Back in the shirt

Its been an odd eighteen months, redundancy, unemployment, volunteer work, crap job, unemployment and now pleasant temping.

I'm in an office, essentially pressing buttons until computer screens and printers go right, then putting bits of paper in order. I'm wearing a shirt and optionally a tie, and whilst this isn't quite the captain of industry role I thought I'd find in London, its all right.

The digital radio in the corner is telling me not to worry about a thing, cos every little thing is going to be all right.

The drive to work in the morning is averaging around 45 minutes, and to get home its around double that. To get trains and buses, it would be more expensive and an hour and a half either way.

The pay is a lot better than the sandwich factory, the hours are sociable and the work involves databases and makes London a better place.

Occasionally, I'm driven out to areas of wasteland to prod around with tape measures and count trees.

Its turned out nice again.

I'm wondering if I did something wrong eighteen months back and somehow I could have ended up in a nice job like this a lot sooner, did I just wander into the wrong agencies, fill in the forms wrong. Or was the credit crunch/recession as bad as I can blame it, things just turned out this way through no fault of my own.

Elsewhere on the internet Dirty Vicar uploaded some old photies of the last Bowie meetup from 2008, friends from a now closed down internet forum. There's still Facebook and Twitter, but the threads connecting us are frayed and stretched. Every so often I notice folk missing from my Facebook friendslist, acquaintances severed, no great loss, we were never that close, but still that old world becomes a little bit smaller.

Maybe its just me, getting further and further away from the man I used to be, Glasgow, Bowlie, popscene.

I went along to MJ Hibbett's Totally Acoustic thing at The Lamb on Conduit Street last night, I arrived in time to catch the last ten minutes of his latest Dinosaur Planet show. It was great, with rapid costume changes, new songs and jokes, it was like a Lew Stringer comic strip made flesh. Kind of sad that I missed most of it.

Then again, I've been to loads of the Totally Acoustic shows. Maybe that's not enough for gig-going and social, its a Red Queen kind of thing, you gotta run as fast as you can just to keep up. And I've been slacking.

Its been months, maybe years, since I went to HDIF, and I've never been to Crimes Against Pop, or dozens of the newer promotions that people I used to know have been putting on.

Must try harder.

Now the unemployment issue has been resolved, I can get out more.

New Year's Resolutions status update

So, after a week, how have I been getting on with my New Year's resolutions:-

• Play a gig in London
  Haven't even touched my guitar this year, but I did promise my girlfriend I'd write a song about her.
  
• Find a job
  Updated my CV once and had a look at reed.co.uk
  
• Build my own audio pre amp
  Had a look on Maplin and RS com for that preamp kit they used to sell.

• 100+ pageviews a day here
  Did it for a few days, but it's kind of tailed off now. Having said that, average views has gone up from 70-ish last month to 85 this year.
  
• Reduce my debts by more than 50%
  Jesus wept, the other day my gas got connected again, and I ended up spending £8 on one day's worth of heating. £8, that's like two hours work for me. So I'm going to have to wear my warm clothes in the house more and turn the heating off.
  
• Mercilessly crush my enemies
  I did a bit of a project plan for this, but have failed to identify any realistic external enemies.
  
• Run 10K in less that 25 minutes
  Its a bit cold out, but I did see my running shoes in my wardrobe the other day.
  

New years resolutions

For 2010 I hereby resolve to:-

• Play a gig in London in front of people who've paid to come in
• Find a new job with better hours that's a bit more career-orientated rather than just rent-paying
• Build my own audio pre amp
• Draw more traffic to this blog (+100 pageviews a day)
• Reduce my debts by more than 50% (£3,500)
• Mercilessly crush my enemies
• Run 10K in less that 25 minutes

They're not particularly ambitious resolutions, and a little project planning will see them through. I'll to keep you informed with monthly updates.

Parential Leave Rights

Last week the London Blogger's Meetup was sponsored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, they wanted to open up new ways to engage with people, be it blogs or twitter or forums or whatever.

My take on it was if they want to listen to what I have to say to them, my message would be a very clear "Please cease to exist, please stop using tax-payer's money".

Days later I read in t'Guardian that many of their directors were resigning cos they didn't like the direction the organisation was going. Cool, maybe somehow they had heard my message.

Alas, the commission is still in operation and I read more of their doings in the Guardian this morning.

