Tag Archives: work

Spinning plates.

I think I start to understand how people become workaholics. This is my twelfth straight day in the office (some of those days have been 12 hour days) and I know that I’m not thinking normally. It’s not just tiredness, it’s a sort of weirdly energised, slightly manic state that’s fun, in a strange sort of way. Part of my just wants to crawl home, and the other half is looking around for more stuff to do.

Accordingly: talk to me. Tell me of your problems, and Solomon like, I shall solve them. Or at least cut them in half. Tell me of the thing you want, or things that you just can’t get off your mind. Tell of things of interest, or at least diverting amusement. Ask me questions.

Anything, just for god’s sake, don’t let me curl up under my desk and sleep. I’ve got all these plates to keep spinning…

Meant to say something yesterday…

My workblog got the news, but I forgot to mention it here: I’m done at Sanctuary, and to be honest, the level of joy this brings on is hard to articulate. I’ll miss my immediate colleagues, who were a good laugh, but I’m so glad to be out of the music business I can’t tell you.

In 15 months, I have added one URL to my CV. And that only went live ten minutes before I left the office yesterday. (Robert Plant’s site if anyone cares.) One, out of five major projects I have worked on in that time. The rest have been held up by Sanctuary’s internal politics, which goes some way to explaining their less-than-a-penny share price as I walked out the door. As one might imagine, one project live in fifteen months is not the sort of thing that I like, as a professional web developer. It looks bad for me, and takes away almost all the pleasure I take in my trade – what I do is build tools for people to communicate with, and if they’re not being used to communicate, then what’s the point of the work?

But I’m done now, and will be starting at WAI on Monday. Roll on taking pleasure in going to work again.

[Work] A long shot, but…

Anyone out there got any experience moving from PHP4.3 to 5.1, and specifically with reference to the problems it causes with reference to a MS-SQL database? I’m getting a really odd change, in that mssql_fetch_array() used to return an empty string for null/zero-length string values, and now it returns a single whitespace character. Which means that all my result evalutions ( and the like) are fucking up, and it’s looking like migrating to the new version may have to be sacked off, which I’d rather not do.

Any help appreciated, as I’m at my wits end.

Local London

Only 4 entries before I felt the need to kvetch about work. In the middle of a huge site re-designed supplied by our national team, which will make the site bastard hard to maintain. We’re already about a week behind deadline, and it will probably launch some time today, but it’s not going to be ready for another month or so. Mercifully, I change job in a little over a week.