Tuesday, July 31, 2007

AMSTRAD Sold to BSkyB

A historical moment as Sir Alan Sugar sells his 30%+ share in the Alan Michael Sugar Trading Company to Merdoch's Sky - for whom they make Set Top Boxes for. Amstrad was a leading UK supplier of computers in the 80s, many a UK Game designer cut their teeth on an Amstrad.

Alan Sugar is the main protagonist of the UK version of the television programme the Apprentice - oft heard ushering out the contestants with the phrace = "You're fired"

Monday, July 30, 2007

Apple iPhones Everywhere ?

False advertising surely, I expect recompense of one iPhone... immediately.

Friday, July 27, 2007

More finance revision.

So today I will mostly be practicing my slap dash finance skills. Creating users for devolved stakeholders, distributing reports to heads of depts.

This morning has been a bit of a comedy of errors, firstly I left conditioner in my hair at the end of the shower... to be fair I don't condition often so it might just be a mistake. Then I forgot to brush my teeth, which I never do, and I hate (So I went and bought a new tooth brush and tooth paste on the way in). Then we ran out of OJ. Then I stalled the car on the way to work. Then I get to work and find I've run out of milk for cereal. all highly annoying.

For those who are interested, my mother's surgery went well. I visited her last night, she was in some pain but it was being managed very well and there is talk of her being home today which is awesome.

Right now I've posted this... back to devolved user menus and data access.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Finance Server brought to you by Symmetry

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Pizza and the simpsons



Budget Woes and making Excel switch negative numbers

I've been in some financial training today... all great fun and it really allowed me to explore IT outside of my normal domain.

However they have some weird habits these accountant folk - and their terminology is more obscure than mine... GL, PL, General Ledger, Code, Cost Centre, Budget, Plan, budget accounts... all great fun, but they also get quite picky about their negative number representations in Excell, and Excell can be very annoying with text formatting and numbers and sometimes completely ignores your instructions - especially in respect of CSV files.

We needed to take some Incomes and make them negative... how counter intuitive is that... however I proved my usefulness by converting the entirety of one of their Worksheet of Incomes to negative numbers.

Place a -1 in a cell and copy it.
Highlight all the numbers you'd like to reverse.
Edit -> Paste Special

Choosing Multiply and Values on that pane.
Hit Ok - Voila... it has turned all the values into negative numbers. I think the finance manager was pretty impressed that the solution flowed from me quite quickly. However full disclosure I had done a sneaky google... and used this as a guide.

Story Telling

Well it is a busy day for me. I have to re-design some output from one of my systems. We're going to try a landscape approach. I'm actually still waiting for all the designs to come in- but I've got somethings to be trying out.

I have to go and pay in an expenses cheque which is much needed since I have zero pence, however we get paid on Monday, week early, (yay I won't be poor anymore) and most of it will be gone by Tuesday, the downside of this early fiscal injection is that I then must wait five weeks until the next pay cheque. In between I have to buy flights to Poland for a stag weekend.

Since it is the school holidays the drive in has been much easier (How that effects my opinion on the congestion charge I'm unsure) - and we get to leave slightly earlier, despite that, so far this week I've been leaving later everyday. I'm determined to get gone on time today so I can attend the dry cleaners with one of my suits, I don't get them done too often - as it can damage them. Another bonus of the kids not being in over summer is that I don't have to come in suited a booted, I still look mighty cool though.

The weather has started to become more consistent too after several days of mixtures of sun and rain each day is starting well this week. That isn't to say it hasn't been consistent so far this summer... it has... consistently wet.

Whilst driving in I have had the pleasure of my Radio 4 recently. This morning I was amused by two items, not the items directly more so small artefacts that came out of them. The first at 0818 was at the abrupt end of an interview with the chairman of the BBC trustees - a technical glitch which the presenter attributed to the interviewee being in New Zealand and using "one of those things called Skype" no I remember using Skype 4 or 5 years ago and being amazed how it just cut right through the network making really simple voice chat online a reality - something that even my brother and my mother could manage. My amusement came because in this age when us online folk are Skype'ing away with gay abandon and using Google maps to find our directions on our iPhones... the mass media companies are finally cottoning on... Sky News uses Google maps, or MS Maps depending what mood they're in. The BBC was using Google Earth to demonstrate where UK flooding was happening some weeks ago and now Skype popping up.

The second was the reappearance of someone whose media career I thought was dead in the water. A one Jeffery Archer. Despite being a convicted criminal I am fond of Lord Archer - a terrific rogue. The article was concerned with twists at the end of tales... Lord Archer's point was that great writers don't need to use a twist to engage the reader they have many other tools in their arsenal - however good story tellers often use the twist at the end of a tale to engage the reader, to make it worth their while. I can whole heartily agree Lord Archer is not a good writer... but he is a jolly good story teller.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Incitment to Murder

Last week saw the conviction of three people who were charged with soliciting murder. A fourth man was convicted of inciting racial hatred. This all stemmed from the unlawful protests outside the Danish embassy last year - the protests, in response to the cartoon of Mohammed as a terrorist, included such lovely chants as "Bomb bomb bom the UK" and other such poison. Now I'm all for freedom of speech and it is something I believe we have in this country - but all freedoms must have limits and these chaps breached those limits with irresponsible abandon - maybe they took leave of the their senses, but that is not a reasonable defence I fear in this case.

Quite frankly I'd see the lot of them defenestrated. However the main point was to offer further short shrift to the chap featured on Radio 4 during my drive home yesterday evening who accused everyone involved in the case to be guilty of something - except those found guilty in court yesterday they "Hadn't done anything unacceptable in Sharia law" well quite simply I don't see how that is relevant - we don't live under Sharia law... we live under the laws as defined by our legislative branch (some of which I don't agree with, but this position doesn't give me carte blanch to go around ignoring them) and people living here, indeed some who are protected from unkindness in their original countries of origin would do well to remember that at the moment.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

A new start


Coffee

A new start


Coffee

Sunday, July 08, 2007

CD Storage issues



I am getting quite addicted to the current HMV sale, the other day I picked up three new albums for £12 quid and still got extra discount thanks to my still valid Uni card... awesome. However from a practical point of view I'm running out of space, now I have most of them ripped to the ole iTunes but it is still nice to see them on display, but not like this. Out of order all different ways round and same artists not kept together... if anyone wants to advise about decent CD storage please do.

For those who are interested I bought,
Counting Crows second Album Recovering the Satellites
Jurassic 5 - Quality Control
Travis - Singles collection
Justin Timberlake - Futuresex/Lovesounds
Groove Armada - Soundboy Rock
Jack Johnson - In between dreams

... Yes I know that's six albums, I went back yesterday to... see it's an addiction.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Not sunny enough.




Well the theory nearly works. We had a bit of bad news this morning, but not as bad as it could have been. It's operable. It's been caught early, it is 8mm across which is pretty small. It is due to be removed in a couple of weeks with no need for breast reconstruction, as she's quite a bosomy lady anyway.

After the news we went to our favorite Italian and had the best Garlic bread in the world.

Bad things are not supposed to happen on sunny days.


This was a rule i had whenever i was awaiting test results, or one my way to an exam this was usually academic tests or exams but today we are awaiting some slightly different test results with profoundly more life altering consequences for my mother.