The weather was shit so I spent most of the day relaxing and playing Fallout 3 with intermittent visits off my dad and grandparents. We went out for dinner in the evening to Mr Chows where I had Prawn Dumplings, Won Ton and Vegetable Curry Parcels to start, Chilli Prawns and Sizzling Chicken in Ginger and Spring Onion for mains (yes… two mains and I ate the lot), then finished the whole thing with Banana Fritters! A couple of TsingTao beers in the mix and I was a well fed and suitably merry chap!

Amy got me a Nintendo DS cake and a monkey shaped pinata called Morris. Fortunately for Morris, he’s too cute to hit with a stick, so I’m going to be performing surgery on him later to extract his sweet candy…

All in all a good birthday… no norebanging this year, but a great birthday none the less!

It would be fair to say for the most part my employment now feels like a waste of 2 years of my life. And like an abused spouse, looking back I wish I’d have escaped my tormentor earlier and can now see it for the twisted, one sided relationship it’s been.

Sure, I’ve actually learnt a lot in this role, but nothing of any substance I wouldn’t have got in a proper development role. I’ve even had to pay for my own MCTS exams (another false promise) once I’d gained the relevant skills (again, rather than the courses the company promised to send me on so a 2 week training course has taken 2 years of hacking and giving me dribs and drabs to achieve).

I was also promised frequent bonuses once I was working full time in Software Development. The only one I have received is tainted with lies and deceit involving me working 80 hours outside of my contractual employment to ensure a clients booking system would be live for the New Year.

Having gone to extra lengths to ensure Amy was supported at home with Ethan and call in a few favours from relatives, I pulled out a weeks worth of all nighters and a weekend of working my arse off for the promise of £1000 cash. I delivered my part yet thanks to a mixture of terrible client management and idiotic bumbling from an overpaid, under qualified Senior Engineer, they ensured the system wasn’t able to be handed over to the client (although finished) and the company tried to weasel out of my bonus on a technicality. They eventually did pay up, but not without general douchebaggery of finalising at paying 75% of the bonus ‘gross’. I ended up after taxes, National Insurance and a massive student loan overpayment thanks to the ridiculous way they calculate what you pay, with a cash value of around £350. Well below minimum wage for the extra hours I put in and a complete slap in the face for my efforts.

My Little Big Boss said through gritted teeth whilst handing over the cheque, “we’re paying you this to put a line underneath it so we can all move on”. In other words we know we’ve fucked you over and because we never agreed anything in writing, there’s nothing you can do about it. More fool me, perhaps, but my business relationship still had a little smidgin of trust at this point…

After this meeting I told the company I would never work above and beyond my 40 hours a week and the relationship has been tainted ever since. To add insult to injury, months later when the project did go live, I had to do nothing to when we flicked the switch, proving categorically everything I’d said was correct. We even got a massive amount of praise for the system after the client saw an increase in conversions and took over £50k online in just over 10 days, something they’ve never done even in peak season.

Idiotically this wasn’t the final straw for me; having worked for the most part of the two weeks I had booked off whilst Mike and the guys were over from Canada (again, the company abusing the informal verbal agreements I’d had), I battled on, believing yet more lies of change and a better future.

The last two straws were simultaneous; one positive, one negative. After getting wind of some cheap MCTS exams from a good buddy of mine, I decided to give them a shot one way or another. I presented it to the company that they should be footing the bill and my requests were fobbed off, then ignored. I was told I would be asked to come in for a chat the following week and it never materialised

Ironically, upon passing the first exam and swanning around the office somewhat pleased with my own achievement, I was asked in for a chat and the apologies started. “I thought we were going to have a chat about these…” yadda, yadda, yadda. I said I couldn’t wait and paid for them myself. No offer of retribution, reimbursement or future planning for ones I might want to take in the future, just a well done and an awkward glance of a man knowing I was now in a position to demand more money. The cake was another lie.

In the similar period it was announced that we had a new Operations Manager. Something positive? No. Not at all. Rather than take the best engineer we had for the job and promote them, we transformed the job of a part time, non technical account manager give them the role instead. Still part time. Utterly clueless when it comes to scheduling the work and you know, being an all round Operations Manager.

