Start of March

Bought another watch this month, a Seiko Sportura kinetic Titanium to replace a Seiko watch I was given as a Birthday present 12 years ago. These watches last a long time, need no battery (self wind) and keep the time. The price is high at around $900 but you get what you pay for.

On the day job side, things at the bank seem to be going crazy. They are so obsessed about saving money after the prime mortgage marked collapsed that they are getting rid of lots of really good teams in the UK and giving the jobs to not so good teams in other countries which have cheap labour. The workload does not decrease and the pressure on teams has now reached breaking point. I can see a lot of customer impact coming in the next 12 months as projects with very poor design will be going in to production. What makes me mad is that our management know we will need to divert most of the team to try and keep things going (we support many businesses in the bank), but are too scared to stand up and try and make them see the customer impact coming. Banks are happy to keep disasters quiet as long as customers do not get affected. So the next time you call your bank and get “All our operators are busy, call later” is just one example of a badly designed system not being able to cope with the data, yet hardware upgrade is not an option because it costs money. All the while the bank pleads poverty and gives most staff no pay-rise or bonus for working most of last year 7 days a week, yet the people at the top and dealers still get a nice increase. To me this is too greedy but most banks I know are the same or worse. There is one Swiss bank I know which intimidates staff to work at least 12 hour days when their contract is 9am-5pm. I am only still here because I have been with the group nearly 15 years (working for different banks within the group) and I like some of the people I work with and when they eventually get rid of our team, I should be a fair compensation.

Now on to my EscSoft work…. I almost finished the cover art import program which I hope to release in beta form in the next week. I also started to re-write iDump in .net to get used to the syntax. I will get it working and then pass the source to Andie to make it look better if he wants before releasing. Also looking at other tools to write in .net starting with a version of the iPod Cover Art Import, a program to copy music between iPods including the cover art and then a new version of iDumpPro as a full media library.

The last few weeks I have watched documentarys on SAS, Future Weapons and history of War, Pirates and treasure hunters. Films, Stardust (again) and Signs.