ANGER
Why is all the current software so appallingly written? You’re supposed to fix this stuff? They’ve got to be kidding right!? You can feel your soul slowly dying while wading through your endless inbox. Yet another open-plan office layout means you can’t concentrate on anything ever.

BARGAINING
Ok so there are problems, but there are problems everywhere, you’ve got to make the best of the situation. There are some simple processes and management that could be put in place that would make such a big improvement. Work hard and impress everyone. People will notice your good work and you’ll get promoted and then you’ll really be able to make a positive difference.

DEPRESSION
You’re getting nowhere. Clients don’t know what they want and no matter what you do it’s somehow wrong!? Even when you write great code you have to try and integrate it with the spaghetti rubbish that other developers and 3rd parties produce. No-one notices how fast your new SQL statements run, they’re too busy wondering what colour the logo should be. You literally hate everyone.

ACCEPTANCE
You’ve completely given up trying to make any positive impact at all. You’ve phased out. It’s time to brush off your CV and start looking for something else. This place is beyond help.

As a developer that uses both OS X and Windows (sadly) – I feel very strongly about this subject and trying to get the sum of all my rage arguments across on twitter was failing badly – so I thought I’d write a post about it here

A little history…
I was a massive hardcore windows fan. I built my first pc back in 1995 while I was at college and got heavily into coding and online gaming.
Every few years I spent a simply ridiculous amount of money building another cutting edge gaming PC  - right up until I moved in with Rick Nunn a few years ago.

By this point I had an Xbox 360 and my online PC gaming had pretty much ended, but I did still use a Windows PC for web development and freelancing. I had just spent £2700 on a brand new cutting edge PC setup running Windows a few weeks before moving in with Rick.

Rick is a very talented designer and me being a developer we decided to work on a few projects together. Rick was using a couple of years old iMac and I was using my PC.
The days coding/designing seemed like ground-hog day. Every day he would come in, pick up his graphics tablet pen and start drawing or start hacking some CSS together.

I would sit and wait for the PC to boot up, see a notification about updates and have to install them and reboot. Plug a usb device in, find some drivers, reboot again. Half way through coding it would blue screen for some completely un-known reason and I’d have to reboot again.

This continued for a few weeks until eventually I kicked my PC into pieces, drove to Meadowhall’s Apple Store and bought a £600 Mac Mini.
Rick helped me get it all setup, showed me the differences between windows & OS X and I discovered bliss!

Suddenly no more reboots – for months and months on end. System updates installed silently and I forgot what a driver even was.
There was no risk of virus’s so I didn’t have to run a virus checker that scanned every file on my machine until it became too slow to use.
My stress levels halved over night and my productivity went through the roof.
I’ve not touched a PC since until….

My current job…
I took a job last year working for a large insurance company. That means an office with 300+ people and a windows domain *sigh*
The IT team chose windows over OS X/Linux because of the control over the users, what they run and what they can install. Exchange is a good mail server and it’s easy to find IT staff trained in microsoft OS’s. This unfortunately meant they wouldn’t let me have a Mac

For 6 months I used a windows PC and my daily experience was hell.
It took on average 5 minutes to get the machine booted up, logged into the domain, start apache+mysql+php, load up komodo, and actually start coding.
If there were any windows updates to install this would require a reboot and my time from arriving at my desk to actually working was knocking on 20-30minutes
The machine crashed regularly (and it’s a new PC not some old 2nd hand hardware). Even with anti-virus on people in the department got virus’s which then meant 1-2 days downtime as they were re-formatted and all the software pain-stakingly re-installed (with the mandatory reboot between each application!!! Argghh)

I eventually had enough of wasting time and asked my manager if I could have a Mac. It was agreed that if I could justify it I could – so I started creating a log of all the time lost specifically because of windows updates, reboots and crashes.
I kept a spreadsheet for over 2 months and the results suprised even me!
In an average 40hr week I was losing between 6 and 9 hours a week to windows.
The cost of this to my company was insane so they agreed to a solution – a £650 mac mini arrived and I’ve been using that ever since.

