The process of going through this blog and re-tagging / categorising every post is a long and relatively boring one.  However, some interesting posts have come back to me.  One of them refers to a post I made on May 21st 2002 about blogging at work. Another is about being demoted the same week, and a bunch of others all grouped in the same month.  That period in my professional life was a time of great change and stress.

My entire team had been transitioned into another department and we were very fucking annoyed about it for many reasons.  We felt that we were coming from a different culture into something more stifling than we had previously experienced, and we didn't like it.  I was ostensibly the team manager, although I think there wasn't much management needed with the guys I had working with me.  We were a very hard-working bunch of guys, and all seriously good at what we did.  Consequently we liked to play hard as well as working hard.  It was our way of letting off steam.  Our work culture was very stressful, and conducive to burning people out, and we really needed an outlet valve.

The department we moved into wasn't like that.  They weren't typically under the kind of pressure we experienced in our team.  Part of the reason for this is that we were working to schedules made by our parent company in the US, and they had the luxury(?) of making their own.  So, while there was a general bad feeling on our new floor, we felt particularly abused because of the change in circumstances forced upon us.  I know I thought some pretty awful things about my manager at that point.  With hindsight, I regret those and am glad I never actually said anything to him.  It would have spoiled what eventually became a pleasant relationship with a very interesting guy.  Anyway, at the time I got seriously disillusioned about my job, and the company I was working for. I stage-managed the creation of a new position for myself in May 2003 and deserted my team.

I just wanted to say I'm sorry.  I suspect at the time you all thought I was maybe a bit fucking selfish to leave you all in the position you were, and I wholeheartedly apologise for that.  We have all moved on to better things (except you Sparky, get your arse in gear!) and have all kept in touch over the years, so I don't think any permanent damage was done. However I don't ever remember asking you all how my leaving affected you.  I hope that you don't think I wasn't thinking of you all, for it simply isn't true.  I hope you can understand why I had to leave.  I had to get out of Technology before I ended up coming in one day and going postal.  That wouldn't have done any of us any good.

One more thing... you absolutely should take the photos Dave.  The reason the Killing Fields are still around and have not been built on is that we need to remember just how fucked up mankind can get.  We need to remember so we won't allow it to ever happen again.  Take the photos, make them good ones, and never forget.

I spent eleven years of my life working at AOL.  That's just a little under a third of the time I have lived.  In all that time, we made some pretty cool things.  We made some pretty shit things too, and I helped to make a lot of them.  The mail guys from Dulles went and build a version of AOL Webmail using a technology called SilverLight.  SilverLight is a Microsoft product that is roughly equivalent to Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash.  It allows rich Internet applications that typically run in a browser.  It is cross browser and cross platform compatible, which means it should provide an equal experience on all browsers and all operating systems.  It has just hit version 2.0, and while the first was very limited in what it could do, the second seems to be awesome.  I'll be playing with that a bit in the near future I think.

This product was demonstrated at MIX08, and you can view that presentation here.  You should be aware that this is a very technical demo, with only a few minutes close to the start where they show you the new UI.

You know what?  I'm beginning to think running this blog on a managed server with .Net is actually a bad thing.  Now, I don't know if there's something I'm doing wrong, but sometimes it takes an age to show pages.  It might be that the caching isn't behaving as I thought it should, or it might be that the server needs to reload the compiled code or something, but its beginning to piss me off.  Its bad enough that I have to admit I miss the old ASP / VB Script days when everything simply loaded.  Unfortunately, I've changd this blog so damn much that that isn't an option anymore, without going back to scratch and doing it all over again.  There are bits on this page that get re-used over and over again, like the buttons on the left and the top and bottom bits.  They're the same on each page, so I broke them out into components.  The only thing that changes is the "content" that you're looking at now.  I though at the time that this was a great idea, and it certainly helped me understand asp.net more, but now I'm not so sure.  Maybe I'll take a look at it again when I get back from holidays.

I'm off to California on Wednesday, for a meeting with some of our technical folks, and then two weeks of holidays.  I'm hooking up with Anna at her mission on Friday morning, though I have to take a seven hour bus ride to get there, one day after a twelve hour flight from London.  Ouch.  Anyway, I'm just about all packed, though I have to get some clothes dried and ironed yet, and I'm crap at ironing.  Two shirts took me nearly half an hour earlier, so I gave up and got some lunch.  I'll probably not post from California, but should have some good photos when I get back to post.  Oh, I still have to fix the damn photo album module...

Crazy work at the moment. I just finished up a major project, which got so bad that I had to be in the office until 5am one morning last week. Still, its all done and dusted now, and I can get back to building my uber-website. Anna got her first essay back from uni yesterday... she got graded an A. Surprise surprise ;-)

Its been a long time with no entries, so here's a summary of the last couple of months I guess. Work first... I've got a new job. I've been getting tired of localisation lately, to the point where I just didn't want to continue with it anymore. I was always fighting with someone to get the UK perspective across, it seems like it has been one big battle recently. So, a position in Marketing came up, and I went for it. I'm now the Client Release Manager, or the guy responsible for getting stuff on CDs and sending them to whomever. Its way more relaxed there, and I have the time to do the things I want, instead of fighting to get the day-to-day things done. I've had this idea on the back burner for a while now, to build a system for tracking CDs through the process, from beginning to end. It will compile the software, test it, burn the CDs, and track each step automatically. It will be fun, and rewarding, and I can't wait to start. I've had to spend the week getting setup though. I picked up my new laptop the other day, and it ROCKS. The monitor runs to 1400x1050, which is just obscene. The banner at the top of this page is about 750px wide, and it stretches half way across this screen.

Anna is thinking about doing a course in Archaeology. She has applied for it, but hasn't heard back yet. She also has a job lined up in the Passage later this year. One of the people working there is going on maternity leave, and not comming back, so Anna asked if she could have the job. Apparently they fell over themselves to say yes ;-) What else... we were in Paris last month, which was really cool. The weather was hot, and we had a hotel in Monmartre. Oh, we're going to Istanbul in October! Anna's parents bought us a holiday for my birthday, which they threatened not to tell me about until we got to the airport. I made them give it to me in Paris though, I couldn't wait that long ;-)

Lets see, whats been happening... um... I've been playing Eve-Online quite a bit lately, and its turning out to be better and better as it goes on. For those of you who don't know, Eve is a massively multiplayer online game in the same genre as Elite. In fact, its almost exactly like Elite, but bigger, and better. It also has real people flying around in it - typically around four thousand of them at the same time. That makes for a fucking awesome game.

Oh, I also got a new job last week. I'm going to move from Technology to Marketing, and do some funky things on the ground floor. More about that later on, I have a lot of things to get through first.