I’ve recently been developing a software tool, and started researching ‘Terms and Conditions’ that I might like to apply to the product. In the process, I found the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and this link about End User License Agreements (EULA).
I’ve recently upgraded my main computer workstation to Windows XP (I know! Cutting Edge!) and in the process realised that at last I could update my system to use Intel Speedstep technology. The upshot of this is that my dual processor machine now looks like a quad processor in Windows, as (to cover the issue somewhat vaguely) the speedstep technology introduces two command ‘pipelines’ into each processor. I’m a bit hazy on the exact details.
I recently received a letter from British Telecom (BT) thanking me for signing up with their online billing service. They wrote: “We recently sent an email to XXXX@XXXXXXXX to welcome you to the service. Unfortunately, the email was returned to us undelivered”.
The only problem is; I have never signed up for online billing! And it is no surprise that the email address they are using is bouncing the emails, because it is nearly 6 years since I closed that account!
Today I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a set of help pages suitable for display in a website I am creating, but also to enable the same information to be used to create a compiled help file, such as you might find installed with any Windows application.
Yesterday, I wrote about varied aspects of looking for work, but concentrating on Equal Opportunities and Job Requirements specifications. Today I’ll look at some other systems that are at work in the job market right now.
When writing on such broad topics, it’s difficult to disassociate oneself from one’s own experience of the marketplace. Unless you have hard facts and figures… and I regret that I do not.
I once worked in an IT company that had a ‘Data Preparation’ department. Every single member of the team (I seem to recall there were about 15 of them) were women. I asked one of the bosses about this once, regarding the equality issues, and he said that only one man had ever applied for a job in that team. Well it was one or none anyway. These days, I sense that answer would not have been enough. Today, I suspect that he would have had to prove that any job adverts for roles in that team would have been ‘equally accessible’ to men and women, that special efforts had been made to ensure men had felt able to apply for the role. What is the equality world coming to?
My electricity bills recently have been horrendous. My bills being high were not a surprise when I was running computers for a business; it was a business cost, and I had made a commercial decision to run them 24/7.
Recently, Jeff Atwood discussed “why software projects can’t be treated like any other construction or engineering project“. He suggested that:
“But software projects truly aren’t like other engineering projects. I don’t say this out of a sense of entitlement, or out of some misguided attempt to obtain special treatment for software developers. I say it because the only kind of software we ever build is unproven, experimental software.”
If you’ve ever read the book noted above (by Robert M. Pirsig) - or perhaps more accurately - if you have read and finished ZATAOMM, then you will know that it is more about a philosophy of values than it is about motorcycle maintenance.