My experiences now are an 8-20second time from sitting down at my desk to writing my first lines of code.
It hasn’t crashed ever. I installed all the apps within 2 hours of un-boxing and didn’t have to reboot once.
I’ve only had to reboot once in 3 months for a system update – all the rest installed seamlessly without interrupting me.
Even the next version of OS X, called Lion, installs fully without a reboot.

Costs
At this point I can hear you all screaming at your screen “Yes but a mac costs THOUSANDS”
This is of course only half true and usually spouted by people who’ve done no proper research (they usually follow it up with “macs only have one mouse button” LOL)

I have a 15″ macbook pro which I use for development which cost £1850. I’ll admit that’s a boat load of money for a laptop in this day and age
However at work I have a 2.4ghz dual core mac mini with 8gb of ram which cost £650. That’s no more than the equivalent Dell PC would cost with a windows license – and I can ensure you it is sooo much more of a machine.

Windows is cursed by the impossible task of writing an operating system for infinite combinations of hardware. OS X runs beautifully because you are restricted to a certain set of hardware for its use. It’s that simple and it’s that brilliant!

So there you go – same cost – infinitely better user experience.

The cost of my macbook has never bothered me because it is a beautifully designed piece of hardware. I wouldn’t ever complain about spending more money on a Ferrari over a Volvo because it’s a slicker, better looking car. The same applies to computer hardware for me. I would rather spend nearly £2k on a Mac than use an Acer laptop slowly falling apart in front of me.

While on the subject of costs – even if the hardware was more expensive (which it isn’t) the cost of windows is astronomical compared to the cost of OS X. The next version of OS X costs £20.99 – for 5 licenses
Windows 7 Premium costs 5x that for just 1 license – making it effectively 25x more expensive if you have multiple computers in your house.

So.. in closing to all those people on twitter arguing about this let me leave you with something

You wouldn’t call someone an idiot for buying a diesel car at a slight premium and then saving hundreds on fuel costs
You wouldn’t argue that from a design/aesthetics point of view that a ferrari isn’t worth the extra money over a volvo
You wouldn’t ever argue that you prefer spending a day rebuilding a broken windows installation rather than doing actual chargeable work

Any extra cost involved for buying a Mac is more than saved over the years of hassle-free development/design work and stupidly cheap OS updates… end of

Oh and to those of you arguing windows is better and you have never actually used a mac for a few weeks – I hate you, I hate you from the very bottom of my soul for arguing about something you will never understand!

Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable, if you’re honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.

Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally “nicely” regardless of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people you’ll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.

Colin Powell

I think it’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and something anyone who’s managing projects and people should read and really understand.

But anything I think was good I buy on DVD – and I have nearly 500 of them now

It is annoying though that a lot of the time watching a film on DVD is a lot more annoying than watching an “illegal” download…

I’ve just put “never back down” on – which is a personal favourite of mine – and compared the download to the dvd

Download
Click on the film on my apple tv – it plays

DVD
Sit through an advert for some shite looking B rated horror flick.
Sit through another advert for some chick flick
Sit through an advert for red bull (seriously WTF)
Choose play from menu – it plays

I got a similar experience with House M.D
I love that show so much I spent £80 on a box set of all series
But with the box set I have to sit through a load of bloody “pirate dvd’s are illegal” adverts that I can’t skip – before watching the show. Ironically on my downloaded versions I can just watch it without that hassle

Why can’t the film and music industry realise that more people would pay for stuff if they didn’t fill the discs up with crappy adverts for films that we don’t care about?

