The Experiment

weblog Thursday, May 31st, 2007

 

This job thing is interesting. It raises all sorts of questions and issues, and has answered a few as well. The answers are almost all very relieving. It turns out that I had not, in fact, become painfully indolent as I was beginning to fear. I just didn’t have enough work, or enough responsibility.

Not that my responsibilities are particularly lofty now, but there’s something oddly satisfying about having them, regardless. Even getting shouted at for a failure of a system that I’m now responsible for (but wasn’t when the problem occurred) was vaguely enjoyable. I found that quite surprising. I also find that I get great satisfaction from finding better ways to do things, and fixing processes. In normal life, this urge has been manifested in a desire to switch everyone to Firefox, which hasn’t always been popular; but people are far more interested in your meddling when you’re offering to optimise something they’re paid to do every day.

Amongst the downsides to a proper, nine to five job are the trains. In the past, I’ve avoided peak hour, and now I find that peak hour is doing its darndest to avoid me. Cancellations, late trains, full trains, slow trains, trains with sick people on them, trains stopped because of suicidal gymnasts… Give me another month, and I shall be that horrid person writing incessantly to the Mx about how crap everything about our public transport is.

Meanwhile, my disturbing myspace dalliance has been all but supplanted by facebook. Draggable modules. Tagging photos. Interactions with ma.gnolia, last.fm and picnik. It appeals to almost every aspect of my web-nerd psyche. However, occasional reviewer (sob) Andy Cocker still scorns my interest in social websites.

In atypicalreview.com’s future, I see more Who reviews, a late Spider-Man 3 review, a brief rant on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and a new writer’s take on the best 10 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I find the time.

327

This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Thursday, May 31st, 2007. It concerns such pressing issues as , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

11 Responses to “The Experiment”


  1. Chris
    May 31st, 2007 at 9:17 am

    yay job.don’t limit yourself to a brief rant about pirates 3. it deserves all your anger. and more.bah.


  2. hayko
    June 1st, 2007 at 7:06 pm

    some here describe it as ‘one of top 10 not to be missed’ – so i’d definitely enjoy a detailed ‘tom’-review as well.

    finding better ways to do things is very fun. if they actually get put to work and don’t die at the hands of a boss (we’ve always done it this way) or an admin (i’m just a network admin, it’s not my job to improve things).

    so what are the appeals in social websites? perhaps we should move this last point to private icq.


  3. Jack
    June 2nd, 2007 at 8:32 am

    I suspect he cares nothing for the ‘social’ aspects of such sites but secretly loves the underlying technology, and the sexy front-ends. Obviously I’m not talking about MySpace. Nothing pleases Tom more than a elegant interface. I can’t prove any of this.


  4. Tom
    June 2nd, 2007 at 7:49 pm

    Jackson is right to an extent. The coolness of having last.fm and ma.gnolia (and atypicalreview.com, through its rss feed) interacting with facebook amuses me deeply. However I also like, in this case, using a platform with lots of friends on it. Normally, there’s 2 — Andy and Jackson — and they stop using it after a bit. With facebook there are 29 people that I genuinely know, which is kind of cool, and makes everything a bit more interesting.


  5. hayko
    June 3rd, 2007 at 8:10 pm

    yes, so what holds this site from growing weary and unused soon? i won’t go through facebook to find atr blogs & such.


  6. Tom
    June 3rd, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    This is my favouritest site. Age shall not weary it, nor the years condemn. It’s not dying any time soon, though it is sadly becoming very Tom-centric these days.


  7. Chris
    June 7th, 2007 at 5:51 am

    FACEBOOK IS SATAN.SATAN, I TELL YOU>


  8. Tom
    June 11th, 2007 at 6:50 am

    Is not.


  9. hayko
    June 28th, 2007 at 6:56 am

    Darn, now my possibly best line of review is gone, too! Life just ain’t fair.


  10. Tom
    June 28th, 2007 at 7:57 am

    It was something along the lines of “you would have fallen asleep if the camera wasn’t moving so much.” A terrible loss.


  11. hayko
    June 30th, 2007 at 8:50 pm

    At least that paraphrase actually is a one-liner now.

↑
↓