The Test Department

 Being Disappointed.. . As a fan of a lower league football club, I have suffered countless disappointments. You know the kind. When that expensive foreign player arrives with great fanfare and high expectations. The player is a flop or has lost form. The player then leaves the club at the next opportunity. The player blames the loss of form on his wife missing her pet poodle. The disappointment in the manager when he sells the best striker to a team in the same league. In the next game against the same player then proceeds to bang 2 goals in against your team. The player then celebrates a bit too much in front of your sad manager who knows his P45 is waiting for him at full time. As a football fan of a lower league team, you learn to live with these disappointments. You become almost engrained against them. Today though my disappointment in my club will take some time to get over. Raith Rovers have decided to sign a player who's had a civil court conviction for rape. The victim

 My Nanowrimo A good few years ago I attempted to do the Nanowrimo. If you don't know, this involves you attempting to write 'a novel' of over 50k words in November. I had a vague idea of a story. Time travel to the late 18th century. Fantasy beings, alternate history/future, magic, life and death! For my fun, I included Robert Burns into this heady mixture. I completed November with over 50k words. There were times it was a huge slog. Other times it was as the great Terry Pratchett said "The most fun you can have on your own" I had not even gotten to the point where the characters had time travelled. I left the unfinished mess alone for a year. The following year I did the same again and this time it was Part II. Another 50k words but I completed it. It is all the readability of a first draft, i.e completely unreadable and all over the place. There are howling spelling mistakes and plot holes all over the shop. I sent Part I to a member of my family who is an awa

 Secret Treaties. I am wheeling one album that had a big impact on my musical journey. Blue Oyster Cult's "Secret Treaties". Like everyone I had heard BOC's classic "Don't Fear The Reaper". That song was my introduction, my older brother had all the first three albums. Called the "Black and White" albums as all the covers were pencil drawings. BOC 1974 There is not a bad track on the album, BOC were hitting their stride musically and in the writing. The whole album oozes lyrical menace. From the opening of "Career Of Evil" ( Co penned by Patti Smith who was Alan Lainer's girlfriend at the time). My favourite is the proto-punk "Dominance and Submission". It sounds like a plot for a David Cronenberg movie that he could of made. The closing epic Alien abduction/invasion "Astronomy" inspired many a future metal band. Metallica went out of its way to cover it. My advice is to put it on now, you will be off your seat

In Your Garden of Delights.. The other day I noticed a story about Disney clawing back a lot of their content is on Netflix. It would appear the days of shared content across platforms is diminishing. The streaming providers want to keep you in their walled garden for as much as possible. If you are a serious tv watcher you are now going to have to subscribe to at least three if not four providers. All that to watch your fave film or TV show. My arithmetic is not that great but it would be safe to say that would be not shy of well over £350 a year. Ouch. We have Prime and Netflix and we do watch them a lot. I had Prime when it was Love Film and £4.99 was a good price. When Amazon came along and waved their wonga at Love Film I continued to only pay £4.99 for years and years. It was down the contract that Amazon had to fulfil. I have since upgraded to a Prime user so now fork out £7.99. My wife decided to pay for Netflix, as she wanted to watch a certain show for a bit. I have to be hon

  As The Song Doesn't Go.. Bad Time My week started well when I had realised that I had left my wallet in the Takeaway last night. There is quite a lot of people traffic through that particular Takeaway. Some of them look like they would not bat an eyelid at trying a lost card. This morning I went through the process of cancelling everything. I kept checking the online bank to see if any overnight spending spree had happened. I went round early this evening and the good man in Takeaway had retrieved it. I had placed my black wallet on the black table in there. The takeaway had arrived a bit sooner than I had expected. The table camouflaged the wallet so I did not see it when I got up to get my takeaway. Being distracted by my silly phone had not helped either. Good Time I had a bit more of a productive day at work today. Being left alone for most of the day helped. I actually said that in our end of day meeting. Not sure how that landed with people but no one passed any comments on

The Truth And Nothing But The Truth Friday I had my brain melted by a 5 and bit hour Zoom meeting. We were attempting to do a full end to end walkthrough of the process/Application we are testing. To use a theatre term is was a "Dress Rehearsal" for next week when we get the business users to do the same thing. It took that long because the application is still riddled with bugs. As well the bugs there as many environmental issues. At almost every point of the process, there are problems. There was aghast team leads on the call who had never seen the application in full flow. The reality of what we have to do to get it to work left them shocked. Our team lead joked with us that they were not allowed to use certain phrases. Phrases like "Environmental Issues" or "Application Issues." are best avoided when they are talking to the business stakeholders. It got me thinking about how progress gets reported in Software Development. A lot of the time managers it