People I know and Like(?)

Quite a lot has happened in and around my little blogosphere in the last few months.

Back in February I mentioned the development blog of my friend, ex-colleague and ex-house-mate, James (Jay) Field's work for his Interactive Media MA project "Frontier".
Frontier is a massively multiplayer online game that Jay is building in Flash. The blog has gone a bit quite at the moment since he was made senior lecturer at the Hull School of Art and Design.


iheartspaceships
Nearly a year and a half ago, Ryan and Andy bought a domain name and said they were going to produce a blog. Yesterday they launched "a day early".

Ryan is a Flash Developer here at twentysix Leeds and works across many large brands on both web and AIR based Flashieness.

Andy is our UI Developer working on many of the same clients and projects but does miraculous things with JavaScript and CSS.

Hopefully they'll have some interesting thoughts soon over at iheartspaceships.com


niid.to
About a month ago James and Tom C left twentysix Leeds to persue a life of love and freedom as freelance developer and designer respectively. Amongst various freelance work that they won't tell us about they also founded niid.to, a social to do list and they have an accompanying blog over at http://niidto.blogspot.com/

26point1
Our Technical Director, Matt, used to run two blogs for the different types of nonsense he likes to spout off about. "matts 2 minute reviews" and "matts random days". Not that long ago, he merged them into one central repository of nonsense over at 26point1. Hop on over there to read about all kinds of rubbish, both technology-based and not...

Recruitment consultants are a special breed of idiot

Following up on Matt's article about recruitment consultants I want to rant about them myself!

Ten minutes ago I recieved an email from someone at Senitor offering me an excelent Desktop Support candidate.

Now, having nothing to do with desktop support as all our IT is provided by our parent group I wrote said recruitment consultant a polite but concise email stating that I am a web developer, I am only concirned with web development and that I wish to be removed from any mailing lists for IT Support staff, but that it was fine for them to keep emailing me about Flash or Web Development candidates they might have.

So two mins later I recieve my read-receipt and all is well. THEN, five minutes after that I get a phone call from some other chap at senitor saying he's just recieved word from this other chap (who I just emailed) saying that I'm looking for a freelancer and can he be of any help.

So I spent five minutes explaining what I had previously wrote in my email and then informed him that we are acutally looking for a Permanent Senior Flash Developer and that he could rind Matt about that.

He mumbled that one of collegues deals with permanent developers and said he would get him to ring through. The conversation ended.

Wonder if I'll get any more IT support emails from them, or maybe a freelance chef or a mechanic?

Good work recruitment consultants!

How many developers does it take to figure out some stats

Matt, Andy and Rich stress over some numbers

SQL Noise

Someone's going to be annoyed when they end up here looking for how to add "noise" to an SQL query.. oh well, sorry...

However, it is an appropriate title because after adapting Matt's SQL on FIRE, I truly feel I'm bringing the noise (to SQL [in my own little way])!

Today really is SQL Day 2008 (another dead end search result there! :)