Looks like I am going to be stuck on this new Letter Ops project, as a full time resource. Co-located in the 'other' building, Trent House. The one that everyone was rumouring would be turned into cinema if we all get outsourced. Which y'know, we're obviously not going to be. Because the rumour about 'Project Blue' (IBM! We all shouted.) got out, and then the powerpoint decks pretty much confirming it got out, and then a big ol' meeting was held where the senior management vehemently denied it all, with copies of the presentation slides without the 'preferred solution' watermarks on.
Anyway, Letter Ops. Good idea for a project, really – our snailmail spamfactory is ridiculously inefficient, and considering how much of it we generate, that's not a good thing. Now, everyone has had some vapid nonsense come through their letterbox from my employers, and there's actually a very complicated cross-selling and targeting or 'customer base segmentation' system underneath all that tat. Cap One pride themselves on the sheer amount of customer data they have, and hooboy, there's a lot of it. Reported on daily, sequenced and indexed and prepped for spamfactory loading. Hee hee hee, spam. It's not really that funny, is it. I can't stand the stuff, but for some companies, it just works. New system will replace current UNIX batch processing of mahoosive files with sensible Oracle based letter/mail merge. Probably going to require some heavy iron to live on, which is where I'll get interested. At least, the test/dev versions anyway. More as/if/when it happens.
Cheerfully, my girlfriend and I have found somewhere to live. After a series of variable disappointments of accomodation, we stumbled into a property across the road from another one we hadn't really been too keen on before. It was less shoddy, had 3 bedrooms and a huge kitchen. It's pretty much ours now, which is a great big relief.
LiveJournal has mysteriously become un-blocked by work's web filtering, so I can post/read there too now. I think I'll keep this going. Apologies for the colour scheme, incidentally – I canne change it, captain.
