Another month almost done, and so many things still to do! Looking back, work wasn’t absolutely crazy, but there’ve been so many different projects floating around that it has really felt like an intense month. On top of work, in my free time I’ve been working on my own projects as usual, slowly getting there - but still don’t really know if it’s worth the effort.

I’ve had to start learning about forex trading recently, in order to do some work for my employer. Finance has never interested me, especially with all those stupid terms, bullish market etc., but this is actually pretty entertaining. Forex trading is a lot of looking at your daily/weekly/(time period) graphs and watching trends whilst developing strategies; this all seems very close to the data classification and regression work I did in the fuzzy logic and computational intelligence course at university. Anyway, apparently the market is very volatile at the moment, so we’re trying to develop and back-test a stable strategy that copes with bad patches.

Been playing a lot of guitar again lately, I’m hoping that it’ll stick this time and I’ll actually progress. I’ve already noticed a lot of changes in my playing - I started to pay attention to what my hands were doing, and have been actively trying to improve fingering/picking as I notice the bad habits. And yeh, it is already paying off, it seems.

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of things that have been irritating me lately, but unfortunately something big came up that made me forget all of them. Well that and the passage of time generally lets me calm down a bit and start ignoring whatever it was that was annoying me.

I quit from a certain company in December, and have since been helping out with a couple hours of work every week, with emergency changes and such. On Tuesday, I was informed that a certain bug “was back” and that I basically should have fixed it properly first time. Ok, let’s do the time warp… 2 or 3 weeks earlier I was sitting in the office holding a piece of paper with the bug written on it; now when I say written I really mean “random words pertaining to feature written haphazardly down in pen”. Asking for clarification from the 3 other people who knew about it (project leader, client who saw the bug, and team manager), not a single one of them can reproduce it in front of me, nor can any remember how it occurred the first place. Now, ever since I got defeated by Lord Doomevil in 2005, I have lost my ESP (that is, telepathic) powers and hence cannot solve problems which I have never seen and have supposedly vanished. Notwithstanding any of this, I am currently very busy and have to be quite careful with my time, so I requested that my regular contract hourly rate be paid… it isn’t even outrageous, it’s quite reasonable; it just happened to be a lot more than I was currently receiving. Cue the “you have to understand about commitment” conversation - sure, commitment… commitment to a project I left in December, commitment to being made to feel that I “owe” the company my time, commitment to sarcastic comments about how precious my time is. Naturally I sent off a very polite, formal letter indicating my inability to continue working on the project - polite and formal, because that’s how you do business, anything casual looks like you don’t really mean it.

The email I received back was nothing short of childish; we’re talking threats about crossing people in the same industry, about the trail of destruction I left (for the record, it’s pretty hard to leave a trail of destruction in what can best be described as code I could’ve written when I was 15; any changes I made were instantly constructive) and how I need to travel to learn about how to conduct myself in a full-time situation. Thank you very much, perhaps I do need to learn how to bang a keyboard when frustrated, how to mouth off clients the second I hang up the phone, and most importantly, how to hit my LCD monitor when I have irreversibly destroyed code that was once working. Never mind all of that though, the job I entered into in November was in fact a 1 month (that’s a single month) contract, which was then upgraded to a 1 week notice/6 month contract because everyone understood that I wasn’t a permanent employee, and might be traveling overseas relatively soon. I really fail to see the bit where I signed up to be responsible for any code I wrote forevermore.

All of this smack talk was left out’ve my emails, don’t worry - I honestly am not bothered by the whole situation, they have some very polite emails from me voicing my displeasure, and that is how I feel. The complete disregard for a friendly relationship, the laying of blame, the whole thing makes it abundantly clear that the company is no longer worth any of my time. A simple polite word would’ve laid this entire thing to rest, the money doesn’t bother me (it’s only money) - I could have happily fixed the bug in 15 minutes and still be on good terms with them, but it seems it was not meant to be.

Re-reading the above, let me just clear up that the disappearing bug was actually observable on Tuesday, it was just the bit about how I should’ve fixed it the first time that irritated me. I was also blamed for the site’s sluggish performance, despite not being in charge of the server, nor being the one who chose which libraries and backend to use (apparently moo.fx was a bad choice, you know, that whole 3kb of cacheable javascript code really broke the server’s back).

Be careful who you work for, being a young contract IT worker seems to instantly paint a big “abuse me” target on your back.