It's all relative

I'm in Peru. We just spent a couple of days around the Cañon de Colca, one of the deepest canyons in the world. The place where we stayed last night, Chivay, is at 3700 metres above sea level and on the way there we stopped at a viewpoint that was 4900 metres above sea level, higher than Mont Blanc. The area around Chivay and the canyon is lush and green and if it wasn't for the thin air, you'd easily forget that you are at an altitude that is higher than most of the Alps' ski resorts.

Nobody told the locals either, as explained by one of the girls in the group this morning: she asked the landlady of the hotel where she stayed overnight whether she kept llamas or alpacas, to which the landlady replied "we don't do that here, only in the mountains". That'd be the steep bits above 4000 metres that we see in the distance then.

Bootnote

This was written on the bus between Chivay and Puno yesterday and uploaded today.

Change Control

One of the biggest risk to any IT project is change. The more changes you get during a project, the more difficult it is to deliver it on time and on budget. Letting change happen willy nilly is a bit like going to a bar and asking the barman for a white wine. Then when he's about to pour it, change your mind and ask for a red wine. And when he's about to pour the red wine, change your mind again and ask for a beer: any sensible barman will then stop and ask you to make your mind up before going any further, potentially charging you if you changed your mind after the drink was poured. It's also a sure way to get served very slowly.

IT projects are the same: if you keep changing your mind, you will never deliver and if you change your mind too late in the process, it's going to cost you a lot. This is why a good Change Control Process is essential.

Now, the project I currently work on has had every single aspect of it changed over the past three weeks. I cannot name a single thing that is identical to what it was three weeks ago. We even changed the Change Control Process!

In fact, I'm unfair, there is one thing that hasn't changed: we are still working out of the same floor in the same office. But that's because we're only meant to move offices in October.

Blogger Labels

Google have apparently revamped the internals of Blogger and we now have the ability to add labels to each post, a feature that had been thoroughly missing up to now. I started doing that and added labels to my last 25 posts. I will try to keep doing it and categorise all the posts since the first one but it will take time, if I ever manage to do them all. As is not completely unexpected, the top label so far is technology. Worryingly, the second one is rants. Have I been that negative recently or is it just a sign that I use this weblog to vent my frustration?

Tell me what you recycle...

Tuesday was the first day of the year the recycling green boxes were collected where I live. My box was full of the usual stuff: paper, a few bottles and cans, nothing special really. The boxes of some of my neighbours were vastly more interesting. The first one down the road contained its usual pile of newspapers, as the guy there seems to be an avid consumer of Sunday papers. He never has any bottles or cans in his box so I wonder if he ever eats in between the Sunday Times and the News of the World. The next one down had a box full of a dozen wine bottles. Obviously, there was some serious partying there! The next one down had a couple of large empty Quality Street chocolates boxes. There was some partying there as well but of a different kind.

Another One Bites The Dust!

One of the reasons why I keep a Windows laptop used to be that the HSBC online business banking site required Internet Explorer or an antiquated version of Netscape so I couldn't use it on my Mac. They recently changed their authentication mechanism and out of curiosity I tried it again with Firefox today. It works perfectly both on Windows and OS-X. So that's now one less reason to keep the Windows laptop. Thank you HSBC.

Exit

Newspaper headlines were saying yesterday Blair out by May next year. Today they are saying Blair out by Christmas. I suppose tomorrow will be Blair out by Sunday.