I'm employed now!
I just had a call from the guy at the agency and he was very pleased to tell me that the RSPCA want me to go and work for them as soon as possible. Apparently, a load of people applied and went for interview, so I should be well-pleased with myself. They want me to start on Monday if I can, although there's some paperwork to fill out, so it might be delayed a day or two. It looks like I'll be working on CRM software again (cool, no need to think too much) and in a team where a suit and tie are not considered essential (even better). I'm really quite looking forward to it, although I'll miss bumming around.
This is excellent, of course, although it leaves me wondering how Psycho will get to her appointments without the car around!
In other news, Psycho had an interview with Mencap today (no, Scary Ross, not for me to become a patient...) which went very well from what I can tell. I'm terribly proud of her: a good first interview for starters, but also in a foreign country and her second language! We're hoping she gets that as it would be a great experience (working with people with Down's syndrome and so on) and a nice 'foot in the door' position for finding psychology contacts. Fingers crossed: she should hear towards the end of the week.
I think it might be a night for some fish 'n' chips, a bottle of wine and a good film. Not to mention copious congratulatory sex, of course.
I feel like today's interview was the first I've ever done: it's been over eight years since I last had to sit through all the questions and ask someone for a job. Thankfully, the two people interviewing me (for the RSPCA, which is cool) were nice and the job sounds like the helpdesk work I started with at Cisco. Exactly what I was looking for.
Their site is about forty minutes' drive away and is very pleasant, the pay is pretty good for helpdesk work and for once I'd be working for a company doing something worthwhile, rather than just making lots of money.
I should hear their decision on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. Fingers crossed.
Number 73: Do not insult the extremely intelligent, knowledgable and well-liked executive editor of the online magazine you work for by calling him a 'buffoon'. Insinuating that he is either ignorant or has a hidden agenda because he suggested changes in your article will not help much, either.
Note: I did not do this.
One more week to go. One more week in the office and I can finally relax a bit (at least for a day or two).
Of course, this morning I was met by a tidal wave of work that has been attempting to wash me out of the window all day, dragging me kicking and screaming down to the sewers. I'm a good swimmer, though, so I'm doing alright.
The worst of the requests for help today was from a user who is either too lazy or too stupid to do her own work. She's asked for a whole bunch of changes to a report that I wrote a while back to help out her team in a moment of difficulty. Said report is unsupported, non-standard and was a short term solution that I asked them not to share or to treat as a source of accurate data (since the figures are part of commissions to the sales force). They have since done both of those things. *sigh*
To add insult to injury, however, this user sent me a list of "requirements" (note that this is no longer a request, but a demand) for changes to the report so that it could be used in a particular way in a particular country.
"That's neither insulting nor injurious," you say. Of course, you're right: what is is that all of the changes she's asking for can be made manually within the reporting software. We're talking a "right-click a column and choose 'Delete'" level of difficulty here.
Why are there always users who are too damned lazy or pig-ignorant to learn the basics of the software instead of finding ways to give all their work to other people? Grrrr.
Running Spam Total: 11,363
Apparently, purely hoping the person I have to train this week would not arrive is not sufficient to actually stop him. Oh, well.
My home PC is back up and running now: I managed to install fresh, copy proper versions of the files that were screwed to a secondary location and then re-image from my Ghost backup, copy the files back over and have everything perfect again! Egad!
Running Spam Total: 10,342
Today marks the half-way point of my remaining work time 'in the office': my boss is very cool, as already noted, and will allow me to finish my notice period at a distance. To mark the occasion, my home PC has decided to blow a cog and refuse to do anything useful - well, except play games!
It looks like I'll have to reinstall everything (again), which is annoying - even the Ghost image I have lying around is no use. The only good news is that the work laptop is as reliable as ever, so I can carry on writing and stuff. Feh.
Running Spam Total: 9932
Tomorrow's a big day at work: huge boss is coming over from the US this week, so the whole day's filled up with meetings, presentations and even a dinner in the evening. Thankfully, I'm working from home today, so I can recover a little from the first two days of the week before being wiped out!
Today's Spam Count: 163
Running Spam Total: 3269
This week is just not getting any better. After many, many hours of fighting stupid company procedures to try to install a fix for a problem, I now find myself with a telephone meeting at 8 p.m. today to get approvals. What a pointless, fruitless waste of time: it'll just be a bunch of dipshits in the States guarding their arses and making sure they follow the rules, rather than caring about the fact that the users haven't been able to work properly for the last two days due to the lack of a fix. This place is turning into a bureaucratic pile of crap.