Concluding that it was time that "policy-making enabled men to play an equal part in parenting", the EHRC proposes that the first 26 weeks of a baby's life would remain dedicated maternity leave for mothers, but with higher rates of pay, so that they would receive 90% of pay for the entirety of their maternity leave. Fathers would still get two weeks of paternity leave at the birth of their child, but this would also go up to 90% of their pay.

Beyond the first six months of maternity leave, the commission proposes three blocks of "parental leave", which could be taken any time before the child's fifth birthday, each of about four months, one block dedicated to mothers, one to fathers and one either could take.

The first eight weeks of each of these blocks of leave would be paid at 90%.

Danger!!

We already have Government Advisor Sir Alan Sugar saying that

... he would be less likely to hire a woman of child-bearing age. Explaining that the law was "counterproductive", he said: "If someone comes into an interview and you think to yourself 'there is a possibility that this woman might have a child and therefore take time off' it is a bit of a psychological negative thought."

So it follows that if the parential leave rules extended equally to men, then men of child-rearing age would similarly be at a disadvantage.

Raedwald has it

One of the other consequences will be that employers will tend to employ men and women beyond their childbearing years, or those who can be classed as confirmed bachelors or spinsters. Half a percent of GDP may be peanuts in this age of fiscal profligacy, but the costs of parental leave to a small enterprise can often be crippling. The public sector will take the proposals up willingly, but with the longer term consequence that single men will earn more and occupy higher positions than married men.

In other words, the changes are likely to improve overall the employment conditions of every group other than young would-be parents.

If I ran a company, a small manufacturing organisation perhaps, where you could easily track that one person working one day produces for the company just enough wealth to pay to employ themself and cover overheads, following the direction of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, that one person working is going to have to generate enough wealth for the company to pay for more staff who aren't working.

Hmm, is this going to drive down wages?

Say a worker for a company generates wealth for the company equivalent to twice his wage, so he gets paid, the boss/admin function gets paid and the overheads and material costs and tax and all that, and the woman currently on maternity leave.

If the company now has to pay for a bloke on maternity leave too, a bloke who previously was a good worker, but is now not generating wealth for the company but still getting paid, then the remaining working chaps are going to have to cover for him and generate wealth for the company equivalent to two and a half or three times their wage, just so the company stays in business.

We can't afford to employ more people, so there's only two ways it can go, the workers who are still working have to increase their productivity by a huge chunk and keep the same wage, or get a wage cut and maintain the same productivity.

Neither of these options are particularly easy to implement, aye we're always striving to improve productivity using engineering skill and technological innovation, that's standard practice, so the only thing we can do different is cutting wages or not increasing them for a few years and keeping them low.

Sorry reader, I'm not in a very productive industry, my guys only generate a few times their own wages in wealth. We can't put up prices or we go out of business, we can't afford to employ more people cos they're going to get pregnant anyway.

Equalities and Human Rights Commission, tell me how I am supposed to afford to pay staff 90% pay when they are not generating any wealth for the company?

Daily vacancies update 26-FEB-2009

Carrying on from yesterday's post about job vacancies in the UK based on how many jobs Reed have, here's today's graph, still going downwards.

Its a fall of 1.19% from yesterday and 4.49% from seven days ago.

Extrapolating up for all vacancies in the UK, there's about 444,495 vacancies now.

Good luck.

Job Vacancies

I am unemployed. I was made redundant about three months ago, for the first month or so I was applying for as many jobs as possible, on loads of websites, and every week rifling through the database at the job centre, engineering jobs, media jobs, marketing, temp, admin, just anything really, but nothing came of it.

I had dozens of GCSEs, a few A-Levels, a degree, a decade of experience in the electronics manufacturing industry, in depth knowledge of London and Glasgow indie music scenes, and about 25 years worth of creating stuff on computers. None of these things seem to be helping me find work.

A few weeks ago, in Prime Minister's questions there were around 500,000 job vacancies in the UK, down from 600,000 he was quoting a few weeks earlier. I dunno where he gets his figures from, are they accurate, how much rounding is there, how up to date?

That was a fortnight ago.

I've been tracking the number of vacancies each day on Reed.co.uk, which I guess could cover a quarter of all vacancies in the UK.
Their total vacancies have fallen by about a 5% in the past ten days. In fact, it looks like the loss of jobs available is accelerating. Its getting harder and harder to find work, its getting a whole lot worse.

