My employer is in the news again, this time in the Australian Financial Review. And it seems for us that any publicity is bad publicity. Key quotes from the article:

• Defence officials say ADI's performance has been "appalling" and that the FFG upgrade is among the worst-performing contracts being managed by the revamped Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO).
• Senior navy officials have told Australian Financial Review that they are "fed up" with ADI and are concerned about the availability of the upgraded FFGs for deployment.
• Defence remains uncertain about the reliability of new combat system software.
• DMO chief Stephen Gumley blamed the 2.5 year delay on "technical difficulties greater than we expected" and agreed that "the highest risk area" was now software and integration.
• "It obviously proved to be much more complicated than the parties appreciated," Senator Hill said.

Other work stuff (speaking of farcical)

This week I've spent 2.5 days checking out every file, adding a one line comment to the top and bottom, then checking it back in again. It's highly challenging work, but I guess that's why I'm on the big bucks. Oh, hang on.

Every time anyone checks in a file, each tech lead gets an email with the reason for the check-in. One of the tech leads arrived at work this morning to find 6000 unread emails. Ha. There's plenty more where that came from...

The rest of the time I'm rewriting a large section of code that was originally written by someone who doesn't work here anymore. The funny thing is that she was here about 2.5 years, yet in only 3 months we have almost finished purging all her code from the project. The not so funny thing is that she was on the big bucks that we all aspire too.

This Friday we're having a compulsory whole company meeting from 12 until 2. Lunch is not provided. Perhaps we're all getting sacked. As we all know from the movie Office Space, Friday is the best day for sacking people.

Wedding stuff

It's almost all organised. We've had a meeting with the photographer to discuss details. No problems there. We also had a meeting with the DJ to discuss music. I went in with an expectation that I would lose any discussion that took place, and I was right. It's just unfortunate that my taste in music would probably scare some of the older guests.

I did win on one point though - Dido's Thankyou will not be used as one of our departure songs. That song always reminds me of getting depressed and angry and driving off a bridge.

I was quite pleased at myself for putting off booking a hire car for the honeymoon. It seems that the later you leave it, the cheaper it gets. Now we will be driving a nice new Camry instead of a Corolla, and it will cost us less.