Gary Sauer-Thompson argued that every photograph should tell a story. The photograph below doesn't so much tell a story as be a bored participant in one.

Like many people today I habitually work weekends - spending at the least a saturday morning catching up on work without the constant interruptions of email, phones, workmates etc. I enjoy it. And it has the added bonus of me being more productive for being able to focus on the tasks infront of me without concern for juggling five things at once.

Last week was July 4th; a large, raucous and sacrosanct American holiday. I worked on July 4th and as I was leaving at about 4pm I locked myself out of the office. I ended up phone a workmate who came in and unlocked the office door for me.

Not only did I feel stupid, to cap it off, he sat down and proceeded to work for a few hours. Such is the American working life. I felt bad for dragging him in, and then his taking advantage of being in the office to get some work done before heading off to celebrate July 4th fireworks.

The image was of the tiles on the second floor atrium in the office complex. I was bored while I was waiting and took some abstract happy snaps. The story isn't obvious in the photograph though.

Sometimes a working week can be summed up into a concise and simple symbol. In the case of this week it is the comma.

Javascript is exceptionally powerful for its object literal syntax and the ability to move functions into the scope of other objects. Where once I used to complain of it giving me a black lung, now I am appreciative of its features and capabilities.

We compress out javascript down into as small a file as possible. So javascript objects which are littered across multiple modules and loaded dynamically in a development environment are compressed into just a few javascript files for production.

Browsers, especially firefox, tend to be forgiving where javascript syntax is concerned. A trailing comma in an object in firefox and safari is ok. In Internet Explorer it is not. When compressing javascript down, other issues that are fine in a raw file, such as a conditional or going across multiple lines in an if conditional, cause the page to fail as the javascript cannot be compiled by the browser's javascript runtime.

At which point it becomes a pig in a poke. Especially in large software systems with numerous teams checking in code across multiple paths, modules, packages and products. This is when the work becomes laborious and syntax checked line by line by javascript lint checkers such as jslint and javascript lint.

This week we got an operation aborted error from IE7/IE6 in our project. The issue according to Microsoft's support website was that the DOM was being manipulated before it had been loaded into the browser. It was an indirection. The issue was syntax. The lesson from this week was lint check for semi-colons, brackets and trailing commas ruthlessly in Javascript code that is going to be compressed.

Westminster Wisdom makes a good connection between blogging and how people fit it in with work. Economic life dominates the majority of our day, currently I am in crunch, so it occupies nearly all my mental efforts and energies as well. As a consequence I often don't have time to jot down anything on this website or blog. This is despite my enjoyment at doing so. Gracchi writes:

[O]ne of the main conditions of modern life is tiredness. Not necessarily physical tiredness but mental tiredness. Much of what people do on the blogosphere is actually displacement activity - its an activity for their spare time and whilst they want their blogs to be good, they don't want to feel the pressure of being excellent and they don't want necessarily to be Newton on their blog when they have to be Boyle at work.

Work is the subject of our lives and so you would expect the internet, which is the activity of spare time, not to be as intense or powerful as working life.

The derivation from this is that for most people the internet is a light entertainment source, except of course, for those who can make a living out of it and throw their entire energies into internet publishing. I know my energies have diverted due to several changes in my life, and the energy I put into southsearepublic.org is no longer here in the camriley.com domain despite them now sharing an IP. Where once it was 4000 word political tracts, now it is a jot, a quote, a photograph, and occasionally a technical problem.