Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

I had that victoria silvstedt in here the other day

June 10, 2005

go away, I’m updating the stylesheet. go on, get that face and hair of yours out of my office and leave me alone. I’ve had enough of you gawping over my shoulder when I’m trying to amend the dynamic press release indexes to incorporate feedback from the central web publishing team, who incidentally are looking for a compelling reason for extra country specific venues to migrate their operations to their centralized model for hosting, maintaining and supporting the business requirements for a worldwide authoring community and so we’re trying to meet in the middle with the globalization programs for FY06 based on the common web platform architecture but we can see some potential collisions with field requirements and the approach I’m already taking with the centralized model because we both know the product set we need is ages away and so with 5 staff in iberia where’s the value add?

so having you with your breasts and the rest barely contained in that outfit and your holster strapped to your thigh that looks like it must contain an experimental ice ray gun or something, is frankly a bit unnerving. I’ve spent 9 perfectly good productive months sat in this office with my window on the world unsullied by nefarious distractions or instrusions until the day that some halfwit bill poster decided that actually the ITV celebrity wrestling adverts should go on the side of the phone box that faces directly across the street at our row of genteel victorian terraced town houses, as opposed to the side which faces into the traffic where it didn’t matter to me that “he’s finally taking her up the aisle”, because I couldn’t see it unless I popped out to M&Ms for a ginsters and some thai sweet chicken mccoys. but now, whatever I’m doing, whenever I’m doing it in this room, there’s always you, victoria, draping yourself over my shoulder like some drunken slapper from down riverside on a friday night, pressing into my back while I’m trying to work out the non-locale-specific version of Logged in as:, or sticking your thigh-length boots into my arm when I’m figuring how we’re going to tackle the issue of the syndicated catalogue. I can’t even write a meaningful email without your ridiculous hair tumbling over my keyboard while I type. so just go away and leave me alone. get c4 to stick up an advert for cheese or desperate housewives or something instead. I’m trying to concentrate.

get distracted yourself. its friday and you need a reason to look at something inconsequential and rubbish.

which way round for globalization development?

June 9, 2005

I’m not sure where this bit goes. I mean, I understand the idea of your über plan and all that, ’cause you’ve been banging on about that and doing those staroffice presentations with all those circles and arrows and things for years, but what exactly do you want me to do when somebody managing global content deletes a node in the global tree and expects the whole operation to be supported seamlessly across multiple venues and countries and languages?

er, I dunno. I only did the strategy, right? or did I do the business requirements as well? I can’t remember. oh, that’s what you mean. so what do you want me to tell you? everything we asked you to tell us 6 months ago about how you actually want this content platform to support a centralized content model at a level where we can actually write something approaching a functional spec which we can turn into something we can actually begin to engineer. have you got time to do that? oh, sure! um, but what is it you actually want me do do? I mean, have I missed something out from the globalization requirements that I did last year? well, yeah. you need to let us know how somebody might actually utilize the platform to perform some kind of task which supports the operational model that you put in those requirements so we can work out whether we need to re-architect the system to enable slurping by delta and node deletion and actually what the criteria are for us having actually delivered a globalized platform that meets your needs, which, by the way, are probably not the same as they were a year ago, because everything’s changed.

oh, right. hang on, are you telling me that my own business requirements might be wrong? you can’t do that, I am the business. there mine. it’ll take them home and not let you play with them if you start saying nasty things about them. no, we’re not saying they’re wrong, they’re just not quite, well, right. here’s a whole bunch of stuff we noted that you might want to consider, because what you’ve asked for and what we’re doing aren’t necessarily exactly converging on a neat path. oh, ok, thanks. jesus! that’s loads of stuff! yeah, but we want to make sure we do it right, right?

so we reach an agreement that I pull my dumbass finger out and actually do those process flows n’ stuff that I never get round to doing and the engineering team will do what’s right, like they always do, and if they need anything urgently to progress the globalization development, they’ll let me know, so I can make something up and filter it back into the strategy later. only joking. I’m calling it the pragmatic globalization development chain (because of course, aggressive pragmatism leads us into systemized sticky matrix approaches), which is how it’s always been really, except the engineering team know globalization as well as the rest of us these days, so I’m much more deferential when I tell them absolutely positively that global content is US-English and the tiered fallback model only goes 2 levels, because they’ll probably be able to point out to me just how that won’t really work, even from a business point of view, but in a really nice way.

globalization. head. wall.

