I’ve finally moved out of the little apartment I had in Darlinghurst. It’s one of those times when I wish that I’d had a car handy so that I could have loaded everything onto a trailer rather than having to pay a removal company. Not that I was desperate to move all the furniture myself.

Before the move I was quite happy at the thought of letting a removal company carry all our stuff down three flights of stairs. That was before Morgan Removals damaged a bunch of stuff because they didn’t strap my new 3 month old fridge in. They get to the other end, two-three suburbs over and the fridge is on a 45 degree angle, laying across everything in the middle. I was not impressed. Had I known then the extent of the damage I would not have paid them.

The front of the fridge now has scratches and dents that weren’t there. The bed frame, one of the items that it fell on, is unusable, since it broke it in two. The most annoying part about the later damage, is that they snuck it into the house. Didn’t bother to tell me that it had been destroyed, just quietly placed it in the bedroom, and left me to discover it when I went to put the bed together later that day.

When I contacted the company,  I was first palmed off on the driver, no response from the actual company. After two follow up emails, I was told that they weren’t going to replace the broken items, stating:

“Unfortunately no responsibility can be taken from our side. On our confirmation letter we advise all our clients to visit our insurance page for all your insurance needs and it is your responsibility to take out  accidental cover or not, as all removal companies advise.“

Accidental damage insurance is laughable, because the fact is that it wasn’t an accident, the movers didn’t bother to strap the fridge in. That’s not accidental in my books, it’s negligent. Before you ask, yes, I explained in detail to the customer service representative about the fridge not being strapped in and falling over.

I usually try to be rational and calm about these things, but they way they’ve treated my stuff, and their desire to lie and avoid responsibility is going to make me spend tomorrow leaving negative reviews on every site I can find.

If you live in Sydney and are looking for a removal company, then I would encourage you to steer clear of Morgan Removals. I’ve included the pictures showing the damage for your information.

Long dent in freezer door

Multiple dents in the fridge door

Nasty scratch on the edge of the fridge door

Damage to the bedframe

Myth has it that ‘Kilroy was here’ was the mark of a shipbuilder before/during WWII, and that it was picked up by Servicemen who found it amusing that the mark was made in supposedly unreachable places. They then spread the mark elsewhere, as locations around the world were liberated.  I love this concept, because I’m not a fan of limitations — I’m an avid gamer, but I rail against games that don’t let you stray from the path. There is no variety, or replay value because each time you have exactly the same sequence of events.

Many hopeful web developers fall into this pitfall as well. I was reading http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2009/10/27/desire-lines-the-metaphor-that-keeps-on-giving/, a(nother) look at a metaphor called ‘desire lines’, that has similarly important lessons for the web2.0 community. You can’t force people to do what you want. The lesson is simple and played out all around us, you can set down a path, but you can’t make people want to use that route. A good designer will probably preempt a lot of what people will want, but not everything, and the overnight success that all of us are searching for is a bit hit and miss. Plenty of good ideas are out there, but finding something that people actually want, and then getting the word out there that you’re product is there is tough.

Or something like that.

I accept planetmcd’s criticism of my previous post. I’m aware that I’m less than eloquent and my arguments less than logical at times.

I can’t say for sure whether anyone has ever done a presentation like that here. I do know that something like that wouldn’t be accepted not just because of the images (sexual or not), but because it doesn’t conform to corporate standards. Ruby/Rails/Web2.0 has no such standards, more,  the culture is one of being risky, on the edge, and of pushing the limits.

There are probably many ways that it could have been done better, but it wasn’t. The problem stems from not going to Matt, and expressing that they didn’t like the presentation. They could have suggested using ‘Fragstar’ next time (via Renae Bair). Instead choosing to drag Rails through the mud publicly, “Here is a professional community that doesn’t respect women”.

I’m aware that Matt has defend his position, and the DHH may have made it worse, but I don’t condone the method this was approached in the first place. It’s sensationalist and unnecessary. Do people actually think they’ve improved the community by acting in this manner?

