Strange Dreams again

I was attending University with Bill (a strange mish-mash of Billy from Stirling and Bill from Standard Life) and at a philosophy class I shouldn't have been at (because I wasnt' taking that class).

I made some kind of smart comment to do with how nicknames are assigned to someone based on external perceptions and therefore assigning one to yourself would be presumptious (it sounded good at the time, honest!) which impressed the teacher. When I told him I wasn't actually in his class, he leaned forward to whisper something in my ear. Sadly, all I could hear was distant whispering sounds, with no actual words. I told him this, and he bent in to whisper again, but once more, all I could hear was distant sounds.

And then I woke up.

America the beautiful

I'm glad to see this kind of dissent is still going on.

Give me hope, ya know.

(no subject)

what decade does your personality live in?


quiz brought to you by lady interference, ltd

New House!

Go here to see the flat I just bought.

Due to Scotland's ridiculous propery system, it cost me £67k rather than £51k, but what can ya do?

I'll be moving in the few weeks following Christmas, so I should be installed by February, party to follow!

Guess who just got in trouble!

I just dragged Erin over to show her the dubyadubyadubya.com link I put in this morning.

She looked at me with a shocked look of outrage and I wondered what I'd done to offend her.

I'd forgotten that it was her that sent me the link.


D'oh!

Good news for the planet!

Number of kids born per woman in the UK is down to 1.64. I believe that replenishment rate is 2.4, so the population is definitely dropping!

Presentation madness

My 7 weeks of introductory training comes to an end tomorrow. The usual method of ending this is to have a presentation that all of our future managers come to. We had lots of fun and games getting them sorted, including an early dearth of ideas for how to actually make the topic "Thinking about Programming: an examination of the thought processes involved in programming" less than completely boring.

Luckily we came up with the theme of "Christmas" (inspired, eh?), and I took the part of Scrooge, visiting by the spirits of Christmas Planning, Christmas Coding and Christmas Testing, who helped me get my project sorted out so that I could live happily ever after. This was all well and good, but what actually made the whole afternoon was the song.

Yes, you heard aright, we sang.

In fact, we sang "The 12 days of training", which was simple enough - just take a stage of the training course, give it an amusing twist and fit it into "The 12 Days Of Christmas". Except that we then complicated it further so that when we sang it together it formed (in parts) coherent sentences, like so:

On the third day of Training, Trevor said to us "Here's Net Express, Use a design, To make COBOL really easy."

while on the next verse was:
.
On the fourth day of Training, Trevor said to us "Here's how to code, With Net Express, And a design, To make COBOL really easy"

Obviously, what with changing stuff like this (and other changes too), plus people singing "Christmas" rather than "Training" it was slightly shambolic, but we pulled it together and impressed people enough that we got about a 45 second ovation, which was marvellous. Apparently they haven't had people do a song before (in 8 years of running the course), so that was nice too.

Anyway, they were all impressed, we came out of it looking good (especially when we presented Trevor with some whisky as a thank you) and my worries were (as usual) completely unfounded.

Now, one more day of "Initial Training" left, then two days of JCL training next week, then three days in my team, off for 2 weeks holiday then into work proper.

And then I get to find out what it's actually like to work for Standard Life, a mere 9 months or so after I originally applied!