Today is the first day of the new year - the new fiscal year at work, that is. From a philosophical point of view, one could say that it is, in fact, the first day of the new year in any sense, since the choice of 1st January as the start of a calendar year is arbitrary (and the Chinese would disagree with it). The only real measurement of a year is a natural one anyway - four complete seasons - and since we've destroyed the environment to a point where those seasons are totally screwed up, the definition of a year must be equally messy. I digress.
In this new fiscal year, I will be changing jobs. As with many companies, outsourcing is the way of the moment, so techie roles are becoming rarer. Since I've also avoided specialising in any particular area, my situation is tenuous at best. Should I explain that a little?
At heart, I'm a techie. I prefer working with machines than with humans, since the latter can be so damned annoying and stupid. However, I've worked in many different areas of the technology industry: on two different helpdesks, as a trainer, a system admin, a general techie and various others. My lack of specialisation has generally been an advantage, allowing me to cover a broad range of applications to a reasonable level of knowledge.
These days, of course, I'm older: the techie scene is generally one for young folks with quick, sharp minds. I'm not that slow, rest assured, but planning a little for the future and shuffling out of the faster areas into something requiring more experience and maturity is a good move. Well, except for the maturity bit. There's also the current trend to outsource everything technical to India or Pakistan or Mars or somewhere with cheap labour, which means that the tech job market in France is diminishing rapidly and only retaining the really serious geeks: I'm not good enough for that.
So I'm changing job to more analysis than tech work. It's going to be very odd to have my fingers on a keyboard purely to document and not to create, but I have a great manager who's very supportive and will push me at the same time. I need to hold out here so I can pay for the apartment as quickly as possible: once that's done, I can move to the Bahamas and sun my skinny butt on a beach all day.
Well, maybe not.
Life here has suddenly become very busy. Life's like that, it seems: for a few weeks, things tinkle along quite nicely and without too much stress, then suddenly everything changes and there's no time to think, let alone sleep or relax. This has happened and has been going on since I moved to the new apartment, with but a few lapses.
This week, for example, I need to fix a bunch of bugs in my reports (the horror!), pick up my new passport, organise delivery of a wardrobe to Psycho's place, sort out a cage for the rat-babies I will soon be adopting, fill the nail-holes in the walls at the old apartment so that it's perfect for the examination by the agency, get through the second part of my annual performance review, release a new set of reports for a different project, buy and hang some curtains, buy a couple of frames and hang some pictures, clear some space on the PC at home, write to Psycho's ADSL provider to claim back the payment for June (she still has no connection and it's on my account), buy a new telephone and check for what exactly the syndicate for the building I live in is trying to charge me money!
All that and breathe, too. Blimey.
I know: I shouldn't get my hopes up. I should leave them down there, wallowing in the mud next to the hippopotami¹, floundering amongst the algae and single-cell life forms. Unfortunately, I'm human (or close, at least) and was born with an optimistic streak that even many years of knowing Psycho cannot destroy. So I continue to hope, beyond hope, that this week will not be as busy as the last three.
Sitting in the office, working on reports, until after nine in the evening on Friday did not help this hope. Neither did working over dialup for several hours on Sunday morning. Nor coming in early this morning to finish things. Nor does the prospect of spending the afternoon fixing the documentation and bugs. Still, where there's life there's hope, as they say... and I'm reasonably certain I'm still alive.
The good news is that I have received notification of my ADSL modem being delivered - or at least an attempt having been made on Friday, apparently. Of course, I wasn't there, so it'll end up at my local post office where I will collect it. Hopefully², this means that I will be able to work from home on Thursday: a pleasure I have not had the opportunity to experience for the last two months. In fact, the last time I tried to do this, my boss called me into the office to work on those darned reports. That was doubly annoying because I had tagged the day for home because of deliveries: I had to cancel them all and goodness only knows when the companies will come back again.
Anyway, apart from Sunday morning being a huge steaming pile of dog vomit, the weekend went by calmly. I watched several (bad) movies³ and played hours upon hours of games: some real R&R for once.
