Hello all

Here's my entry in this week's B3TA compo;



Middle management under siege as shit starts rolling
up hill

Sorry for shittiness...

Bomber out

Hello all

I had an email from Tracy this morning. She and Shaun are doing well, living somewhere very home counties (Henley, I think) and having a dog and stuff. She sent me this very cute picture of baby Charlotte, clearly not the fruit of Shaun's loins...



Now, after me; everybody say "ahh, she's so cute!" Glad to hear the the clan Rowberry are doing so well. This all came though a link I sent out to the www.footballbadgers.com website, which contains a completely addictive flash thingy about England, Euro 2004 and, err, badgers. Well, there you go. Also this fabulous GIF entitled "we're going to need a bigger cat";



Bomber out

Hello all

well SpaceshipOne made it and is now (and forever) the first privately funded manned space flight. Not without "glitches" (in inverted commas due to subjectivity of term being almost as vague as "torture" at the moment)

Yesterday was a holiday (some boat festival with dragons or something) and I had planned 1/2 a day of light work followed by 1/2 a day of computer games and bugging the cats. In the morning, I decided to flip my plan around and fired up Knights of the Old Republic. 12 hours later...

Having decided that work could wait, rented TxCSM (the remake) on DVD. Dave had mentioned a unique camera technique, which was duly noted, as was one of the best ever gratuitous wet tee shirt shot and the missed opportunity for the best ever gratuitous erect nipple shot 5 minutes later. Other than that, not very good, really. Roughly 4 scary moments, far too much footage of leatherface and several missed opportunities to scare the crap out of me. Never saw the original, but suspect this is a little like remaking Dangerous liaisons with teenagers (easy on the eye, heavy on the conscience)

Back to work today, a short week culminating in either sailing or mountainbiking weekend. Although KotOR is calling...

Bomber out

Morning all

It has been clearly brought home to me in the last week that I now have 2 bosses, one of whom seems determined to make their (my 2 bosses) mutual boss sweat by making his decision vis a vis my job look like a bad one. Unfortunately the way he is choosing to do this is by running up by back. I have got myself stuck in the middle and this may pan out into a bridge burning situation.

It breaks down like this;

my firm in HK has 2 departments most easily described as Big Projecs and Small Projects. Years ago when there was tons of work around, everyone worked for BP. When work started to get a bit lean, SP sprang up, doing shopfronts etc for a couple of deep pocketed clients. SP always had a somewhat unofficial position within the company until last year and was referred to as "the department of small works." You can work out how much respect they got. I work for SP. My new project (Korea) is for BP. I now have one boss in BP and one in SP. The boss of SP made a deal (I think) to release me temporarily to BP on the understanding that he would get a particular staff member from BP to transfer to SP and that I would complete current projects. Seems that this was not the understanding of BP. I have transferred, I must complete all current projects for SP, but no new staff have been transferred to SP. My SP boss seems to hold me responsible for this, although I suspect that the truth is more like; I'm the only one he can get at.

The upshot is that the payrise I agreed with BP has been changed to a "Project Allowance" meaning it gets reasessed at the end of the BP project. A pathetic move, as they'd have to take a very negative line indeed to justify taking it off me without actually letting me go. Further; I sent out a delivery recently in which one component was missing, for this I have been accused of doing "half a job" which is a little harsh to say the least. SP boss has clearly decided that he has nothing to gain by mollifying me and so I think I'm in for a little bit of a rough ride over the next months. That or I'll get the free time I've been after, anyway.

What nonsense

Politics aside (well not really...) and Wired today reports that;

The Department of Defense is asking for an exemption from the Privacy Act, which outlaws secret databases on Americans.

The exemption would be a little pointless unless it was backdated...

For anyone interested in space and that; Spaceship one, the X-prize competitor, will attempt the first privately funded sub-orbital manned flight ... TODAY. I read about this project a year or so ago and they had planned to complete by this August, so they migth actually do it on schedule... Not much time left as the X-prize expires at the end of this year. To won, Spaceship one will need to take 3 people to 100Km altitude and return to earth, repeating the same trip within 2 weeks. Apparantly a ticket costs 100K USD. And Bubble thought we were buying a house this year...

The Guardian lists what they say are the the hundred best British albums of all time. As they say; If the beatles came second; who won? Not sure If I can agree with their choice, but I more strongly object to Blue Lines getting No. 7, when Mezzanine fails to get a mention. Queen do not figure, which I also feel is a gross omission. On a brief count I own 10 albums on their list, which just goes to show you, really.

I failed to win with my black poo entry in the corporate rebranding competition last week. The (well deserved) winner was a very simple banner reading "NEW LABOR". This week the challenge is physics gone wrong. See what I can come up with.

Bubble's off to China, so I'm playing computer games like a good boy for the next month.

Must get some breakfast in; I wonder how smelly the cat litter gets after a month...? Might be a deadly experiment.

Bomber out