'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Work's Secret Santa happened today. I got gifted with this, which raised a few eyebrows...



Colleague: "That looks delightfully dangerous"

Boss: "Do we need to do a health-and-safety risk assessment?"


Overall it looks to have been a success - everyone seemed generally pleased/amused with their presents, so perhaps next year it may become officially sanctioned (it ended up being a sort of unofficial don't-ask-don't-tell thing due to Reasons - except one of the directors did take part as well, so does that make it officially unofficial?).

You can do all sorts of wonderful things with modern office phones. Like, to pick a totally-not-random example, set someone's ring tone to this hilarity...

One colleague did that to another as a very long-delayed prank - the recipient's reaction to their phone blaring that out was interesting...

Despite various postage fails (including Royal Mail choosing to deliver a letter with no postage whatsoever!), the back-and-forth of Important Documents is now complete and everything is now signed. It's not quite ended yet - there's still one more payment, and one more Important Document, both of which will happen in a few weeks (because Reasons). But in the meantime it's onwards and upwards!

So in relation to the ongoing saga I've been making various decisions. Some have obvious yes answers (get in touch with $WORK-1? Of course, they're practically right next door), some have obvious no answers (apply to $OUTFIT? No, terrible commute and I've got better options to try first), and some just appear out of nowhere and make one go "um.....".

This particular one is a message that dropped into my Linkedin inbox, from a fairly well-known company in the software development community, saying that some particular aspects of my profile had sparked their interest and they had some roles that might be of interest. I've had a look at their openings and they do indeed fit, and ordinarily it'd be a fairly obvious decision to follow it up.

Except... they're based in Australia.

On the one hand it's a great opportunity. But on the other hand... do I really want to relocate to Australia? Probably not, for many reasons... but then again, it could work out...

[Poll #2062879]

The Process has entered a new phase, in which Important Decisions have occurred, Important Letters despatched, and timescales are now fully known. And the timings in my case are such that certain other options are now moot, although it's not over yet and there are still options available.

Curiously enough for one particular part of the Process I am required to seek legal advice (well... technically I could choose not to do so, but certain Important Documents are invalid without doing so and work is paying for it). So today's new thing was formally contacting a solicitor - never had to do that before!

In today's hilarity, it appears that all estimates for upcoming timescales of Important Decisions and Important Letters have just gone out of the window. There are certain Obligations that can't easily be disregarded, and one particular Obligation appears to be being extended. Certainly it will last longer than the Process was ever expected to run for.

This leaves something of a conundrum. On one hand, there are certain incentives that only occur if the Process is followed to the very end. But on the other hand, there are options that may come to fruition earlier than the Process... and the incentives from the Process are not particularly incentivising. Decisions, decisions.

In other news, we had a visit from a consultant who can provide services relating to the Process. It was actually rather informative, and the services look to be very useful. Unfortunately the services don't become available until the Process has reached a certain point, which is now looking further off than expected... but nonetheless I shall keep them in mind.

Haha. Right, well, epic fail has occurred on many levels with the continuing saga - certain figures used in calculations were wrong, certain durations used were wrong (no, 4 weeks is not equivalent to 1 month), and an interesting tidbit of news has called various justifications into question as well.

The wording of a certain Important Letter is also rather curious - taken one way it could mean a large lump sum payment in additional to everything that's normally due. The way it's worded implies that some reliance can be placed on this figure, which did I mention is one of those wrong figures (wrong in my favour as it happens which makes it even more fun)?

The bringers of the letters (who are doing everything properly) have gone away with a set of rather pointed questions to ask certain parties. Legal's reaction to it all may be... interesting. There is a Process that must be followed in the ongoing saga and it appears that other parties have not followed said Process...

Today at work my boss stumbled across GCHQ's Minority Report code challenge, and so since the rest of the business seems to have no idea what we should be doing the team decided to have a crack at it.

For reference, GCHQ's puzzle is:

If Samuel transcribed what Louis wrote…
…and Louis wrote what Ludwik translated…
…and Ludwik translated what Tim said…
…then what did Tim say?

Here is Samuel’s transcription:

IN AAAAIAN INAAANAIA IA IAINA AI AA IAIIA IAA AAIAAINN AA IAAANN IAINANI
NA ANNNNMA NAANIANMN NN ANNAN NN AM MNNNN ANI MAAINNIA AM NNAMIA NNAANIN
AM MMIAAMA MMIMAAMMA MM AMAAA MA AM AAAMA AAA MAMAAAAM AM AAIMMM MMMMAMA

CLUE: The key to unlocking the puzzle is identifying Samuel, Louis and Ludwik. There are links between them!

Anyway, after about 15 minutes we had the answer (which in lowercase and without trailing punctuation should have a MD5 hash of 29fa3b97488c805267461800b3c5d1a3). Turns out that if you throw a half-dozen software engineers at a puzzle it gets solved fairly quickly!

( Warning: spoilerish notes )

The drive back from Horsham was full of having to avoid collisions. You know - brake hard to avoid the people dashing across the A24, brake to avoid someone suddenly slowing for a turning, brake hard to avoid the car that popped out to overtake at 55mph (on a 70mph dual carriageway), brake really hard to avoid the muppet who pulled out of a layby on the A27 approaching Chichester. That last one I braked hard enough to cause the hazard lights to come on (which either means the ABS cut in or I managed better than about 6ms^-2 deceleration - the Internets aren't clear on what the criteria is) which is a first for me. The MiTo can slow from 70mph to 30 scarily quickly!

Driving fun and games aside, it's been another weekend of abortive plans. Friday morning a relative was admitted to hospital - don't worry, she's stable, and more cranky about the whole thing than anything else (which is a good sign - it's when patients go quiet that you need to worry). This completely scrambled whatever half-made plans there were for the weekend, and has thrown a large spanner in the works of a planned party that was going to involve her next weekend. Latest news is that the party is (probably) (maybe) going ahead. I'm sure I'll find out that there's been an entirely new set of plans concocted by Friday. Ah well, such is life.

At work the aircon guy did indeed turn up on Friday, and tinkered with the controllers. Our theory about the temperature sensors was partially accurate - he changed it to use the sensor on the controller rather than in the aircon unit so hopefully it'll behave better. We also ended up with surprise beer in the afternoon as a reward for bashing together a demo over the past week (which not only works, but also works when you try it a second time!).

pleaseremove's just called - his media centre is broken again (suspected power supply problems). We blame brokencube - in the Brighton house he broke computers just by being in the same room as them, and some of this may have rubbed off on pleaseremove while he was there...

So today at work I ended up explaining to a colleague that XMLHttpRequest isn't just for JSON, but that it can parse XML documents and turn them into a nice object structure. He was thinking that I'd have to receive the XML as text and use some XML-to-JS library to parse it (which to be fair I may still have to do - some of the code I'm writing will run server-side where XMLHttpRequest doesn't exist).

For those who don't know their web development history, the original point of XMLHttpRequest was to let JavaScript make XML requests and handle XML responses. Using it for JSON came much later.