I bought battlefield Bad Company 2 – but how anyone can say that’s a better game is beyond me. The single player campaign is a joke, enemies just appear from fresh air in front of you, and several of the maps you can just run down the side all the way to the end without ever shooting anyone! The battlfield fans (and I used to be one – BF1942 on PC was awesome in its day) will tell you it’s superior because of the environment damage. I’m sorry but it’s clearly not. Yes you can shoot a telegraph pole down, but then if you run at it you can kick it along the floor like it’s fresh air – it never really feels like you’re actually in the game

But anyway, moving on – I mostly love the COD:Modern Warfare series – but in MW2 there are 2 major problems which are nearly making the game unplayable

BOOSTING
Not 5 minutes goes by these days without getting a message from someone I don’t know saying “FREE 4 ALL BOOSTIN ASK 4 INVITE”, which is frustrating, but worst of all it is very VERY rare that you can play a free for all game without finding 2 people in a remote area of a map shooting each other.

For those who haven’t come across this (you must have had your head buried pretty deep in the sand for the last 6 months) it involves 2 friends joining the same free for all map and boosting your score using tactical insertion.
One person puts a tactical insertion down and the other person then shoots them in the head, when the first person respawns they put another tactical insertion down and get shot in the head again. Repeat this as you work through your killstreak (helicopters, ac130, then finally a NUKE) and you get a load of points and finish 30 for 0.

What a fucking stupid thing for the game developers to allow!! Also how retarded do you have to be to think spending 3 hours shooting the same person over and over in the face just to get to rank 70 prestige 10 is a fun way to spend your spare time?? Arggghhh!!

Sniper Rifle Scope Bug
The sniper rifles are good in MW2 – very good. You have to hold your breath for a steady aim (unlike battlefield) and the scopes are quite realistic. HOWEVER a massive bug makes them get completely misused.

If you pull the left trigger to go to a scoped view – but halfway through the gun coming up to your eye you then pull the right trigger to shoot – it will 99% of the time kill whoever is in front of you, regardless of if you’re actually aiming at them or not. Which means people use sniper rifles for single shot kills from the hip.

How utterly stupid is that bug? I’m 99% sure people don’t run around in real life with .50 cal sniper rifles rapid firing them from the hip or halfway up to their eye..

Every search and destroy game I play is ruined by the sound of 15 snipers all firing rapidly across the map!

Rant over

I’m going to skirt around the issue that global warming is nothing more than a media-produced reason for governments to earn more money – that’s a post for another day.

What really has p*ssed me off is who they are targeting with their new eco tax, like you couldn’t guess. Motorists and home owners.
Proposals to introduce a tax on people who use too much electricity/gas – and triple the fuel tax for everyone.

Why the hell don’t these consultants understand the simple difference between Necessity and Abuse.
Owning a 4×4 landrover and only using it to take the kids to school at 12mpg is abuse.
Owning a family sized car and using it to get to work and back is Necessity.

The UK has an APPAULING public transport network. A bus from my house to the local town takes 1.5hrs – it takes 25minutes by car.
A train to my local town costs a little over £8 – it’s about £4 in unleaded in my car. And the trains stop running if a leaf hits a track which is dead handy if you’re going to a job interview or actually want to be on time for anything ever.
For my girlfriend to go home to Wales to see her parents – its either 3 comfy hours with some music in her car, or 4 different trains where the changes are mostly sitting around in a town center train station surrounded by drunken football supporters on her own!

I don’t get in my car every morning because I enjoy sitting at 40mph all the way to work behind the 92 year old who can’t see over her dashboard. I don’t enjoy dodging the giant potholes in the UK road network. I don’t enjoy any part of my drive to work. But I have to do it or I wouldn’t have a job – it’s that simple!
I don’t enjoy having a house – it offers me virtually no pleasure at all. But sleeping on the pavement is a little inconvenient.

It’s just much much easier to tax people on things they can’t avoid doing and then when they complain tell them its their own fault because if we walked to work every day and didn’t use any central heating in winter we could avoid the tax.. utter joke

Everyone has to work, everyone has to provide a place for their family to live. All of that currently involves burning fossil fuels – which are running out. But until alternatives are provided its necessary. Yes that means the earth is slowly dying, yes that means the human race is doing a pretty good job of killing itself, no that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

Thinking for a 5 year plan for myself – the way the UK is going there’s only 2 sensible options.

