Wheelz Online

So I guess if you live in the UK you have heard about the floods which hit South Yorkshire last week.  Well I certainly did,  to the tune of about a foot of water in my living room.  That was a nightmare.  Because I live in a ground floor flat it was bound to happen at some point in my life  but I wish that it wasn’t then.  So we’ve had a new pine floor put down in the room courtesy of the Management company of the complex. So now we just have to wait on the insurance company about our belongings.  We were pretty lucky really, all we lost was our living room furniture, TV, HiFi and the Sofa.  Our house is insured for £60000 and when we added up our claim, we were asking for a measly £2450.  They better pay up for that little sum of money.  I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Then this week I’ve been told that I have to move sites where I work.  At the moment my drive into work is about 10 minutes.  I am now going to have to move to a portacabin at a site which is going to be a building site for 3 years and have to drive for 40 minutes each way.  Don’t know what you lot think, but i’m pretty sick at the thought of it.

As you may know, I have worked for the same company for eight years now and during that time i’ve moved office 3 times, lost all my original work colleages and made few friends because i’m in a small office off the beaten path.  But then 5 years ago I was offered the chance to work on an online project because it had been known that i was a web designer.  So fast forward 5 years and what have I achieved?  Well I still havent managed to educate the people I work with about timescales and managing online projects, I’ve been part of a team that has won 2 major national online learning awards, and still not got any formal recognition from the management.

OK, so I work in the public sector, so there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I am going to be able to get a payrise out of all the work and recognition.  But a new job title would have been nice.  It starts to get embarrassing when you go to a web conference and have to say that you are a ‘management analyst’  rather than anything to do with new media.  So what do I do?  Well the only thing I can - I lie.  This makes me feel uneasy as I don’t think I should have to lie to my peers about what my company thinks of me.

All this thinking has come about after reading an article on Jeffery Zeldman’s blog about the unsung people of web development.  Its an interesting and is written 10 times better than I could ever do, so please go and have a read.

I was doing a spot of surfing some blogs I enjoy reading on web developments and I came across this post by Eric Meyer regarding diversity of speakers at conferences, and it seems like he’s had a lot of negative responses to his take on it. In a nutshell his post said that when he books a speaker to talk at a conference, he looks at the ability to deliver an interesting and useful seminar:

Well, I’m hereby bucking that trend. In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don’t feel that I have anything to address next time around. What’s important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That’s it. That’s always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

The point he was making was that there shouldn’t be a quota of female, black, white, hispanic etc just to satisfy the politically correct. Speaking as someone who attends one or two conferences a year, I agree totally with him. Why should I pay £400-£600 for two days and then have to listen to someone who is black/female/chinese/ pink with blue spots etc just because it looks wrong if you have too many white men delivering sessions. I want to be able to go and listen to Eric Meyer, Tantek Celik, Dan Cederholm, not because I only listen to men, but because they are top in their fields. Tantek was responsible for IE5 for the mac. Why should I have to listen to someone else talk about web browsers who doesn’t have that insight simply to fit a profile?

I apologise upfront if this sounds sexist/racist - it truly isn’t. If anything its merit-ist..

My brother is a dreamer.  The best way I can describe him is for all the UK people who read this, The character of Nick Harper from My Family must have been based on him.  Every hairbrained idea Nick came up with was almost certainly thought of by my brother first.  While this makes for an interesting sibling, some of his ‘fantastic ideas’ rub off on me.

I collect Bad Taste Bears, over 100 of them at the last count.  I go to the parties and the conventions and I meet other members and chat for ages.  But yesterday I had my stupidest idea to date.  One of the shops where I buy my bears is closing down and they are selling EVERYTHING.  So I went and bought the display stands for their Bad taste Bears.  This thing has got to be 6ft square at least.  Its one of those ’seemed a good idea at the time’ moments.  We do need a new display case as the other two are full.  But because I’m related to my brother i bought them without thinking of two important things.

1. How am I going to get it home
2. Where the hell am I going to put it.

I’ll let you know when I have the answers.

All my imediate family live about 10 miles apart with myself at one end and my parents at the other, with my sister and grandfather somewhere in the middle.  Now, I’m always very busy, I work long hours in the office and at home and generally don’t get to see as much of my family as I would want to.  This is especially true for my grandad. Over the last year, I have averaged about once a month.  I knew that I would like to see more of him and he would like to see more of me, but I figured he would understand.

But this weekend brought home how bad of a grandson I really am.  The last time I saw him was 3 weeks ago at a family dinner at my parents.  Then I kept saying to my partner and sister “I’m going to have to go and see grandad soon”, but I get a phone call yesterday to inform me that he is in intensive care in hospital, but i can’t go and see him as they will only allow 2 people, and I feel it should be my mother and her sister.  But I feel really bad now because I’ve made excuses to myself to put off going to see him.  I make myself this promise now.  If and when he recovers I will go to see him EVERY week.