Farewell to all that

Yesterday was definitely a blue Monday, and not in a good late 80s electro pop way.

There's something very dispiriting about sitting down at my desk in a half empty office when it is still practically dark. The odd bits of tinsel and other festive tat that we've got draped over the cubicle dividers do little more than accentuate the gloom outside.

The day picked up though, when I tracked down the route of the help desk call that I had been passed, which turned out to be a feature rather than a bug. Yes, a delete button will appear on the beneficiary form if you have the table level security set to 'A' for all, rather than 'E' for edit. It was slightly confusing that the security level set on the process map overrides the user level security, but stepping through the code and looking at the generated sql for the database call caused the metaphorical light bulb to go ping over my head.

Today was much brighter.

The sun rose above the horizon like a vast ball of fusing hydrogen atoms, picking out the clouds with a lovely pink tinge. Note to self, must investigate the art of simile. Blue skies always lift my mood considerably, even if it is flipping freezing with it.

I was also pleased to see an old colleague in the office, who I hadn't seen for five years or more. Apparently some of the sites that I projected managed all of those years ago back in the days of character based terminals are still happily using the same software for their transactional back end systems.

I've been using bloglines as my rss reading weapon of choice for several years now, but this weekend when the site was down for maintenance I decided to give google reader a whirl, and I have to say I'm impressed. It's very easy to add and manage subscriptions, and navigating the feeds is straight forward too. I like the way that you can switch from a list view with just the headlines to the detail view - this makes managing high volume feeds much easier. Marking favourite posts with a star is a better mechanism for saving items than the equivalent bloglines method of pinning them - I don't necessarily want to see the posts in my unread feed all the time, but I need a way of storing them for later.

Another plus point is that it works quite smoothly on my Nokia N800, even without using the mobile version of the page, and there is also a useful widget for my igoogle home page too. It's definitely worth considering if you use rss feeds on more than one pc at a time.

Weekend DVD viewing was 'No Country For Old Men', and jolly good it was too. Seedy motels and random violence in the heart of Texas. Tommy Lee Jones was in fine form as the dogged sheriff, but the film belonged to Javier Bardem who was utterly terrifying as the sociopathic killer Chigurh. I can see why some critics complained about the ending, although to my mind the dour anti-climax was far more fitting conclusion to the theme of accepting or rejecting the whims of random chance.