I stumbled across this attack piece on Huffington Post.
I find it slightly surprisingly for a left-leaning organisation to publish such a blatant a attack piece directed at Richard Dawkins.
And it is such plainly daft, anti-atheist, bigoted nonsense that it deserves a thorough fisking.
I know how a lot of people are feeling at the moment with the huge ash cloud causing flight delays across Europe.
I had a similar experience in January when I became snowbound at Manchester Airport in the UK and my flight was canceled.
But now, thanks to the bbc, I now know that KLM screwed me royally.
If a flight is delayed, there are strict European rules in place, which mean that the airline is obliged to supply meals and refreshments, along with accommodation if an overnight stay is required and you have a confirmed return booking.
Now, I had a confirmed return booking and KLM operatives refused to pay for a night in a Hotel.
They claimed, incorrectly it now seams, that they could not pay for my night in a hotel.
I can only assume that the reason they refused was the following;
However, if you are on the outward leg of a journey, this will not be given.
I am British and so maybe my British accent gave the staff the entirely incorrect assumption that I was on an outward leg.
I freaking live in Amsterdam. I am a freaking expat. I was returning home!
If any expat is reading this and is delayed don’t let it happen to you.
Demand your rights and get those arseholes to bloody well pay.
[For more information print this out in advance before flying.]
BTW, I have complained about being shafted.
Let us see how bad KLMs customer service really is.
John Gruber and some others are inferring that the problems with Flash as cross-platform system are the same as the problems with the Mac OS X JVM.
This is an absurd and disingenuous straw man.
Let me concisely point out why;
The Flash VM is written and managed by Adobe, but he OS X JVM is written and managed by APPLE.
I have been thinking for some time about what the selection criteria should be for choosing a digital agency.
I should note that no digital agency currently meets all of the criteria I define below. [Most do not meet any.]
I know that there are way more than just 5 things to look out for, I could easily list a further 5, but these are my personal top 5.
[Put your own personal top 5 in the comments section.]
If I was out shopping for a Digital Agency these are my must-haves above an beyond all the other considerations…
It is most definitely not a science.
Science requires the rigorous confines of the scientific method.
As an atheist who often rants against pseudoscientific and mystical thinking, I can say categorically that Software Development cannot be considered a science as it does not in any way base itself in any way on (dis)provable hypotheses and evidence.
A lot of people consider it a science because the discipline exists purely because of scientific advancements.
[And greatly contributes to further scientific advancement.]
But this is a ludicrous as calling an Olympic swimmer a scientist because he is proving the hypotheses of fluid dynamics.
So, no, not a science.
The language of software development is very engineering related.
We talk about building.
We talk about construction.
We talk about infrastructure.
We talk about design.
We talk about architecture.
To the layman this sounds similar to the language used to build bridges, boats and planes.
But the similarity is totally superficial.
Software Development as a discipline is extremely new, compared to masonry, and so appropriated existing language as metaphors for similarly scoped, but entirely different, tasks.
It may be that building software in the 70s took a long time, but now it is instantaneous.
The software infrastructure of a distributed server farm may be impressive, but not to the scale and magnificence of the catacombs.
Using the tired old metaphors of engineering in today’s world just does not work as well.
So, no, not engineering.
There is without a doubt high creativity at work in good Software Development.
Although it is in a manner that those outside of the discipline would rarely comprehend or appreciate.
Seeing my first MVC application, in the wild rather than in the dry leaves of some academic tome, was, for me, a work of beauty equivalent to a Caravaggio.
Stupendous and awe-inspiring in its depth of vision.
But, even so, software development can never be as nebulous or personally subjective as art.
True, there are many debates in software development, loose vs. strict typing, procedural vs. functional vs. object-oriented programming, etc.
But these are just minor disagreements compared to the pointillists vs. synthetist disagreements of post-impressionism. [See van Gogh vs. Gaugin]
Even the most partisan of software developers would agree that an opposing concept has some merit. [Excepting Richard Stallman, of course. 
]
Something no artistic difference would ever permit.
