Sanity–;
At work we have recently been working on the final stages of this new device we made. Its at the point where some of the tests we do to make sure its ok are soooo boring that you end up laughing uncontrolably at random things.
Today we were calibrating a few of these devices and started laughing uncontrolably about how these devices acctually allow you to time travel and that the Bourne Identity acctually used them and wore flairs, he then pulled out 2 guns and shot people. Its quite crazy when i put it down like this... but it makes sense when you are that bored... Anyway after about 2 weeks of having to do this hardcore testing its quite good that even though the work is mundane and mind melting, its fun as long as you have got a good team and a good working environment.
This got me thinking about other places ive worked before and the atmospheres there. My first IT job was awesome, I was in charge of a gaming network/cyber cafe as well as fixing and building computers. It wasn't hard work and all the staff there were funny and we all had a laugh, even joined in on some of the games when we got bored and nothing was happening.
The next IT job i had was still doing building/fixing computers but was for a less fun company and usually it was just me there, so it was boring as hell and not much pay. Funny thing was the place closed down after about 8 months, as someone broke in and stole everything, although i still think it was an insurance scam from the guys who owned it, they still owed me like £300 as well... cheeky buggers!
After getting bored of the hardware industry i thought i would go into software, as had been doing development work for a good few years and its a bit more fun working in teams on stuff, rather than just doing no brainer pc stuff.
Got a job in an IT company who did mainly multimedia stuff but had a small software development team. This was quite fun to begin with as I was working with a few friends and it was fairly interesting working on an existing project that I was unfamiliar with. After a few months there i realised why so many people kept leaving the place, the work was mundane after a while and the deadlines were ridiculous, paired with very little motivation to do the work well.
There were some awesome times there though, where we all were sooo demotivated and sick of the work that we sent made up game shows/films names round. That was class, one of the all time favorites was "Snake Fingers, hes the man... the man with the fingers of snakes" as well as the ever popular "Lesley Garrets pants are too tight, LETS PULL EM DOWN" followed by "Pets do the most canabalistic things". These were definatly the hilight of our days there, we laughed soooo damn hard at some of the stupid things we all came up with. Although it was always dull when management realised we were having a modicum of fun and Captain Fun told us to stop talking and get on with our work. I wouldn't really have minded too much if we didn't get the work done, but we did, and the extra work, and the stuff that gets thrown in last minute... we had such stupid workloads that we had to permenantly give 120%.
I still dont know how companies can possibly think that this sort of regime is good? a happy worker is a productive worker, you start treating the office like a prison and no one is going to WANT to put in the extra effort, and when it comes to writing software that extra effort is what saves the company £££ on support costs and extra implementation. Fair enough if everyone talked all day and did no work it would be anarchy, but being on the opposite end of the spectrum is just as bad for the company.
These days its quite fun working in a friendly adaptive sort of environment, chatting while working, developing decent software and acctually WANTING to put in that extra effort. Anyway im going to get back to productive stuff now that my sanitys gone ++; a bit more!
Randomness^2
We got bored the other day after work and came up with an awesome idea... Make the worlds most random webpage...
The link above shows what we created, its unoptimized so its a tad slow, but it gets the job done, and after 30 mins of coding thats all you can really expect.
For anyone wondering what the hell it acctually is...
Its a random webpage generator, it scours the net for random sites and then mashes them all together in a big pot and then pours it all over your screen.
Also a new update, we went to the vending machine to get something to drink, BAM it reset and robbed my 20p, so i was quite miffed, wouldnt give me money back. So we pressed alot of random buttons, well i say WE, i actually mean Charlie did.
Then the funniest thing happened, it gave us a free drink, we didnt know what it was but it was free. Then we pressed more buttons and got more free drinks. 15 free drinks later for us all and we forgot about the 20p and went back to work... about 5 people got free drinks from my rogue 20p, also got a BLING deal on crisps, 20p for a big bag of Walkers Sensations, got 3 packs @ 20p each...
PS3 Almost Released
Well... under a month to go now before the PS3 is launched. At £425 I aint going to buy it until it comes WAAAAY down in price.
Im sure WoW and the Wii can keep me entertained until it does drop in price.
One thing that is quite annoying is the fact that game prices seem to have shot up again by quite a bit, we were discussing this the other day round at Kinky Johns house... or at least i think it was his house.
Games used to be cheap as chips on the C64, i remember getting my £3 pocket money and being able to buy a magazine with like 3 games and 5 demos on, or get 2 brand new games. Then came consoles, which were awesome to be fair, but quite pricey. I had a NES, and had to save up for a month to be able to afford a crappy 2nd hand game
This was quite a jump from £1.50 per game to £30 per game, then followed by the Megadrive and Snes which seemed to be at £40-£50 for some games. It was quite pricey and most people only owned about 5 games and just relied on their friends and christmas to play new ones.
Then came the PSX, i remember a friend of mine getting one when they first came out in the UK, im sure he paid almost £400 for it or something daft. Anyway it was an awesome console and i remember crashing round at his house lots playing on Destruction Derby and Loaded. Games seemed to come back down in price at this point when Saturn and PSX were out together, roughly £30-£40 a game.
Ive just realised how much im rambling here so im just gonna speed it up and say that game prices were quite decent until recently, and now they are shooting back up, and its not a very nice thing for a gamer to have to spend £40-50 for a new game that is pretty but only lasts about 10 hours and is never played again.
PS3 Online Seller Lookup
I have not touched the Wii seller lookup thing for a while, and am not sure if anyone still uses it. Im still not sure if its worth putting up a PS3 seller lookup script as there are so many other people who have dedicated a WHOLE site to doing the same task.
If > 50 people want a PS3 seller lookup script then i will make on just like the Wii lookup to help PS3 hunters get their consoles, although im not sure if there will be much of a shortage with them. If you want one, then post a comment saying so, otherwise best of luck PS3 searching!