Taxi drivers, I believe, are professional drivers.  Professionals in that they get paid to drive you from one location to another location of your choosing.  Lets break that down shall we?

Driving: there is a large body of laws and regulations regarding the operation of a motor vehicle on the roads and highways.  It includes many simple things like speed limits, indicating when a change of lane or direction is desired, and how to follow the lines on a road when turning a corner through an intersection.  It also covers more arcane things like when the use of high-beams is permitted and what to do when another motorist is in distress.  Of the many taxi drivers of many many nationalities that I have encountered, there have been less than 5 that I think would pass a driving exam.  Take some pride in your work people!  Make an effort, know the rules – even the sillier ones, and use them!  I’m sure it doesn’t help that their employers just don’t care; there is no incentive to improve.  Have you ever called a taxi company to make a comment on a drivers performance, or the DoI?  I have never heard people more uninterested in my life.

Location: Police, Fire, and Ambulance services don’t generally have GPS navigation devices – the reason stated is usually that the money could be better spent on life saving equipment, etc.  Their professional drivers are instead expected to know how to get just about anywhere in Melbourne, and to be able to read a map in a moments notice when necessary.  Is it so much to expect this from Taxi drivers?  So they are new to the city perhaps?  A modest up-front (credit-paid, tax-claimable, interest-free for 12-months) fee for the purchase of a GPS navigation device would pay for itself within days or weeks in efficiencies gained through better navigation.

Of course, I write all this in the presumption of innocence, that they do this from incompetence or lack of effort.  I believe this is largely the case, but have definitely had some very shonky drivers.  One for example doubled the fare at the last moment and then tried to deny it.  Sure, it always costs $90 to get to Mill Park from the city at 11pm.  Nice try buddy, but I’m sure it works often enough to make it worthwhile for him to try.

Feeling ranty?  Have a go!

The target organisation is a popular Australian company, established by 3 friends around 10 years ago, and does at least 90% of it’s business Internet facing.  It’s grown quite large since then, but they claim to have kept the DotCom feel to the organisation and placed a large emphasis on their “Values” during the interview.  The values are: Honesty, Ownership, Teamwork, and Passion.  I was specifically instructed to address all of these values in my answers during the interview, and I thought I did rather well.  Keep in mind here, that to even be considered for interviewing I was required to have had 8+ years of serious Systems Engineering experience on Internet facing and corporate systems and had to pass the qualifying interview from the recruiter.

The point of contention arose from one of those “Do you have any questions for us?” moments.  I asked what the policy or position was regarding discussing my prospective new employer and broad details of day-to-day activities on “new media” such as blogs, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.  As this is evidently where it all went wrong…

Their 1st response was to presume that I wanted to spend my day blogging or tweeting, followed very quickly by repeated concerns regarding client confidentiality, trade secrets, product launch schedules and similar.  I was staggered and tried in vain to steer the conversation back to the Honesty, Ownership and Passion values they had just been espousing.

• Honesty: blogging, etc giving a genuine and human face to the organisation
• Ownership: admitting mistakes, taking credit, and being proud of my work
• Passion: exhibiting pride in my employer, our work, enticing more clients to the sites, etc

After some further discussion This is where I left it and felt the gaff had been resolved, but no.  The recruiter’s feedback to me was that they thought I was a security risk, wouldn’t fit well with the team (of 3), and would be “troublesome to manage”.  I don’t know of anyone who could have worked in the corporate, government, or financial spaces without learning a few things about non-disclosure agreements and keeping secrets.  I have to seriously wonder what has happened in the past to have them respond this way…

And this is where I don’t get it: for a dotcom-survivor they just don’t understand Web2.0.  There are a multitude of examples where staff can provide the human element without revealing too much information, and generating real interest in the organisation and it’s people.  Hey, even Robert Scoble abrasive as he can be, did wonders for Microsoft’s public image in the years he was there.  And *many* finer examples are still coming out of the Microsoft wood-work!  Surely the potential positives that come from the efforts of honest, hard-working, passionate staff connecting with clients in a meaningful way are obvious…?

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious?  Please, can someone clue me up as it’s driving me insane.  This is precisely the response I would expect from my current employer which is still largely stuck in the 70s and doesn’t understand much beyond web-sites as extended newspaper ads.  But they are actually trying I guess…

Anyway, the process of writing this has been therapeutic for me.  I would dearly love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to comment here or check How to contact me if you would like to make more private comments.

Thanks for listening, and Have Fun!

[Update: Oh, and none of the interviewers I dealt with seem to exist on LinkedIn, they have completely locked off their FaceBook profiles, no blogs, and Google is not their friend. Then again, that goes for all the staff we have interviewed for positions at my current employer... Am I wrong for expecting guru-level IT staff to have an Internet presence?]

