Simeon Pilgrim

The year the Foo Fighters released a Tom Petty quality song (Wheels).

James Cameron released a very hyped computer generated ‘blue version’ of Dances with Wolves.

People continued to claim RSS/Blogging was dead, and Twitter was the new king. With all of the wonder of limited capacity but with an instant and continuous stream of dribble. Proving tech people are no better than the CNN watching masses. And we wonder why the newspapers are dying…

And the year I spent weeks filling in US governmental forms that were unnecessarily complex. Texts fields to small for  requested information, pdf forms that don’t allow you to save, and helpful blobs of text wasting form space, but telling you how much time it should take to fill the form out, which due to the previous problems means you have to do it in one sitting, thus have all your answers pre-found, thus you do the form twice to find the things you didn’t know. Making a mockery of the stupid Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980. It’s not like when you did things by hand with a pen, you couldn’t just put the pen down (save) and resume later…

Roll on 2010.

OMG, WTF, LinkedIn developers in their lack of vision have added support for Twitter into LinkedIn, thus turning it from a business network tool, into a Facebook style pile of dung.

I’m ok with that, but what I’m not cool about is them adding this dribble to my RSS feed about my network.

If I wanted Twitter dribble from my professional peers, I’d follow then on Twitter… where’s the opt-in/opt-out…

ARRGGGGG!!!!!

Well 2008 Olympics, and I have enjoyed it quite a bit.  I really enjoyed the opening ceremony, and it was a great chance to use the PVR to record the whole thing.

It will be good to not feel compelled to have the TV on for a while.  When so much top level competition is happening I feel that I need to enjoy it all…

Things I will not miss, and think should be scraped are:

Walking race – really how is this a sport, it’s so contrived, ‘lets run, but without running‘. I mean you walk when you don’t want to run, or you run when your late and have a need to get there faster.  So running races are about going as fast as you can, yet the walk (I don’t want to go fast) race, is about going as fast as you can without going fast, how can that be a race.

Womans beach volleyball – lets get a great team sport, and empty the court of most of the players so that points are easy to get.  Oh and now lets skimp the togs down so people watch.  Um, if the people are not watching it’s because it’s boring.  So tarting it up means only oglers will watch – is that what the Olympics is about, perving?

My other major gripe I have is with sports that could be defined as a ‘game’.  Football, Baseball, Softball and Tennis are not really higher, longer, faster are they.  Ok, there are some team games I do like, but would be willing to loose, Volleyball, Table Tenis.  I just don’t see ‘games’ as personal excellence.

My last gripe, is that TV One had four TV streams available on-line, but our Internet plan charges for traffic because ‘international traffic is expensive‘ yet local traffic also gets billed at these rates, because ISPs can. Nice one ISPs.

Oh my god, the people further up the ladder have after a year and a half decided what our new database/reporting tools will be named.

The tools came from another company (X) that is now owned by our parent (Y) so they were called:

X 2DB, X DB Configurator, X DB Editor, X DB Reports

because they loaded data into the DB, configured the normalised data, edited the loaded data, and reported on the data.

When one and a half years ago we merged with these tools, both parties rebranded them:

Y 2DB, Y DB Configurator, Y DB Editor, Y DB Reports

But now we have a directive from on high to call them:

Y 2DB, Y Configurator, Y Editor, Y Reports

They didn’t rename the data loader, either because Y 2 is too stupid, or more likely they didn’t know what a “2DB” was, so left it alone. The next problem is we have had another Configuration program in the pipeline for the last year, to configure machines, which we were going to call Y Machine Configurator. Will they also want to remove the Machine from that name, as it also adds to much descriptive value?

*arggg* it drives me batty the crap that others do in the name of “adding value”