Posts from February 2007

job vacancy

Travel Administrator for overpaid and unbelievably stupid IT consultant

  • must be capable of using a corporate travel service to book a flight to Copenhagen from London Heathrow
  • must be capable of reading confirmation email to check flight is actually from LHR and not London City airport
  • must be able to secure approvals for travel booked less than 7 days from departure
  • must be able to verify a flexible ticket has indeed been issued as requested
  • must be able to convince the lady at SAS ticket sales to change a fixed, non-refundable, non-changeable ticket to a different flight at no additional cost

Salary - none. Bonus - none although you will receive my eternal thanks and defer my next nervous breakdown.

Benefits - you can blog about your idiotic boss right here every weekday.

dugg, slashdotted and tailranked

Dear Reader

My cruel owner got very excited last night when he went to play with his rotating tagline. Instead of his precious blog, much to his surprise, he was presented with this. His reaction to this mundane error was startling.

At last ! Look, blog, look at this. 18 months and I've finally done it. At last ! We've been dugg ! Why did it take them so long to catch on ? Look blog, look. Finally, we've been Slashdotted ! The poor old servers at Bluehost don't know what's hit them. Thousands of hits per second. Apache is on its knees begging for mercy and more swap space. Why, I bet Matt Eaton will be on the phone any second now. We've done it. Technorati Top 100. Blog, look, just look at that screen !

18 months, 3 different hosting providers, 500 articles, 4 readers, 6 comments and 2 self-inflicted disasters. And now, finally, it is all worthwhile. My life is complete. And you know what - I think it is very interesting how all this happened shortly after my brilliant idea to introduce the rotating tagline.

Of course, you know what this means, blog. We're going to have to move house (again). Prestigious, high traffic sites on the TailRank front page can't live on cheap, 5 dollar a month hosting.

We are going to have to move to MediaTemple with a powerful grid infrastructure. Of course, the hosting will be absolutely free because MediaTemple will be fighting off Google and Microsoft for the privilege of hosting us !

Now I need to go and powder my nose. I'm doing a podcast on the Scoble Show in 10 minutes.

My cruel owner was so excited and happy, I couldn't bear to tell him this was just a temporary glitch on the Bluehost monitoring agent and everything was back to normal now. Yours

The interminable bytestream that is 'Blog in isolation'

bedroom antics with the wife

Last night, I happened to catch my wife composing an email. I noticed that when she sent a personal email to her friends, she invariably typed From Norma as the subject line. This just seemed really weird to me.

I asked her what she thought of the 'semantic web' and whether she had given any thought to adding tags to her personal emails such as 'Norma' and 'From' to help build a valuable taxonomy for her friends.

She looked at me blankly and said 'Just because you work with computers, you think you're so clever, don't you ?'