The Grax Domain

19 Nov 2004 I hate Cowboy Coders

Good God, if I ever meet the guy who last designed the site I'm working on I'm gonna tear him a new one. It's so bloody diffcult to work with!

I tried to add some new sales shopping pages to the site and it seemed to work fine. But once it was made live and people started using it, the damn site mixed up all the stupid order codes and stuff. I've managed to fix the problem now, but that was half a day of checking/fixing/testing/repeat that I did not need. Why thew hell do people write code that's so damn hard to work out what's going on?

Of course the exception would be if you were trying to keep a secure thing secure, like military documents or something. But this is just a shopping cart function for Gods sake (and some DHTML drop down menus while I'm at it. I hate people with use single letters for important variables!). It's practically freeware, you can make it yourself.

"But maybe I'm being too hard on this guy" I probably should keep reminding myself. After all he might be a beginner who's new to the programming scene. We've all been there before, I know I have. However one of the things that annoy me is the fact that someone payed this guy to make this pile of crap. And probably a big lump of money too. It just seems wrong that these cowboys can get away with this sort of thing. They should be on Watchdog or something.

Dammit, I haven't started on what I was supposed to be working on. >:(

11 Nov 2004 Random Rambles

What if being in a band was a souless job position rather than a individual's passion?

What I mean is that a band is like a company which some big manager owns, like say Metallica for the sake of argument, and each of the positions is a temporary job position that anyone could fill. That way, if someone's no pulling their weight, the big guy fires that person and puts out an ad in the local paper for a replacement. If none of the 'employees' are doing well enough, then they would all be fired and new members would be hired (for a smaller payslip probably).

The main feature of this theory is that the band could (in theory) live forever, but its member would always be different. Maybe it would change every generation or something. It wouldn't be just the employees either. The whole style of music could change as well. Like Industrial Goth Metal one generation and Tripping Trace the next. I was thinking about this idea the other day whilst listening to "Metallica: S&M".

Now I think about it, the whole thing is pretty similar to what happens in real life, isn't it...? Prime examples are AC/DC replacing their singer, Metallica replacing their bass player twice. Madonna has changed her music styles a few times over the years. My theory is nothing new at all. I've just wasted my time and yours talking about it haven't I?

I'll shut up now.... ^_^

8 Nov 2004 Skool Dayz (because I couldn't think of a better title...)

Sometimes I hate subliminal advertising. Prime example is that today, while at work, I was listening to the radio and they were talking about Ben Elton who has written a book about a guy who tries to solve murders that are related to the Friends Reunited web site. By the end of the day I'd signed on to Friends Reunited and got me an account with them. Damn you Radio Two *shakes fist*.

Still it wasn't all bad. It was interesting to see what everyone one else was doing with their lives, both the popular and the unpopular kids at school. I wouldn't mind doing a big-ass school reunion with my old school-mates to see how much better (or worse) my life is compared to theirs.

They have their lives, but I've my own web site. How many people can claim that....? (*shakes head in shame*)