Now, the bus service is titled “TrainLink”. Train. Link. Far too many times (3 times this week) the bus has arrived too late to meet the train. Similarly in the evening, if the train is running late the bus does not wait for 5 mins. I (and others) then have to wait 30 (!!!!) mins instead for the next bus.

Train. Link. Not working.

And finally: I get substantially better service from the 571 route on weekends (and even Christmas day!) than I do during the week. It runs down Centenary drive every 20 mins on Christmas Day, why can’t it do that during the week??

If only you would actually follow up the link to Google you provide and use it to define Podcast, you would find this: “Podcasting, …, is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, …”

And from Wikipedia: “Podcasting is an automatic mechanism by which multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client, which pulls down XML files containing the Internet addresses of the media files.”

What you have is not a podcast, it is a manual download of an audio file. I would gladly add an RSS feed to my podcatcher and listen regularly as new shows are automatically downloaded – like a real podcast. I will not regularly be registering all my details on a page before manually downloading the audio and manually causing it to be synchronised to my MP3 player. I’ve done it once and will not be doing it again, no matter how compelling the content.

This year, I’m really liking the new LEGO Mindstorms NXT – you should watch the (slightly) hidden “Easter Egg” on the Mindstorms site (hint: Steven from BimP shows the way).

However. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. The LEGO Shop at Home for US lists the NXT Kit for US$249.99. Google tells me USD$249.99 in AUD$ is AU$327.68. The LS@H for Australia lists it for $429.99. Yes. Thats right. AU$102.31 more than the equivalent US price. And if I want to do them a favour and pre-order it, I can pay either $45 or $100 extra for delivery.

Nope. Can’t do it. Sorry LEGO, you had me then you lost me. There is no way I’ll pay $150-$200 more than US Retail.

Now I just need to find something I want that I can justify.

I get nuisance notices early in the morning about how a service was cancelled and then not cancelled. I get notices about how the 6:25am from Epping will not run, but don’t receive them until 7:30am (for example).

And finally today, when there is a major disruption to all services, I get … bugger all. Nothing, not a single message. The Connex website does not even have a notice regarding the disruption. Thankfully the Metlink site had some useful information.

How on earth can we expect people to use public transport more often when we get such apalling service?

I had three problems with that concept:

1. What about e-mails from old friends who changed address (or current friends who like changing e-mail addresses every few months. Hi Andrew! )?
2. It was never a good idea to depend on a completely spoofable “from” address.
3. There is plenty of great software out there to stop spam in a much friendlier manner, and it’s been around for quite some time!

So what do I use an what are my results?

E-mail: SpamAssassin – And you thought the Apache group only did a rawking web server! Results? Maybe one spam a week gets to my inbox, and no false positives for the 3 months I was monitoring it. I’ve stopped monitoring it though – what’s the point of reading all that spam when I’m trying to block it?!

Blog: Akismet – This is by far the easiest and quickest anti-blog-spam tool I have ever used! Included free in WordPress 2.0 (or was it 2.0.1?) and as easy to configure as registering on wordpress.com (I occasionally post scripting/programming stuff to Scripting. Stuff. anyway). Results? I think I had one spam make it to the moderation queue once. Not to the live site, just to the moderation queue. I could be wrong – I might be thinking of a legitimate comment that got moderated because of my WordPress settings (moderate authors without a previously approved comment).

Easy as 1, 2 … err 2.

Conclusion: Free and Open Source software rawks!

Disclaimer: Your results may vary, not a guarantee, not my problem, etc.

Update: Just adding FSF and OSI links

The latest culprit: Apple iTunes on Windows

Ok, so I bought Kim an iPod Nano for her birthday – she’s only been begging for one for about 3 years…

• I installed iTunes on our PC using a dedicated Administrator account then logged back in with a Limited User account (Actually we are all Guests and depend on the default Windows XP inclusion of AUTHENTICATED and INTERACTIVE in the Users group).
• As a Limited User we could rip music off CDs we own (Apparently illegal in Australia).
• We could sync those songs onto the iPod with no problems
• We could play the songs with no problems
• We bought some tracks from the iTunes Music Store and downloaded them
• The played perfectly on the PC
• We synced them to the iPod
• They would not play!

The symptom: Whenever we tried to play the purchased songs on the iPod, it would simply skip them all very quickly

Apple’s iPod Support pages were of no assistance – I went through “the five Rs” and had absolutely no change in function, and authorised/deauthorised the PC many times.

