I particularly thought the comments our tutor made about “rosy glow” to be interesting. The question he referred to was one that three other team mates worked on – and I spluttered and wondered if I’d done the same course as them, when I read their answer. It was indeed rose-tinted. We did everything so well and worked together perfectly! I decided not to post my real thoughts, because if they really were enjoying the course this much, who am I to piss all over their cake? Or whatever the saying is. It is reassuring to know that perhaps not everyone believed the happy rosiness.

Fuckity fuckity fuck this course.

It’s designed to teach you about distributed teamwork – that is, teamwork between members at disparate locations. I’ve worked in IT for the last 6 or 7 years, by its nature distributed (remote support, for example, is hardly face to face!), and I’ve yet to encounter such a demoralising and stressful situation. We’re told to sort ourselves out into team roles, establish team rules, distribute work, etc. Unfortunately no one really seems to give a flying fuck about doing this and I feel like I’m left with:

1. Taking the same laid back stance as everyone else and hoping someone else will get off their butt and try to get work done.
2. Doing what I’m currently doing, which is staying fake-positive in the forums, wiki, and emails, gently trying to remind people of deadlines, asking for input from others that’s never responded to, and all the while worrying that I’m making too much noise and everyone’s just annoyed and ignoring me
3. Doing everything I possibly can myself and ignoring the lack of / very slow contributions. But there’s no “I” in teamwork, and all that bullshit.

Another worry I have is related to a section of the course literature:

Since the module aims to test the process of team working, being able to demonstrate active participation in the team is very important. The marking of this TMA may include penalties against students who cannot demonstrate active participation in the team tasks.

I’m reasonably sure that my frustratedly loudmouth tactics can’t be ignored as “active participation”, but I’m worried about some of the quieter team members. A reminder would probably just piss them off (it would me). Sigh. This course just fills me with horrible angst every time I think about it. Reading reviews online doesn’t help, at all. Like:

• the official OU reviews
• “M253 – Soul Destroyer”
• “a bunch of w***y b******s”
• this entire blog – but my favourite bit is where the author lists all of their favourite things in lieu of M253, including necrotic bowel syndrome.

So far, the only upside is that it’s only pass/fail so my desire for the highest scores possible doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t finish with an exam.

The fee was more than most markets on that street are, and when I discussed it with Phil from Exposed magazine, who was organising the market stalls for the event, he stated that due to the high footfall (150,000+ people) it was reasonable to charge a higher fee. Fair enough…

Comes the day, I find the car park where the even is at about 8am, set up my stall beside a lovely friendly lady selling mostly handmade bags, as well as some other fabric/textiley things. And I wait. And wait. And wait. As do all of the other stallholders in the carpark. We can hear the music, we can see the people walking down the street, just over there…. but they’re all walking down Eldon Street and not bothering with Eldon Street carpark.

3pm, once we’d been there for about 7 hours, some Tramlines staff come along, and say we’ve been authorised to move the market on to the street (it was blocked off, so cars couldn’t use it) but only until 9pm, rather than 11pm as originally promised. It took nearly an hour to move and set everything back up again – the stalls had to be dismantled, merchandise packed away, then I had to rope some staff into moving the stall, since I was on my own and couldn’t carry a 3×1 meter steel and wooden stall on my own! Then there’s trying to set everything back up in the horrid wind…. argh.

The stallholder beside me didn’t bother to even move her stall, she just went home.

Once I’d gotten set up on the street, sales started to pour in! well, not quite pouring, but I’m pretty confident that I wouldn’t have made a yucky smelly loss, if only I’d not been mis-sold the footfall and lost the larger portion of the first day. I’ve tried to add Dave Healy, the Tramlines Director as a contact on LinkedIn in hopes I’ll be able to discuss the messup. I’ll give him a day or two and then try other avenues if need be.

On the positive note: I bought up lots of beads before the festival, specifically to make some of these necklaces, in leads of different colours. On the second day I was making them as fast as I could between customers, which admittedly wasn’t terribly fast – but I ran out of beads and nearly sold out of the necklaces. Niiiiiice. Bulk order of those beads coming up, kthx!

Went to A&E due to unpleasant heart palpitations on friday night (thankfully we live prettymuch around the corner from it the hospital). Was diagnosed with PVCs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premature_ventricular_contraction. They’re benign for most part, but I’ve still been told to see a GP for further investigation.