The baby rats are growing fast now: they look like they've been shaved, as their fur is just starting to grow out a little. We can almost see what colours they will be, which is really cool. There's one in there who, if s/he retains the colours that are showing now, will be incredible!
Ooh, look... I just noticed that it's almost midday. Time for some lunch!
¹ A little Flanders and Swan reference, for the more cultured amongst you. Oh, and yes, I studied Latin.
² See what I mean? Pesky optimistic streak again...
³ This one was bearable and amusing, this one was good but very dated, this one was excellent, as expected, and this one was surprisingly good: the story wasn't appalling, the Playboy-esque scenes weren't overdone, the acting was bearable and I even quite enjoyed it!
I've been a little quiet the last couple of days because I'm overworked. The company which employs me is renowned for getting a lot out of their salaried staff (well in excess of $500,000 of revenue for every one of us, I believe), but I'd never really thought about it very much before.
This week, I had a bit of a management invasion: my direct boss - a lovely lady who leaves me to my own devices, provided the work gets done - wanted me to fill in my six-month performance review documentation (don't even think of going there, Scary Ross) and Big Big Boss™ visited.
The performance review was really quite an eye-opener. Since the last one in August, the number of things I am doing has doubled. Literally. I knew I was doing a lot, but seeing it on virtual paper was a surprise. Still, the half-year bonus should be good, in that case!
As for the Big Big Boss™, he wanted to meet each of us individually. He's a surprisingly normal person: no use of buzzwords, he listens, he gives his opinion... not at all the standard upper-management bod. Of course, he has that 'poker face' where one has no clue what he's thinking until he says it, but for me that just means I don't know if he's lying (as opposed to my normal assumptions for most managers). It was nice to have the opportunity to express that I was enjoying myself as always, but to point out that I refuse to be a manager, so stop trying to make me one!
Phew. Got that off my chest.
P.S. Almost forgot: Flowerhead's moved... and still no sign of Jackie.
Just had a bit of a moment here at work: I'm back in the office today as I promised a couple of people I would be. I don't really feel up to it, to be honest, but such is life. A promise is a promise.
So one of my bosses wanders by as I'm chugging through some very annoying work, to ask how things are and so on. I almost told him where to go... oops. Have to watch that: when I'm unwell, my annoyance meter rises very quickly.
Anyways, must check through the 500 spam messages and work through the 300-odd real ones to see what I'm supposed to be doing today. Boy, do I need a holiday.
OK, I'm obviously missing something here (no, Ross, I checked and that's not missing). I'm supposed to be writing 'use case' documents for the reporting track of this project as part of my new role. I have the business requirements document. I have the report outlines. Deadline is a week away and folks are worried the four cases won't be ready in time.
I stick the requirements and outlines together with chewing gum and string, squish them into a template which looks a little different, but basically says the same thing in a standard format... and my 'mentor' (i.e. the chap who's kind enough to show me what I'm supposed to be doing) says they're good to go. The whole process takes about 45 minutes per case.
As I say: I'm obviously missing something here. It's just too easy. Either that, or analysis really is just a pile of BS.
I am so tired that I can hardly think. I don't know how I dragged myself out of bed this morning, how much coffee I will need to keep my eyes open or how I am going to try to get through the mountain of work scheduled for today when I am having trouble typing a few words that make sense. This afternoon's meeting will be an exercise in not closing my eyes.
I want to go home and sleep. Right now.
Today was 'company medical day' for me: here in France, the law stipulates that every full-time employee must go for a medical every year, at the expense of their employer. To be honest, it's a bit of a joke: they ask a bunch of ridiculous questions, such as whether you've been ill in the last year and so on, then do some really basic checks.
"Read this" - OK, I can see.
"Breathe" - yup, lungs still working.
"Try to touch your toes" - yup, spine still there.
After these gruelling tests, they give you a little green piece of paper that says you are 'apte' (capable) for your job. Still, it makes for a nice 30-minute break from work, I suppose.
Recently, I lost contact with my Vietnamese penpal/correspondent for a few days because her email (or, apparently, most of Vietnam's email) was only working intermittently. Sitting here at a massive networking company, I was mildly surprised: it's been so long since I had network troubles beyond "Oh my! I can only download at 100Kb/s!" that I'd forgotten what it's like to not be able to do anything online.
What's that? You didn't know I have a Vietnamese correspondant? Well, I do - her name's Trung and she's fun, although a little down at the moment.
