Major Success

I have a long history of taking broken things apart to try and fix them. And a somewhat shorter specklier history of getting them back together, especially with no spare parts.

So when one of the doofers dropped his iplop, I was up for having a go at replacing the creen. Then I read on t’interwebs that its a pretty tricky fix, but 15 quid off fleabay v 150 for a new ipod touch. How hard can it be?

Pretty damn fookin tricky as it turns out. But after a few attempts, and with no spare bits left…

Its pretty tough to get those broken screens off in one go!

Sods law now its working, he’s just discovered a new set of books.

I saw an article on the beeb the other day about fixing an ipad, which sounds even harder. I had to rely on the interwebs and the Mrs’ hair dryer rather than wandering experts with the right tools.

Any of you guys fixed one of these? Or something worse?

cheers

simon

Number 5 busses

You know what its like, you wait ages for a bus then 3 come along at once.

And the same with jobs…

You wait ages, as confidence in the viability of your skill set rapidly evaporates, and suddenly several offers come in within half an hour.

Considering the imminent collapse of the global financial system I jumped at the chance to move into pharma.

Back to VBA, which is tough after the luxury of C#/VS2010 (and to Access after SQL Server – even tougher!), have just about got out of the habit of adding a semi colon at the end of each line. Still keep getting comments wrong though.

I had lots of great insight from agents, in particular the idea that most front office dev work has now been offshored and the main onshore work is is risk and regulatory. Those areas interest me, but as the banks announce huge layoffs again (funny in the alledged ‘recovery’), it seems a bit of a delicate target market.

I’d say between the offshoring and the bodyshop invasion, Excel/VBA is officially dead as a viable IT department skillset. There are still roles but mainly through business areas, and/or on crap rates. The .net roles are pure buzzword overload, and clearly a world removed from the cut and thrust of the actual business. No pressure but not much interest either.

I hope you are all sorted work wise.

cheers

simon

Infopap re-envisioned

MS have announced that infopath will soon be pining for the fjords.

I always found infopath as the perfect demonstrations of how MS have no clue how most people actually use their software.

I have never actually met anyone outside Microsoft (or Contoso :-)) that has ever used it.

I read an interesting article recently about keyboards. Hopefully we all know that the current ones really aren’t very good, and for example Dvorak layout is more efficient. Anyway the article was a plea to people to stop developing new and novel keyboards and focus on making the current ones as good as they can be. The argument being that although they are poor at least they are consistent. New designs and layouts just cause cognitive friction because people always end up using more than one. (eg at work and at home)

(I use about 5 mildly different layouts which really is a pain in the arse. Worse one of my phones is qwerty and one is qwertz.)

Microsoft would do well (under its ‘new’ leadership) to optimise the way people actually use their products rather than trying to dictate their (mostly wrong) view of the best way.

I assume they will continue to recruit inexperienced graduates and lock them in airless rooms in ivory towers to imaginate new ways of doing stuff instead of rebuilding their ties with actual real world user communities. These were the ties Ballmer destroyed. The people who had already found the better workaround for product limitations.

I’m expecting more pointless products rather than a new round of MSDN roadshows!

Are you a big infopath user?

what do you use it for?

cheers

simon