With a bit of extrapolation, from uncle Gordon's figure of 500,000 vacancies a few week's back, now we're on 450,000.

21st Century Rave

Reading this on The Register about how a Facebook flashmob replay of the T-Mobile Ad got an order of magnitude more people.

Original T-Mobile ad


February re-make


I'm wondering whether this is the 21st centuries version of the M25 raves of last century. And although its all about the technology rather than the drugs, I guess the vibe and the kinship is the same. But what's going to emerge as the soundtrack?

Are the music press onto this? Is there even a music press anymore? Can it be a band or a group who make the music, or some kind of mysterious soundsystem?

If I were designing or engineering the sound, it would start with crowd noise and train announcements, but indistinct, no actual words, or twoo distorted to hear words, and there'd be some kind of shibboleth or countdown before conventional 'music' kicks in. Maybe the music would just start off bass-heavy, rhythmic trains before convoluting into something more danceable.

Your polis and security wouldn't be aware of what was happening until the dance music kicks in, but up until that point the rest of the crowd would all be picking up these triggers, these audio cues.

SQL queries

Oh woe is me, I know more about SQL than anyone else in the building, and I'm stuck. It can't be this difficult can it?

Can it possibly be the case that there is a minimum IQ below which SQL is witchcraft, and that this IQ level is something like the 99th percentile? That less than 1% of the world's population are smart enough to comprehend SQL?

There's my table:-

It says that on this date, for this part number, a quantity of this many were 'O' (ordered) or 'I' (received at goods in).

What I want is a wee query which tells me how many of each part number are still on order.

I can do this:-

Which neatly tells me how many of each part I've ever ordered and how many of each part I've ever received at goods in. I just can't figure out how to subtract one quantity from the other.

I'm stuck.

This isn't a puzzle like a Rubiks Cube where there is definitely a solution, this is a mystery where is possible that there is no way I can ever know the answer, no way I could ever have gotten to this stage in my life with the knowledge of how to find the answer, no way to save the company, and destined to have ever shorter and shallower relationships with women until the day I pass away.

Having sufficient SQL knowledge isn't in the usual Manufacturing Engineer's skillset, if I'd spent sufficient time learning SQL to have the answer, I wouldn't be a manufacturing engineer, I wouldn't have this job and so this problem would never have come about, etc.

Any help with these problems greatly appreciated, will pay for dinner.

*UPDATED*

I'm getting there slowly, in small bite-sized chunks

This is my query for listing parts ordered:-

SELECT "PARTNO", SUM( "QUANTITY" ) AS "QUANTITY ORDERED"
FROM "INVENTORYOP"
WHERE ( ( "FLAG" = 'O' ) )
GROUP BY "PARTNO"

And this is my query for listing parts received:-

SELECT "PARTNO", SUM( "QUANTITY" ) AS "QUANTITY RECIEVED"
FROM "INVENTORYOP"
WHERE ( ( "FLAG" = 'I' ) )
GROUP BY "PARTNO"

Now I just need to somehow put them into subqueries and subtract one from the other, aye?

Database admin

I want to hire me a database consultant, I can afford about £20 a week, and whether thats for two hours or one hour, I don't mind, just as long as this database monkey knows their stuff and can either tell me what to do, or do it themselves.

I have wee questions all the time, and I think it'll be money well spent.

This database monkey could be anywhere in the world, doesn't have to be local.

Example #1:-

I have one table, PART NUMBERS, with just two columns, part number and part description
Then I have another table, PART SUPPLIERS, with loads of columns, part number, supplier, supplier description, supplier part number, price, MOQ, manufacturer, manufacturer's part number, and many more.

Should I start another table for PART PROPERTIES, like whether they are surface mount, stored in tubes or reels, capacitance, tolerance, resistance, inductance, etc, which will all be fixed to the manufacturers part number (if I have it) or just our part number?
Or do I just add extra columns in the PART SUPPLIERS?
If I start adding extra columns, this could go on for miles.

Example #2:-
I have a table called BOMs which lists how many of each part is used in each subassembly. Some of the sub assemblies are mechanical, some are packaging and some are PCBs

I have another table called COMPONENT LOCATIONS, which lists where on each PCB each component is used.

I can run a neat SQL queries which counts how many of each component is used on each PCB, and then I manually update the BOMs table from this.

It was be really cool if it automatically updated the BOMs table, every time I changed a component on the locations table. I have no idea ho to do this.