Unfortunately, this morning, I found out what it was like. It seems that the transatlantic link died and the failover went out at the same time, too, so loads of centralised stuff stopped working. Basically anything that relied on linking to Corporate was unavailable - including printers, for some strange reason. Of course, today was the day I wanted to print out my expenses, some documents, an application form, an analysis template... *sigh*
Still, the good news is that the lack of network forced me to produce the document I'd been carefully avoiding all week. There's always an up-side to these situations. The network's back now, of course, but that temporary outage was really quite unpleasant.
Had an excellent chat with my new manager yesterday about this whole new job thing. She knows me better than most folks at work, since she was also my first boss some six years or so ago!
Turns out she wants me to do analysis for and coordinate/supervise one of her projects while she's off on maternity leave, which is a relief for me. Basically, it's an administration job, rather than some kind of go-get-'em, proactive managerial thingummy.
Good grief... I hate meetings with more than one manager in them... why, why, why, why, why, why, why do these people feel a psychotic need to hijack everything and go off talking about global focus or some other nonsense instead of what the meeting is about? Grrrrrr.
Talk about a complete opposite to the last meeting I had on this same subject, with four other IT guys: twenty minutes, all questions answered, completely focussed on what the meeting was about.
And people wonder why I don't want to be a manager. Pah!
It's been one of those weeks. What with the new style of work, the massive project that comes with it, the "several" other projects I still have to work on and a manager (one of the three I currently have!) becoming a tad flaky in recent times, I need a break. Pity I just came back from a holiday, really.
Yesterday was another part of the insanity that I could have done without. The gateway machine at home (by the way, that's "gateway" as in "a machine providing a bridge to access the Internet" and not "Gateway" as in "I don't know doodlysquat about computers so I'll buy one from these nice folks who will screw me totally") has been acting up recently: the virus scanner and firewall seem unwilling to install their latest updates. Given the current climate of MSBlast and SoBig attacks that shows no sign of relenting, this is a bad thing.
Oh, a small aside: thank you all those complete and utter imbeciles who have forced the computer world to accept that one does not have to understand computers to use them. You are the drunk-drivers of the information age, and I hate you for your incompetence. The little firewall notifications every ten seconds from different IPs are visual proof that you all need to be unplugged. Now.
Thankfully, I managed to get both programs uninstalled and back on again in little time and without too much effort (and yes, I remembered to go offline to do it). Unfortunately, the firewall was kind enough to forget absolutely everything I had taught it, so I then spent the next 90 minutes trying to get my VPN connection (to work) to stay up for more than about three minutes at a time. It finally started working properly just before a really important conference call with some folks in the US, which is nice since I didn't really want an hour-long international call on my home phone bill and was able to use my USB IP SoftPhone!
Of course, days like this don't just go away, either. Over at Psycho's place in the evening, I had to do the whole lot again. Yes, she got infected by MSBlast. I never thought she'd actually go on-line, since her knowledge of computers is limited to what I have had time to teach her: obviously a horrible oversight on my part. Incidentally, that virus is a total nightmare. Disappearing icons, no connection, no folder contents visible... and her PC even tried to dial out and connect without being asked! (Unless, of course, she asked it to and didn't realise she had, which is entirely possible.)
So I spent the evening installing the same programs on her machine and doing all the updates... over a 56kbps line. Oh joy.
After yesterday's great big long blabby nonsense, today should be a touch shorter. Thanks to The Experiment and Jackie for their comments, by the way: hearing other people air their views is always helpful and sometimes spots something that I would otherwise overlook.
I thought that today, I should clarify a certain small matter: I don't ever want to be a manager. The company deciding to convert me to management would, in fact, be one of the only reasons I would seriously consider leaving and finding a new job. I mean, it's bad enough that what I do has no impact on the world in general (I just make it easier for other folks to sell stuff and make money) and doesn't change anyone's life... but to be doing that and to be in management?
Managers are, as a whole, the dregs of human society. They create no end product, no tangible results and spend their time in a million stupid meetings with (other) people who talk out of their posteriors. It's an exercise in petty empire building, in office politics and various other matters of which I would never wish to partake.
