Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn » work

But will it make the boat go faster?

Alex — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:16:53 +0000

Yesterday I attended an all day away event with work. It was a combination of motivational speaking, team working exercises as well as management Q&A’s and board level views. There was talk about vision and values. We had pretty much the entire company in the same place including the teams from South Africa and Malaysia.

I’m usually quite cynical about these sort of exercises, probably as a result of my experience with Marconi Communications fall from grace. However yesterday’s event was genuinely exciting. The day was facilitated by Olympic rowing champion Ben Hunt-Davis who described the steps the coxed eights rowing team took over 2 years that lead to winning the gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Apart from it being an inspiring story he drew out a lot of lessons on how to get a team functioning well together even if they didn’t all actually like each other.

Other sessions included the obligatory Great Egg Race type challenge as well as for me the most interesting “view from the board”. While the company has been going for 10 years, all but the last 2 supported by VC cash it is now making money and growing. It was refreshing the board are committed to growth and taking advantage of the massive opportunity the current explosion in mobile data provides us. No one can predict the future with regards to IPOs or someone coming along with a suitably large bag of cash it was very much concentrate on growth and the field of options will only get wider.

After the day event we relocated to a cocktail bar in town where the free bar was serving themed cocktails and a fantastic band had most of the company funking out on the dance floor. It was a great informal occasion and a chance to chat amiably to people I don’t tend to deal with on a day to day basis.

I came away from the day feeling pretty good about the company. Even after a horrific recession the company is still standing, achieving double digit growth, hiring new people* and most importantly exporting to the rest of the world. Who says the UK can’t produce world class products the rest of the world wants to buy?

* if your interested let me know, recruitment bonuses are worthwhile, especially considering the fee’s agencies can charge

Return to form

Alex — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:15:05 +0000

I have returned to my clean shaved form. As the mornings get lighter and winter starts to recede I prefer my whole face to take advantage of the additional sunlight. I fairly certain I shall return to bearded form next winter.

Today has been clear-out day at work. Much of the activity has been stymied by the lack of skip which was due to be delivered this morning. I’ve done my best to return spare staplers and folders and the like to the stationary cupboard. I’ve also managed to snaffle a rather nice wide screen monitor for my principle display. The only downside is dragging windows across from the normal aspect monitor on the left can result in ugliness (and the odd feeling the fonts have changed). However as the one directly front of my face is the one I stare at the most I’m willing to live with that.

I am a little dismayed by the amount of stuff going into the skip though. I’ve been assured the electronic stuff won’t end up in landfill but I don’t know if that just means it will get shipped to India or China for dismantling. I can see why it’s not worth keeping the base units (or even scavenging the memory) but I’m fighting the thought that something better could be done with all that hardware. I have rescued an EeePC which will put into service as a router/access point as it’s a fairly low power device.

That was quick

Alex — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 19:41:45 +0000

I’ve spent about 4 hours traveling today and about 3 hours in the clients offices. Everything went fairly smoothly and despite occasional language impeadence I’ve only gained an extra 3-4 feature requests, none of which should be too tricky to implement. I’ll probably pop into our local partners office tomorrow morning for a write-up before having the rest of the day to explore. Any recommendations gratefully received.

New Job, Old Job

Alex — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:53:00 +0000

I started my new job today. In many ways* it’s like my old job except with paid holidays and stuff. I’ll miss the 2 spare days a week I had to indulge other interests but projects but I suspect I’ll just have to do that at the weekends like everyone else. Half-Llama will still be around though for consultancy work and I suspect I’ll keep up with the networking.

* pretty much every way except my effective daily rate. The world is full of ironies

Sea of sharks

Alex — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:17:31 +0000

I spent the day with a potential client today looking over an interesting safety product. If I get any paying work out of it my client list would total 3 which isn’t too bad considering how long I have been trading as Half Llama Technology. The catch of course is getting paid for the work.

Like most of the UK manufacturing base this company is suffering in the current climate. It’s not helped by being a start-up type affair with investors jumping ship. However it’s an interesting product and despite development being hosted on Windows and using a unfamiliar processor I was able to sort a few things out during today’s free consultation. I’ll probably end up committing 5-10 days of my free time to the project and crossing my fingers. If nothing else it will add a few more tick boxes to my CV. Being paid for the work will feel like a bonus

Bunker mentality

Alex — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:58:36 +0000

True to Hofstader’s law it took a few extra days to finish of my (unpaid) work at Essex University. You can see the final results here. It was essentially tweaking a psychology experiment to work in a different colour space and with some funky high dynamic colour range hardware. After the first day of struggling with Python IDLE editor I caved in and installed a Windows aware copy of Emacs and fiddled with getting python-mode working in Windows. It removed a lot of the pain apart from every time the keymap randomly switched and whenever I had to use the browser which didn’t have an awesome bar. And I certainly don’t miss the constant reboots and bad crashes.

The last few days we have been hunkered in at home as the weather decides how much snow it will dump each day. The trains to London are basically broken so Fliss has been working from home. I’m also working from home and onto my next project of generating smart playlists for Rhythmbox. Luckily it seems someone has already done some work on this so I can concentrate on plumbing the existing code into Rhythmbox and cleaning up the UI.