The dress code is only one facet of what I was trying (albeit poorly) to express. If you asked a programmer whether he would prefer to wear jeans and t-shirt or suit and tie to work which would he pick? What is the dress code at the Web2.0 development houses (not having worked at one I don’t know)? If it is jeans and t-shirts then that workplace is different to mine. My current employers wouldn’t consider them very professional either – This is where it goes to the heart of the community. You can do development the traditional, non agile way, any time you want to put on a suit and tie and forget you know techniques like metaprogramming/bdd/tdd (and don’t forget how to use windows, because that’s what corporate professionals use).

I have worked for a few industrial clients where staff had nudes as desktop wallpapers (we’re not talking partial nudity either), and pinups scattered around the sheds. There were certainly females around, though how they felt about it never came up. They would consider themselves professional, in that they provide top notch solutions to their clients. Warranties & quality assurance, etc. I doubt my current employer would find them very professional either, sweaty, greasy, and not very formal.

One of the things that I’ve heard raised when Australian corporate entities deal with overseas counterparts, is that we’re a good deal less formal and respectful than they are. Socially and culturally Australians are more laid back, some might say unprofessional. Different people are always going to have differing opinions on professionalism, I find it unlikely that Matt felt he was being unprofessional in using the pictures and analogy that he did. I would hazard he still doesn’t feel he was unprofessional, though he undoubtedly realizes that it was a mistake.

Spent most of the night downloading Documentum 6.5 components for Linux & Oracle. While I would prefer to use an open source database like PostgreSQL as the backend, the actual database isn’t going to matter much once its installed (they don’t offer it as an alternative anyway). What I’m looking to do is have a D6.5 environment that I can tune to be as fast as possible. This includes doing things that you wouldn’t be able to do on a System that has to be supported, such as using Nginx as the front end instead of Apache Httpd  with Apache Tomcat.

I’m still a bit up in the air as to which App Server I’m going to use. Tomcat is the obvious answer and the starting point for clients that don’t want to invest in IBM Websphere,  BEA(Oracle) Weblogic, or Jboss. I do think that Apache Geronimo and Jetty are worth investigating as alternatives. One of the complaints that I’ve heard against Tomcat in production environments is that it is ridiculously unstable when running Webtop. With the app servers needing to be restarted every week (or more frequently). IMO there is more likely an issue with Webtop itself rather than Tomcat. I haven’t heard of stability complaints when running other webapps.

One of the big complaints against Apache Tomcat is that it isn’t a full stack App Server like IBM Websphere, for instance architecturally IBM Websphere has a lot more under the covers. I’ve not installed Apache Geronimo before but it’s supposed to be more of a complete App Server. I’ll let you know how my project goes anyway,  got to run off to work now.

Information Solutions – technology, is a simple way of expressing that the IT department is there to serve the needs of the client facing business. The current enterprise that I’m working at is the first massive global organisation that I’ve worked with. 130,000 odd employees throughout the world, with about a quarter of that in the APAC region.

I’m proud to say that the IS-t teams that I work with on a daily basis are excellent people, as are the people from other departments that I’ve had dealings with. Honest hard working people, just trying to do the best they can at their jobs.

Belief and evidence led me to believe enterprises move pretty slowly. Despite that things can change pretty rapidly up here, there is a level of adaptability that I’d not expected to find. A mission that IS-t should be an enabler for change, not an excuse that it is all too difficult. Things have been booming in the last ten or so years. A colleague has a graph on his wall showing the steady climb in the amount of employees that have been added to the ranks in Australia.

There was money, and there probably still is, but something changed a little while back. The negligence of the US property market (and other factors I don’t try to fathom) has sent the world spiraling into a recession. All of a sudden the extravagance of the last decade is thing of the past.