Don't get me wrong: there are, of course, some very good managers. I have been fortunate enough to work with some and, in fact, will be back under the direction of my first (and best) manager for this change in job. She even seems pleased, which surprised me. I just don't believe that one or two good managers can make up for the puerile office dictators I have to deal with on a much more regular basis - those who dislike me because of my blunt honesty and my demand that they earn my respect.
I will not kowtow to anyone who will not prove their worth.
What's worse than coming in to the office on the day you would normally work from home?
Massive traffic jams on the way in to work?
The fact that the person you came in to meet with isn't here?
The fact that the other person you came in to meet with isn't here either?
The whiny phone call from Psycho?
Or, quite simply, all of the above?
As Janice from Friends would say if she saw the mountain of emails waiting for me this morning: "Oh. My. God."
I'm used to receiving a lot of email, especially if I go away on holiday, but coming back to almost 4,000 of them is a little excessive. I'm grateful I have a decent spam-spotter, as that removed about 1,800 of them immediately (allowing me to simply scan through rather than individually open them), but it still leaves me with a couple of thousand to check through before I can even do anything. Insane.
Ah, well... I know what I'll be doing for the rest of the day!
Wooooo! I found out today that I have been included in this quarter's global "IT Awards & Recognition", for my part as a member of a virtual team on next-generation networking. Gosh, golly and gee!
Edit: Go and see Flowerhead's wonderful news! Right now! Do it, I say!
This morning, my alarm sounded at 6:30. Yes, I'm back at work. I'm still not 100%, to be honest, as I continue to hack up slimy piles of mucus from my lungs every hour or so. On the other hand, I have holidays coming up in a couple of weeks, so I should really try to get some stuff sorted before I go. Plus, of course, three days of sitting at home, followed by a weekend, is enough to drive me nuts... or at least make me want to never go back to work again!
In addition to the alarm blaring in my ear at the aforementioned unthinkable time, I had the pleasure of being woken by Pie. Not only did he lick my eyelids today, as is his wont, but he also decided that - to wake me up properly - he had to lick my chin, the palm of one hand and brush his tail under my nose while sitting on my chest and purring.
He's such a pain in the arse sometimes, but at least I didn't go back to sleep!
Ah, bliss. I sorted out that database problem yesterday evening: or more specifically, the chap in the US who really knows the thing inside out kindly spent an hour on the phone with me to see what was wrong! It turns out that the problem was on their side of things: when they transferred our BO Universe into production, the security definitions for one or more of the tables we look at in the huge database were not transferred with it! Phew... it wasn't simply that I couldn't find anything wrong, then.
It's also payday today, so all is well in the world. At least for about a week, until Psycho spends all my money on manic stupidities and petty obsessions.
Whoa... this is way too much for me. The lovely Italian project manager emailed me this morning with a total bugger of a problem on the Business Objects universe she uses (and I'm maintaining). Her problem is way out of reach of my understanding - for all of the application, the universe and the databases being used. Nightmare.
Of course, I inherited this thing from someone who left, anyway, and have never had any training on the app, so I don't feel quite so bad. Having said that, I still feel bad. I hate not being able to help folks out. For now, a workaround might have to suffice, that I found by pure chance.
Time to book those BO courses, quick-sharp! I think I'll also book some time with that same Italian lady so she can explain what on earth all this stuff means in real terms, rather than just as database tables and columns. For the moment, I'm going to go somewhere quiet and kick myself for not knowing what she's talking about. Darn and blast it.
Ah, what a day. I decided to go back through my work email today and sort out all the 'pending' jobs I have been overlooking in favour of more important tasks. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the conclusion that everyone considers me their job-waste-basket: I now have about thirty tasks to perform for people who, in many cases, can't be bothered to do the work themselves.
Of course, this could be my own stupid fault: I've never specialised in any particular subject, the consequence of which is that I tend to attract all the 'interesting' little jobs that aren't really in anyone else's field of expertise: Business Objects, Siebel, web stuff, server admin, data migration... it's all there!
In other matters, I discovered today that I have truly become the only person in Europe who knows what's going on in my primary application. All my old managers and technical leads have moved on to other companies or other positions. This is excellent: it means that, finally, management will listen when I speak. There is no one left above me who can ignore my opinion on such matters! Yahoo!
I think I shall look at the positive side of this pile of work and consider my task list a potentially fun opportunity to fool around with a plethora of different tools and applications. That's probably a better idea than moaning about it, after all! To work!
