A very old term for moving and assembling network parts together inside a corporation, 1.
Explanation:
Now this is a phrase I thought I’d never hear again but have recently heard multiple times. It is now used in a slightly derogatory fashion, to signify when the cloud part of a network is taking too long to complete, has been made overly complex, or seems to be letting down the dream of cloud networking.
Using it like this harkens back to the times when we could do this kind of stuff relatively easily. In context: “they’re only just Slinging Tin why is this taking weeks?” often used by people who have assembled entire complex networks consisting of all of the parts still being used in today’s networks and have done it within a few days.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
more commonly known in the real world as a phrase for weightlifting[↩]
To Gargoyle: The act of going to someone’s desk when you want them to do something and simply refusing to move until they do it. 1
Explanation:
The corporate term “To Gargoyle” isn’t something that has been used an awful lot in the last couple of years due to the pandemic home working, but is now on the rise again due to companies starting to pull people back into the office; essentially, it is going to the desk of someone who you want to do something for you and simply refusing to move until they do. However two points differentiate between being a gargoyle and just being a pain in the arse:
1) You can’t just need something or want something immediately and then just go to someone’s desk and demand it, they will just tell you to get knotted, they’re busy, they’ve got important stuff to do, etc etc. you have to have a right to be there, you have to have raised the correct forms and requests and attempted to follow up on them, you have to have followed the rules of the system; and the reason you are standing there now is that you have been driven to it because another part of the company has not done its job.
2) You can’t actively stop someone from continuing to do their current work; if they are on a call you sit next to their desk and continue to work on your phone, near to them, but not actually intrusive. It has to be clear that you are going to just be there until they do their thing for you. but in a passive aggressive way.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
This is very different from the urban dictionary term “Gargoyling[↩]
Well, this has been a really odd work year. The first part of this year wasn’t massively productive from a value of delivery point of view, although good from a personnel management stand point, with new lessons on how to deal with high stress and how to minimise impact to your team caused by changes in other areas, but from a pure enjoyment point of view not one of the greatest, and I’ve been always one of the very, lucky people who have always enjoyed their work. Thankfully its an old lesson, to always value the joy in your work first so I decided that, going back to full time consulting, rather than a permanent role was where the fun was, I DID however, make a huge ton of good friends, and as a number of them left after me the network of good people I now know has grown.
The latter half of this year has been far more enjoyable. It’s been challenging, but fun. It has been filled with enthusiastic techs rather than political battles. It has been totally delivery orientated. It’s just been everything I’ve always loved In a job, and people that know me have noted that I am back to my old bounce, The new set of clients I have been working with have also squared the circle for me in improving my CV.
The next part is I have for my day to day work moved even further into the management role. Away from technical and that is simply down to discovering that it was the place I could do the most good. As a tech, there is a limit to what I can fix, but as a manager that represents the interest of delivery and technical people and tries to actually help them reach their goals, that’s a big thing and the sheer volume of good, if you can call it that, that such a view point can provide in a corporate environment is huge. It’s been very, very rewarding. And I’m going to be a little bit egotistical and say It’s actually made a few people’s lives and work better, and who could ask for more.
But if I look at the three basic areas that I normally review:
Management: I am still treating this as a growth thing, and something that I have noted with quite a few of my management colleagues at various different clients over the years. Managers do not treat their personal growth in the same way as techs and business people treat theirs. They think in terms of their growth, rising through an organisation, getting more powerful, but not in terms of their skill set, and I’m finding that that is a really wonderful thing to try for, can you be a better manager, not simply a more powerful manager, so that is where I’m going at the moment. its my main focus which means I’m not looking at getting any formal certifications as you would if this was a business or a technical position.
The old management certifications aren’t worth what they used to be and Agile while it is nearly the only game in town nowadays. It is being treated more as a religion than a faith. I’ll expand on this more on a separate blog post. To me Agile has been for the last 20 odd years merely the simplest way of getting a lot of deliveries done while keeping track of them. Now as always these things have grown into far more of a religion. There are people with silly titles. There’s people who do silly ceremonies that don’t actually bring you closer to your delivery and just chew up time and frustrate your team. I found that going a little bit old school on this and trying to just focus on things that help deliver is making my management style work much better. I’m getting good feedback from both the people I work with and the people I work for. one of this years challenges will be to try and better explain it as a process.
Technical: As always, I might do management as a role but what I am is a Tech, and I still fiddle with it constantly. The two technical areas I’m mainly working on both last year and the coming year is making sure that my Azure is as good as my AWS. and ensuring that I keep up to date on Salesforce. And while you might be expecting me to do AI, I am not learning it in the normal way. The large language model side. Everyone’s getting excited about that, but I like to dig under the covers, and particularly how vector databases are working and growing and how they work in terms of security are my big things that I have both been learning and am continuing to learn. thank fully I have a smaller client that has had me working on a challenging little problem on this very subject, and this is hitting all my geek buttons.
Business: My business knowledge is growing at the same pace as management. Because my new set of clients, even though they’re in the same field as my old ones, they are dealing with wildly different things. Unfortunately, I haven’t made as much progress as I wanted with my CII certification. That is still on my hard to do list and it’s getting more and more important this year.