Operations management is an area of business concerned with the production of goods and services, and involves the responsibility of ensuring that business operations are efficient in terms of using as little resource as needed, and effective in terms of meeting customer requirements. It is concerned with managing the process that converts inputs (in the forms of materials, labour and energy) into outputs (in the form of goods and services).

How can an Operations Manager do this job without a fundamental understanding of the resources they are trying to minimise the use of? I’ll tell you how…

You tell the OM a time-scale you need to complete a project, baring in mind the engineers here are already overworked and under compensated, then they multiple the figure by a factor of less that one depending on how little the actually understand the task you are going to be doing.  The higher the complexity, the more likely you are to end up with a lower number.

Having watched this happen first hand and seen the utter, utter despair in the engineers eyes when his on site server rebuild and system role out was changed from 3 days to 2, plus the travel and preparation being allocated to his own time, the penny finally dropped. There was no delicious cake. It was all just a series of lies intended to keep us all hungry, but with the baking close enough to smell so you believe one day it could be true.

Maybe it is callow of me to think otherwise, but if this is business, it can go fuck itself… I’d rather be unemployed!

That is all!

One of my passions in life is cooking. It doesn’t mean I’m any good at it, or have any delusions of Grandeur when I’m in the kitchen, I just enjoy experimenting in there. Today was one of those days…

Having lived in Korea for just over 7 months of my life, Mike and I ate a lot at a little place called Gimbap Chonguk. It was basically a Korean “fast food” franchise that specialised in fresh Gimbap (Korean equivalent of sashimi, I guess, would be a close approximation. Nore, rice and a “cooked” sandwich type filling instead of raw fish. My personal favourite was tuna) and inexpensive yet nutritious meals. One of my most ordered dishes was Cheesu Donkas.

Basically, its a pork cutlet and a piece of cheese, coated in breadcrumbs and deep fried. Its served with a sweet and sour-esce sauce, rice and a side salad. It’s awesome. It’s also really easy to make so I thought I’d share how!

Ingredients (Donkas)
1 Pork Fillet
Cheese Slices
2 Slices of bread
Corn Flour
2 Eggs

Optional to season the coating
Garlic Salt
Black Pepper
Coriander
Sesame Seeds

Ingredients (Sauce)
Tomato Ketchup
Tomato Purée
Soy Sauce
Sugar
Salt and Pepper

Right, start by ripping up your bread and tossing it in a blender. Bung in the rest of the things on the list, and anything else that you think might work. If you want to kick it up a notch I recommend some Cayenne Pepper to get some subtle heat into the coating - I usually do this if I’m making spicy mozzarella bites and I can imagine in a Donkas it’d work well. Fresh coriander also works well. Blitz them up so you have some loose breadcrumbs.

Next you need to bash the shit out of that pork fillet with a rolling pin so its nice and flat. The first image is a prime example of why it needs to be thin; it needs to cook through quickly and there seemed to be a fine line between the oil being too hot and browning the coating too quickly and it being too cool which causes the cheese to pour out and go mental in the oil. A professional would be able to tell you the ideal temperature (but that’s not me…)

Once the fillets looking good, you need a cheese slice or two and mirror the fillet with it. I’d recommend putting a bit more in the middle of the fillet so as it melts, it spreads throughout the donkas. I’m sure you could use any cheese but standard burger slices work well as they cling to the pork better.

Next, coat the pork cheese with the cornflour. Rub it in so it’s nice and smooth and all over both sides. Then, dip in the whisked up egg and into the breadcrumbs. It doesn’t need a major coating, just ensure the cheese side is fully coated. Now we’re ready for deep frying!

The ideal temperature for the oil is cooler than what you would use for chips. I use a chip pan on an electric hob and normally it would be between 5 and MAX for chips, I found donkas needed to be on 3. Make of that what you will.. I recommend a few trials with a little offcuts!

If the oil is just right, the cheese will start to seep out just as it hits cooking perfection. Whip it out and pat it down with a bit of kitchen paper, plating up with rice.

The sauce is just a pan, a blob of ketchup, a squirt of purée, a dash of soy sauce and a sprinkling of sugar. Stir and season to taste, then pour over the cooked donaks and boom… she’s done.

