The Angry Geek

We’ve recently acquired a rather useless kettle in our office; it replaced the differently useless one that took around 15 minutes to heat enough water for one cup of tea…

The new kettle is a much faster boiler (I no longer have time for a loo break while waiting for my tea), but suffers from a strange design failure.  For some reason, as the kettle gets hotter, it shifts slightly on the cordless base, losing the power connection long before the water is fully boiled.  It’s easy to get round this though – you just hold the back of the kettle in place for a few seconds until the thermal cut-out kicks in as the water finally boils.

However, I think this kettle would be an ideal interview tool for new developers.  Here’s how it would work: halfway through the interview, you ask the interviewee if he (or she) would mind making a couple of cups of tea while you just answer a call…  Points are then allocated based on how they handle the kettle:

0 points – if he doesn’t even notice that it disconnected rather than cutting out properly.

1 point – for noticing it failed to boil, but just giving up

2 points – if he holds down the “on” switch to get it to boil

3 points – for realising that it’s nothing to do with the switch, and just holds the handle in place (allowing the thermal cut-out to work)

4 points – for figuring out that you can just put a paper towel under the front of the kettle, and then you don’t even need to hold it

5 points – for spotting the paper towel that was already there in place, and realising it has a purpose, so not moving it to start with!

My bet is that most of the people currently in my office would get 3 points at best.

There’s a sign just gone up in my office building advertising a chocolate sale. It looks like this:

CHOCOHOLICS

Come and try free samples and buy gifts for friends and family, 12pm-2pm today.

Now… imagine the outrage if that had read “Alcoholics” instead… Why are chocolate addicts treated so badly that we don’t care about this kind of insensitive taking of advantage?

Programmers are good at writing step by step instructions. After all, that’s all a computer program ever is – a set of very simple step by step instructions. Of course, modern programming languages try and make it more complicated, by adding objects and events, but in the end, everything comes down to a set of instructions.
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I have a very nice Vodafone v1615 mobile which runs the Windows Mobile 6 (WM6) operating system. On Saturday, I lent it to my wonderful Fiancée while she was in the shops and I had to run back to the flat to solve a crisis at work. I’d like to say that ever since then it’s been running slowly; but the truth is it was giving me grief even before that… I just noticed it more after using her sleek, shiny (but tragically pink) Samsung Tocco.

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I’m sick of the negative media. For months I’ve been convinced that if, instead of going for sensational headlines of doom, the press were just a little more optimistic – balanced even – then the financial markets would probably sort themselves out. Even though that’s probably a bit too optimistic, having spoken to a wide range of business analysts in the last few months on the subject, I’m firmly convinced that even if reporting good news wouldn’t help, reporting all this exaggerated bad news is certainly making things worse.

Sadly, it’s not just the news-hounds who hate people having a good attitude. Baroness Shriti Vadera has been publicly shamed today for daring to voice optimism in this current economic climate. According to the Tories (who I supposedly support), saying “I am seeing a few green shoots” demonstrates how out of touch and insensitive she is…

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The latest beta of Windows came out last weekend… and I don’t care. Yes, I downloaded it as soon as I could. Yes, I’ve installed it on a virtual machine. Yes, Microsoft has declared “Beta Keys for Everyone”, so the world should be running on Windows 7 Beta – but no, I just don’t care.

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The worst thing about being the most technically competent person in a company is that all too often, the buck stops at my desk.  I can’t complain – it’s a problem of my own making; I’m too lazy to pass on knowledge in a usable format, so I end up having to do a lot of the work.

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Supposedly, this site is an advert for Compare the Market (dot com), where you can compare quotes for all kinds of things – insurance, credit cards, mortgages etc.

To be honest though, I think Compare the Meerkat is an entertaining website in its own right (although the annoying voice-over is, well, annoying).  Even if it is viral marketing… I like it!

As well all know – the egg came first; long before there was ever a bird that might even be considered an early ancestor of a chicken, things laid eggs.  The question of “Which came first, the Chicken or the Chicken Egg?” is more tricky – I’ll leave that one for the philosophers.

The question for me though, is which came first – the content or the readership?

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In vino veritas is a well-known Latin phrase. It means “in wine [there is the] truth”.

I’ve had a lot to drink tonight – perhaps (though I hope the spell checker will help with this) you will be able to tell this from my typing.  It’s an odd conundrum – although it is thought that alcohol is supposed to bring out the truth, I find myself quite an acomplished liar after drinking.

The trick to a good lie is two parts truth to one part lie.  The secret to drunken lies is to let slip the first “truth” while you’re still sober enough to remember what you’ve said… once that’s done, you only need to remember to tell the lie – the other truth will come out by itself.

So remember, all of you – Just because a person is drunk, doesn’t mean all he says is the truth!