And to complicate matters, it would be neat if each change was time-stamped.

Manufacturing engineering problem of the day #1

Take a look at the three JEC JS-608R rocker switches below.

Rocker switch (a)

Rocker switch (b)

Rocker switch (c)

Whilst they all say on them that they are JEC JS-608R rocker switches, only one of them is actually a JS-608R rocker switch, the others are something else. I dunno if they are fakes, or just from a different batch, but they're crap, we can't use them. Using them would be a bad thing.

Here's the spec drawing for it


Now, can you see which of the photies is the correct one?

Yeah, me too. Now I've got to go through our stock of them and segregate the crap ones. And then figure out how we got the crap ones.

Soul

Have signed up to SoulMates on the Guardian websitey thing. Kind of like bowing to pressure, I have my doubts.

My profile is here

My cow orker suggested that getting to the top of the most popular profiles list is something to aim for, so feel free to have a look, call your collegues over and get them to have a look too.

I had to resist the urge to just write about killing people, killing lots of people, in the 'why shoul people get to know me' and 'perfect match' descriptions. I fear being arrested as a murder suspect.

The one thats shameless, shameless

Went to London Bloggers Meetup.

Arrived on my own without usual meetup companion Aref-Adib and as a result sat on my own in a corner for the first half hour or so, scribbling notes about the sponsored goodie bag.

Berocca make vitamin drinks and engery tablets, the goodie bag contain a fine branded glass (about 400ml), one branded biro, a tube of the Berocca effervescent tablets (orange flavour) and a pad of branded post-it notes.

I'm sceptical about the effervescent tablets, one side of the pack says "Taking more than your recommended daily intake may be harmful", the other side of the pack says each tablet contains 860% of your recommended daily allowance of some of the vitamins.

It is a fine branded glass they provide and the branded post-it notes make my mind boggle at the possibilities. But the warnings and information on the packaging are a bit ambiguous. Its like if a pack of razor blades says how sharp the blades are and then warns you against cutting yourself.

Anyhoo, Jaz and Lisa both recommended taking the stuff, so I have done. The fizzy bubbly goodness has burnt my lip, but I think the goodness will do as a surrogate breakfast for me tomorrow morning. It is orange flavour so I think it counts as one of my five daily portions (along with two cups of coffee, bacon roll and microwave meal).

I am well healthy me.

Met the following bloggers:-

Andy from the marketing blagger
Chris from qwghlm
Andy from Distributed Research
Jure from Zemanta
Lisa from u-handbag
Krista from Londelicious
Julius he's an event manager
Jaz from ShinyRed
Tom the Flashboy from The Metro

Also I think I glanced at:-

Carmen from Green is Not a Colour
Annie from the Going Underground
Peter Marshall from My London Diary

Mouth

Still in agony, woke up twice last night in pain after turning on the wrong side.

Work is okay, but i did get overcome with emotion and had to go and cry in a quiet corner after we managed to get some stuff done on time.

Over on Facebook, Rosie reckons if I change my profile picture I won't remain single for much longer, suggesting first I use a photo of me and my niece, and then an arty black and white one of me playing guitar.

Four hours later and it hasn't had any effect on my singularity, but I do become sad reading facebook.

Over on the nuddy chicks site, after the phenomenal success of my first venture, I'm looking around at work to find a post-it pad to do a quick "YOUR ADVERT HERE $2/week" image of the side column. If you know of anyone who'd want to advertise their wares to around 14,000 people all over the world every week, email me.

Went out last night to meet Rowan and Mark and go on the London Eye, the damned thing closes at 8pm at this time of year so we went to a pub, watched the football and I drank that Fruli's strawberry beer. Its like CAMRA alcopop.

I'm really getting into this database business. At the moment I have ten different tables, and about four different part number lists, which I'll have to pull together later. I've mastered forms and sub-forms with wee nodules of SQL code, but I fear that generating reports could be a bit tricky.

I'm starting to suspect that using Open Office's database, whilst good for starting out into this new world, isn't going to cale well and I ought to be using MySQL. So can I export everything from OpenOffice to MySQL, and I mean everything, tables, forms and all, or will I only be able to export the tables and'll have to recreate all the relationships and forms?

At what point can I quit the database admin and management business and get back to manufacturing engineering?

Ooh, gigs tonight, with people and faces.