#14: I don’t know

I am currently listening to DJ Shadow’s “Private Press” album, and I got the urge to blog. I don’t know what to write about, though.

The new Arctic Monkeys album (Favourite Worst Nightmare) is brilliant. It took me a few listens to get into it but I have to say, they’ve done very well. Not sure if it’s quite as good as the first yet, but there’s certainly a lot of it that I like. I’ve got a trip to Redhill ahead of me tomorrow to go and install a new Cisco router, and do a load of reconfiguration to try and make it work with a customer-managed VPN solution we have to start using. It’s a good idea, but things like this are rarely simple and I see many problems occurring along the way!

It’s been a good few weeks since I last blogged but there’s not really much to say. I’ve installed Kubuntu as my main operating system and I’m attempting to switch full-time from Windows XP to Linux by using it. It’s been booted for two days now and I haven’t needed to go back to Windows yet, so maybe it’s the start of something beautiful.

I’ll try make the updates a little more regular.

#13: Monkey Business

I went to see the Arctic Monkeys at the London Astoria on Thursday night, and I can honestly say that it was the best gig I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ve seen Oasis, Incubus, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blink 182 (I was a lot younger, and I’m not proud), Scissor Sisters, Faithless, The Music and quite a few others, but none of them came close. Incubus were my previous favourite live band, but the Monkeys beat them into a cocked hat.

The atmosphere in the place was just fantastic. The Astoria is quite small and only holds 2000 people so it was much more personal than most gigs I’ve been to before. I arrived fashionably late and so only saw the second support band, “The Little Flames” - they weren’t bad at all, although I didn’t know any of their stuff. The Monkeys came on at 9 and started with “Brianstorm“, their new single. After that, they played “Still Take You Home”, which is probably my favourite tune off their debut album, and the whole place just went off. Everyone was jumping around and singing their heads off - I’ve had some rushes of adrenaline in my time, but only coming up on ecstasy compares to the surge I got when they started playing that tune.

They were on for about an hour and ten minutes in total, played all the popular tunes off the debut album and about four off the new album. It was just an astounding gig and I’m so glad I went. I’ll definitely be buying the new album when it comes out on the 24th - “Teddy Picker” is currently my favourite tune off it. They played it at the gig and it just stuck in my head.

I’ll write a bit more soon, but I have work to do. I’m in the London office this morning (work on a Saturday, my god!) to provide onsite technical support (for “technical support” read “sitting on IRC on my laptop”) while new carpet tiles are fitted. And when they’re done, I’m going to go and meet Andy for a pint or three somewhere in London :)

#12: Motivation

Sometimes at work, I struggle for motivation. It’s quite difficult to make yourself do things when all you have on your to-do board is stuff that you don’t actually want “to-do” - stuff that’s been there for ages and you know won’t go away, but you can’t bring yourself to do.

“I don’t want to edit your website. It’s poorly designed and doesn’t conform to any standards anywhere, and was last overhauled in about 1999. I’d offer to redesign it all for you except I suck at design, and all I’d do would be to keep the current layout but make it XHTML compliant. That’s a bit pointless.”

I need to switch all our work websites over to a content management system or something like that, but I’ve never found one yet that I’ve really got to grips with and liked. I’ve tried Mambo, PHPnuke and Drupal, but none of them have given me all the options I want.

I guess I could write my own, but that would be a disaster waiting to happen. Last time I wrote something, it was designed to be able to take 500 or so “offers” (rows in a database) and display them to the user, so they could be modified one at a time. I didn’t think it’d be a problem… until such time as they (the users, who else) decided that actually, they were going to load 23,000 offers into it instead.

In fairness to my code, it’s stood up to it remarkably well, and provides the XML feed that it’s supposed to, but it’s totally horrific if you try and use it edit more than one offer at a time with it. I told them that they hadn’t given me any idea of the scale and couldn’t be blamed for it, but still they whinged. In the end, I capitulated and made a couple of extra modules - one that outputs the whole database as a CSV file, and one that can accept a CSV file as input and publish it back to the database. At least then they can edit the bastard thing with Excel (which is a total nightmare when it comes to MySQL DATE formats in CSV files, by the way)

If only they’d told me they wanted to load 23,000 offers into it, I’d have taken a bit longer over the design of the database and made it possible to edit multiple offers at once in the style of Phpmyadmin or similar. I’d also have introduced support for scrolling the offers by page, and the ability to jump to a particular offer if you knew something about it. I just didn’t bank on them totally moving the goalposts.

I guess that’s business for you.

In other news, I went to the gym yesterday and worked myself harder than I ever have at a gym before. I felt absolutely great when I left - so good in fact that I’m going again tonight. I’m only doing a two and a half day week at work this week - I’m doing a half day Thursday and have Friday off, as I’m off to see the Arctic Monkeys at the Astoria on Thursday evening and I’m not planning on being back until late.

What was the point of this post? Perhaps I should make a “procrastination” category.

I think I will.

#11: Productivity

I’ve had a productive day today. I’ve sorted a number of work-based problems that were causing me trouble, and I am now sitting watching Liverpool own PSV in the Champions League while eating a Subway.

I have recently discovered the delights of The Werewolf game. This game is brilliant when you play it on IRC with people you’ve known for a while. You just find yourself sitting and laughing at your monitor :)