I’m officially management now. Whether that’s a good or bad thing only time will tell!
I’ve been given a secondary role at work of “People Manager.” As you might have guessed, it’s not a technical role; every staff member has a People Manager who is responsible for providing guidance, support, and a whole gaggle of approvals such as timesheets, procurement, holidays, and training.
One important part of the role is annual appraisals and performance ratings. This is something I’m quite interested in. My personal feeling is the appraisal system in most companies is broken – particularly once they grow past a certain size. While I’m under no illusions I’ll be able to change the system here (and, to be fair, my experience last year was it was one of the better systems), it will be good to observe it from the inside, and pick up on the key pain points from both sides of the table.
Of course, I’ve been appointed to the role just in time for this year’s annual appraisals, so nothing like being dropped in at the deep end!
If you were a good boy or girl this year (like me), you may have been lucky enough to get a Raspberry Pi under the Christmas tree. Which is awesome, but (like me) you may be wondering what on earth you’re going to do with it!
My new Raspberry Pi, in a PiBow case
The choices are limited only by your imagination, but as per usual – the more choice you have, the harder it is to choose! I’m still deciding what to do with mine, but here are a few links which might inspire you:
It’ll never sell (or, my favourite: “the only people who’ll buy it are Apple ‘Sheeple/fanboi’s/posers’ with too much money”)
You’re paying an “Apple Tax” just because it looks pretty/has an Apple logo
Things said about the iPad Mini in the 24 hours since it was announced:
Competitors are cheaper
Competitors have more features
Competitors are smaller
It’s not “open”
It’ll never sell (or, my favourite: “the only people who’ll buy it are Apple ‘Sheeple/fanboi’s/posers’ with too much money”)
You’re paying an “Apple Tax” just because it looks pretty/has an Apple logo
Even though I doubt I’ll be buying one in the short-term, make no mistake – I think the iPad Mini will sell in droves, just like the iPod Mini went on to.
I confidently believe it will outsell the Google Nexus 7, and probably also the Kindle Fire (the biggest competition in my mind) this Christmas, despite the much higher price. Apple has shown consumers will pay that extra “tax” for the overall experience. Not only that, Joe/Jane Consumer can now see thename brand iPad on sale below £300 for the first time. That’s a really big deal for anyone not trapped in the Tech Bubble.
When I started out in 1974, I was the future – TV’s first robot newsreader. But what once seemed cutting-edge is now regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned, and I have been frozen out by the powers that be, yet another victim of BBC ageism.
I can’t take it any more. It’s a struggle to get up for the nightshift, and my poor pixels are tired. My friend Oracle said it would end like this.
Today was a good day – I managed to hit one of my work goals, and when I did I made sure I gave credit those that helped me.
My current role is a mix of support and development. For the last year and a bit it has been mostly support because a) I was the only person who knew the technical-side of the application, b) documentation was lacking (so I was learning as I went along) and c) the application had a very large user base spread across the globe. Support queues were general pretty busy – 30 or so open issues was common, and with only myself able to work on things there was seemingly no end in sight. Further developments and bug-fixes were always being pushed back because I just couldn’t find the time away from support. I resolved that I would get things under control; one day, the incident queue would read zero.
Today, 10 months or so after making it, I hit my goal. I literally did a little jig of excitement in the office (thankfully very few people were able to see me) when I closed out that last support ticket.
It’s important to celebrate life’s little successes, and it would be a good highlight to give the client, so I decided to write an email to my manager about the milestone. It’s also important to give credit where it is due, so I wrote the email first and foremost to the two offshore colleagues I had been working with recently, thanking them for their hard work, copying in their line manager so they could get the recognition they deserved. To be honest, I’m not sure what I felt better about – to reach my goal, or to give someone the recognition for helping me.
Over the weekend I started a fun little project. I’m tracking down and integrating as much of my old blog content as I can, across all of the sites I’ve written over the years.
I’m not going to integrate every last bit of content I find, just the “highlights” (some things are best left forgotten…). Linkblog entries, and projects with no relevance will be left behind. So far I’ve added around about 26 entries covering from 2003-2009. No doubt I’ll go back over these years and add more, as the content resurfaces. Where possible I am preserving the original formatting and links, though in some cases I will have to link to an Internet Archive page.
The impetus for this little personal project came from realising I had neglected and discarded a lot of my history. As I’ve moved from site to site, platform to platform, I’ve usually wanted to “start fresh”, to see if it gives me that impetus I need to keep the blogging habit going. So far that approach has rarely worked, so why allow the old content to disappear? It’s a shame I thought of this so late. There’s large holes in 10 years of content charting my growth as a person lost to the void.
In the content I have found I have noted a marked difference to how I am now. I used to be quite open, generally had a more upbeat, less formal tone, and was more inclined to create something for the sake of releasing it to the world. Entries were generally short, and more frequent, but punctuated occasionally by something more in-depth. It’s interesting, and definitely something I’m going to reflect on.
As a side-note, with the content moving over, I’ve redirected traffic visiting the old domains to a landing page on this site. Although most of the sites had been inactive for a while, or the content otherwise not available, it would be wrong to just leave them to expire without giving someone the chance to find what they were looking for. Besides, Fickle Me might decide to reuse the domain in the future!
Of course, if you want to check out the “historical” content, head on over to the Archive page.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a quick note signaling my intent to predominantly use my iPad as my main computer when I travel going forward. What started as a successful two-day experiment led to a long weekend away last week. That went well enough that I’m confident in my choice. The iPad is my new road machine.
MG went for the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover, which was my second-choice after the Apple Wireless Keyboard. He believes Apple will eventually release their own “keyboard in a cover” accessory, citing the Microsoft Surface as a potential reason/influence. I don’t think Apple will release their own accessory – for one, it’d be a bit “me too”, with several options available on the market for quite some time (not to mention following in the wake of the Surface announcement); secondly, as one of the most-touted features of the Surface, I’m pretty sure Microsoft would see their “Smart” keyboard cover falling under the “don’t copy” patent licensing agreement held between the two companies.
There’s a very nicely done visualisation over at Distant Shape, charting 10 years of Daring Fireball. As noted on the page, you can trace the evolution of Apple from computers to mobile.
After getting fed-up of not being able to read sites in Reeder on my Mac without getting bombarded with ads I looked around for a good hosts file I could use to block the buggers at the network level, rather than rely on plugins such as AdBlock at the application level.
So what does it do? Basically it takes a (huge) list of known ad/spy/malware domain names and tells your computer their IP address is 127.0.0.1, i.e. your own computer, rather than their actual IP addresses, so their scripts/ads/viruses/trackers/etc won’t ever load. As a side effect, ad-enabled websites should load faster.
Most of my small personal projects tend to get built with CodeIgniter (CI), which is a simple to use, fast, lightweight PHP5 MVC framework.
For a while now I’ve had an itch to build something fun against the Facebook API so I can start learning how Open Graph works, and as a primer to building a “proper” Facebook integrated application. I also realised I hadn’t actually tried using CodeIgniter 2.x since it was released (quite some time ago). With an abundance of free time this weekend it seemed like the perfect time to get hacking!
Before I could build anything I would need to know one thing: just how do you connect a CodeIgniter app to Facebook?