And finally, and most damningly, with art you need not be an artist, or even remotely artistic, to truly appreciate the beauty of the art.
So, no, not art.
This is a tough question.
It does not naturally fit any of the above descriptions neatly.
It is like science in its approach, but without needing to prove a hypothesis.
It is like engineering in implementation, but without actually building something physical.
And it is like art in its intricate beauty, but it cannot be appreciate fully by the layman.
Software Development is a craft
A software developer has a wealth of experience and skill to bring to bear on the writing of software.
And the skill that software developers have grows over time with experience.
It is not an unskilled profession.
It is a craft and will be for quite some time to come.
Total and utter BS.
The death throws of an industry that is rapidly fading into irrelevance due to advances of technology and the collective behaviours of a more “involved” consumer base.
I found the whole “looky here at our meaningless self-given awards” such pretentious self promotion twaddle.
Like those awards actually ‘mean’ anything.
The ANDY Awards do not even have a wiki page.
They WP:FAILN!
AD industry awards are purely for how things “look”.
Not that how things “look” actually seems to count anymore in today’s search engine, social media and feed-reader driven world. [Thanks to Google, Content is finally King.]
There are no awards given for the ROI of a campaign.
Which is what clients are interested in when they engage an AD agency in the first place.
Financial Results.
¥€$
Do not get me wrong.
Cool creative shit is still cool.
And it definitely deserves rewards.
But the self-aggrandising hyperbole of their statement just makes me cringe.
And why do I work in such an industry?
I love a challenge.
So today was another day in paradise in the office.
I have suddenly gotten, since my contract renewal on January 1st, a ton of new responsibilities, and I am learning a bunch of new stuff about my work, and myself, at an excruciating rate.
Today I learnt;
Somehow, when people put data into a system, they expect it to come out the other end.
Oh, how naive!
Most systems only allow a “view” or “portal” to the underlying data that they contain.
So when there was a requirement, of which I had not previously been aware, of retrieving data from a system in a completely new manner… it failed.
The fix was simple.
Enter and retrieve the data in the conventional and expected way.
Sorted.
[But keep an eye out for people having poor understanding and false expectations of infrastructure. Help them manage their expectations of the systems better.]
I missed a document containing an iteration of fields that I needed to know to be able to do some investigation.
Of course, finding a single column in a 5 MB spreadsheet at 25% zoom was non-trivial.
But if I had spent the time to actually read it I would have not emailed people unnecessarily. Requesting the data that I already had.
My communication abilities tend towards the tech-savy crowd.
I am now working far more with people who are unable to map the 7 layer OSI model to the 5 layer TCP/IP protocol stack.
So I need to strive to keep things at a far more, ahem, Apple Keynote level of communication most of the time.
I need only geek-out with those that can appreciate it.
[Yes. I had the glassy-stare-of-too-much-techy-info today. Again.]
No matter how much I hope they will. They just will not die!
Ok, that is a bit harsh.
When a project that is truly groundbreaking, but very back-end intensive, comes back from a zombie-like limbo, then it means trying to put in place strategies to stop servers melting through the Earths crust on their merry way to China.
We worked out, thanks to doing some prior investigation into various high-load delivery strategies, a way of achieving the damn-near impossible.
So all is good with the world.
So I must stop fearing this. [Tick!]
Really.
It does.
And I appreciate being around such dedicated and talented people.
Having a colleague in my team IM me with a solution, investigated in their own time, and IM’ed just before midnight, of how to serve proprietary “house-fonts” using a cross-browser CSS, you know you are working with some of the best. [And insomniacs...]
Perhaps I should stop browsing the intarwubs and do something equally productive in my spare time. Something to consider.
I manage all my negativity by externalising it.
Not an attractive trait, but an effective coping mechanism.
But today I was caught off-guard being positive about a situation and enthusiastic about the outcome.
I must learn this is not to be feared, but embraced.
[Kool aid-time!]
That is about it for tonight’s instalment of “Graney goes on about work in a non-specific manner”
