I haven’t posted for days, because I’ve been unfeasibly busy with work, both day and night.
I am, however, loving it.
To keep you going, here’s a great illustration of everything I hate about Flash websites…
(nb. To Jim: yes, I know Flash can be useful and fun. Rathergood.com is testament to that. But most people (and more to the point, most Flash developers) don’t know that…)
Half way through the week, I’ve cycled 25 miles so far – 5 miles each way to work and back. If I can keep this up for the rest of the week, that’ll be 50 miles in 5 days. This must be a good thing.
I do feel a little healthier, but haven’t weighed myself in a while. The endorphins are aflow by the time I get to the office, which is a more efficient wake-up technique than any breakfast cereal I’ve discovered so far.
The only obvious down-side is that I apparently need to either stop cycling, smoking or breathing soon, as my lungs are far from happy with the current state of affairs.
The Guardian’s Zoe Williams on MPs’ reading habits:
On The Da Vinci Code:
Mention of this book is often suffixed by how many copies it has sold, as if sheer weight of numbers obviates all consideration of how rubbish it is. And it’s a bit late to launch into a critique of a work that makes people feel physically sick when they finish it, like a pound of strawberry bonbons, but the question remains – why aren’t they embarrassed? Why aren’t they at least pretending a greater intellectual evolution than this? What are they trying to hide? That they really prefer Enid Blyton?
On Harry Potter:
This isn’t a question of literary snobbery, of failing to understand the joy of an undemanding read. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve been working; if you can find pleasure and, more importantly, diversion in a book that has been written with deliberate preteen simplicity, a very low level of ambiguity and an emphasis on dog-level clarity (Yes! No! Good! Bad!) then you are not very bright.
I’ll get some stick for agreeing, I’m sure, but The Da Vinci Code was a poorly written novel. The Harry Potter movies have (so far) been light-hearted fun, but a couple of hours slumped on the couch watching an easily-digestible film is a very different notion to wading through several hundred pages of a children’s book. Perhaps this is subconsciously why I haven’t got round to reading them yet, despite several people’s insistence that I should do so immediately.
I left the education system with very little to show – my last formal examinations were taken at the age of 16, and I didn’t even perform to my potential in those. Yet I try to better myself, and have made my way through the various works of eg. Virgil, Joyce, Tolkien, Wilde, Yeats, Orwell… And all the while, those who would represent me – those luminaries of the ivory towers of Oxford and Cambridge – are reading pulp fiction and children’s stories.
Ten years ago, I left Birkdale High School with eight GCSEs, and a hatred weariness of the British formal education system. Of the 150 or so pupils in my year, I’ve kept in touch with a very small number.
Dan is still, as he was then, a very close friend. We lived together for a while until I relocated for $JOB[-1], and both work in IT.
Martin, while we lost touch for a while during his university years, is a very close friend, and I’m delighted that we’ve managed to keep in touch so well since he emigrated to Thailand to become something of an entrepeneur in 2001.
Mike and I lost touch for years, but now correspond regularly, and I caught up with him a while ago in London, where he works as a solicitor.
Tomorrow, all four of us will be together for the first time in years: although we all went on to the same college, I left fairly quickly (which is another story entirely), and the others went their separate ways, taking very different classes and going on to different universities.
I’m looking forward to reminiscing about “the happiest days of our lives” (what an enormous lie that was), and as I’m the host, trying to suggest even vaguely interesting things to do in Milton Keynes…
Around six weeks ago, I interviewed for a position with a (nameless) company based in Oxford. The job spec wasn’t exactly perfect (a web development role – it sounded like it could be a step backwards), but I love Oxford – my parents grew up there, and whilst I’ve never actually lived there myself, it’s always felt like a second home to me. A friend also happened to be working in Oxford that day, so interviewing there in the afternoon made it nicely convenient to go for a few beers with him afterwards.
The interview itself started with a quick psychometric test – one generally acknowledged (according to a certain business psychologist I mentioned it to) as being particularly badly-designed. Not a great start. Then the interview itself began, and I learnt that the position on offer was not just the role of web developer, but the role of the web department. I would be the entire technical team. Alarm bells began to ring. I breezed through the technical tests, but things just didn’t feel right.
A week or two later, I accepted an offer from a different company, rather closer to home, and promptly forgot all about my Oxford experience. I supposed I should have contacted them to notify them that I was no longer available, but since they hadn’t contacted me either I guess we were even.
I returned this afternoon from a great weekend in London to find a letter from the company in question. Addressed initially to Barry Price, it begins:
Friday 12th August 2005
Re: Web Developer
Dear Mr Pain
*blink* Who?
…we regret to inform you that we find your skills do not correspond to the criteria for this particular role…
Aside from being amused by the rejection (and the bizarre typo) from a company which I’d long ago rejected the idea of working for, this illustrates everything that’s wrong with stock responses.
The letter tells me nothing at all. The fact that I hadn’t heard from the company for six weeks already told me that they either didn’t want to hire me, or couldn’t afford to. To be fair, it’s more annoying when a company don’t let you know anything at all after an interview, and refuse to acknowledge emails or telephone calls when you chase them up. This is all too common, and so I suppose I should at least be grateful that the company had the manners to contact me.
But quite why it took them six weeks to do so, I have no idea. Leaving it this long is still almost as bad as doing nothing at all.
The phrase “your skills do not correspond to the criteria for this particular role” is the most annoying by far. My skills are listed on my CV. The criteria for the role were on the job spec, which I read thoroughly, and made sure that the custom version of my CV which I submitted emphasised all of the relevant technologies and skills, as well as mentioning as many of the others as would comfortably fit onto two pages.
In fact, I was required to hand-write some SQL queries in the interview, which the technical interviewer verified were correct, and was also asked to hand-write a couple of text-parsing routines in Perl. I think the technical interviewer actually commented that her version of one of the routines was ten lines of code – she’d have accepted up to fifteen. I solved the problem with just five lines, if I remember rightly.
So in summary, I have a letter which tells me that:
I can’t decide whether to throw it away or have it framed.