Hiding my glee

Do you judge people by the company they keep?

I've set up my own today, which implies:
1. I'm leaving my current company, which is deeply patronising.
2. I've won some business!

I have to hide my glee as I'm still in dispute with my current employers, but I'm over the bloody moon.

In case you need to get from Standford to Stockholm

Google advise on travelling from California to Sweden. Check out direction number 33.

Expert, schmexpert

Here are the categories for our new company expert programme:

1. Multi Channel e.g. IPTV, Mobile, Tablet PCs


2. Emerging Technologies eg, Vista, Ruby on Rails


3. Transactional Merchandising


4. Social Computing & Networking


5. Convergence


6. Youth Market & Online behaviour


7. New Online Business Models


8. Information Management, Enterprise Search & Dashboards


9. Rich Media


10. Inclusive Design


11. Youth trends

These are the subjects where my company sees itself at the forefront of thought and wants to produce a PowerPoint each quarter to prove it.
Some notable absences from the list: content management, systems integration, CRM, business process improvement, scalability and performance, security. What I'd call the fundamentals.
I have two main issues with the list: firstly, there's no place for me to show expertise unless I appropriate information management as being a broader understanding of content management (which it isn't really) and secondly, it's so bloody assumptive. If you're some kind of futurologist determining strategy and saying these are the things we should be interested in, why do you assume dashboards are going to be valuable, when all the current user research shows how much people hate adopting them? And why are Tablet PCs in there? Is the act of clicking on a website with a pen on a tablet radically different to using a mouse with a laptop? Why are multi-channel and convergence different subjects? Why are youth trends and youth market separate?
Then there's the final issue, which is that for each subject, the company is going to nominate four experts from different streams to contribute their expertise. How can you talk about new business models and about social networking and then prescribe who you define as an expert? Have these people never heard of wikis? Oh yes, they tried to implement a wiki but failed to grasp the fundamental concepts: there are 19 company wikis, where you can't add documents, can't use HTML and which can't be searched across. Nice.

How long to hack into your personal data?

Interesting table showing how long it takes to hack a password. I'll be changing all of mine to 9 characters mixed case, I think...

Time recovery

Fed up with having lost an hour's sleep at the weekend? Take a look at the benefits of power napping.

Snippets of apocrypha

I don't drink alcohol much anymore these days, but I recognise that some people are still susceptible to hangovers. Where are they going wrong? Should they be drinking a pint of water before they go to bed or making themselves curried scrambled eggs when they get up the next afternoon? No, these are myths, in comparison with the hangover cure pillow. It appears that all you need to stand bright lights and loud noises are some Himalayan herbs wrapped in cotton.

On a separate, similarly mythical note, I refer you to a story which is quite feasible, given how much money Alen Boksic used to earn.

Six degrees of refrigeration

Today, the maximum temperature is 9 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is considerably lower than that, around 6 degrees. But I'm sat in my corridor at my new permanent seat with no heating to speak of and no insulation save a broken glass panel above my head that's covered with a bit of cardboard box. How can this be an appropriate working environment by anyone's judgement? Must stop now as my fingers are seizing up... (No, that's not an exaggeration.)

Just desserts

The Football Association has expressed its dismay that a Tottenham fan managed to get close enough to Frank Lampard last night to aim a punch at him. Interestingly, this is closer than Emmanuel Adebayor got and he still got a four-match ban. So what retribution should we take against this hooligan? He's going to get a lifetime ban from White Hart Lane, which is surely a blessing rather than a punishment. If he'd actually hit Lampard he should have got a medal.

"This is not a meritocracy"

Some 10 days after submitting a grievance to my company about the way I've been treated, I had a meeting with my head of department and HR rep yesterday. How enlightening it was too.
While it's difficult to go into the nature of the grievance in detail, suffice to say that following a merger I was assigned a new "level" in the merged company that I felt denigrated my contribution. This is one of many grievances I raised.
My moment of clarity came when my head of department explained that people are assigned a level in the company based on commercial need, so that even if they meet their objectives and the criteria for a level, they may not be promoted (the only way to receive a pay rise).
- Does that mean we're not a meritocracy, I asked.
- Yes, this is not a meritocracy, he replied.
Call me naïve if you want, but I thought the point of setting individual objectives was for people to be recognised and rewarded for meeting them.
Leaving aside any legal implications of his statement, how does it motivate me for my head of department to tell me that my promotion is dependent on plugging a commercial gap rather than on what I do? What are my prospects if no one vacates a more senior position?
These apparently arbitrary levels are used to allocate people to projects, so another point I raised was that I would be allocated to less challenging work than I'm capable of, so my potential value to the company is diminished. My head of department corrected me on this point too: the business director would request me because he knows I'm capable of delivering a project even though I'm not officially ranked at a higher level.
The (quite overt) implication is that the company will keep me on a lower-level rating at a lower salary even though I'm doing higher-level work which, if they needed to recruit someone to do, they'd have to pay a significant amount more to that consultant. So I'm cheap labour doing a skilled job. Thanks very much.
I was also told that the work I've done in management and reporting is irrelevant to any consultancy skills (even though it's a measure on the appraisal form). Not like we sell management and reporting is it? Oh, hang on, we do.
The meeting concluded with the company representatives telling me that I shouldn't feel that I'm being picked on. These kind of problems are an issue across the company: it's just that I've been affected more than others have.

