I said I wouldn’t complain, but what the hell, it’s not like I’m going to devote the whole post to it. This 30-in-30 challenge is hard. When I started blogging I really thought I’d have all this cool stuff to say. Turns out I don’t.

I’m not going to broadcast my every thought on this blog (maybe I would have where it an anonymous blog) so that cuts out a lot of potentially amusing stuff. I don’t want an on-line diary (today I went to the shops and bought a box of Oatees, a frozen dinner and a box of Easter eggs …) and because I have put my name to my blog, I can’t blog indiscriminately about work colleagues or family. If any of these people were to find my blog they’d quickly realize I was talking about them / their aunt / their friend. I need to be happy to take full responsibility for what I write here, so I’m not going to exploit anyone else’s life or say nasty things about other people. A long story short, my blog idea pool is a bit shallow at the moment. I expect if I keep this up I will get better at generating ideas but in the meantime BlackMakros gave me a suggestion to use stumbleupon to help me find some ideas.

My third click today took me here:

http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/member/birthdayno1.php

I entered my birth day / month / year thinking that it’s unlikely that I’d even know the song or artist that was number one more than 28 years ago. I picked the UK link to honor my British heritage and what do you know? It brought up The Boomtown Rats – I don’t like Mondays. I love that song! It was soooo me in high school, a morbid teenager who hated Mondays something hectic. Still don’t like them much, but I’m less morbid these days. I love Fridays. I have a little song & dance I do on Friday mornings when I get in to the office, but I dropped the “kill-me-it’s-Monday” vibe a few years back. Still, I think the song rocks, and I’m so glad it’s my birthday song.

Hunny got Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen – not bad either.

I tried a couple of more recent dates – 1 Jan 2000, our wedding day in 2005, my last birthday – but nothing good came up.

The irony is, because of leap years I’ll be waiting until August 14 2017 before I actually have a birthday on a Monday again, but that’s cool. Monday birthdays suck.

If you are bored go check out the site & let me know what your song is …

I just completed my tax return. Yeah yeah, I know I’m cutting it fine, submissions must be in by Thursday. I really do have to commend the folk at SARS for their eFiling system. It works like a charm. I completed my tax return myself in less time that it would take me to drive to my (former) tax consultant. And I’m slow at these kind of things: I check and recheck everything several times. A good thing too, because I seem to have forgotten how to operate a calculator. I also say 5 at the same time as I write 3. Odd.

This is IT making a difference, and it’s really cool. It almost inspires me to get into IT. Oh wait, I am

On a related note we interviewed a candidate for a C++ developer role today. When I read her CV I though it odd that she’d want to move from where she was (SAP Admin) into C++ programming. To put it in less tech speak, that would be like moving from car sales into the workshop as a mechanic. Not a change someone would normally make. We went ahead with the interview anyway, she did okay, but she didn’t have any of the skills we needed. That was not surprising because she last did C++ at varsity and hasn’t coded at all in 18 months.

As we were wrapping up the interview she confessed that she thought she was there for a SAP Admin interview (makes sense – that’s what she’s been doing for the last 18 months). Somewhere between our HR department and the agency that submitted her CV they’d mistakenly submitted her CV to us as a C++ resource. The poor woman sat through the whole interview answering as best as she could and trying to sound keen on what we were offering. Considering that, she did a really good job. It doesn’t change the fact that it was a waste of her time and ours though.