Tuesday, May 23, 2006

What's new ....

I was on blogger.com's frontpage when a link rolled past. It meant nothing to me, it still doesn't but for some reason it attracted me in. Anyway, it took me to ...

http://lcmglife.blogspot.com/

Which appears to be a very new blog and with only two posts so far but I have to say that the article on a child safe internet was a very interesting read and the second blog that it linked too was also a good read and both broadly match my views.

What else ... oh yes ...

https://anonybrowser.com/login.php looks interesting, especially in the light of the above two mentioned blogs. For a paltry $4 a month one can have unfettered access to the internet ... or is it too good to be true? I personally am not concerned enough about my privacy to need to hide behind an anoymous company who may disappear tomorrow.

Friday, May 12, 2006

The Apprentice

I have questions ....

1. Why does Alan Sugar insist on having himself called Sir Alan?

- Yes, I know he's a Sir but this smacks of having to 'Lord' it over others because you can because you have a title and a bit of money and in this case because you are looking for sycophants.

2. Was it just me, or did Badge come over as being someone who doesn't need molding or training and in which case she in no way meets the criteria for an apprentice?

3. Are all the apprentices just a little bit - ok then, a lot - anally retentive? I haven't watched the series avidly but to a person they are all totally full of themselves and in need of personalities.

Is life really a better place because we have these over ambitious self-centred achievers appearing on our TV?

For my part I will walk away from anybody who comes over this way as my life doesn't need the grief. If this makes them happy then fair enough it's their life - but you only had to look at each of their faces as they were fired to realise that not one of them are happy. Is this what they (and here they becomes more generic to represent anybody like this and in my time I've met a few) believe they are here for? Is it their sole purpose to climb the corporate ladder? come the end of the road, will they look back happy that they've made it? What is their legacy going to be?

I'm only asking these questions because I now work with somebody whom I can see has similar traits and I'm trying to work out what it is that drives them. This person - let's call him/her Z - had to go on a grad course recently and was so anti it you'd have thought that Z had already been on the course and knew it's content. Well surprisingly Z has come back from this course with an entirely different attitude and is determined to move on - that's good for Z but what I spotted as Z regaled us with stories of the course was shades of 'The Badger' - arrogance and over-confident attitude dressed up as competence and ability in a young package.

And since Z's return to work Z has done precisely nothing in terms of what they are supposed to be doing. Z has spent time eMailing new mentors (found from the course) and studying. Neither of which is a bad thing when we have nothing to do .... I'll leave it to you to figure out if we have nothing to do.

Don't any of these people realise that life is so much more than our achievements?

HDDLife - An Update

I was so wanting for the folks at BinarySense Ltd (aka HDDLife) to not respond to my post and to not supply their promised license but I was also determined not to let is slide too easily.

So I persisted, filled in their form several times and eventually - though I held no hope for an answer - sent them a personal eMail via their only locatable eMail address.

Here's the reply I received - you can excuse the English as I believe they are a Russian based company.

#00FF00Sorry for inconvenience, due to some error in configuration, posts from form don't pass in our automatic ticket system, so we don't see them.

Now all fixed and we parsing posts, your license will be send tomorrow.


And I am happy to report that I now have my license and what's more my first Whoop Whoop alert which woke me up. The alert is due to me not changing the defaults - which is perhaps one area where this little app could be improved. Default levels for different hardware platforms (laptops always work much hotter than desktops).