Keeping up with the MySpacers

A couple of posts about work this morning, which doesn't reflect the intended balance of this blog but for which I'm unapologetic.
Our company is launching a new corporate website to reflect its brand, the work it does, complete full service bla bla bla.
The site is (obviously) in Flash and quite funky. But does it work? Let's send an email out in an open source software style to the company and tell them there's a "PHAT" prize for the person who can find the weirdest error they don't yet know about.
There's a bit of a rumble of contentment goes around the office as any automated test produced 100s of errors. Then people start picking the bones through the site and finding more user-journey based errors (ever tried going back in a Flash animation?). So people compare and contrast what they've found and email it back to the project team.
About a week later I got an email from someone in the team saying they couldn't replicate the errors I'd found in Firefox. The team is using version 1.5. Why? Version 2 has been out of Beta for months. And the team have never heard of AdBlock, even though it's the most downloaded Firefox Add-On. Then I discover that this isn't from some bussed-in tester, but from a bleeding "Program (sic) Manager", that is one of the most senior people responsibility for delivery in the organisation.
Is it just me or is this company fucked?

ASBO 2.0

I quite liked this cartoon representation of networking sites. If you use the social sites in question, however, you'll probably have already seen the link...

PDF to happiness

I've been doing some work for Dresdner Kleinwort recently, who conduct some interesting macro-economic research. One of their stars is a guy call James Montier, who writes about behaviours involved in investing. He's written a particularly interesting article on the psychology of happiness, which is well worth the read even though it's in a PDF.

Underlying insecurities

If you read Bruce Schneier, you'll already be familiar with this story about terrorists trying to bring down the UK internet from the Sunday Times. If you don't, I thought I'd bring it to your attention for the wealth of ignorance about how the internet works.
The comments are particularly funny, on both sides of the coin. Is Telehouse bomb proof? I went to assess it for a central government client in the UK and of course it isn't, but it's pretty secure. Could you take in the twenty or so 4U servers and pack them with semtex as one commentator suggests. Absolutely not. If you've ever tried to pick up a 4U server or seen a data house loading bay you'd know why. Basically, I'd read the article and comments and assume that whatever is said is the opposite of the truth. Apart from a comment by someone called Jon which just says LMAO. That was pretty much my response too.

Too taboo to be true?

What are we to make of this story from Yahoo News? What kind of fascism is this? In the old capitalist days you simply cut any funding to people who were carrying out research into things you didn't like...

Pushing the envelope

This is an interesting story, which you may already have seen, about how to clone the new UK passport. It particularly annoys me when ignorant fuckers like Peter Hain and John Reid get up and tell the world that these things can't be copied, that they'll provide extra security and solve the populist xenophobic agenda of middle England when this technology will do nothing of the sort.

Free speech or safe trial?

The Guardian has succeeded in publishing a story the BBC failed to, citing public interest and press freedom to overturn an injunction. This is very positive as for once, it's a subject we should know about. This is a case where it is alleged that people sold the highest legal power through sitting in the House of Lords, in exchange for support in the highest political power through supporting general election campaigns.
However, let me put a slight dampener on the Guardian's success. What is more important: the paper telling us that this has happened or people being brought to justice? If the trial fails based on prejudicial material available to the public, what will the newspaper do then?
We can hope that the judge who refused the injunction did so safe in the knowledge that this would not affect a subsequent trial, but how confident can anyone be of that? The cynical among you might look at Shirley Porter and say this will never come to court anyway...

Finally done it

So I submitted my grievance today to my HR rep. Of course, I had to go to the HR department to find out who my HR rep was...
21 grievances listed. I also suggested 6 things that would fix them.
I'm not sure what they're going to come back with, because it's so unpredictable. I can quite easily imagine that they do nothing for the next couple of weeks: sit on my complaint until I go to harrass them again. Alternatively, they may get bolshy about me not having followed proper channels: not that these have been explained to me, of course. And I wouldn't put it past them to agree that I have a case, but then find some other way to make my life difficult. I saw them really stick the knife in two of my colleagues through some legal shennanigans they'd contrived. I'm open-minded about it, but not expecting too much.
What most annoys me, however, is that I feel forced into this position. This company, for all its faults, represents a really good opportunity for me to learn new skills and work on interesting projects. But if they're forcing me into a position where I can't actually work here, then what choice do I have?

Thinking outside the box?

A number of broadcasters, notably Fox, have got a bit tetchy with YouTube recently for failing to protect their property adequately. People have uploaded entire series of The Simpsons and 24 just as they're being aired.
Auntie Beeb, has taken another angle by signing a deal with Google's video service to promote shows. The mentality seems to be, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Except when you take a slightly more cynical perspective. How much dross is now showing up from YouTube in BBC broadcasts? We now have "news" that a pensioner's video blog has more subscribers than Paris Hilton, or that a couple that imitated Dirty Dancing at their wedding reception. It's just a short step to making video clip shows of stuff that's been uploaded, for people who can't be bothered to go to the site themselves: in fact, I've already seen this on Swiss TV (don't ask me how).
So now, if I'm desperate for TV at any time, I can sneak a preview of what I'd like to watch on YouTube; not sure why I'd rather go there than use the BBC site, which must have enough infrastructure to support this. And if I'm desperate for some user-generated content all I need to do is turn on my TV. Is this what they call channel convergence?