Hangovers, FOREX & BBQs

Santacon Rocked. Definitely doing it again next year. Seems other santas had a big weekend too. Will post pix to flickr, although the videos are the most fun.
Today I got my Hep A & B shots, travelers cheques and booked a hotel in Tokyo for the first 3 nights. After that the plan is to go to Kanazawa to see my friend Kana, and who knows from there. I've only got the faintest outline of what I'm doing after that. Because I've never been there before I'll suss it out a bit during that time before I make a decision.

I'm a bit annoyed I didn't get any more time at the beach. I really could use an extra week when I get back to just lie on the beach for the whole time. That whole "race riot" thing should've calmed down by then. Not that I particularly like cronulla beach anyway. I'm more fond of Bondi for some reason.

Work is particularly sucking at the moment. I can't wait to get the hell out of here. We're currently paying for our totally shoddy development practices. Stuff has been released which we don't have the source code for. Other stuff we have binaries for but it looks like someone has made several point releases without actually checking in the code. Fuck. If only they listened to me, but I get the feeling I'm not taken seriously. No idea why. So many things here just seem so amateurish. Now I'll be the first to say I'm not the smartest programmer in the world, and I have absolutely no inclination to do any management, but after 6 years of doing this shit one does get some idea on the best way to do certain things.

For example, there is absolutely no peer review here. Zero. There aren't even any email notifications when someone commits something into CVS. Now how the fuck are we expected to keep track of changes? There is a system they call ECN, Engineering Change Notices that is totally manual. Until recently it was an actual dead tree logbook that was supposed to detail the changes made to software. We've recently moved to a web based version, but to really use it, I have to: Ask my manager to create an ECN for me, wait for him to do that,
and then fill in the ECN detailing changes, including a version number. I think there's even another step after that.

This is complete and utter bullshit system that IMO adds exactly -50 points of manageability. No account is taken of what actual code is modified, apart from in the CVS log. And that's what actually matters. If emails were sent, a simple script could parse out the description of the commit and file it away somewhere, not to mention the patch containing the actual change. Essentially the same as this brain damaged ECN thing, but fully automatic and wasting nobody's time. But let's do things the way we did it in 1987 because that's the way I used to do it and I don't wanna change. Right?

I've got so much bile I wanna spew about this and can't it's not funny.