My Life

I’ve had what I thought was a cold for almost a week now. I say I thought it was a cold although I only had a sore throat. It was annoying but nothing more, but gradually it has got worse and worse until yesterday I was struggling to even drink water because it hurt so much. I’m never really one to go to the doctor but even I thought this was a bit odd so I’ve been working at home today and just spent the last 90 minutes or so in the doctor’s surgery. They had a poke around and decided after a fairly quick discussion that I have strep throat.

So now I am being dosed up on penicillin and they have sent a swab off just for confirmation. Hopefully it will get sorted out fairly quickly as I haven’t slept properly for a week now.

A friend was having their leaving do last night in the City, a night when every single person was trying to get into a bar or pub to watch the football. Luckily we managed to find a square inch to stand in and hold a beer or two or three or four and see the game. It’s always good fun when England score in such a packed environment, everyone just goes mad although they did keep us waiting.

Tonight is a traditional champagne and curry night (entering the sixth glorious year of these Domino team celebrations). So off to Tower 42, the Fishmarket and finally Brick Lane. Of course I’d love to be in Ireland for the ILUG today but with the new job couldn’t make it so this is a very nice substitute evening instead.

Good luck goes to Paul and all the rest of the stellar list of presenters today in Dublin. How Paul managed to get everyone together is a really impressive achievement, no doubt there will be stories a-plenty in the blogs over the next few days. They can only get better after the shocking photo of Bill that got released this morning.

We’ve just had the first really good weekend of the summer, unbroken sunshine and some properly warm temperatures. Of course we are not really set up to handle hot weather (or cold weather) and so everything breaks with the first hot day of the year. The office hasn’t got any air-con this morning, currently it is about 28 degrees in here (about 82 in old money), but luckily we can open the front door and get a few fans blowing to get some air movement.

It’s also traditional at this time of year for the trains to go belly up for a while, hopefully the "new" rolling stock won’t be quite as bad as before but it wouldn’t surprise me.

This is not to say I’m complaining, the weekend was about as perfect as you could wish for… hot weather, barbeques everywhere and as much sport on the TV as you can shake a stick at. Hugely relaxing just sitting in the garden with the portable TV in the shade, a few beers and England even winning in the football (we won’t mention the rugby).

Long may it last.

I haven’t spent this long working exclusively on a notebook for a long time, I had forgotten the impact it has on your back and neck when the screen is in the wrong position. In addition I have also been finding that the power management in Windows doesn’t play well with the MacBook so the case was getting extremely hot by the middle of the afternoon.

I was chatting with one of the guys in the office and he mentioned that you can get notebook stands which also have fans built into them, there was an old one lieing around unused and unloved in the office so I have nabbed it and been using it today, it makes a huge difference on both counts. So a big thumbs up goes out to the Notepal by Cooler Master. The heat problem is probably exacerbated by the MacBook but I think the stand will make a difference to anyone who uses a meaty notebook for extended periods, it’s got to the end of the day and most of the casing is actually cold rather than bordering on dangerously hot and my back doesn’t feel like I’ve been jumped up and down on all day!

I was up in Nottingham again this weekend to enjoy a trip to Trent Bridge and the third test between England and Sri Lanka. With all the rain we’ve been having recently I was fearing the worst but in the end both days of the weekend were just right. Saturday was scorching, but at least we could go inside, when we were in the stands on Sunday it would have been impossible to avoid the really serious sunshine (or rain if there were any) so overall it couldn’t have been better.

The cricket itself was pretty poor to be honest, Sri Lanka have got themselves into a position at the end of the third day where England need to post a record run chasing score and there are a few injuries to deal with as well. But the beauty of watching cricket is that there are always other things to see besides the sport. I think we were in the roudiest stand on Sunday with several stag parties all trying to out drink and out sing each other. Lots of beer was drunk (except by me unfortunately as I had to drive home last night), to the point where one guy who was three sheets to the wind twice tried to carry a tray of beers back to his seat but failed both times due to the barrage of things thrown at him by the rest of the croud. Very funny.

If you’re looking for a chilled day out there are not many better ways to go than a day at the cricket with a newspaper, a few drinks and good company.

It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on the scoreboard today to see if England pull the game back from the brink, I’d be very surprised but they have managed it in the past so we’ll keep the faith for the moment.

Well it’s almost a week into the new contract and so far things are looking good. I have never worked in a purely IBM shop before and it’s a very refreshing change with all of the latest versions of software being used from DB2 right up to Domino 7.0.1 on some of the servers. They’ve got me working on an interesting project which involves Web Services integration and PDF generation both of which are relatively new to me.

The environment is nice and relaxed and the rest of the guys on the floor have been very forgiving with all of my stupid new-boy questions. We’ll see how the social side is tomorrow night with a trip out to a pub or two.

Overall it’s good to be back doing what I enjoy in an environment which just lets you get on with it. And joy of joys I haven;t even encountered any politics (yet!).

To be honest I thought it would take somewhat longer to find a new contract but it’s always nice to be surprised. In total I’ve spent eight days looking and this morning I heard that one of the earlier contracts which I thought had gone were actually very keen to hire me. So a little bit of negotiation later (not much to be honest, the work seems pretty interesting) and we have an agreement. Everything is happening quickly now as they want me to start tomorrow, so I have to get my brain back into proper work mode, buy train tickets, iron shirts and exciting things like that.

I’ve really enjoyed not working for a while, it’s given me a much needed break, not because I was particularly tired but because I had been in the same job for a long time and things were beginning to get me down a little. Hopefully a new company, new colleagues and new projects will keep me reinvigorated. The only down side is that I had been making some real progress with my own applications and that’s going to slow down dramatically now. Still earning a little money after just spending (quite heavily) since March makes me feel a lot better!

I’ve spent the weekend up in Nottingham with Simon, Fiona and Elspeth. As usual we didn’t do a huge amount but caught up with each other and I got to spend a bit of “quality time” with my unfeasibly happy 10 month old neice. Unless she’s hungry or tired she’s just grinning or burbling away to whoever’s in the room, great fun to be around.

Of course we did find time to watch the FA Cup final which was a superb game of football, with six goals and a penalty shoot out. To try and assuage the guilt we did manage to put up a gate across the living room door so that Elspeth can’t escape now that she’s mobile, but to be honest it involved putting in about 12 screws and took 4 hours so we weren’t especially productive.

Overall an entirely chilled out weekend doing very little, a great way to spend a couple of days.

After a great and hugely relaxing few weeks away it’s back to the real world and thinking about finding some work.

So far I have sent my CV out to a few select recruitment agencies to see what sort of reaction I get. It’s an interesting process made somewhat easier by the fact that I can be quite picky about what work I accept as I can afford to wait for a job which is really appealling rather than just taking the first thing that comes along.

For obvious reasons I can’t post a huge amount about what’s happening so things are going to go silent here for a while, still keep the RSS reader subscribed and I’ll let you know when normal service will resume. In the meantime I’ll try and do a couple of SnTT posts (although probably not this week I’m afraid).

One of the other big bonuses at the moment is that I can enjoy the weather for a change, it’s been pretty good weather so far other than a bit of rain. Who needs holidays for a sun tan eh?

The journey was incredibly easy, I arrived home by 9:15 this morning and even managed a couple of hours sleep on the plane which is rare for me.

I am going through all of the ridiculous amount of post which has built up while I was away and got a nice surprise, my broadband has been upgraded to 8mb download and 500kb upload, I haven’t really tried anything yet but we’re getting into the realms of video streaming, certainly music downloads will be a lot faster now.

Now to try and stay awake until a reasonable time this evening to kill the jet lag.