Ethics in business

Consider a hypothetical situation.

Imagine you had been asked to provide a test manager type resource to an organisation. You provided one of your most experienced staff members, then looked to backfill (as that person performed other tasks). You found a suitably experienced resource and started bringing them in.

What if the real true blue Aussie company, say, oh I don't know a Christmas Catalogue company, decided that the resource you had presented wasn't appropriate. The company might suggest that your person didn't offer the right 'cultural fit', and that they had come to that decision in 2 or 3 hours of your person being there. What if the person you had put forward had genetics based around the asian region? What if you suspected this company of being racist? What would you do? Would you find someone else? Would you tell them to stick their tinned meat products and cheap festive garb up their comfortable white blinkered behind, or would you try and educate them? Or would you kowtow to them?

While this is of course a hypothetical situation I certainly want to strive for only working with ethical companies. The rational arguments against discriminative behaviour far outweigh any emotional argument for. After all, if we were truly racist, wouldn't we send the entire population of immigrants (even the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th generations) back to Europe and leave it for the indiginous population.

Anyway, like I said, this is all hypothetical, but inspired by a news article that surprised me regarding the number of death threats Obama gets per day.

iTunes images and xml files

ARGH. Been trying to organise my iTunes collection especially as I've had a few dramas with the storage of the music.

- had a harddisk crash on a PC with 3 drives. 2 set up RAID1 whilst OS (Ubuntu) running on 3rd. Fortunately it was the OS drive that crashed, but I had to rebuild that to get to the music.
- had a second disk crash. This time, one of the RAID drives. PC wouldn't boot either, random beeps on boot during POST, graphics card not working, seating of memory affecting it sometimes, plus OS had crashed again.
- Moved to NAS. Working ok, except by trying to clean up what I had, I somehow deleted some of the album covers.
- downloaded icoverart. This allowed me to list and identify the tracks with missing artwork.
- After sorting out 1000's of songs, iCoverArt complains about some tracks yet the image shows in iTunes.
- It looks like I have an Album art folder on the NAS and one locally. And I'm guessing they don't match. Some of the missing art from an iCoverArt perspective is visible in iTunes.
- Now trying to look at iTunes XML file and work out how the persistent ID is used to find an image file.
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- Oh, its that simple. The persistent ID is the suffix to the library identifier. Just a search reveals which hex labelled folder has the ITC file. I was trying to work out if some AND op on the persistent ID and the library ID revealed the directories that the image file is in.

Anyway, iCoverArt is working pretty well to help identify and search for album artwork, along with http://www.coverhunt.com/ and http://www.discogs.com/

It's on, it's off

So perhaps I counted my chickens. The contract fell through, which is a shame after having 4 different parties interested. C'est la vie. Hopefully the open home on Saturday will keep the momentum going.

SOLD!

Well would you believe it; the house is under offer, and pending building and pest reports will be sorted in 35 days. It would be good to be able to move on and not have to worry about having to deal with someone I can't trust, and I'm not talking about the real estate agent.

If anything Dale deserves a medal for getting such a decent photographer round for the house, doing such a good write up, and acting as an independent voice of reason during discussions with Cathy.

There is still an open home this week, so I have to iron the doona and get the fire going for the morning, and hopefully it might continue the interest there has been in the house; it's nice to keep the momentum.

On other fronts, I've got a Bluetooth mouse that works very well thank you very much, and England have one the first test at Lords. Bit of a good day all round really. Just a pity I noticed a pair of my suit trousers seem a little bit tighter around the waist . . . .