June 7, 2005

there’s no myths associated with globalization just a simple truth. you’ve got to change all your business processes mate, cos this globalized solution ain’t gonna work if you keep producing stuff like you’re in an exam room with your arm over the answers and then expect it to spread the sharing message to where the revenue is, which is not where you are, probably. the burgeoning underclass of globalization managers have been squirrelling around for years, trying to get you in a small room with no natural light just so you can understand how it might actually be possible to transform our beautifully crafted concept album of monetization through pragmatic centralization into a workable, sustainable and accountable framework for managing our messaging and enabling our commerce venues with cascading content inheritance and local value-added content support, like what I just drew on those concentric circles in staroffice, in case you were trying to work out what that was. this projector’s a bit rubbish. and I’m in another country, of course.

I mean, it’s not like its gonna even cost you a fistful of dollars. you’re already building that central web application architecture, right? I just know you’re gonna be fully internationalized an’ that, and lookit, you got hooks into localization workflows and all that stuff going on, so its gonna be like sticking a lemon on the eiffel tower. easy innit? so why not let us talk to the authors and business owners so we can’t just have some sort of arrangement where we give them this lovely globalized platform where localized milk and internationalized honey flow across the plains of centralization and over the cliffs of subscription and into the valleys of unified content taxonomies and they just have to change the way they’ve been creating stuff for the last 10 years. I think they’ll be open to that. I expect they’re falling over themselves to break their agreements with their press agencies and design vendors and actually, I bet if we pointed out to them that copy and pasting entire sections of our corporate site into Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: URGENT: Re: [Fwd: emails and then expecting the intern to create the online equivalent of the cistine chapel on 15 disparate sites in 10 languages in flash isn’t the most viable authoring solution, then they’d probably have some kind of religious experience and convert wholeheartedly to the church of g11n and succumb to the divine and all-knowing truth of ‘the content model’.

so, I’m off down the newsagents to pick up my copy of Marketing Matters – But Not If I Can’t Employ My Friends To Do It magazine and I’ll leave it to you to arrange the con call that has to work for Santa Clara, Camberley, Singapore and Moscow that will kick this stuff off. but don’t do it on Wednesday afternoon, cos I have an appointment with a medico about a collapsed idea.

oi

May 26, 2005

shut it you blart. look, if I say you ave to change your business processes then you aint got a leg to stand on right? I mean, it stands to reason dunnit? you got a lahvly set of content there – oi, dave, ain’t that a lahvly set of content? look ere, look. its got tabs and everything, real class, not like that muck you get over at those cowboys down the east end. anyway, here’s the thing. I’ve got a proposition for you which I reckon you might take a fancy to. I just had an associate of mine drop round for a little chat, and we got talking in the back of the jag, see? it only turns out he’s got a bleedin globalization strategy for our web venues that massively reduces complexity in our publishing processes, enables content reuse and promotes a consistent, coherent voice to our customers, while providing a feature-rich user experience supporting local business priorities and an extensible content model that integrates localization workflow and plug-in web services on a centralized, internationalized, common web platform, dunnit?

so here’s the deal, my son. as I’m feeling generous and I’ve ad enough trouble with little narks like you today, I’m gonna let you in on a little bit of business. call it a mark of my gratitude for the loyalty you’ve shown to me over the years. I mean, you’re like a brother to me. except of course you ain’t, but you know, you’re like family, right? and what do families do? that’s right, my son, they share things. you share your takings and I share you a slap from ron here, but today it’s different, cos today, I’m sharing with you a chance to put all that behind you. what I’ve got for you today my son is only a bleedin global content model, innit? eh? geddit? a global content model. you know what that means, right? ere, ron, I don’t think he’s understanding me right. I ain’t seeing any gratitude. do I ave to spell it out for you? look, its a bleedin centralized content authoring and production environment with subscription, global tree merge, and all that nice stuff, based on a write centrally, view locally publishing model that supports the research and buy cycle in local language for a local market where we do 60% of that kind of stuff, whatever that is. it even lets you carry on authoring all those things you do youself and then sticks everything together in some kind sepository or something so it all looks like it’s supposed to be and not like its just fallen of the back of a virtual lorry and you’ve got some slave labour at 10 quid an hour to patch it up like a kipper. tell im dave,

look, this offer don’t last right? as soon as we’re out that door we’re off down whitehall to see a man about a bit of trouble with opening sauces or something, and then the offer’s closed. all I want you to do, my son, is just make a small change to your business process. that’s all. just a small change. all you have to do is stop making stuff that only works in one place and start making stuff that works in any place. then we’ll throw in the globalization bits and we’ll be laughin. that’s gotta be the best deal you’ve ad all day, right? tell him ron. make him understand the value of localization-readiness in content creation, but don’t make a mess, mind. I’ve already got blood on me Armani from that trip down camberley.

javaone one. I mean the first one. you know what I mean.

