Category Archives: MobLog

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That Sinking Feeling…

March 9, 2006 Richard 1 Comment

It was all going so well. Although I’d spent about twenty minutes sat in the queues in Wokingham to get across the level crossing, I’d had no problems retrieving the money I’d contributed to the SSE Sharesave scheme over the years from the branch of Halifax in town. Whilst it wasn’t anything like the amount that would have come back in shares based on the current price, it was still a nice sum.

Going back down towards the office, there was what looked like two muddy tracks on the road coming out of a building site, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I pulled into the car park, and then reversing into the space the steering felt a bit heavy. I got out to a really audible hissing noise, and the front wing of the car slowly sinking…

Anyway, it was tipping down with rain, and since I didn’t much fancy struggling with the weedy little tools in the wet, and after the quick work they made of it last time, I took the easy way out and made use of my rarely used AA membership, and got a patrolman – complete with big beefy jack – to change over to the space-saver spare.

Thankfully, the patrolman appeared in what turned out to be one of the few dry periods in the afternoon. As before, he had a full sized trolley jack, and made quick work of getting the tyre off, the only point of difficulty being the traditional struggle to shift the machine tightened wheel nuts. When the AA man got the tyre off, we had a look around it to see where the hole was – and at first site, it seemed absolutely fine. After a closer look the AA man spotted a small split in the tread, but no sign of the cause. I had a quick look around the car park, but there was nothing obvious, so whatever had caused the puncture must have dropped off pretty quickly. Annoyingly it wasn’t a puncture in the old tyres on the back either, but in one of the two new tyres I bought just before Christmas – I’d got just three months use out of it! Anyway, I put in a call to Ridgeway and ordered in a replacement. Slightly amusingly, after forgetting to note down the tyre details before phoning them last time, I made sure I had all the tyre details, however I needn’t have bothered as Ridgeway had kept a note of them from last time! Hopefully with the relatively new tyre on the passenger side at the front, there won’t be an issue with uneven tyre wear. My experience with the first set of front tyres on the Golf is that the drivers side seemed to have worn a bit quicker than the passenger side anyway, possibly something to do with having most of the weight on that side of the car most of the time I guess. The new tyre will be in by tomorrow lunchtime, so I’ve been allowed to leave work early tomorrow afternoon to get it fitted. I guess I should be more careful of what is in mud on the road in future too!

MobLog

New Job, New Desk, New Traffic Jams

February 28, 2006 Richard Leave a comment

So after two days at the new job, I thought I’d share a picture of my new desk.

Each of the developers at my new job are equipped with a laptop, plus docking station, monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse. The idea is that the developers have something easily portable to take out on site if needed, but when docked, it also means that effectively you get a dual screen setup to work with. Desk space wise it is much better than what I had at SSE. The office is entirely equipped with modern curved desks, so even compared with the large desks at SSE there is plenty of space. Compared to the small desks that most of the guys on my team at SSE work with it is positively palatial.

I was expecting the first week to basically be training on the various products and bits of software that the company sells. However this morning, after a brief introduction yesterday, I found myself chucked in at the deep end with a bit of coding for a customer, in VB.Net no less. As is the way with small software companies, there is a bit of rush on, and it’s all hands to the pumps to get a project out the door. So despite the fact that it’s not in my skill-set, (although since I have VB6 and C#, so it’s not massively difficult) it’s a question of picking up a book, and getting it done. Anyway, by the end of the day I had a custom control up and running, and had only tripped over a couple of the differences between VB.Net and C#. Certainly it does look like I’m going to get quite a variety of different languages and platforms to play with, as before I went home tonight there was a discussion about a potential customer who are involved in publishing, and therefore run their business entirely on Mac rather than PC.

About the only frustration at the moment is nothing to do with the job, but more that, thanks to South-East Water, the journey is not nearly as quick as expected.

Rather than the expected 15 minute journey, the past couple of days it has taken between 30 and 40 minutes, thanks to the closure of a short stretch of the A321 near Tesco. As a result, everything coming in to Wokingham from the south west side is being directed across the level crossing, and not surprisingly it is tailing back, resulting in virtual grid-lock at rush hour. It’s not going to get much better either as once they finish the three weeks on this stretch, they then spend another thirteen weeks digging up the road further up the Finchampstead Road. Whilst South-East Water is absolutely right, the work has to be done or risk a main bursting, it is still going to be a long sixteen weeks…

MobLog

Last Day at SSE

February 24, 2006 Richard Leave a comment

So today, after almost four years, I’ve finally left SSE, so no more long daily commute down to the South Coast, which with the arrival of snow yesterday evening made me really rather glad!

My last day was pretty well just clearing up. I spent the morning going through all the rubbish on my hard drive so that whoever gets the machine after me has at least some space, although they’d do well to just rebuild the whole thing from scratch, as it hasn’t had anything much done to the install of windows for at least a couple of years, and it’s a bit slow to say the least! This afternoon was the physical clearing up of going through the stacks of paper on my desk and in the drawers, fishing out the stuff that was useful, and disposing of the rest. As per usual I didn’t actually leave on time, as I waited around whilst Rob put a build of the application I’ve been working on for the past few months onto the test server, so as to test the results of the changes we had made over the past few weeks to reduce the memory usage. Certainly with the brief chance I got to try it out it seemed to have solved the problem, but unfortunately had hit the performance somewhat. Having said that, between myself, Rob and Darren we had managed to clear the majority of the outstanding incidents from the last round of testing, which is what I had said I would do before I went. I would have liked to have seen it onto the live box, but unfortunately the memory issues proved to be a lot more complicated to solve than expected, thanks to the joys of Infragistics.

