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Richy's Random Ramblings

Another year older and Superhero Movie

June 15, 2008
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Yep, it’s official – I’m now 29 years old and just working through the first few hours of my thirtieth year of this incarnation and no, I won’t tell you which bank I bank with (hello UFies! 🙂 ).

I didn’t do too badly – got a few cards, got some money (which will come in very useful at the moment: with becoming a contractor just at the time the PHP contract market appears to have dried up means I’m pushing my overdraft to it’s limits!) and my other half treated me to see Superhero Movie (reasonably ok – but Leslie “Airplane!/Naked Gun” Nielsen had a smallish part, Brent “Data” Spiner had a smaller one, Robert “Airplane!” Hays had an even smaller one, and Craig “US Red Dwarf Lister” Bierko, Dan “Homer Simpson” Castellaneta and Pamela “Baywatch” Anderson had even smaller parts: if they all had larger parts and said more then two sentences each it might have been a bit better, but it wasn’t a too bad Superman spoof except for the OTT Stephen Hawkin bit which had parts in bad taste and the necrophillia and beasility references which us think made it warrant a higher than 12a rating) and then to a carvery meal at the Toby Carvery at the Foxhunter Roundabout in Enderby (despite her not liking carverys).

Not a too bad day overall then despite the extra aging!

Net Fun: Homer and Bush in CSS

May 5, 2008
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Román Cortés has produced two CSS ASCII images of Homer Simpson and a certain George W. Bush Jr. The snag, well for the George Bush image there’s 31.82kB of source code, but the Homer one is a bit more compact at 16kB.

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Roman first created these images by hand, but he’s now written a Windows program which converts JPEG images to CSS “images”.

Allegedly, there’s an animated Homer CSS page as well, but that server’s been Slashdotted for now…

Contracting: Introduction

April 25, 2008
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As I’m in the process of leaving full time permanent employment to become an outcast (also known as an IT Contractor), I thought I’d jot down important information/costs/stages as blog entries for anybody else thinking of taking the giant leap into the unknown in the future.

I’ll say from this point, this “series” (of unknown length), will be based on own personal experience and as I’m writing this (and as I’ll write more posts), I won’t know if these experiences lead to positive outcomes making me millions and billions of pounds (mwahaha!) or if they are brain-dumbing stupid decisions which lead to me becoming homeless. Nothing in these posts (or in this blog generally) is intended to act as legal and/or financial advice of any sort. It’s your responsibility to do your own research and take responsibility for your own actions – if in doubt, consult an accountant or solicitor who you are paying for to act for you and provide you with advice!

Work: Recruitment Companies – did you know…

April 23, 2008
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Were you aware that some of the largest IT recruitment companies such as Computer Futures, Huxley Associates, Progressive (all three of which have recently received my CV and details of my contracting abilities: and if you are interested, let me know!) and Pathway (and 8 others) are all part of the same company SThree? I’ve suspected it for a while, but only now just thought I’ll spend the few minutes looking into it.

It appears Sthree also operate The IT Job Board.com and is the same company that found two strangers enjoying “relations” on one of their desks at Christmas!

It’s amazing what you can turn up with a quick search – and if their CV submission systems didn’t have the same placeholder text for the “contractor opt out” section, I might not have looked as much as I did.