WordPress = worthless shit

I’ve come to the conclusion that WordPress is worthless shit, and I won’t be using it any more.

I had been looking forward to gradually learning how to do cool stuff, like posting photos and videos and linking to friends’ blogs and suchlike. However, I won’t be. And the reason is staring you in the face.

I’m posting this from a Core 2 Duo computer with over 250Gb of storage and a 19″ TFT. Not a fucking typewriter.

And yet, due to the broken nature of WordPress, I have to press ”return” every time I want a line break.

The entire raison d’etre of this site is getting words onto a screen. The concept that it can fail utterly to something as basic, fundamental and simple as wrap text automatically boggles my mind.

I cannot now even look at a WordPress blog without being overcome by a wave of contempt.

As a result, this will be my last post here.

Interview

No, not for a job. This is a meme that seems to be knocking about, so I thought I’d get in on it.

A person you know well, or not, sends you questions, and you answer them. This is supposed to give readers an insight into your psyche, or something. Anyway, Aphra Behn sent me these…

Five Questions:

1. A lot of people have one particularly inspiring teacher, did you, and in what way were they outstanding?

I think I was very lucky, in that despite going only to state schools (never private, or as we perversely call them in England, “public” schools), I nevertheless encountered more than my fair share of very good teachers.

Miss Jones taught French in a way that was transparently brilliant, by which I mean it was so

Oh my god I hate this website. It’s BROKEN. It’s FUCKING BROKEN. It works fine for a paragraph or two

and then suddenly unilaterally decides it isn’t going to bother justifying your text or word wrapping it.

I HATE IT.

I give up.

Management, Japanese style

I had an interesting conversation with a Japanese colleague the other day, regarding the differences between our behaviour in the corporate environment, and theirs. It’s the British way to plan, to some degree, what we do, discuss the plan, refine it, and eventually, after a lot of blather, to start to execute.

It seems the Japanese way is a bit different. Someone up high says “Is this possible?”, and because they’re culturally conditioned never to say “No”, they say “Yes”. “Good,” comes the answer, “Have it done by August.”

The British response would be “There’s no realistic prospect of finishing the design by August, much less procurement, installation, commissioning and handover. March next year if you’re very lucky.” And then the stops would be pulled out and it would get delivered by January.

The Japanese response is “OK.”, and then everyone runs round in circles like headless chickens duplicating work and doing 18 hour days… and the project gets delivered the following May, because of the inefficiencies of the process.

Apparently, the Japanese idea is “think while running”. This is to say, given a task, they start work first, THEN work out what they’re going to do.

I’d love to see an orienteering competition in Japan…

And here’s another. Gantt charts work like this…
Here is today’s date. Here’s the start of the project.
Now we guess how long it will take for:
Development, design, bid document preparation, bidding, selection, detailed design, procurement, installation, commissioning, handover and startup. That gets you an estimated end date. Then you start working out how you can pull the end date so it’s closer to today.

The Japanese do it differently.
Here’s the day we need the product - a day in the future.
Working backwards from there… commissioning, installation, procurement, detailed design, bidding, bid document, design, development… ah. The plan indicates we should have completed the detailed design phase last week… How do we complete the detailed design by the end of this week, given that we don’t even have a developed process or an outline design today?

Hello world

I’ve never seen much point in one of these things before, but I’ve been browsing the blog of a friend and realised that it’s a lot of self-indulgent trossachs, so I’m thinking I’ll have me a bit of that. I doubt I’ll post here much, but we’ll see.

 For now, this is supposed to be some sort of online diary or description of my deepest thoughts or something, so here it is:

 Right now, my problem is motivation. I have stress paralysis. I have too many things to do, not enough time to do them in, I know they have to be done but I can’t even decide how to start thinking about what order they need to be done in, let alone actually doing them. Usually what it takes to get me out of this mental state is a sudden, seriously stressful event. Given that it was a sudden, seriously stressful event that put me in this state in the first place, I’m not sure whether the normal rules apply.

But enough of that. More later if I can be bothered.