Move to another country .. or .. quit my job, sit in a house paid for by the government, heating on full, with a couple of screaming kids running about the place and claim benefits to spend on vodka like all the other people my age do..

Well done Labour.. well done

At home I have iTunes open all the time as it syncs with my AppleTV – so it’s not so much a problem. Though it is hugely annoying that when Im listening to spotify and I press pause – it starts playing a track from itunes grrr.
But at work I don’t use itunes for anything – I listen to my iPod or Spotify. So when I press pause or play while in spotify and suddenly itunes loads up – its rather frustrating.

I don’t know if this is a simple bug or if Apple are heading down the MS route and trying to force people to use itunes instead of any “competition” just like MS used to try to force IE as the default browser. I’m hoping its just a bug

If anyone knows a way to fix it that isn’t some horrid renaming patch please let me know

Is there anyone who can actually iron? I’m starting to think that people just go out and buy new clothes
2 bloody hours trying to iron a bunch of t-shirts. One of them is now in the bin in 8 pieces and my plasterboard wall has a new hole in it

I hate my house being covered in un-ironed and un-washed clothes, but the for the life of me I CAN’T IRON, all I do is iron a load of creases in until everything needs washing again..

A couple of hundred thousand years of human evolution and we still can’t make clothes that don’t need ironing?? SRSLY!

It was my first ever visit to Ikea, and while there is breath left in my body will be my last too.
I have never before come across such a retarded stock control system in operation.

When you arrive you are guided into an area filled with all their furniture and items in real-life layouts. It takes about an hour and a half to walk around all these mock bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms etc.. but its technically a brilliant idea as you can write down what you want as you go round and get ideas of how to layout your own house.
I took pictures of everything I liked and the little tags telling me where to collect them at the end… brilliant so far. In my head I’d spent triple what I’d budgeted by the time we got round it all.

Then comes the staggeringly retarded part – you walk out the back into a warehouse full of flat packed furniture. You collect a trolley and are expected to then find all the items you want on the racking and pick it yourself. No problem I thought, IQ over 50 and the racks are labeled we should have no problem.

First row – chest of drawers, oh no they’re out of stock. Thats a pain, well I’ll get the others I liked, no wait they’re out of stock of those too.
Hrmmmmmm well what about the storage solution I wanted for the spare room… nope sold out as well. What about the other 3 storage solutions, oh sold out too!
Ok what about the nice expensive tv/media cabinet my mum wants – sold out too….. riiight

Then my mum goes over to the information desk to ask if they have a catalogue as we can’t remember the other stuff that that possibly could have worked, and don’t really want to drive for 90minutes home empty handed. They don’t have catalogues, but the guy at the information desk tells her if she goes to the information desk they can help her.

Errrr hi? Retarded much? Honestly to work at Ikea I think you have to actually have an IQ level which makes breathing challenging.
About this point I felt like stabbing myself, you waste over an hour of your life picking furniture out and planning your own house, only to get to the end to find out they have literally nothing in stock.

If you are considering a trip to Ikea I can tell you know, save yourself some time… load up the Ikea website and browse all their lovely goods, then sit and stare at a wall and waste 4 hours of your life. It save’s the petrol and has the exact same outcome!

I like to view re-developing existing systems as a point of change for the better, where existing processes within a company can be analysed and optimised. That way the company can save some money, and everyone can be a little bit happier in there job.

However I always find that other staff within companies are reluctant to change, they know how they currently work and they want to stick to that, even when the current processes within the company are slow, laborious and in places just plain wrong.

I don’t understand why other people find it so hard to step back, look at what they’re doing, and see where they can save time and stress with just a few changes!
This is the most frustrating part of my life, I find it very hard to motivate myself to model web applications around company processes that I can see are wrong.

In order to save myself from a heart-attack mid way through my 30′s I’m not sure if I need to find a way to stop caring about improving the companies I work at, or whether I should try to migrate my job away from writing apps into some kind of business processes analyst?

For now I’ll stick to drinking JD every night until I stop caring