It was only after 6+ hours of incredibly frustrating, tedious, tiresome diagnosis that it occurred to me that it could be permissions related – it was a last ditch effort and I thought it was a long shot given that we had not received a single access exception.

Yep. Bloody hell! You need to be a local Administrator for purchased music to work when synced to an iPod. Unprotected AAC’s work perfectly without Administrator access. Protected AAC’s work perfectly on the PC without Administrator access. Only if you want to play your purchased tunes on your iPod do you need to be a local Administrator. Pfff, who would want to do that?!

And now with the line that I seem to use far too many times: I can’t be the only person who has experienced this!*

Why is it not in the Apple Support pages? Why do I have to buy AppleCare to log a fault with them? For crying out loud, I’ve diagnosed the bloody problem for them already – I just want to make sure a ticket gets logged in their fault tracking system and will get resolved in the next point(less) release!

[breath] [breath] [breath]

Ok, so I’m calming down now. Everything’s fine, the iPod works – even if we have to add Administrator access to our accounts when syncing the iPod – and Kim is very happy with the new music she purchased.

* Google was NOT my friend

Update: Fixed links and typos.

Update 2: How odd – TinyMCE in WordPress had popped a strange piece of HTML in that messed up some of the links displaying (<a  xhref=”http://www.apple.com.au/itunes/” />)

I love the fact that I can solve my own problems, and then submit the fixes back to the developers … and actually have them pay attention! And I don’t mean this in just a theoretical sense; this is something I actually do.

In my professional career as an “I.T. Systems Engineer” I have to diagnose faults with an amazing variety of big budget, closed source software. Once I have determined the solution (and occaisionally actually created patches or other code fixes), I find that the vendor has absolutely no interest in actually fixing the product and completely ignores any suggestions or solutions. (The conspiracy theorist in me says it’s because they make so much more money out of their premium support services)

No so with the open source projects I have participated in. For starters, it’s so much easier to diagnose issues when you can see the actual code, tinker with its innards, re-compile, etc. Once you have a solution, it’s normally a very simple task to submit changes, patches, documentation, and fault reproduction procedures back to the developers. Who more often than not are completely under-paid – if they are paid at all! The best bit comes next … the developers take your patches, integrate them into the product …and … say “Thank you”

This is sooo different from my daily professional grind. It’s so fulfilling I have to gush The best response I get from a vendor in my professional life is to be ignored. The worst was when I actually got accused of revealing trade secrets … serves me right for trying to do good

I’m probably spoilt a little by working with the WordPress folks: they are really on the ball, and patches are often vetted, approved and applied within minutes! Unfortunately the only changeset that I have attibution on is one for a typo..

Hmm this post is a little dis-jointed, mostly due to it being written in several quick sessions over the last few days.

I don’t think people really give Lego enough credit for stimulating and encouraging children. Sure, everyone recognises the link with engineering but often don’t consider the versatility and potential of the humble brick.

Solo play includes the obvious tower/bridge/fortress options to build the tallest/longest/stongest construction and learning the associated science and engineering concepts, but why stop there? I think Lego could be used in just about any area of childhood (and adult) development.

In particular I think Lego is invaluable in learning co-operative play (collaboration to us big kids). Certainly collaboration can be learned with other toys or even without any props (story telling springs to mind) – Lego just makes such a potent combination, enabling multiple learning streams at once. Construction, sharing of parts, consistency of design, inter-operability of created objects, relevance to themes or story-lines, and timeliness of completion are all necessary skills in a successful co-operative play session. And don’t limit your thinking here to purely mechanical aspects (does my person fit the scale of the cash register my neighbour built?), but asthetics as well (do our colour schemes work together? am I using too many soft shapes vs. my neighbour’s angular objects?).

Problem solving skills and lateral thinking are big by-products of extended Lego play – you never have exactly the right bricks you need to create a non-catalogue object. I often wish some of my work associates had spent more time learning the habits of lateral thinking and problem solving as a child, because they appear to be incapable of learning them as an adult.

Lego can also save you money! Why bother buying all the latest “fad” toys when all you need is some Lego and a creative mind to have any toy you want (erm, or your children want – I guess ). And your grown children can make a living from their Lego habit. It can even help us average joes too: interviewing methods incorporating Lego and all the collaborative features I’ve just mentioned are catching on, so your Lego skills may be the deciding point in your favour for your next job.

So, what prompted this explosion of Lego favour? As a sometime follower of the LEGOFan site, in excited by their new BrickJournal. The first issue is fabulous … and frustrating – I don’t want to wait for the next issue! I want it now, now, now, NOW!

(BrickJournal link via BoingBoing)