Blog gone!

Coopblog has been laid to rest. Best wishes Eloon, you're always welcome to join one of our drinking sessions up London. I'll miss you, don't forget to visit and keep it real sista!

xxx

Hot news

Swiss Tony has updated his blog.

Interwebnet cafe

Found one, right across the road from work, nice machines, good coffee and food. Pity I finish this job tomorrow really.

Lowlife

I went to the company Christmas do last night, had a pretty good time and managed to avoid eating any turkey and upseting anyone. Some of the people even talked after a few drinks. The journey home on the last train from Clapham Junction was an education though. I guess that it must have been the annual Protsmouth Trailer Park White Trash junket to London judging by the number of tattoos, piercings, track suits and Burberry baseball caps on show. A thoroughly unpleasant journey made worse by one particular little twat with a big mouth who simply would not shut the fuck up. A prime candidate for compulsory sterilization come te revolution.

User interfaces? We used coding sheets in my day.

Whilst at the Java Meet on Monday evening I spent a good deal of time being baffled by Sam amongst others. I recall understanding some of what he was talking about when the subject left quantum fusion chaos theory nano-rocket meta-science. The discussion came around to web site design, CSS (the brilliant Zen Garden CSS site was mentioned) and the fact that a fine balance that needs to be maintained between design and function. The point was that a good programmer should be part engineer, part designer, part artist and part psychologist. I agree with this wholeheartedly. A lot of the software end users in my current job, and many others, are in their early twenties (young people with their loud music, firm bottoms and trendy clothes. Pah!). When you walk past their desks they invariably have a few cool web pages open (I haven't seen neveratossBlog yet but...) and they all seem to be using a music player application with flashing lights and stuff. Shiny new designer gadgets, 3G mobile phones, MP3 players, iPods and so on are all over their desks. All these have pretty well designed user interfaces. Unfortunately, the poor sods spend eight hours a day eking out a minimum wage living in front of bloody awful green screens keying boring information from even more boring pieces of paper. Don't they have a right to expect a decent user interface whilst they have their noses to the grindstone these days? These people are at the start of their careers, they'e going to change the world if we don't destroy their souls and bore the ambition out of them. So, if you have any input into designing computer applications, give the user interface a bit of thought, if you're no good at design (and you know if you are or not) find someone who is, read a book, visit some websites, look out of the window. Somebody will have to use your software one day, probably the pretty twenty year old in the accounts department (you know, the one with the nice legs/blonde hair/blue eyes/attractive mum*) and it's your choice whether she hates you or thinks that you're cool and groovy.

* - Delete as applicable.

Don’t pack fudge kids

You know when you grab a loose handful of choccies from the Quality Street tin? The one generously bought by one of your colleagues as a gesture of Christmas cheer and goodwill. As you are wolfing down the goodies so that you can dash back for some more before the scumbag management get their hands on them, do you gag when you inadvertently stuff a piece of chocolate covered fudge into your cakehole? I do, yeeeeeeuch!

I went along to the Java meet last night with Simon. Met a great bunch of very young and mainly hairy people who are all far clevererer than me. Very friendly and quite happy to talk rocket science to a complete Java novice like me, I even understood some of what was said. I'm inspired to hit the Java books again and beef up my Hello World applet. One word of advice when attending one of these dos ... stay off the Red Stripe lager.