Above the Fold: The Blog

Snagging is a building term - it’s the faults and issues requiring fixing that are discovered during the handover of a new premesis. My stint with a development team for a housing association last year taught me that.

We have discovered some snagging issues with our move to the new site today. The biggest, from a health and safety point of view, is probably also the daftest.

The architect who redesigned our office area is obviously a fan of natural light. He had all those nasty florescent overhead lights taken out and the empty ports neatly covered over. We have lovely big windows that are wonderful on a sunny day. What did the architect forget?

Replacement lights.

Yes, if the sun goes behind clouds or, god forbit, it gets dark outside as it is wont to do in the evenings, we have no lighting. Ah. Facilities sees our problem, apparently. They’re going to see whether they can rustle up a couple of stand-alone lamps. Not a terribly practical solution due to the layout of the office (my desk, for example, will still be quite dark), but it’s a step there. We’re hoping they sort it out before winter because we won’t have many hours of usable sunlight…

Other issues, such as having no printers (nobody noticed that our department, which has been scattered on other sites for years, has none of its own), missing computers, insufficient electrical sockets and sauna-like heating seem fairly small in comparison.

Although the lack of kitchen facilities is annoying.

One missing computer did cause me some problems - it contains a program that fastloads data into our datawarehouse. I have a trial going on at the moment that requires a weekly data upload to the warehouse. Inserting over 50,000 rows of data from a text file takes a couple of days without this software. The reports for my trial should have gone out today. Someone is popping back to the old site with a car tomorrow so the reports should only be a day late.

Who says working for one of the biggest companies in the country ain’t fun?

When I graduated from university I was filled with excitement and, in my own opinion, the kind of knowledge that employers should have been desperate to grab. Unfortunately there were around twenty million other IT graduates with the same kind of enthusiasm and knowledge, all of them much better at selling themsevles through CVs and interviews than little old me. But I did find a job. No the perfect job by any stretch of the imagination, but a good job with a blue chip company that will look good on my CV. In many ways, this job has been the real test of what I learnt through university.

The world definitely does not work in the clean, whizzy ways that unversity convinced me it would. My job as an analyst has turned out to require a lot more software development than I’d expected (phew!), but we are primarily data analysts so many of the principles that I learnt in unversity don’t fit with my department’s work methods. In fact, most of my colleagues have maths degrees. The strange thing is that I’m learning just how valuable some of methodology taught at uni was. Planning out a project and using standard coding conventions just isn’t something that’s done in my department. User requirements before beginning the project? Pah! Modelling the tool before building it to make sure that it does what people want? Never going to happen. Re-working the entire project after finishing because the internal customer actually wanted something different? Every day occurance.

I do what I can with my work, trying to make my code readable without random ‘x’ variables appearing for no apparent reason and using sensible commenting, but as time goes by I’m realising just how sensible many of the techniques taught at uni were.

Take databases as a random example. My courses at uni emphasised the importance of good indexing and using primary keys. Our data warehouse uses multi-set tables as standard in all commonly accessed tables, which means that indexing is often a joke. You try your best to write good SQL using the indexes, but the primay index on those tables does not identify one record. Whenever I’m creating tables in our little hidden corner of the warehouse I go with what I know and try to index correctly because it actually does make a difference in query efficiency when you’re dealing with tables containing millions of rows rather than the few hundred rows that I played with at uni.

And I seem to recall despairing over ever understanding grouping properly at uni, yet now I write queries with half a dozen table joins, derived tables, grouping all over the place and even the odd HAVING declaration with no problems at all.

I guess you really never learn to do things properly and confidently until you actually do them for real.

I’ve been experimenting a little with Google Talk over the last few days, primarily with the intention of introducing my mother to it. Her sister lives in Canada and is flying over to visit us this week. When she goes home, though, my aunt plans to finally buy herself a computer and I’m wondering whether I can get the two of them chatting on-line. Partially this would be so that they can communicate more often than phone calls a couple of months and also to give my aunt a private way to chat when she doesn’t want her housemate to overhear her.

The problem is that they’re both complete technophobes. My aunt is probably worse than my mom, but not by much. Instant messaging is a concept that they’re both figuring is too new-fangled and complicated for them.

Hence my experimentation with Google Talk. In the past I’ve had both AIM and Yahoo IM set up and not really liked either, which is problematic coming from a geek. A Jabber or Trillian type program would be perfect for me, but probably too much for my aunt to set up on her own. Mom has been considering changing from her current email provider and she seems quite interested in setting up a Gmail account. We could easily set up a Gmail account for my aunt while she’s here, saving her from the scary side of first steps on the Internet. And my experiments this week have shown exactly how easy it is to set up Google Talk - quite literally, you download and go. That should be just right for my aunt. And chatting is wonderfully easy. Er, too easy because I can now chat to friends at daft times

I don’t plan to use Google Talk for VoiP telephone much - I’m still concerned about security stuff there and I don’t have a microphone set up on this computer. But I did receive a call from a friend in the States today. We’ve been emailing and chatting for around four years, but never spoken in person. Until today - she called and talked, I typed back. Her kids even said hi. It was wonderful. I finally know what her voice sounds like. I’m going to do some more reading up on the security, pricing and so on before instigating return calls, but it was absolutely wonderful to hear her voice for the first time.

I suspect that the reason I’ve never got into IM-ing before is because I know how addictive it could be. But it is good to chat to people in real time rather than some of the long-winded email conversations I have!