May 20, 2005

1996. It was the beginning of a short period when I was a really quite bad java programmer. still, I got the JavaOne backpack and realized that its possible to have a garden on top of a bunker in the center of town. well, I say the center, but it’s not really, but that means I could park in that garage down the road next to the freeway where I discovered that the rental car had lights that come on by themselves. which is nice, but couldn’t turn them off.

I’ve still got the backpack, but I can no longer overload an operator, unless it’s the statusline for BT broadband. I recall that nobody really knew what the hell was going on at the event and just kind of wondered around clutching handouts and pieces of cheese and trying to work out which was the most popular breakout session. which was probably beans. or servlets. in fact, they were probably the only breakout sessions. oh, and Scott held up the 7 inch future of computing and we all rocked.

it was great. I ate Casey Jones for 2 weeks straight, ages before that bloke on the telly.

no, it’s really just rubbish

May 19, 2005

too bad. 22 years forcing myself to like Barrett, but today I give it a 2, which means I’ll never hear it again. stupid tea-brained outcast, whining uncontrallably in front of a fireplace in his bare-floorboards front room while dave and nick bring him soup from the co-op and prop him up on a stool, where he just dribbles into his chest, the spark gone right out. I used to live in the flat upstairs to that room when I was sticking £35 price tags on mono copies of piper at the gates of dawn in the upstairs of the cambridge beat goes on and I thought that was just very cool, but actually neither of those things were and now I’m deleting him from my playlist to make way for The Longcut, so there.

in between sticking pins in my arm to remind myself I’m still here and that I really should be revising the standard templates and indexes for global venues in line with Sun’s rebranding and the things I forgot to do in the first place, I’m fiddling with a P800 and pointing a gun at my foot as I think about what to put on the Tadpole to see me through the next week in the land of high-altitude Jagermeister and a big bed at the Omni that I’ll probably fall out of at 4 in the morning as I stumble for the hotel ethernet cable that will connect me up to the Sun network to coordinate Japan. I have to use photoshop, so I have to use XP. I need to install JDS, but I really don’t have the wit to dual boot and I only have 1 day to sort it out anyway and by the way, if you’re thinking of suggesting the gimp, then don’t. I’ll do the right thing when I get back and then reinstall the entire home network with solaris 10 and get VPN working because chris managed it so I should be able to, even though he’s got a Ferrari now like what all them engineers do. you just need to get NAT to point to the right port and apparently a tunnel opens up, like fricken Narnia or something. I dunno.

so i’m going to rip the heart out of an About Sun gateway and stick it back together again with ‘I know what I’m talking about, really’ glue, ready to hoof over to the development team to do that stuff they do with XML and god knows what and then I’ll stick a new stylesheet on the press pages and wrap up the indexes like dynamic fajitas and then I’ll ask the lovely people in Australia if they would like to opt in to changing the world and everything in it just by configuring their NSAPI. or I’ll have another pie. pie it is. hang on, Spiritualized. blimey, that’s a bit rubbish too.

but I want to do it another way

May 2, 2005

just a quick check to see if everythings ok and oh, world of pain. so Tom and the boys are gathered around an Americano, throwing bits of anchovy at a twisted effigy of a marketeer made out old Dreamweaver boxes. it’s a public holiday so they’ve decided to spend all day slumped over a big top, poking at bits of Hungarian until the end drops off and they have to copy and paste umlauts from a transcription of the Sun Web Karaoke ’98 event in Copenhagen, where Anna was looking particularly elfin. to make things worse, I don’t even have a clue what they’re supposed to be doing tomorrow, so I’m relying on Mr. Swindon to perform his usual unfaltering push script fandango, so that kudos flutters from the sky like the dry leaves of a recognition tree and alights on the shoulders of the hunchbacks and misfits that make up this great global brotherhood of monkeys.

meanwhile, I’m coughing up internal organs and getting very cold shoulders because I’ve not left my crack pit since returning from Andalucia. there’s 17 load balancing balinesians to plunder and that’s before I’ve checked in with Marco, who’s pointing his roots at the moon, and Johanesjohanusnessunsen who has sprung from an email backup to inform me that everything is alright forever and if they can’t find the press section, I’m sure they’ll work it out themselves. not to mention that Tanned Guy who is quietly moving up on the outside, finding a space between an un-kerned exclamation mark and a stack of 508 update requests.

The reason I’m doing this is unclear. I’ve just kind of got stuck in a project plan trap, but I’ve got so fat I can’t bend over to chew my foot off. while I’m simpering into a bucket, various apparitions dance before me, floating around in the ether and slapping me in the chuff with wet gantt charts until I agree to put me arm in the trap as well, ooh, and while you’re there, could you just make us a cup of tea? I agree to do this, of course, because I’ve got Cliff Richard coming round and I don’t what him to think I’m a slacker, even though he didn’t send me a birthday card this year.

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