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All this training is getting a bit much. To use a Brit Yob expression, "its doing my head in". This last week was pretty much as the week before - with everyone seemingly trying to imitate headless chickens. Although why they would want to do such a thing so near to Christmas and risk the chance that they could be mistaken for turkeys, I don't know. Still, Turkeys is just as apt a description.

Now forgive me if I am impetuous, rash, nieve etc, but after investigating the rewrite of your core systems some six years ago, then getting into a joint development with your nearest competitor and entrusting the management and development of your business critical systems to IBM. After five years of living through that nightmare and finally realising that you were not onto a winner but were heading toward the precipice along with OS/2 and the Micro Channel Architecture. After investigating the feasibility of whacking your electricity business into a water system and proclaiming to the board that there was a 74% fit and that you were 89% confident of success (inexact percentages must lend an artificial air of confidence and thoroughness to the investigation). After all that, you would think that there would be some inkling of the requirements. Some vague idea as to what the system was about, what it was supposed to do. Some shred of documentation which was useable and which was supposedly necessary to decide upon the 74% fit. You would think that after ditching a five year seventy million pound (as in half a Billion Rand), they would be eager to see some tangible results for any new system.

Well, no. The current plan (drawn up by one of the aforementioned turkeys) is to form eight project teams to investigate and come up with the Business Requirements for the SWALEC electricity business. This will be led by "users" and SWALEC permies with analyst support. No support team. No DBA's. No High Level Design. No Architecture development. Nothing but a new farm cuddly feeling that they can begin Workshops to discuss the Business Requirements and can then document these. These activities will presumably float along for a long as possible, before they start to realise that the eight separate teams actually need to work together. Then no doubt there will be some Joint Workshops, Cross System teams, Quality Reviews, External Consultants. No doubt the external consultants will report that the requirements are in a mess, that the project is going down the tubes and that all the people who are to blame left six months ago on early retirement after cashing in huge sums of share options.

Why, why, why do people not learn from past IT developments, and why can't people get it right. I guess as a contractor working for vast sums of pounds (and vast sums * 7.8 of Rands) per hour, I should not complain, it would just be nice to one day work for a project which is professionally run and about which I can feel proud to be associated. Is it just me ?

After last weeks knuckle rapping for getting an IIS (Internet Information Server) up in a week and annoying the locals who had been working on it for a year, this week I got rapped on the knuckles for converting everyone across to Exchange from ccMail. Not because of any stuff up you understand, just that another team had been working on it for the last two months, and where planning to move us all to Exchange "after that had upgraded their capacity". As soon as people start to use that sort of management speak to me, I get cross. You mean as soon as you buy a new hard disk. Something you can do in the next ten minutes if you really wanted to, Or something you can do right now by a bit of moving of files aroung or ripping unused drives out of unused PC's and putting them where they are needed. Grr...

So this week, I got my revenge by starting the ball rolling converting everyone from Organiser to Schedule Plus. More knuckle pain to follow I presume.

Ok, enough about work.

On December 15th, South Africa is playing Wales rugby at Cardiff Arms park and the Chalmers family will be there to watch the men in green and gold whip the wimps in red.

Nicky's dance extravaganza went of reasonably well last weekend, despite the frightening words "unique" and "experimental" in the programme and the first dance being performed in sleeping bags. The final, after interval dance and music (with a youth orchestra) was excellent, "Pictures of an Exhibition" by some Musso or other. Half time was a bit embarrassing when Maggie and Bob (husband of Sue, the mother of the new baby, Emma - come on now, keep up) went and helped themselves to wine from the "sponsors" area. The further disgraced themselves by trying to look through a window which was actually a piece of “modern” art. At the interval another group of dancers provided some interval entertainment by doing some char dancing to Elvis music downstairs in the foyer. Feeling spurred on by the creativity and obvious appreciation of the audience I too got involved and choreographed Tarryn and Katie (daughter of the aforementioned Bob and Sue and friend of Tarryn) sitting on some upstairs chairs eating their chocolate ice creams. I called the dance - “Two girls eating ice creams”, but the performance was interrupted by a call to return to our seats before the critics could fully appreciate the deeper meaning and “experimental” nature of the work.

The orchestra for the second half performance (the first half’s dances were all performed to home made, hissy, scratchy tapes), was excellent, despite being a youth orchestra and brought some relief to the night.

Yesterday Maggie and I went through to Salisbury to do some Christmas shopping - and had a pretty successful day really, although I am now wearing some of the purchases - a nice jersey, so I guess this will have to be called a non-Christmas present.

Yesterday we also had the first serious loss of data on the DataK Lan when we realised that we were missing some files which were on the Seagate which packed up three weeks ago. The DAT tape backups were all too old and the hot disk and Zip drive backups did not cover the file in question as I had stupidly not saved it in the data directory. The file in question was our genealogy file which used to hold close to three hundred relations. So now poor old Nicky is recapturing the information off some original paper sources. I think at the moment it is ten done two hundred and ninety to do. Bugger. I don’t think the backup systems themselves were to blame, just me not saving the data in the right directory.

Well, let me add an elephant to this and then send it off.

Q: Why don't elephants play basketball?

A: You can't find five elephants willing to have purple shorts.

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