Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - work

Still paddling under the water

2011-02-10T12:15:00+00:00

Don't take the lack of activity on this blog as an indication that life has been quiet, far from it. Work continues to be an exercise of multiple plate juggling. Although most nights I've been either clocking up kills on CoD multi-player or vegging watching DVDs other stuff has happened. In brief:

* I bought a new PC, pimped out with 16GB of RAM and an SSD it makes a fine development box.
* I switched my phone from VillianRom to compiled from source CyanogenMod.
* I now own real actual shares (as opposed to maybe-someday-options)
* Married life continues to be wonderful

Fliss has also been very busy doing some long hours in London so a lot of our post-work slobbing has been mutual. However we are both looking forward to a long weekend walking in Wales to blow away the post-Christmas cobwebs.

Sound of Drums

2011-01-27T11:02:00+00:00

Yesterday I spent most of the day at the companies annual conference. It's quite a good day as we bring the whole company together in Cambridge so we catch up with the guys working overseas. The first half of the day is the usual discussion about the state of the company and discussing our objectives for the next year. Luckily the business of shifting bits seems to be something that is still in demand, whatever direction the economy is heading in. Of course after hitting our targets last year we have even higher targets to achieve this year, there is always another mountain to climb it seems.

The afternoon session was fun. We came back into theatre to find some guys banging away and drums and "tuned rhythm pipes" on every seat. Without prompting we soon had the whole company making a lot of surprisingly rhythmic noise and joining in. It was a great two hours although my fingers are feeling it slightly this morning. After the finale we all decamped to one of the local bars where free food and booze and funk had been laid on. It's one of the thing I enjoy about smaller companies where you can reasonably know most of the company and get a genuine sense of camaraderie.

Busy busy bee

2011-01-25T11:14:00+00:00

One reason my posting rate has dropped off so massively is I've been really busy at work. So busy that my capacity for intellectual thought in the evening is reduced to slobbing on the sofa watching DVDs or occasionally firing up CoD in split-screen and killing people with my wife.

While I delivered my main project more or less on time at the beginning of January it's having more teething problems than most releases. This is in part due to it being a rather major upgrade, including the base OS being upgraded. However I have also just been given extra responsibilities for a part of the embedded product which has rather aggressive deadlines of it's own. We were hoping to go skiing at the end of February/Early March with the rest of the family but until I get a handle on things it's hard to predict if we can.

I suppose with everything else that's going on it's good that we are so busy because we can't hire engineers fast enough as the company is growing quite strongly. There are worse problems to have I'm sure.

But will it make the boat go faster?

2010-07-16T12:16:00+01:00

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

2010-02-26T14:15:00+00:00

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

2009-12-02T19:41:00+00:00

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

2009-08-24T12:53:00+01:00

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

2009-07-07T19:17:00+01:00

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

2009-02-06T09:58:00+00:00

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.