Alioth's Journal: Lo que me gustaría decir...

It's been a while since I wrote a JE...

It's been busy. We have a new contract at work, and OK - it's a money maker, but the project itself is *awful*. No specs, no formal requirements, no process - just things thrown at us and two days (or less) later it has to go live. Of course, this means there have been cock-ups. I keep trying to warn people that no requirements = eventual failure, but it's difficult to get people to listen - especially as it's the customer who's the one we have to persuade. At the moment, it is utterly chaotic and I spend all day fighting fires.

I don't mind being busy, in fact that's fine - but when it's all chaos and firefighting, it wears thin. Especially since I'm going away for a week from Wednesday, and I've not been able to document anything because (a) I've been fighting fires, and (b) it's so fluid that by the time I've written something down the requirements have changed on us again (via a phone call, the details of which I get third hand, nothing so concrete as an email).

Fortunately the cockups so far have been human issues rather than my code falling to bits. But if we had more time and better requirements perhaps we could have designed a system that prevented some of the human error. The trouble is we're kind of "on trial" to get the contract and it can all fall through at any moment now, and it's the difference between us making money and us not making money since our usual core business has basically gone down the pan (parcel volumes have simply collapsed since the Credit Crunch).

Aside from work, last week I was also busy trying to get video for the Southern 100 races. Sadly, one of the sidecar drivers (Phil Dongworth) was killed in a crash in the second practise session. He hit a wall very hard - he survived the impact and was conscious and talking when the helicopter took him to hospital, but he died on the operating table. When the last racing fatality happened at the Southern, the riders were understandably dispondent and were debating whether to race the next day; it was Phil who held the riders' meeting and told everyone, "if it were me, I'd want you to still race". This time, there was no debate - the crews went out and raced. My Dad didn't have a very good time though - the engine started to perform badly in the first race and he pulled in after two laps, and when they took the sump off the engine they found bits of metal all over the place (practically big enough to have part numbers on them). So that was the end of that. I did have my bullet cam on his bike, but I had to find someone else to carry it to get some rearward facing shots (of the passenger working). In the end, it went on Steve Coombes's bike, looking at his passenger. Unfortunately, they crashed on the last lap - they weren't hurt but the outfit was pretty dinged up - and worse than just crashing, the camera stopped recording about 1/2 a lap before they crashed, so I didn't even get any crash footage... I can really, really rate the Sony digital-8 tape recorders - not only has mine been around the very bumpy Southern 100 course for years running on a sidecar, and still functions perfectly - it's now survived being in a sidecar that hit a Manx stone wall and is still intact and working perfectly. Amazingly robust recorders. Still, next year I'm going to try to get hold of a couple of solid state recorders - this outfit had a different shaped fuel tank to my Dad's meaning the recorder was much nearer the sidecar wheel, and the jolts from the sidecar wheel (which lacks suspension) caused it to drop out several times, and was probably what caused it to stop recording.

The difficult thing is how to make the video a bit of a memorial for Phil, dealing with emotional stuff is something I'm just not good at. I do have some ideas, though. I'll probably talk to my Dad to see if he thinks they are good ones.

On to retrocomputing. I'm off to RetroEuskal in Bilbao this week... I leave on Wednesday. I'm going to demonstrate my ethernet hardware... I hope they can understand my terrible accent when I speak Spanish, and I hope I can understand them :-) Having said that in the computing world most people at least have a rudimentary knowledge of computery English so somehow we'll muddle through. Here's the terrifying link to my ZX Spectrum ethernet event...

http://www.retroaccion.org/node/96