information, by hook or by crook

[sergebroom]

At last. Once a month, our team receives many feeds from other groups within the company. For most of them, our automated processes simply take the feeds and upload them into our database. There is one group though that could charitably be describes as a cauldron seething with awesome incompetence. Almost every month, we've had to manually upload corrections to their information, before we could process the feed. Still, in spite of this monthly cleanup, they managed to let a lot of garbage thru. A project was established for us to do one FINAL cleanup, going as far back as 4 years ago. This is what I spent the previous 2 weeks of my life on, and so did our user I was doing this with, preparing and testing a very lonnnnnnng script. The script has now run, and I'm certain that some minor tinkering will be needed on Monday. Mind you, that is probably what the higher-ups will focus on, not the tens of thousands of fixes that will have functionned perfectly. I guess I'll then fantasize about resigning, until I remember what happens to those who resign:

Comments

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Any of them drive a British-racing-green Lotus?

(I've been to The Village. It was SO COOL.)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I hope not. They have Rover so I should be the one with the cool car.

So you've been to the Village? What is it like? My understanding is that the buildings's scale is a bit smaller than 'real' buildings are. The closest way I can envision it is DisneyLand. Kind of an evil DisneyLand, I guess. No matter what, it sounds neat.

By the way, did you ever watch Secret Agent? No, I'm not asking because of the obvious link between the two series. One of the episodes of Secret Agent, titled Colony Three, was about Drake winding up in a modern British village, one with the peculiarity that it was located in the middle of the Soviet Union, and it served as a training ground for communist agents who eventually would go on to the real thing.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

The building that's Number Two's house is only one room deep. It has the facade of a mansion but it's really only four rooms.

The rest of it didn't seem all THAT tiny. I was there 20 years ago, some of my memory is sketchy.

They had a Lotus parked there. No Rover.

I joined the fan society (Six of One) for a year. Interesting stuff on derived chronological order of the episodes from internal evidence as opposed to airing order. Also, suppliers listed for weather balloons, and the warning that they were not very durable when used as Rover.

I never did see Secret Agent.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

You've never seen Secret Agent, which is also known as Danger Man? You might want to put that on your NetFlix queue - if you have one, of course. It was really quite good, and had more to do with John Le Carré's world of spies than with James Bond.

As for the scale of the Village's buildings, I may be the one misremembering. It's been years since I've watched the series. I should go thru the DVD set (as soon as my darn laptop decides it'll work as well at home as it does at the office) and see if I'll notice any odd scale. Of course, this time, I'd watch it not in the order in which they were aired, but in one of the proposed alternate orders: the one I had come across had been proposed by the show's host when it ran on the Bay Area's PBS station KTEH, and was based, if I remember correctly, on the Prisoner's attitude - more confrontational at first, but eventually appearing to be more pliable.

About Rover... My understanding is that the original Village guardian was an actual machine on wheels and such, but that it was quite a pain to control and that it fell into the sea. Then someone had the brilliant idea of using a balloon.

Meanwhile, I wonder what's going on with the 6-episode series that was going to have Christopher Eccleston as the Prisoner.