I work here in a converted barn type building in Chester Springs. It's nice, but we're moving soon alas into the thronging King of Prussia. I thought that before we departed I would take some pictures of the nice place where I've been working for over a year now. It's not often that I work at a place longer than a year, so I guess I must like it! :)

Ok - I'm not sure what the heck is actually going on here, but FFS, that dude is one brave dude.

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I've never had a particularly awful job. The worst job I had though was working for Royal Mail in the UK. I answered the phone and gave out postcodes for addresses. This doesn't sound too terrible, and it wasn't, but there were mitigating factors. The computers we had to do the lookups on were horribly old and slow, and we were being judged on how many calls we could answer in a day, even though that was as much a factor of how fast our computer was as of how fast we were. At the start of the period of working there, we were not told that we were being monitored for speed. Then half way through we were told, at which point they told us they would publish the figures, but then they didn't, so I never found out how I was doing. Add to that that the workstations would have failed health and safety if anyone would have bothered to check such things. The screens were too high and didn't adjust, the chairs were awful, and it made for an uncomfortable day. Add to that the fact that the office didn't have any air conditioning either and this was in high summer, and it got pretty hot. We were required to wear a suit and tie too.

That might not have been the worst day. The worst day was when I was a removal man. We were moving a large three bedroom house from one side of Cambridge to the other. We started at 08:00 and were expected to be completely moved by the end of the day. We had three guys and one panel truck the size of a medium sized U-Haul. The host family had not packed at all. It was horrible. We didn't get done till 3:00am, and the guy had the nerve to tip us just 5GBP each. I woke up the next day stiff as a board, and didn't get up till 12:00.

Then there was the employer who deducted my child support from my pay check, but didn't send it in to the state, and I got hauled up in court for it.

I wandered around the park again for a bit today. Managed to get a distance picture of a what looks to me like a wren:



Not much other than that - got a couple of flying crows, but I keep forgetting to do basic things like setting up my exposure compensation when taking a picture of such a dark bird, so it's basically a blurry silhouette against the sky, so it looks pretty crappy.

Got some goodish ones today of flying geese:

photos

If you can even figure out how this works, Kudos. I'm pretty proud I figured out how to make this. There might be better ways, but this way works, and gets me what I need:

select * from task x, (select p.project_id, u.workflow_id, (select min(due_date) as min_due_date from task t where t.workflow_id=u.workflow_id) as min_due_date from task u, workflow p where u.workflow_id=p.workflow_id group by u.workflow_id, p.project_id) y where x.due_date=y.min_due_date and x.workflow_id=y.workflow_id;

Muhahahaha.

I thought that, as an evolved species, we had grown out of the adolescent internet years and solidly put the days of the flaming logo behind us. Today I was disturbed to find this:




On the AT&T website next to an iPhone.

A flaming logo.

Steve Jobs is probably having a fit.

From the PHP homepage:

PHP 5.2.7 has been removed from distribution
[07-Dec-2008]

Due to a security bug found in the PHP 5.2.7 release, it has been removed from distribution. The bug affects configurations where magic_quotes_gpc is enabled, because it remains off even when set to on. In the meantime, use PHP 5.2.6 until PHP 5.2.8 is later released.

This means that even if you used magic_quotes_gpc, which is evil anyway, but necessary for MySQL (reasons not to use MySQL and PHP), you would have been open to an injection attack, and that values that had single quotes in them like O'Reilly would have broken your site.

Can anyone say regression tests?

PHP - Not enterprise software.

I got only a solitary good picture today. The lake was quiet, so I wandered back behind the lake to the picnic area. Managed to hear a woodpecker in the tree, and got a couple of shots, of which only one really turned out worth anything.

Today I wandered off to Marsh Creek again in hopes of having more luck that Tuesday.

I got a few shots of birds that I'm thinking are maybe crows on the ice, none really turned out thogh, and I thought I was pretty much done. I started packing up, and as I had just closed the trunk, two crows flew over and landed on top of the building next to me. I was dumbfounded. I stood there looking at them for a minute and wondered if I should get my camera out, if they would hang around for long enough. I dithered about it, and the flew off and landed on the ice, at a good range. I quickly got my camera together again and as I looked up they were flying off to the right. It didn't seem as if they flew far so I hurried around the other side of the building, and found the birds wheeling and dancing over the ice a bit far away, but as I was watching, they started flying in front of the building, and I managed to catch a few shots of both a couple of gulls and a couple of crows (I'm sure someone will correct me here). They weren't the best shots ever, but they might be my best shots ever.

I don't know how to figure out how to get sharper pictures though. I'm not sure it was camera shake, as some of them were as high as 1/2000^th of a second. I think they just weren't quite in focus. Because of my lens not being the high end f2.8 lens, the camera turns off auto-focus when you slap on the 2x converter, so it was hand-held manual focus all the way. Given that, I'm not too unhappy. I've only had the lens a few days, and I'm still not used to zooming and focusing and taking pictures all in one go yet.

Pictures of birds flying about Marsh Creek