Here I am in Auckland library, waiting for Mrs Willsy to finish teaching, and then we can go home, back to the lake. On the way, we have to stop off at my sister in laws to fix her computer. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but I hope it won’t take long. I’m over the cold now, but I can’t seem to shake the beat up feeling you get after one though. We’re going away for a few days this weekend, so I think that should fix it.
I was just thinking back to the time I got called to the HM’s study to explain a blog I had started before – it had been pointed out to him by another member of the staff, and at that time I had a watch set on my website to record who visited it, so I have a fair idea who it was, and I can’t say I’m at all surprised. (have a look at my previous blogs, and you might be able to see who I’m talking about) it’s hard not to be a little paranoid when things like the evaporating job happen, you do a lot of looking over your shoulder. Mind you with the way the boarding house was run after that, with all the petty little rules, and the kids moaning at me nearly every day about how they didn’t like the way it was run, I didn’t have much to worry about. The fact that this was the kid’s home was lost somewhere in the bureaucracy that was the boarding house in those days.
Now I believe they have someone who left his last position under a cloud (daren't mention the 'B' word). That place just goes from bad to worse.
Here I am back again, I've just had a cold, and didn't really feel like doing much at all. summer colds are the worst aren't they? Back to my rant: I haven’t been to see if the HM has done another blog yet, but I’m willing to bet money that he hasn’t. I must tell you about the saga of the management software though.
The outgoing HM (remember, the big Jock?) had asked me if it would be possible to write it, and after a lot of to and froing, which included me giving up a couple of paying contracts, the school decided to go with some software that was written by two teachers from another school (talk about the old boys network). This has got add ons (that you have to pay extra for), like on-line reports, a bundled in web page, a single linked in database and quite a lot more. These are things that a professional developer (like me) would have done as a matter of course. Not to mention that mine was about half the price.
To top it all off, I find out it’s been written in one of those pseudo languages that make it very hard to do anything else with, like output useable data and have user defined views of the data, without going through a very expensive re-write by the developers. On top of all that, if the Big OS in the Sky (you know the one) decides that the pseudo language is taking too much away from their own languages, then nasty things will happen to it. Remember Netscape? Oh, and BTW, I hope they don’t even think of upgrading to a 64 bit OS. Then they’ll learn all about the phrase, ‘paying through the eyes and nose’ means. See you next week.
