My Life

I woke up to a couple of inches of snow this morning so decided to head out early as I was convinced the journey to work would be a problem. And yet I am here at the usual time. The roads to the station were pretty appalling, couldn’t go above 20mph as the gritters hadn’t been out but, shock and horror, the train was on time. Usually this sort of weather is the perfect excuse to have a 3 or 4 hour journey but credit where credit’s due, the train worked perfectly.

It’ll be interesting to see whether people who come in on other lines are as lucky as me.

The good day continues. I have just waved goodbye to my old car which, quite unbelievably, sold on eBay rather than the traditional methods. I think with transactions of this size a lot of the deal comes down to trust on the side of both parties but I think we are both happy with the deal and the buyer has just left in a spangly new (old) car.

I’m off to buy a lottery ticket now 🙂

Much to my surprise and largely, I suspect, to a very dedicated department manager my table and chairs have arrived this morning. After giving them up for a lost cause and starting the process of getting my money back from American Express, I got a call during the week from my new hero, Jan, who said she was fed up with not being able to help her customers so would I mind if she just sent the display furniture out to me. She was as good as her word and the delivery even arrived early.

After the week we’ve had at work some good news is a welcome change. The new project is growing at an alarming rate but the delivery date is not moving accordingly, but at least we have a project manager starting next week so maybe he’ll be able to tame the beast. To make things even harder we have been spending the last couple of days interviewing to get some help in. When you don’t interview for a while you forget how hard it is, not just for the interviewee but the interviewers as well. Out of 15 CVs we have interviewed 3 people and have some decisions to make over the weekend. The theory in Joel’s book is fine but putting it into practice properly is slightly harder.

Work over the last few days has been relentless as we are starting a new project. Another triumph for Domino over all-comers. This time we are going to be the lynch-pin of an enterprise compliance system incorporating elements of SQL Server, Captiva Document Scanning and a Mobius Document Management System.

It’s going to be a very challenging few months as, although no individual element of the project will be hard, there are a huge number of tasks to get done within extremely aggressive timescales for reasons which can’t be entered into here. Still it’s much better than not having anything to do and you never know, we may find somewhere to fit a Workplace server 🙂

After a week where everyone has been so upbeat it was a bit of a shock when I phoned Allders today to arrange the delivery of a dining table I had ordered with them. Unfortunately they have gone into administration so it doesn’t look likely that I’ll get my furniture.

It won’t be a problem for me, my card company will cover the loss but the poor lady on the phone had obviously been dealing with a lot of less than happy customers. I won’t know what’s happening until Wednesday apparently when they might be able to get it to me, otherwise I’ll have to phone American Express to get them going on the refund.

After an excellent New Years weekend I have spent most of today just catching up with paperwork and doing some very minor coding. At the request of Simon I have added a referrers log and the ability to add comments to 50WordReview.com. You may also have noticed that both that site and this have been up and down like nobodies business over the last couple of days as I took the opportunity to rebuild the server which they sit on. Hopefully it will be a little more stable and has a better backup setup now so in the event of a hardware failure (which I am sort of expecting as the box is 3 years old) it shouldn’t take too long to restore things.

Everyone will be back to work in the UK tomorrow and, rather coincidentally, we have reached the end of the project we had been working on for the last couple of months so I would imagine (well hope really) that things will be a little quiet for a couple of weeks before Lotusphere.

After a good party last night we have just been lazing around and slowly waking up today. Simon and Fiona are currently lying under a blanket on my sofa whilst watching the football scores come (Ipswich are 2-0 down) in and considering what to do for the rest of the afternoon. I think the general concensus is that do nothing has worked pretty well so far.

Hope fully this level of relaxation will continue well in the New Year, although I fear that it will be an all to brief respite.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to you all – I hope it brings interest, fun and and excitement for all.

I hope you all have a great New Year’s Eve party tonight. I am trying very hard to get out of work early at the moment so that I can get to the gathering in Witnesham. Hopefully the vast email distribution which I am working on at the moment runs smoothly.

Back to work this morning rather early (as the photo shows). The train was empty as is the office but I am getting rather a lot of work done which makes a pleasant change.

The Christmas break is coming to an end today (for me at least) as I have to go back to work tomorrow. It’s been a hugely relaxing few days, very quiet, but that was exactly what was called for after a fairly hectic few months. The main thing learned from this year is that I need more than 10 days holiday. I honestly don’t know how our American colleagues can work productively with only 2 weeks vacation.

The emphasis of things (in the Lotus world at least) will switch to Lotusphere for the next few weeks but until the new year I imagine it will stay pretty quiet here unless I am very bored at work. Although that is quite likely as I think there are only a couple of us in the office until next week.