I’ve been experiencing them every day since, and it seems pretty likely to me that the trigger is Darren’s upcoming redundancy (16th July 2011). It seems pretty damn obvious to me that it’s mostly due to pure selfishness in a way that really, really ticks me off. Yesterday I remarked how much I’d have like to stop at a pub and have tea outside in the warm sun, but was sad we couldn’t afford it. Shortly thereafter I got several hours of frequent palpitations.

It’d make more sense if we weren’t pretty freaking confident we’ll be able to afford it ok if we don’t splurge. My pay is good and likely to continue to get better.

So, dear self: Please stop it.

Going to doc shortly as advised by A&E. Funny how having to miss work increases my stress levels.

PS, follow me as @mattressonline to entertain me during the daytime :D

Also, aren’t the miniatures at Beardy Gamer so wonderfully photographed and cropped?

I suppose I should ;) but usually I use Chrome. It syncs, and I don’t have to reboot it when I install an extension, and it’s prettier. I already have ff 3.6 and ff4 at work of course (although I’m chagrined that IE9 can’t be run on XP. This is a VERY big lack in my eyes. Sigh)

I love my work at the moment, really truly. I’ve been doing Google Analytics work today, and working on automating image resizing for the website product photos. I’m getting paid for this stuff, internet stuff! I hope the shine doesn’t wear off any time soon. I know there is a long line of satellite websites in my future, and some of that will be samey, but some will be new creative bursts every time, suiting the design of the site to the specific needs of the products it’ll be presenting. Having tinkered a lot with my wordpress themes over the years, and helping D tweak his mediawikis and wordpresses and joomlas and whatnot has made me feel pretty darn comfy with modifying presentation whilst keeping content presentable. I have a huge hankering for fixing all the niggles in this site and maybe making one I really love. Is that really possible? Probably if I polish it more than I usually bother with lol.

Talking about redesign, I’m seriously considering to changing my jewellery business name to catwithnoname jewellery, and possibly migrating the blog elsewhere (I have a domain I’m not using that could work or I might get a new one). There’re too many “X’s handmade jewellery”s out there!! Decisions, decisions!

I’ve been working as the front end web designer for Mattress Online.co.uk since late Jan 2011. This is 100% full of WIN compared to CC. There’s a lot of admin – which I think nowdays you have to expect with almost any job – and also crazy fun like getting to take photos and edit photos but get PAID for it.

I have two main parallel job requirements I guess – creating and maintaining products online, and creating satellite websites. The product side involves photography of products, editing manufacturer product pics, LOADS of XML work (pretty easy XML editing, no XSL or XPATH or anything interesting like that. Just be well formed, dude) and keeping prices / stocklists up to date. The satellite site thing is much more in depth and interesting, as I get to poke loads of html and css and js with a stick and make something presentably professional, I hope. There is a good quality backend db / cms sort of thingy, made by the good quality backend dev – so I am really very front end. I noticed on Thursday it used Scriptaculous / Prototype to do some frontend pretties, which is half a bummer because I am fond of jQuery and half a good thing because at least it seems pretty similar to jQuery.

I don’t even have a telephone on my desk. Callcentre is gone nao, kthxbai. So:

:D

Alterations:

• Being vegetarian, I used quorn fillets instead of a segmented chicken.
• I omitted:
  • The cinnamon, which I strongly dislike
  • The poppy seeds (because there weren’t any at Tesco yesterday and I didn’t have time to search further afield)
  • the peanuts, because my mother in law thinks she gets unwell from some nuts. She’s fine with pine nuts and coconut for sure (mostly because I’ve fed her them by accident in curries and pestos) and it’s not Anaphylactic Shock that she goes into, just am upset tummy…. so who knows.
• Chilli substitution. It called for six kashmiri chillies. I used three chillies from a pack at Tesco marked as strength 2 out of 5. The chillies got whirrrrrrrred into a paste, but the paste made me cough when I was near it. Errrrr….. hot.

Impressions: Overall, pleasantly flavoursome. It had three onions but WASN’T unpleasantly onion-ey – possibly because the onions were overwhelmed by all the other seeds I toasted and ground, the fresh coconut, and the fresh coriander. (OM NOM NOM!!) The lime garnish was lovely too – but I’m obsessed with limes so I might not be the best judge. The heat was a big big problem, though. I’ve cooked enough BBC curry recipes to know that generally they like to kill foolish individuals who obey the chilli count, and I’d adjusted by using three chillies. Or so I thought. MIL said it was the hottest curry she’s ever been willing to eat. D said it was nearly like a Vindaloo. I had a drink of milk and some yoghurt on the side, and thought it no hotter than many curries I’ve had at a curry house.

I wish I’d remembered to take a photo….