Pragmatic Dictator

Ever had the feeling you just weren’t the kind of person someone had in mind when they designed a form?

A couple of weeks back I was filling in such a form which was asking for details of all the companies I’ve worked for over the last 5 or so years. In addition, they wanted contact details for my line managers at those places of work.

Hmmm, you kind of know they want to get references from these places which is difficult when your current company is your own and the previous one was joint-founded by you and others. I just knew as I wrote the details down it wasn’t going to work. Sure enough…..

“Could we please have contact details for business referees that can confirm Mr Creswell’s involvement with Lone Crusader Ltd“.

There now, wouldn’t it just have been eaasier to do what everyone else does and ask for referees rather than last places of work and line management?
Being outside the demographic is sometimes a compliment and sometimes a curse…….

Technorati Tags: humour

Blowing some cobwebs out of my life at the moment. More news on that soon but for starters I’m gonna be posting some more “human” stuff here alongside the usual tech.

To wit, I’m not generally a fan of anything Sophie Ellis-Bextor turns out but I heard Catch You a couple of weeks ago and felt it worth hitting the iTunes buy button for this morning. Punchy, fast-paced and suits Sophie’s voice well. Co-written by Cathy Dennis (Can’t Get You Out Of My Head and Toxic).

Likely to be making an appearance on my next back-road blast in the BMW…..

Technorati Tags: music itunes Sophie Ellis-Bextor

I wrote something about parallels between distributed systems and real life which included some stuff on the bird flu’ outbreak here in the UK. Imagine my surprise when I saw this referral!

Made me smile anyways, not quite the readership I was expecting!

It seems it’s traditional to post on the reasons for moving blogging packages so I’ll be no exception.

I’ve been using JRoller for some time and stayed loyal through some stability issues and the like. However, in recent times it’s all getting too much, it’s not keeping up with other offerings feature wise, has some esoteric behaviours that upset Ecto (my remote publishing tool of choice as I’m on OS X) and stability is not good.

So I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands and transfer to Scattered Thoughts which I’ve normally used for Jini only stuff. At the same time, I’ve installed some plugins and am now pushing feeds through feedburner.

I plan to follow up my previous posting on Green IT with a further discussion of the pain that firewalls bring to building web applications and networked applications in general plus their effects on scaling etc.

Update: Now imported the most recent posts from JRoller