Wow. I would never have imagined just how difficult it would be to low-level format a drive. It's been so very long since I've had to do it, you see, and all this modern technology is much less helpful than one would imagine.
Read on for the technical saga of the WD-HDD!
I have an old PC (an AMD Duron 533, believe it or not), which I thought I might try to get working again. I'd pretty much gutted it of everything that was in there: the ATI Radeon 7500 DV went on loan to a friend with a video camera, keyboard and mouse went to my new machine, sound card went to another friend on loan and so on. I found a really ancient S3 card lying around in another PC carcass - a Diamond Stealth (how old is that?!) - so that solved the problem of 'bare bones'.
However, once I got the machine started, I ran into a bunch of problems. Firstly, it was on Windows 2000: not necessarily a bad thing, but I really wanted to set it up to re-encode video files. Yes, it would be very slow, but at least I could just leave it running and not have to use the main PC for that. The programs I want to use don't run too well on Win2k, so an OS change was in order. Windows 98 SE or XP? Hmmm... well, might as well go the whole hog.
Unfortunately, the CD drive in the machine doesn't work, which makes things... interesting. So I rigged it up to the main PC and AIMed the files over from a Windows 98 CD and from the Windows XP CD to the old machine's D: partition. I know, bizarre. However, this meant I could boot from a floppy and install Win98SE as a secondary OS (which I did) just in case everything went toes-up. Over the years, I've learnt from my own stupid mistakes that it's a good idea to have a Plan B. Once 98 was installed, I could then reformat the C: partition (always start fresh with any OS install!) and launch the WinXP install from within 98. That went surprisingly well, all things considered: the wireless keyboard even worked (once I'd replaced the batteries!).
Now for the real problem-causer: the PC locks up very frequently. I don't really know why, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's due to a naffed Western Digital 13Gb Caviar drive. The thing shows up fine in the BIOS, but as five separate drives in Windows... freaky! Now, of course, I have no way of knowing this is the problem, but repairs have to start somewhere. The drive cannot be formatted due to some problem and even Partition Magic wouldn't deal with it, so I figured it was time to lose the data and go for the low-level format. A radical solution, yes, but it's an old drive and an old machine.
That's where the problems began. First off, I needed a bootable floppy: unfortunately, XP seems to have a habit of destroying any disks I try to format via the GUI. It can do them via a command prompt, but XP no longer allows the /s switch, so I couldn't make a bootable disk. Having gone through three or four floppies and reaching a fairly high state of annoyance, I figured it was time to go back to Windows 98 on the old machine... only this was no longer working due to the install of XP! Hmm, intriguing.
Off I went to Western Digital: they provide the tools for low-level formats as a floppy image! Excellent! Unfortunately, again, this doesn't seem to work on my main machine... so I had to transfer the image to the old machine and run it from there. It still didn't work: they use DR-DOS, which has a strange habit of crashing the old PC on startup, rather than doing anything useful. What next? Well, I transferred the files from the floppy to a directory on the C: drive and went looking for a basic boot floppy image.
Thank the Gods for DrD's Windows 95 page! The only resource I have managed to find today that has boot disk images that will run from DOS! Everywhere else, they only run via the Windows GUI... which, given that my main PC destroys floppies when it accesses them from the GUI, is not very helpful in my situation. So, finally, I was able to make a DOS 5.0 boot floppy and start the old PC from it. Bliss. Switch floppy, run the Western Digital tools... and I had the wrong version! Aaaaaaaargh! Re-download, re-image a floppy, re-copy, restart, re-run...
In 26 minutes, I will know if the low-level format has solved the drive problem. After a mere six hours of fixing...
I received a wonderful email yesterday that I simply couldn't resist sharing with you all. It's the pinnacle of achievement in the field of management buzzword-vomiting. I was truly impressed. Names have been changed to protect the less-than-innocent:
"This initiative will enable us to formalize activities, drive efficiencies and establish new levels of partnership with our customers, partners and suppliers, as well as extending collaboration activities across [our] global employee base."
WHAT?! After much consideration of the actual subject of the email (a new content management (publication) system for web pages for everyone from customers to business partners to employees), I figured out what it meant:
"This new system will help us manage the web content better, so everyone can profit from it in lots of ways."
Ain't management talk grand?
::This link here:: is for Scary Ross, who should check out the T-shirt in the photos for Kasia's entry. Cool!