Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

I’m not going to use the phrase economic crisis because we’re not in one. Everything is fine. The only reason we’re in a recession because we decided to call it a recession which then scares everyone and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. I would however like to throw a few ideas out there on the current economic climate.

Government’s all over the world are in the middle of nationalising banks. Like everywhere. Iceland’s Glitnir, which I’m told was a rather large bank, has recently been nationalised. Here in the UK, Bradford & Bingley have just gone. We’re still bailing out Northern Rock. Me, my tax money is bailing them out.

Point is, this isn’t how a free market capitalist economy is supposed to work. There shouldn’t be government bail outs, a free market only really works when the market is free. Companies go down, other companies take their place, circle of life and all that jazz.

Surely the way to encourage economic growth in such times is to increase the capitalist freedoms and reduce the socialist state rather than the current trend of increasing the socialist state with government bailouts and suprise taxes. Slash taxes, slash minimum wage, make it more profitable to actually generate profit than go cap in hand to the government.

We’re all moaning about these huge salaries the city big wigs are getting paid then coming to the tax payer for the bail out. Who can blaim them? That’s just common sense. They don’t lose it all when their company goes down to the toilet, most boards are remaining intact when the company is nationalised. Who wouldn’t take up that offer?

If we’re going to this whole capitalist economy (which we are, because it works, get over it) we should just get on with it. The world economy well go down the pan if government’s don’t intervene. But it will be back again. Bigger, better and even stronger than before.

Several night’s sleep and a fair few drinks later and I think my head is starting to clear. It’s been a bit of a messy weekend but having spent quite a bit of time over at Colton I think I’m back on form for A-Soc’s intro meeting tomorrow. I have a lot of blogging to catch up on. Here goes…

And I need your soul because your always soulful.

And I need your heart, because your always in the right places.

I went to Leeds Bradford International Airport on Thursday to pick Michelle up and I have to say, it’s a bit of a joke.

I mean, international airport? Granted there are some international flights but few if any that would be considered real international flights. How many scheduled flights fly to America for example? They are all crappy like chartered package holidays.

But they like to keep up the pretense. Having found my way through a series of basically country lanes which is what they were, it suddenly opens up into a big duel carriageway – for 100 metres! Seriously, who are they kiding?

Being a developer I don’t drink tea or coffee. That’s not exclusively true, if we’re making proper coffee at a dinner party I will have a cup but I tend to play that down as I feel a slowly developing taste for coffee and the fact we throw dinner parties are both signs that I am getting old. But back on the point, when I need that pick me up, it’s all abou the energy drinks. You just can’t beat them.

Just reading over the front of my can of Red Bull though I notice is proudly announces…

0g fat
123 calories
0g salt

Which is great. Though it makes me question why it would be an achivement to have no fat or salt in a drink. I mean, is that normal? Did it used to? It’s like when you see “suitable for vegitarians” on a chocolate bar and wonder why it wasn’t before (interestly, McDonald’s strawberry milkshakes only became suitable for vegitarians about 6 months ago, think about what that means :p).

Futher round the back of the can it goes on to say…

A serving (250ml) contains the equivalent of approx. 0g of salt

What does that mean? Approximately means it actually does contain some salt I presume. And equivalent means it has some kind of salt substitute equal to the amount of salt that would be in there if there was salt in there? Which means none as there isn’t any? So they have replaced the salt with 0g of something similar?

What are the betting lawyers were involved here?

Tonight I am a man of few words.

Electricity.

Pineapple.

Time.

This is all.

Oh, we’re still alive btw. You win again, science!

I really enjoyed Saturday night. Sat in a car park in Castleford eating some kind of chicken wrap.

But as myself and Becky talked the night away we arrived on the scary fact that we are approaching 22. Making our next landmark birthdays 30! I’m almost 30! That’s so old, so amazingly old. I mean, you’re actually past it by then, on the downward slope, your life effectively over. How scary is that?

Life is just expensive. I’m sure it never used to be.

I mean, I came from from Tesco this evening being £100 less well off. Between the £50 I spent on good (I’m not sure how, I only spent £10 on alcohol) and £50 I spent on petrol, it’s just depressing to do a Tesco shop these days. Though it is mighty tasty :D.

Here’s an interesting fact you may not know (or to be fair, even find interesting). The American expression “my two cents” is actually just an Americanised version of the original British idiom “my two pennies worth.” Yep much like whisky and invading less powerful countries, the phrase is just another concept that actually came from the British Isles and was merely imitated by the United States.

So, given many of us are soon to be or indeed have started graduate jobs, I thought I would throw in experiences and thoughts given I have been working for over a month now on the off chance it is helpful but mainly because I am guessing I can score a few cheap jokes somewhere in this post.

It really is a lot of the things you imagine to be honest. You know when we were doing things like normalised databases and understanding business processes before designing a system and we’re all sat there thinking this clearly is a better way of doing this but nobody is going to be doing this in the real world and because I know this it’s then going to be my job to have to go in and sort it all out which is just going to be painful.

Well, that is exactly how it is :D. Having arrived for my first week by boss Nick announced he was going to be away for the next week so I used the time to almost entirely rewrite a big system we had written for a client so it is all normalised and doesn’t duplicate silly amounts of code (it now only duplicates a large amount of code ;)). But it’s far less painful to actually sort out – it’s more of a fun challenge once you actually get into it.

You’re going to like the people you work with. Possibly because they geniunely nice people. I think I’ve got lucky in that the people I work with really are geniunely nice people. Even if they weren’t though, you are still going to like them because it’s like that in halls – you make friends and then looking back a year or two later you realise that they were actually a right bunch of losers.

The first week or so you haven’t really got into the swing of things so they can be a bit boring while you really build up the knowledge to just be able to walk in on a morning and get on with things. So if there is some serious clock watching in that first week, don’t worry, it’s going to get better once you’re up to speed.

Chances are, you aren’t going to be a newbie for too long. Most of the companies we are going for will have a relatively high turnover compared with companies outside of IT and not recruiting graduates who are going places so with all probability there will be someone else who started just before you and will soon be someone newer than you too. My company recruited a few months before I started and have some else starting in about two weeks.

Things happen slowly. This is where your experience running societies comes in. Remember all that nagging of people to get things done that a president has to do constantly throughout their term? It is a skill that will come in handy a lot. If you missed out on the experience of running a society then don’t worry too much, you’re just going to feel far less flustrated when nothing gets done.

Finally, whenever you get stressed, just remember that you only have 40 years of work left. And a good few years of people telling you that joke. Over and over. Like Thursday crashing a car. So yeah, good luck!