Plated up it would normally come with a side salad of finely chopped cabbage, sweetcorn and a blob of thousand island sauce but I didn’t have the cabbage in the fridge. The results were delicious!

It took me three attempts to get the oil right, and I put the large cutlet in the oil a little tentatively but cutting into the donkas, the results spoke for themselves. Just as I remembered it!

I also whipped up Amy some Cheesu Ramen too… another of Mikes favourites, and a few mozzarella bites (Amy lived on these in Korea) on the side seen as we had left over breadcrumbs.

All in all it was a successful day of experimental Korean cooking and Cheesu Donkas is definitely on the menu in the future!

And speaking of games, I officially broke the Achievement Point 40k barrier whilst baby and mother slept, proving that my addiction to gaming can officially withstand the birth of a child. But of the games I’ve played, a few minor summaries would be:

Civilization Revolut’n : Awesome… buy it now!

FIFA Street 3 : Annoying but fun in brief periods

Bee Movie™ Game : Surprising deep for a movie game, great game engine

Virtua Tennis 3 : Brought back memories of the Dreamcast because this game could be called Virtua Tennis 2+, Now with New Douchebags

Beautiful Katamari : Great but very, very cheap of Namco to rerelease a PS2 version and then nickle and dime XBL for the new levels…

SEGA Superstars Tennis : Frustrating as hell yet sometimes brilliant…

EA SPORTS FN 3 : Give Me Geekpoints… not a bad game though… worth a play through

LEGO® Indiana Jones™ : Amy liked this a lot more than I did in Co-op mode… I found myself getting annoyed with her wandering off…

Battle for the Pacific : Wank… and I still completed it…

LEGO Star Wars: TCS : Completely cheap if you’ve already played through Star Wars II as its just bolted that onto the first three chapters

Top Spin 2 : Meh…

Halo 3 : Eventually played through the entire game on Normal after beginning it on Legendary and after a few Near Joypad Destruction Experiences, reduced the difficultly to Heroic, then down again to Normal….

NHL 2K6 : Fucking game… I did the damn score a penalty achievement on All Star and I didn’t give me the achievement!

I also got my ass down to Morrisons today in my lunch break, to get Viva Pinata : Trouble in Paradise. Normally I would be ashamed to step foot in a Morrisons but for this week only they have all the Top 10 games for X360 and PS3 for £25, most Wii games for £15 (including Mario Kart with Wheel) and DS games for £12.

Other than looking after baby and gaming though, I haven’t been up to a great deal… a bit of Nintendo DS demo coding to show potential employers, some humorous eBaying and some grilling in the rain. Nothing exciting really!

This update was more to make sure I could still log into my blog than anything else…

It came as no surprise though, and had I not have signed a Non Disclosure Act with the company until the game had been released, I could’ve told you this 18 months ago. You see I interviewed with Ninja Theory back in January ‘07 and after being definitively bored by there technical wankery of the PS3, I turned down the chance to work on Heavenly Sword in favour of eating my own fist more money at my previous employer.

* I can see you wondering whats brought me to talk about this today, so it was this post on UK:R about Games 100 best games of all time.

Anyway, I knew they weren’t for me within the first 5 minutes of the interview, when they questioned the “favourite games” section of my CV. My choice of Shenmue was almost mockingly scoffed at, like I knew nothing about gaming and had picked some 2 week old title like GTAIV…

In fact, fuck them… looking back they were mocking it, the cunts!

Unsurprisingly the interview progressed to them talking about Heavenly Sword and what type of game it was. My comment of “so its a bit like Golden Axe then with only the female character to select from?” didn’t go down particularly well but ironically, I was completely right… it is a fucking hack ‘n slash after all. Nothing more, nothing less… it just looks “pretty” and cost £24.9mil more than it’s 1989 arcade father.

I also came out the interview feeling slightly violated after they jotted down my ideas furiously like I was the fucking Dali Lama of Video Game Design. I’ve not played HS so I can’t comment if any of my input translated to the game but whatever. I’m sure something from that free labour brain storming session we had got brought up elsewhere.

