2012 — 22 March: Thursday
Just because I was tired, and went to bed much earlier than 'usual', seems to have no effect on wakefulness this morning. Nor did I get much extra sleep. No matter.
I was correct1 in hearing the name "David Tebbutt" on the news about a Somali kidnapping case but note it's not the chap I knew in ICL who went on to edit Personal Computer World magazine. (Unless he went on to become Finance director at Faber and Faber.) Is murder 'better' when it's a stranger involved? Not really. Parts of the world continue to be frightening and ugly.
Where to begin? (Link.)
This piece on IT pay is horribly enjoyable. Source and snippet:
Even if you work for Capita, you occasionally actually finish something useful so you must let people know. The logic is simple: if you invite a bunch of people for a quick beer to celebrate the completion of the data ingest module, then it must be good. The fact that it's a VBA macro to import CSV files into Excel is not the issue, the message is that it's working great. Each victory over the formless hell of Oracle is worthy of you picking up a box of chocolates from the supermarket and sharing them with people passing your desk. The £10 cost pays back very well as you build up an aura as "someone who gets things done".
Quite a bit...
... later, I'm now back from a) a quick trip to Soton ("Jeans ahoy!") in the late morning and b) a somewhat longer trip — post-prandial — over to the care-home. Only now (17:04), therefore, can I reveal the reward I permitted myself after being terribly grown-up and buying two new pairs of jeans in M&S for probably the first time in my supposedly adult life:
Actually, I bought "Landing" after I'd read the review just put up by this chap. And I've been a delighted fan of Pete Frame's vision-damaging Rotring work for nearly 32 years now. But the third title is a complete gamble.