Business class flights are out the window for all but the highest of managers, and furthermore, travel itself only happens as an absolute necessity. Perhaps that’s the way it should have been all along. On Tuesday we had the largest video conference that the IS-t department has ever done.  People from the Infrastructure side of IS-t came together in a massive video conference that brought the whole APAC region into the one room. It wasn’t free but it was a damn sight cheaper than flying them here, or having them continue to work on their own and duplicate resources.

After all the scene setting I’ve done above, this is the real meat. There are steps being taken to eliminate the duplicity that has been taking place. No longer will there be 5-10 efforts to manage the desktops and laptop images (the standard set of software installed on machines), and why should there be? Sure it means a lot more work for the people in the Desktop team, moving from managing the computers of 5000 people to 30000 people, but there is an economy of scale. One or two people are assigned to create the image (or fix the image), and the people from other regions that were duplicating this effort can do other things, which does not mean redundancy. There is always too much work and too few people.

Technology has long passed the point where it is possible to work effectively across countries. My own responsibility, the Document Management System, is a part of this. Tools that allow you to collaborate effectively on the creation of documents, and create workflow processes that allow the steps taken when dealing with content, to be distilled.

The global economic crisis has changed a lot of things. Budgets that were a foregone conclusion have been reevaluated. This isn’t a bad thing, good economic times breed weakness. Rather than being smart about things, taking the easy way out because if you throw enough money at the problem will eventually go away.

I say bring on the chance to be leaner. The chance to prune to weak.

I’m back from leave this morning with mixed feelings. I got paid today which put me in a good mood (I get paid monthly so its a bigger deal). I’m not usually a rollercoaster of emotion, but I find myself both loving and hating the place that I’m contracted to work today. On the one hand I returned to find voicemail messages from the managing partner (sent firmwide), expressing the fact that they we’re moved by the tragedy that had struck Victoria in the form of the bushfires.

More importantly promising money from the firm and exhorting partners and employees alike to contribute to the appeal. I felt moved. I know that there is a certain amount of publicity in giving and responding like that to the bush fires, but in real terms they’ll be unlikely to rate a mention on the news. There has been a flood of support for the bushfire victims (as there should be), and the firm responding to that need is touching. Indeed one of their Victorian employees died in the firestorm that has engulfed Victoria, so it is personal on another level for the managing partner who spent time talking to the mother of the employee.

What I don’t understand is how they can be so caring on one hand, and so callous on the other. It wasn’t long after I got in that I spoke to my project manager, to catch up on everything that’s happened while I was away, and discovered that an Executive Assistant had been made redundant. It would not have touched me so much had she not been involved with the project.

To be fair the person that she was working for had relocated to Hong Kong? as part of a strategy where he was to play a bigger role in the Far East as well as being the CIO for Oceania. So her role may well have been redundant considering her boss was no longer close. The question I have though is *so what*. People != Roles, you can make a role redundant, but does that mean that you need to kick the person out the door? No.

Sure there are times when employees need to be let go, if they’re not performing for instance. Truthfully though, there is no reason that the employee in question couldn’t have been moved sideways. I think, I believe from the brief time I spent working with her, that she was competent. She was certainly pleasant to work with, and had a wealth of knowledge. So why let her go? The firm is tightening its belt with the financial crisis being in full swing, an understandable descision even though its more proactive than reactive action.

Truth time; at a certain level businesses don’t care about people. The actions inside the business speak truer than the public actions that the business takes. You can give all the money you want to people that are suffering, but when your employees become nothing more than numbers, and what you do is about making money and nothing else then you’ve lost your way. Money is great, money is neccessary, but its the people and relationships that count. The dynamics of the people I’m working with at the moment have changed, and not necessarily for the better.

I feel slightly dirty for being so happy about my pay.  I’m not happy to be dependent on it. In some ways the company that I work for is better than the business that I’m contracted to. It’s smaller, they haven’t fired anyone, or let anyone go since I’ve been there. I need to remember that while I know the name of everyone that works at my company, they’re still in the business of making money first.