World of Warcraft and am battling away in Duskwood with all its ghouls, flesh eaters, plague spreaders and other horrible creatures and it’s not easy as there’s never anybody else about to party with. This means I am having the devils own job of completing quests in Duskwood. Suppose I could just abandon those quests and hack away at the creatures in the Redbridge Mountains where there are more other players.

Yesterday I asked someone to invite me to their party and the leader said no. They were all level 18-20′s. I thought they would have liked my help, being on level 27. But the leader was dead set against it.

Maybe the idea of my character being female and that many levels ahead of him, and therefore being able to help and save him, was something he didn’t like. Anyway, who cares. I did get the feeling I was talking to, at most, a 14 year old boy, and he obviously thought he was talking to someone of the same age.

Reminded me of being at school.

I’m still reading Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stephen Baxter’s book Firstborn and there’s precious little Clarke in it, mostly Baxter. Most of the book is a return to the subject of the Discontinuity from the first book of the three – ‘Times Eye’, and boy is this stuff confusing, but then it was confusing in ‘Times Eye’ as well. The chapters jump about like billy-o and it makes me want to draw up flowchart of the chapters to see if that makes any more sense. Maybe it will finish with a Clarke flourish. 

I thought I’d play around with Facebook just to see if I can find any use for it.

I feel like the last person in the World that hasn’t used it. Last night I saw someone who I hadn’t seen in a while and she was enthusing about it. I asked her how many friends she had. Five. Hmmm…I thought you were supposed to have thousands. She actually finds it useful and these five friends are people she actually knows and it’s, to her, a ridiculously easy way way to keep in immediate contact with people. I got it to have a look at my Hotmail address book and it found a few people on that. Then I exported my contacts from Outlook into a spreadsheet and it suggested me emailing about 10 people from that, which I did. Let’s see if anyone replies.

What is a bit sad is that as I come from a development background I always end up with this kind of technology trying to figure out, in the back of my mind, how it works and worse still what doesn’t work. Also I want to read a manual on the darn thing which is a bit pathetic.

Some very odd practices

I got an email from the project manager the other day sent at 6.30am, impressive. A couple of days later I got another email, again from the project manager, sent at 11.55pm – nearly midnight. Last week I received one from the same person and it was sent at 3.45am. The project manager was not abroad when she sent them so these were the actual send times. Somebody can’t sleep.

When I was talking to one of the other testers the other day I was talking about industry best practices, as I am prone to do sometimes, just because I’ve been  doing this for so long. Later I overheard one of the team leaders say “we’ll knock all that stuff out of him in a few weeks”.

There was another tester that worked there, and left shortly before I started, who was a bit serious about his work and he was supposed to have just about 2 years testing experience and to annoy him they insisted on calling him the junior tester. When they took on a graduate from University recently his immediate job title was System Tester, despite having no experience whatsover. He’s know considered an old hand as he’s been there 6 weeks. No doubt that had something to do with the junior tester leaving. Go figure.