Chris Worfolk's Blog

Traditionally I enjoy my somewhat cryptic blog posts.

Recently though I have begun to reconsider their use. After all, my blog has a public readerbase and really they don’t mean anything to the author. They tend to leave everyone else a little nonplussed.

Sometimes though, your blog simply needs to serve as an emotional release. So this is me, as if driving at the speeds I just drove back at and talking it out with Moz weren’t enough, releasing my anguish onto my blog. You can stop reading here. This really won’t mean anything to you.

But I mean seriously, WTF?

WTF?

It isn’t just me right?

Because the sad truth is I already know. But I don’t want to admit it. Or maybe I geniunely don’t know. But is that the seeds of doubt I wish were there because I’m in denial?

And seriously, why are you still reading?

Having received an email through regarding the upcoming TKD grading I feel I need to express my appreciation for Mr. Smith’s blunt and to the point style. Allow me to pick out some examples…

2. ‘Ironed’ means that that you get a household electrical appliance called an ‘iron’. If you haven’t seen one or used one get a friend to help. After you have ironed your dobok fold it as neatly as you can to take to class. If you stuff it in your bag it isn’t ‘ironed’ anymore.

…

If your dobok is heavily creased or grey or dirty you will be killed before the start of the grading.

…

5. If you try to wear any other type of tshirt with a fun/music/anything print on then you will be killed.

…

7. ‘I don’t trust the internet’ is something your grandparents would say. I will ridicule you if you say it.

…

9. If you completed the form less than 3 weeks ago and you email me to say ‘you said to email you I hadn’t got my licence book through’ I will come to your house and throw bricks through your windows.

10. If you completed the form less than 1 week ago and you email me to say ‘you said to email you I hadn’t got my licence book through’ I will come to your house and kill you in front of your housemates.

…

13. Unless you have already been spoken to about an assessed grading and you ask if you can double grade because you missed the last grading then you will be killed and left in the corner of the hall out of the way until the bin men come.

Enjoy your grading and try not to get killed.

Good advice all round I feel :D.

Having been reading the debate regarding Jason Calacanis’ post how to save money running a startup I feel I should step up the mark and take on my usual roll as devil’s advocate.

The first point I would note is that many of the critical responses to Jason are just plain harsh. They seem more like attacks than criticisms.

More overly, though, I agree with a lot of what Jason has to say. The fact is, you do need the people in a startup to work really hard. Whether this is a case of hiring the right people in the first place or getting rid of them when they don’t work hard seems to be irrelevant. Have you seen the failure rates of startups?

Other criticisms seem to be just in denial about the world. Stilgherrian writes that Jason is basically suggesting we should “hold meetings at lunchtime so people never get a mental break from work.” Let’s not pretend most companies don’t do this because most of them do in some form. Work at any office job and chances are you will end up eating lunch at your desk because the company wants you to so you will be thinking about your work all lunch time. It happens at The D too, get this, managers on a night (because there is only one of them) can’t clock out and go off and have a break because there has to be a first aider on shift. So they have to eat their break food in the office. Point is, its nothing new for people to be encouraged to be work focused on their breaks.

I would also dispute the point that the workaholic lifestyle can’t be maintained. I am fully aware there are many arguments to say I don’t work as much as it would seem (uni holidays are long, some work doesn’t really count as work, etc) but I generally do something like a 50-60 hour week and I work every day. Even if you don’t count that, I was working every day over summer doing a real job if you don’t wish to count a full-time degree and again that was doing 50-60+ hour weeks and going weeks on end without a day off. I’m still here, I haven’t exploded yet. Why? Because I love a lot of what I do.

Allen Stern (http://www.centernetworks.com/mahalo-employees-like-prison) seems a bit more supportive but some of the comments seem a little naive to me. Dual screens are like cell phones and dishwashers. You get along fine without them until you actually try them, then you can never go back. Well worth it. Flexible hours is also incredibly important. We geeks, as a people, are not known for our 9-5 lifestyles.

Congratulations to Si who has just being accepted onto my blog roll. His ramblings have been offering some fresh content to my Netvibes on a reasonably regular basis which seems to be somewhat of a rarity these days. On saying that most people have posted within the past week or so. I might do a little pruning of those who haven’t.

Michelle has just gone home meaning that I am the last remaining person in DEC-10.

I don’t see the point in going home really, I have to be back on campus for like 8:45 so I figured I would feel worse if I went to sleep. Still I have a really full today – I’m booked up almost solidly until 9pm which should be lots of fun. Still, only 40 minutes until I can have my last Red Bull (I’m rationing until the shops open again :D).