Anyway, back to what I wanted to discuss and that was the Top 100 Greatest Games of all time, not according to Game or the children they had participate (seriously, the winners idea of the best game being Killzone induced coffee being spat on my monitor in a definite WTF moment). I just want to make a few points for future lists so they get a little bit closer to the mark:

• Anything in a Greatest X list has to be more than three years old. In video gaming I’ll let this slip to 12 months at a push, but titles that fall into this category had better be fucking amazing.
• Just because Sega don’t have a current gen console, doesn’t mean you can forget about their games. This also counts for Lucas Arts (they did more than Monkey Island) in the software platform.
• Arcade games count so stop leaving them out
• If the list doesn’t have Castlevania Symphony of the Night on it, it instantly fails

Call of Duty 4 is good, but above Zelda Ocarina of Time… you’re having a laugh aren’t you?!

• Updated my sites to the latest revisions in Fantango - I haven’t touched Oh For Fucks Sake yet though for fear of breaking it after it failed on another Drupal site
• Post a blog on OhFFS about Norton Internet Security and how wank it is…
• Wrote the following complaint letter to Kenco in an attempt to get free coffee out of them:

Just wanted to register my dissatisfaction with the sachet sizes for Kenco based products. I wouldn’t say the cups we use at our company are too large, in fact I would argue they were slightly below the “national average” yet the colour and flavour provided by a single use sachet was less than required to make the perfect cup of delicious Kenco goodness.

They come as a massive disappointment given their obvious benefits that the sealed retention of flavour gives as we often find ourselves using a 3 for 2 ratio to get adequate flavour and strength into our mugs. The coffee inside is always delicious, we just thought you should consider reviewing the portion sizes..

40 minutes to go….. for fucks sake… GTA4 better be awesome…

If you live in the Fylde area, starting next Tuesday we are running a games night in our local that everyone is welcome to. We had a dry run this week and although there were only 4 people involved playing repeatedly, some of the regulars even had a go on PGR4 and the SWOS mini league we had got a few older players interested. I think in future, once I actually take Rock Band down too, the night will become quite awesome!

 New posters coming today so the starting date is the 18th and every alternate week from then. We’re doing a quiz on the other Tuesdays which is also going to be fun!

Does it mean I’ll be back to posting more regularly? I doubt it but the thought is there if nothing else!

And on the back of that, today I got reprimanded for my persistent tardiness even though I never take a lunch, and on the back of the comments I’ve been leaving on my job sheets he was pissed off. Apparently it was an inappropriate outlet for my grievences and I should have approached him directly and am never forced into working my lunch (bullshit).

I wouldn’t mind so much but I’ve tried that already after approaching our supposed manager of scheduling about the extra hours I’ve been doing and never getting a lunch break and he said and i quote:

“I understand what you are saying about lunch breaks, I too find it difficult to step away from the desk to take a meaningful break. It requires a different type of discipline to detach from what you are doing especially in lieu of the deadlines we have to achieve. When you work it out let me know!”

Which is typical of the weasily little fucker he is, completely avoiding my questions and point and making some arbitrary comment that is utterly meaningless. This cunt is the reason our companies going down the swanny too… he has an “office” in the south yet works on his own and could do his job from home. I’m sure it’s really hard to have a lunch break when other people aren’t relying on your help… douchebag.

“When I work it out”. When I fucking quit more like…

My main boss also justified my shitty lunch setup by using my tardiness as a “swings and roundabouts” linchpin. Good one, dickhead… so if I was coming in on time every day for my Gold Star I would be getting my full one hour lunch break? Would I fuck, so don’t try and give me such bullshit.

I mean don’t get me wrong, if I had my own company and persistently saw a member of staff coming in 10 minutes late I would address it too, but 10 minutes of early morning work time vs. one hours worth of lunch break are in no way a “swings and roundabouts” trade off. Hows about we look at the average hours a month I’m working compared to what I’m being paid for. Lets deduct my lateness minutes and then add on the amount of times I’ve stayed late without even a whimper of complaint and see whether I’m the one taking the piss or is it you?

Bosses… why does a position of authority go to everyones head and you instantly have to become a prick?!

Oh, and whilst I’m on the subject of piss taking… wheres my fucking Christmas Bonus?? Nice lies people… nice lies..