Bonjour 2019

For some reason I thought it was 2020, probably working in a Finance Department in the Financial Year 2019 for the last eight months. I do believe that tax and accountancy is just an annoying situation where a bunch of ex council pedants make up rules to make life difficult for everyone else.

Anyway less work talk and here we are on the first day of 2019 with my first post before my first sleep of the New Year. I' will go for (like I probably did last year) "New Year's Day" by U2 from the "Under A Blood Red Sky" album that I bought from Woolworth's in Goole when I was on my first contract at Hygena coding COBOL on a DEC/VAX . I was quite amazed when there was all the palaver about the Millenium Bug because I'd been programming since 1980 catering for the millenium, so how come programming in the late nineties didn't see the Millenium coming. Still "Under A Blood Red Sky" is one of my favourite U2 albums which I still play today

Not to worry, we are still here despite the morons in the USA and UK Governments at the moment and sure that we will deal with these like our bodies deal with infections, we will purge them.

Welcome to 2019 everybody.

Work

I suppose a sign of you enjoying your job is you don't begrudge thinking about solutions to problems when you are away from work. I'm wrestling with a problem of testing a system updateby  basically replicating the live system using Excel. The set up is all over the place so there is no consistency between units. When Iasked to do this last year I set out what needed to be done and was then told that the testers were taking "a different approach". If I had a COBOL set up this would be a cinch to set up , though I think I may be able to do it using SQL but stepping back it's OK how differnt units need to be treated differently but then you get the exceptions thrown in , sometimes for no other reason than "they need to be treated differently". The thing is solving things like this makes time fly, especially when you are working with good people. The other thing is failure is not an option, so it will be done, and there is a tedious manual option, but that is a last resort.

I can;t believe this is the first time I've mentioned COBOL on this blog, though I've not used it for fifteen years it was my first programming language and as far as I know is still used for large batch processing operations in places.

Anywaty it's Friday Morning, the weekend is closer, the weather is mild but boring so I will be walking to work and am currently listening to Hawkwind's "Space Ritual" which I bought on vinyl recently and still looks wonderful and sounds excellent, over the top riff driven space rock smattered with poetry readings. I saw Hawkwind a couple of times and loved the music and light show, and listening now I'm impressed by how simple the song constructions are while still sounding impressive (well they do to me). I've chose "Orgone Accumulator" which lifted the "Green Onions" riff and went on for ten minutes but it's still a great song.

Have a great day everybody.