I’m entering a competition at University. Yes, I admit it – I go to University – and feel quite a bit out of place at that. Sometimes I think I’m the only one that’s actually interested in the subject that we’re being lectured at. I look around at the best and brightest around me in all their youthful splendour and realise that they can’t wait for the lecture to end so they can get out and do god only knows what it is they do. It kind of reminds of me twenty years ago, yep, that long when I was at College. Anyway, the competition is to write a game based applet that is educational, relative to the school of computing and that fits within a few technical issues such as small file size. I have about six weeks to submit my entry and I can’t believe that some students have submitted their entry already. I’m either getting slower these days or need time to think things through – it took me over a week to decide what sort of game to produce – during which time some students had that already considered and were well into the programming.

Programming, that’s something that gets on my goat these days. What exactly is a programmer? I had someone describe himself as an Excel Programmer the other day. What? You wrote Excel I thought? No, I can write macro’s in Excel he tells me – and that qualifies you to use the term programmer? Does that mean that anyone who can program their sky box or video is a programmer? I remember when you had to write actual code to be a programmer but now there are Flash Programmers, CSS programmers, how long before we get Photoshop programmers? I have to press a combination of keys on the coffee machine in our office to get a drink – does that make me a coffee machine programmer ? Actually, maybe it does. From my memory a ‘program’ is something that has a combination of inputs, processes and outputs and a programmer is someone who implements those processes. So, the coffee machine has buttons, for milk and sugar and coffee or tea. The machine then processes my instructions, and I myself have to consider the order in which they are processed and the output hopefully is a cup of hot coffee. Maybe I am a coffee machine programmer after all? Actually, the same could be said about my Phone on my desk, or my Calculator, at this rate my CV is going to be huge.

Rant over. We have ‘lost’ a number of emails recently. And these have been customer orders. Upon investigation it turns out that these customers have been mail ‘blacklisted’ and our mail server was dropping an emails from blacklisted senders. Try explaining that to the Sales Director, Finance Director and Managing Director – needless to say we have now loosened that particular restrictions and muggings here has to manually check them all when they come in. Thanks for that.