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.

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

Upon ringing the cancellation team the gentleman who answered my called asked me why I was leaving – so I said because i’d bought an iPhone

He then said “so you bought the old one”
me – “no I bought the new one that came out yesterday”
him – “no thats the old one – a new one comes out july 1st”
me – “no that came out yesterday – I already have it”
him – “oh so they brought it out early then”
me – “no not really, it was out yesterday”
him – “have you looked at the new google phone because its much better than the iPhone”
me – “I don’t really want to be told that you think i’ve bought the wrong phone I just want to cancel the contract’

AND HE HUNG UP!!

I’m so annoyed that I have been treated like this after 3 years of never missing a bill and being loyal to vodafone. I understand they don’t want to lose customers but being talked at like that – and being told what I should and should’nt buy is a joke

Then when I rang back and got a different lady she sent me a pac code, without asking if I wanted to port my number out, then AFTERWARDS explained that was for a number transfer, which I don’t want because I’ve got a new number. So then she said I had to write a letter to the cancellations department but that I had to wait for the pac code to land first and then give 30 days notice

Utter joke.. cancelled my direct debit and written a letter to cancellations. Vodaphone won’t be receiving any money for my last month after the way i’ve just been spoken to!

What happened to the customer is always right?

I was in Lincoln at the time, ironically heading to the Phones4u store to upgrade anyway. So I told the lad that I would just do it in store so I could look at the phones.
“We can do you a better deal than the shop mate, cos we work at head office”.. hrmmm
I hung up and told the guys in the store what had happened, and they said the number wasn’t Phones4U and they weren’t sure who it was.
The number then rang again… I told them they weren’t who they said they were. The lad then told me my name, address, date of birth, mobile phone I had, and contract I was on…

WOW what a complete failure in confidentiality on Phones4U and/or Vodafones behalf!!

I eventually took an upgrade in-store, and informed the lad who kept ringing that I had already upgraded. The calls eventually stopped

Fast forward another 18months… I’ve now had 81 calls in the last week from this number.
I originally explained I wasnt interested in another phone, or changing my contract. But that got me a very angry “What so you dont want to save money then?” Grrr..
So then I started just cancelling the call, then answering the call but not speaking to see if that would stop them ringing.. it didn’t.
I then tried random swearing down the phone, and eventually today I’ve resorted to waiting till they speak then smashing the phone into the desk over and over until they hang up

So enough being well and truly enough, I rang vodafone to get a block put on this number.
After 5 minutes on hold I get a customer services woman who politely informs me “I don’t think we can block numbers, let me talk to a colleague”, and then put me on hold for 15 minutes until I got bored and hung up

The level of sheer incomptence on the behalf of primarily Phones4U, but also Vodafone, as a service provider is ASTOUNDING

My contract ends in June, I have no intention of renewing it whatsoever. I will be taking £345 of my hard earned cash to the nearest O2 store and walking out with an iPhone. I sincerely hope anyone reading this who works at whatever company resides behind the 08450 264628 has to spend a week trapped in a closet listening to a permanent repeat of “The greatest elevator music ever”! Grrrrr