I have been an extremely long-time headphone user. I was very very lucky to get one of the very first Walkman’s when they were a gigantic thing that ate batteries, and I’ve worn headphones ever since.
Everything from audio books through concentration music through to terrible, terrible choices in music, I am very, very audio-based.
However, it has only been fairly recently that headphones have been allowed in the majority of office workplaces. Before that, you had to be working in certain areas or with a certain type of person, and even then, if you failed to communicate normally, it would be frowned on and headphones would be blamed.
Now the world has moved on, and most people use them at work to help with concentration and for the never-ending video calls. and they come in lots of different styles and feature sets, but none seem to be totally perfect for the work environment.
But with the Oladance Pro, I think there is a set that actually match and deal with all of the problems of an office environment.
Problem 1: You can’t hear what’s going on in an office with a pair of headphones on.
Any decent pair of headphones will block out your hearing. Recently, there have been bone-conducting headphones, but their audio quality has always been dreadful when I’ve tried them. These ones don’t do that. They seemingly fire the audio in using part of the top of your ear rather than blocking the ear canal. Which means that your actual ear canals are open. Not only does this mean that you can hear everything around you, But it’s obvious that your ears are not plugged or covered, so your work colleagues know they can talk to you and stuff like that.
Problem 2: Small ear buds never have a proper full day of battery 1
These have a true full-day battery life; they last for 16 hours, and they do mean 16 hours. So you can put them on in the morning. Go to work with them. Have them on all day. Go home, take them out, and you won’t have any problems. They also have a nice slim battery case, which makes them easy to carry around and charge.
Problem 3: Bluetooth range and behaviour is very dependent on the chipset in the headphones; poor range and poor connectivity issues still plague headphones after all these years.
These ones have solved the main issues that drive me wild:
Range – The range away from audio sources for these are solid, as good as any of the big over-ear headphones, although at extreme range they can get a tiny bit out of sync with each other till you come back closer.
Multi Source and Connectivity – being able to connect to 2 sources at once is mandatory in my opinion, especially in a work environment. As well as the ability to swap and recover said connectivity, the Oladance Pro have been improved over the Oladance 2 as they can connect to 2 sources at once, and handle switching between them simply and automatically 2, lastly, they auto-reconnect to the sources when you go fully out of range, which is nice.
Downsides
No serious noise isolation: You can’t really use them on a subway, they are much better than any other open headphones and they have a noise cancelling “Zone” mode which does help 3 but it gets overloaded in massively loud places 4.
You lose your “Do Not Disturb” mode: because they’re so obviously not in your ears. at work you cannot use them to pretend you can’t hear or are deeply engrossed in something; you have to interact with more humans than you are used too.
And finally, a bit of a big one
Don’t throw away the box. This first release is suffering from some serious hardware failure issues. I’m on my 4th pair, with the previous 3 being returned for a variety of reasons, from refusing to charge to a bright red light that means one side won’t talk to another. The company refunded and replaced them with no problem so it’s not a huge issue but I hope they fix it on the second production run.
None work Upside
This one has little to do with work but was too important to not include. A female friend started using the version 2 earphones and pointed out that it meant she could now listen to music when walking her dog at night; normally she can’t as she can’t take the risk of not hearing an attacker approaching, but headphones like these don’t suffer from that problem, a valuable feature.
Conclusion
All of this together means that other than the very occasional use where I need to block out all external noise, these are now my main and only headphones and rarely leave my ears 5 , its an overused phrase and only applies to this latest version but they really are a game changer, if only they can get the reliability up to the same level as the version 2 headphones.
and I mean a proper full day, 8-10 hours plus 2-4 hours commute, don’t give me that “30 hours if you keep charging them with a case” rubbish [↩]
they do it fast and without loud beeps and notifications[↩]
One of the necessary evils of doing work for corporate clients is that you often have to have in addition to all your own equipment a client’s laptop or PC. This is for obvious security reasons and is just how corporations work, but that does mean that often what is bought out of convenience for the corporation is not best of breed, and in fact, sometimes awful or missing entirely, headsets and decent keyboards are two of the most obvious examples.
Thankfully, while most corporations obviously ban you from installing your own software on their laptops, they have no objection to USB keyboards or the like. This is where programmable media keyboards come in.
Dedicated media keyboards are very useful. Particularly functions like “mic. toggle” and “camera toggle”. but I would not advise you use ones that have dedicated buttons that don’t need drivers, I’ve never had any luck with them as they are either very generic in the functions they trigger or don’t cater to the many different types of conference kit you might use 1.
So it’s much better to have your own programmable one that you can adjust to any need, but most of the time you are limited by the inability to load the driver software. However, good makes such as Vaydeer get around this. You actually flash the keyboard with the functions you want to use using your own computer, they’re stored permanently on the keyboard and then you can plug them in elsewhere driver free. This means that you can build up exactly what you want the keyboard to do. configure it and set it up on your laptop. Then, disconnect it, plug it straight in to your clients laptop simply as a standard keyboard which works on 99% of them.
As you can see on the above screen shot I have flashed the 2 left buttons on this keyboard with macros that work for Microsoft teams, and they work perfectly, you can also just swap keycaps for media ones, the two on this keyboard were stolen from a cheap dedicated one that didn’t work before I figured this solution out. Obviously, you can do sticky labels or what have you, for any kind of keycaps.
