… but this year is special. This year is the only (touch wood, cross fingers, and so on) year in which I get to send St Valentine’s Day love to my fiancée.
Archive for the ‘My Life’ Category
Know any nice spaceships? The sort you'd invite to a wedding?
Posted on in My Life.One of the ideas we have for the wedding (I’ll leave it to you to decide which half of ‘we’ actually came up with this idea) is to name all the tables at the reception after famous spaceships from TV and film. Here’s a partial list:
- Enterprise (from Star Trek)
- Defiant (Star Trek Deep Space Nine)
- Voyager (Star Trek Voyager)
- Serenity (Firefly)
- Liberator (Blake’s 7)
- Scorpio (Blake’s 7)
- Moya (Farscape)
- Lexx (Lexx)
- Andromeda Ascendent (Andromeda)
- White Star (Babylon 5)
- Excalibur (Crusade)
- TARDIS (Doctor Who)
- Discovery (2001)
- Leonov (2010)
- Galactica (Battlestar Galactica)
- Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
- Heart of Gold (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)
- Valley Forge (Silent Running)
- Saratoga (Space: Above and Beyond)
- Prometheus (Stargate SG1)
- Roger Young (Starship Troopers)
- Nostromo (Alien)
- Narcissus (Alien)
- Sulaco (Aliens – yes, all the ship names in the Aliens films are Conrad references)
Some of these are great names but not really suitable for a wedding, some of these are really terrible names. We won’t know how many we’ll need until we work out the seating plan. Anyone got any other suggestions? I’m sure I’ve missed loads.
It would be fun to come up with wedding themed names along the lines of those used by ships from Iain Banks’ Culture.
Your taxes = my beer
Posted on in My Life, WWW.Oh yes, I’m working for the government. Making the web site of one of the main government departments accessible. Well, more accessible than it is at present. Full accessibility will wait until a new site is launched sometime next year.
Yesterday someone came in to say hello and saw a sketch of many nested rectangles I’d made on paper.
“Is that our template?”
“That’s part of your template.”
Then I showed him what I’d been working on – Firefox with the Web Developer extension and the “Outline Table Cells” option enabled. In one tab I had a page from the live site and in another tab I had a copy of the same page that I had been working one. One was almost totally red the other wasn’t.
In one place I’d replaced five levels of nested tables with a single div.
The brief is accessibility, and the nested tables, although excessive, did linearise acceptably and were mostly sized with percentages. So why did I bother? Accessibility it not just about users with disabilities. It’s about users who, for any reason, have problems accessing the site. Any user on dialup will see the difference – the page has gone from 51kb to 36kb already and I’m sure that I’ll be making further reductions.
And there’s more: the div version looks better (both tidier and truer to the design) in Netscape 4.x than the table version did. Backwards compatability by using more modern code.
Your tax money = my beer money + a faster, more compatible, more accessible web site.
Are you experienced?
Posted on in My Life.Today I got rejected for a contract job, because “the clients think [I’m] too experienced for what they’re after.”
So what does “too experienced” mean? I can think of several possible meanings.
- “too experienced” means “too old”. Not the case in this situation as my CV doesn’t include my date of birth or even the date I left university.
- “too experienced” means “too expensive”. Possible. I quoted a rate as an opening position in negotiations but maybe it was just too high for them to even consider haggling.
- “too experienced” means “too experienced”. They think that I’d leave before the end of the contract as soon as a more senior position opened up elsewhere. I don’t know about this, the description of the role seemed to match my skills quite well – they wanted decent technical skills and client facing experience. Indeed the job description used the word “experience” twice, so this wasn’t an entry level position.
- “too experienced” means “too opinionated”. Maybe they were looking for someone who would just do the job and not ask questions or make suggestions. In which case, they were probably right. But they would have had to reach this conclusion based solely on my CV, as they didn’t even interview me.
I’m 30 years old. Do I have three decades of this to look forward to?
Oh, the clients in question are a large, very well known, firm of management consultants. So they’re wankers anyway.
Wicked History
Posted on in My Life.Two years ago today I was made redundent.
So were a dozen other people as the company we worked for, Wicked Web, went into liquidation. We went out and got very, very drunk; I recall that tequilla slammers were involved, which is never a good sign.
As I’ve been working in the web business for seven years, being made redundent only once is quite good going.
Two years ago tomorrow I was back in the same office, doing the same work, for twice the money; and so began my career as a freelancer.
Another new Blog
Posted on in My Life.Just what the world needs. We’ll see if it lasts longer than my previous attempt at blogging two years ago which managed about six posts spread over three months.