January 2, 2003

The year begins :p

First of all, a very happy New Year to all who read this page – all three of you :p My New Year has really started off nice – NOT! Yesterday being the first day of the New Year, my boss wants to have an executive committee meeting and I am a member of the executive committee (or the EXCO for short). The EXCO is basically a set of people who are supposed to be the top-level administrators in our company and all of us report directly to the managing director – who will be referred to as "the boss" from now onwards.

Of course, here I have to step back a bit and recount something that happened last year for it any of what will follow to make any sense. Last year, around the time I was trying to get to the US, the boss and I had a major row. He has this habit of trying to get people to do their work by intimidating them and while I normally simply ignore his tactics, he got to be be a bit obnoxious in his verbiage in front of others and I simply retorted back. So basically, we ended up screaming at each other back and forth in front of the whole office for a few minutes. I did apologize to him before I left for the US and he seemed to be OK at that time. On my return however, he calls me into his room and I realize that he’s been brooding about the whole thing and that he wasn’t happy with what happened. I was proven right because he tells me that because of what happened, that he’s losing his authority because he feels that anybody will think that they can scream at him now. But actually what it boiled down to was the fact that he was afraid that nobody would be afraid of him now since I showed that I wasn’t really scared of him or of him firing me. So I told him that if he wasn’t happy with what happened, he could fire me and that I would leave. Of course, he didn’t like that either since that would make him look like a petty, vindictive guy. So he basically told me to be careful and it seemed to end at that.
However, it looks as if it hasn’t ended there after all – did anybody think it would? :p He starts talking about performance reviews at the EXCO meeting yesterday and tells me that I have not been doing too well with the newspapers. So I asked him what was wrong. He says that the page that we are doing is not interesting enough. So I tell him that it is about the (now stopped) war and the peace process and it was hardly possible to jazz it up since that would trivialize the issue. To which he responds that he is more aware of the seriousness of the issue than I but that I’m not doing a good enough job. So I asked him what I could do to make it more interesting as he claims. Of course to that there was no answer. He did take away responsibility for the newspapers from me (leaving me with no defined job for the moment) and gave it to somebody else. The meeting ended there but it looks to me as if the writing’s on the wall since he was also talking about letting people go since the company has too many employees :p

I’m waiting for his next move to see what it will be but my friend Robin and I discussed it yesterday after the meeting (Robin is part of the EXCO too incidentally) and he wanted to know if I wanted an educated guess as to how soon I’ll get fired and I said that it would probably be within the week and Robin says maybe sooner :p So that’s where it stands at the moment. I’m not really worried about it except to wonder about the level of professionalism in the company when the boss acts like a little spoilt kid. Oh well … stay tuned for the next episode I guess :p

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Posted by Fahim at 11:42 am  |  2 Comments

My efforts at site redesign still continue :p I’d give you a link to a sample but I don’t like the way the original layout turned out and would rather wait till I can get the second effort up today with the actual look I wanted. I’ll probably go back and redo bits of the layout but working in layers in PhotoShop has it’s advantages in that that I don’t have to redo all of my work – just certain bits 🙂 I’ve actually been enjoying my work in PhotoShop – it’s different from coding but gives you the same kind of satisfaction when something comes together just the way you wanted it. Of course, my problem usually is that I can imagine it but don’t have enough graphics knowledge to implement it :p Oh, I just realized why my layout doesn’t look the way I wanted it to – and now I realized why I can’t do it that way and retain a good HTML page which works at all resolutions :p Ah well, I still don’t know if it’s any good but I’ll be interested in your reactions when I can put up the next test page today …

In the meantime, I’ve also been turning over the idea of doing some PHP-based behind the scenes manipulation to let users choose different colored variations of the same style for the site. The code is definitely doable (heck other people are doing it :p) but I realized that at least one of the mirror sites would have to run off one of the other servers because it doesn’t have PHP installed on it. The problem there is that if the server with PHP were to be offline, the mirror server would not display the page properly either – unless I put in some sort of mechanism in place for that eventuality too. That seems to complicate things but I guess I should first get the layout out, then look into theme switching and then worry about using that on all of my sites :p

As for actual coding on Scope, Blog or BlogMan, I’m afraid that I’ve done nothing :p I still think there is some sort of a problem in my migration to Delphi 7.0 but can’t put my finger on it. I need to work on it but at the moment the call of PhotoShop is greater and so bear with me while I get PhotoShop out of my system and get back to coding :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:40 am  |  6 Comments