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I had the chance to catch up with a friend this week and as is always the way, we soon ended up chatting about our respective jobs.  My friend is a barber so you would expect him to have a wealth of tales to tell about the many varied people who sit in his chair for 15 minutes or so and reveal all manner of tidbits of their life as he snips away and bemoans Arsenal’s many missed chances to score a goal of late. (more…)

So, we’re now into March and it’s officially Spring!  Say what you like about global warming but I, rather selfishly, can’t wait for the scorching desert-like conditions the environmentalists refer to; in fact I sometimes wonder about the delicious irony of them being called environmentalists in the first place (more…)

If you are reading this in the UK then you probably know that we had a flurry of snow that caused a little disruption to the usually smooth running public transport system here in London.  OK, that’s not exactly correct, if you’re lucky it might be running but seldom is it ever smooth! 

Unlike a lot of people who found themselves stranded at home I was able to work thanks to the wonders of remote access. It’s interesting how things have progressed, I remember in 1989 when I worked for British Telecom and the notion of being able to log onto your corporate desktop from your home PC was getting bandied about.  No one quite believed it would ever catch on and even to this day there are a great many sceptical people, managers included, who raise an eyebrow when someone says they are working from home, the belief is often that without someone there to watch over them the at home worker will spend all day watching daytime TV in between visits to the fridge. (more…)

There are many issues that perplex the human race it seems; world peace, the identity of The Stig, should a martini be stirred or shaken and how long should a blog post be are just a few of those that seem to be most pressing here at King Street Towers.

Perhaps with the exception of The Stig, there is no conclusive answer to the questions above or the majority of any others you can think of.  Unlike computers, which are programmed to work in a logical manner,  their programmers have varying thoughts and opinions on most matters and thanks to this quirk of human nature, whilst it can be debated ad infinitum, there is often no right or wrong answer, only the one that you believe in.  Obviously of course this doesn’t mean that you can rewrite the rules of mathematics or English grammar however hard text messengers try!

When it comes to blogging, which is still a relatively new art, there are few rule books from which to read from, unless of course you harness the might of your preferred search engine, in which case you’ll find around 149 million results for the question, How long should a blog be? and yes, that probably means about 149 million different opinions as to why your answer is wrong and the writers is correct. (more…)

As well as being a support worker I also have the joy(?!) of dealing with the I.T. needs for ScotsCare, you know…the really exciting things like anti-virus software, data backups, clearing printer jams and making sure that everyone can access their email.  If you asked my colleagues they would most likely say that I only seem to work on I.T. when they don’t have a problem and spend my time chuckling over the latest Dilbert strip (I call it research) when they do.

Personally I like the fact that my colleagues think I do nothing, that tells me that I.T. is doing it’s job, busily working away in the background and making the working day that little bit easier.  A lot of my time is spent wading through the glossy sales literature and spiffy websites from companies promising to sell me the best tool for the job…most of the time, as is often the case, it’s all talk and it takes me all my time to get to the facts which enable me to compare like with like.

This causes me to have flashbacks to my maths lessons when Mrs McCance would yell at the class, “In algebra you can’t add apples and oranges together!”  A great many I.T. marketing departments would have benefited from attending her algebra classes however I half suspect companies collude to ensure they never disclose the same information thus making it that much harder for consumers to make a truly informed decision but that’s probably just the inner cynic in me talking.

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