If you missed the house party on Friday you missed an interesting affair. Notable events included Fonze drinking himself unconscious and waking up in hospital, Liz taking off her jeans while in my darkened bedroom, Izzy feeling up Norm, lots and lots of Chinese food and endless discussions about pornography. So yeah, your standard Circle event really.

I haven’t posted for a week. A week! That’s a long time for me. Though I have noticed that I have been blogging less lately. Some would say it’s because of how busy we are all are a the moment but then I’m always busy and it has never stopped me before. Others would argue my life is just a little less exciting a the moment. Myself, I remain unsure.

Perhaps it is the inevitable doom of FYP. The fact that we also have plenty of coursework deadlines on top of that (I have another 5 before the end of semester 2) not only doesn’t really help the situation but also explains why I’m in the lab at 4am. And glad to be here. The hardcore nights are back :D. It’s good we get one more run in before we graduates.

Because quite frankly, this could be the last time. I mean what is there after this? Once I get these courseworks out of the way and given our software demos are next week (mine is on Monday so I won’t be pulling all nighters for it next week) there is really just report writing to be done which I doubt many people (though I would like to think a few of us will) will be writing up in labs. And in any case, doing write up isn’t the communal experience you gain from late night coding sessions.

We really need one more for old time’s sake. And get some chair races in too.

Kieran correctly pointed out earlier today (well, technically yesterday now) that things are getting a little too close to graduation. Today was our last staff student forum meeting (at which it was agreed to go ahead with my proposal to re-name of the school to the Chris Worfolk Institute of Computing Excellence but only if I was dead). There are a lot of things coming up that will be the last of something. It’s actually getting scary.

On the plus side the provisional exam timetables are now out and I don’t have an exam at 9am the night after I go to Manchester for a gig. Which is quite a nice bonus. It’s also quite a nice bonus that I seem to finish before everyone else which makes a big chance – indeed last summer I had an exam on the Friday of week 3 – the very last day of exams.

So yeah, that is my late night rambling on what’s been happening recently. I’m sure I’ll think of more as soon as I hit publish. Luckily, you shall be saved that fate ;).

I passed through Chrismukkah without much of a stir, not really engaging in the spirit of the holiday if there were such a thing as it were. Much to Michelle’s disappointment no doubt.

However, I have recently concluded that it isn’t due to the fact that I am cold and empty inside. Notably because, while Chrismukkah isn’t my celebration of choice, equally such Christmas lovers as Michelle do not feel the same affinity to such events as Rationalist Week.

The reason I bring it up is because it’s two months till Rationalist Week which while in the planning terms isn’t too far away, from an outside perspective it is quite a while away, and yet I am beginning to get madly excited about it. It was when I found myself jumping up and down in the shower shouting “it’s nearly Rationalist Week” that I realised how much my actions echoed those of Michelle’s when she began talking about Christmas in October.

While this is an interesting point to meditate on, I also want to talk about something else – namely, that Rationalist Week is coming! We’re already in the planning stages putting together provisional events timetables, getting quotes for the various stuff we need to hire, fund raising, etc.

It’s all so exciting!

The disadvantage of living on a huge fault line in the Earth’s crust is that occasionally, it moves.

We don’t. But it didn’t seem to save us last night. Sometime between midnight and 1ish the ground decided to shake measuring 5.3 in the Richter scale^[1]. Not a bad effort for the UK, indeed it was the biggest we have had for almost 25 years.

What I was particularly surprised out was that the UK actually seems to have survived. While I feel it is too strong a term to use the phrase natural disaster because let’s face it, 5.3 on a global scale doesn’t even really qualify as an incident (and therefore let us call it a natural event), any kind of natural phenomenon just brings the UK to a stand still. For example you would think that a country known worldwide for it’s miserably rainy weather would be able to deal with rain. Of course in reality, you’d be wrong.

So I guess all that remains to do now is sit back and wait for someone in the church to claim this is God’s way of punishing homosexuals in Grimsby.

The season is upon us again.

With the general workload being very high this year anyway it’s easy to forget how manic it gets when coursework deadlines start looming. And they have. I found out today that the first AI23 coursework was in fact due in this morning. And it’s formative. So yeah, dropped the ball a bit there. Luckily it’s an easy enough piece of work that I get it done today – after all, I have 19 hours from my lecture finishing till 9am tomorrow :D.

Meanwhile my IS coursework is quickly approaching, GI32 is due in at the end of next week and SY32 is due in the week after along with the software for my final year project. There will be a second piece of AI23 coursework due in some time as well as the final report for my FYP and in between that I have to fit in planning for Rationalist Week, putting on a rocky horror night, a school disco, my TKD grading, writing One Life sessions and a to do list which is still over a page long. You’ve gotta love it :P.