Interestingly, the news this morning did an item about the demise of the carriage clock as the leaving gift of choice, so I was quite interested to see what, if anything, the guys from work had got for me. Thankfully I was spared a loudspeaker announced presentation, and instead was given the card and present over lunch. It seems that in much the same way as with my birthday and Christmas presents, I lived up to my reputation of being difficult to buy for. As I don’t drink, they avoided the old staple of getting alcohol, and in the end plumped for book tokens, which I suspect will end up going towards computer books – if Beth doesn’t get to them first!

What has been quite interesting over the past month since I resigned has been quite how many people have admitted to not being happy. I’ve said before that there are two very distinct groups in the IT department at SSE – the long-term people who are generally in the final salary pension scheme, and then a pretty regular turnover of more recent arrivals who usually depart before the notice period changes at five years. The ones in the final salary scheme seem pretty well resigned to the long haul, however in the recent arrivals I know at least two or three in the team who are actively looking, indeed one admitted that he turned down a job offering a 25% pay rise only a few days after I resigned. A number of people said that they were surprised I hadn’t gone sooner with the journey I’ve been doing every day. In general there seems to be some uncertainty as to where peoples roles are going, particularly with the increasing presence of Infosys and TCS staff working on projects around the building. Anyway, I’m all clear of that corporate politics stuff now.

So what will I miss about SSE. Well they are a nice bunch of people, and certainly there are a number of them I’ll miss having lunch with every day. Job security wise, it was certainly a good place to ride out some rough times in the IT industry. However what I won’t miss are some of the big company stuff such as the slow procurement processes that have to be signed off by multiple layers of management, and the real problems getting things done quickly. I also won’t miss the obsessions, such as the stair safety where at times people would be fined for not holding on to the handrail, and the rest of the time you had posters on every landing warning you to hold on. In fact there were signs everywhere, from those on the stairs, to signs in the toilets asking you to keep the blinds closed so as not to upset the team of women on the ground floor who could see the frosted window of the gents toilet from their desks. I also won’t miss my security pass, which combined with having to identify myself by my payroll number a lot of the time did sometimes make you feel like a number. (I am not a number, I am a free man!)

Anyway, I’ll finish off with one of the comments that was put in my leaving card:

Parole at last! Let us know what the secret is…

Computers/Technology, MobLog

Phil Sleeps on the Sofa?

February 18, 2006 Richard Leave a comment

Last night I went along to Howard’s for another night of network gaming. Unfortunately we weren’t blessed with the presence of Chris, as he was suffering from one of the pitfalls of being a teacher – picking up something nasty disease from a pupil. However he did join us between trips to the bathroom remotely. Anyway all this play seems to be improving my skill at UT2004, although I still can’t get the hang of moving and aiming straight at the same time, and also I do tend to get lost at times too, hence I get accused all the time of camping…

Ok, I have to admit, that the accusation is not totally unfounded. 😀 There are a few maps where I do quite deliberately camp out at certain points and use sniper tactics. Not that I’m the only one – both Phil and Chris used the same tactic at various points during the evening!

Anyway, instead of the usual shot of a load of blokes sitting around with laptops, I’ve included a picture that shows that despite what he maintains, Howard does know how to use his kitchen – although his fridge is still primarily filled with a vast selection of drinks and not much else!

Whilst the game playing was fun, the highlight of the evening had to be Phil pretty well ensuring that he was going to be sleeping on the sofa when he got home. Around midnight both he and I started packing up our respective sets of kit to head home. Phil started to get quite a bit of teasing from the remain three single guys, and Jarrod whose wife is back over in the USA, about how early he was going. Phil’s retort was effectively that at least he had someone to go home to, and he’d find a lot more interesting things to do than spend the night with a load of drunk blokes! At that point somebody asked the question as to whether Catherine would still be up when Phil got home, at which point Phil came back with a reply that probably isn’t suitable for a family blog, but that came over pretty much as a sort of alpha male type ‘I’ll do what I want with my wife in my house’ type statement, to which I replied that knowing Catherine that probably wasn’t overly accurate!

However, the BIG problem at this point though was that after somebody had questioned whether Catherine would still be awake, and without Phil noticing, Howard had called Catherine to see if she was still up – she was, and she had heard everything Phil had said, including that comment.

Having been told she was listening, Phil managed to look both embarrassed, nervous and sheepish, all at the same time, and took the phone off Howard. He then disappeared upstairs for a bit of fast talking I guess. He did come back down at one point – still talking – although went back upstairs again when he got the inevitable back-chat from the rest of us. We’ve yet to hear whether he did end up sleeping on the sofa last night…

MobLog, Pictures

Temptation

February 8, 2006 Richard 2 Comments

At Christmas, my Uncle who for years has worked as a freelancer out of an office in the back of his garage was talking about the culture shock of going back to working in a city office environment, as he was having to do for his current contract.

Aside from the differences being around more people, one of the other things he commented on was how hard it was to avoid putting on weight as he was sat next to the desk where his office colleagues would leave cakes for their fellow workers.

I have to say that since the rearrangement of our office, which put us next to the e-commerce team, we’ve had similar temptations. The picture here shows the Yard of Jaffa Cakes that Jon came back from buying his lunch having bought. Reading the text on the box it was fairly obviously some sort of Christmas promotion, which explains why it was being sold off. It is worth saying that between the four teams around our area most of these were eaten by the end of the afternoon.

However, this follows on from a load of other temptations – tins of sweets over Christmas, and chocolates brought in whenever anybody returns from holiday.

Perhaps the ultimate though was this selection of cakes that Jon brought back from the bakers a week or so ago. Oddly enough these were a bit too much for most people, so in fact some of them ended up being divided up to take home. I guess a couple of Jaffa cakes or a few sweets can slip through temptation, but you just end up feeling really bad having too many of these!!! Anyway, whether it’s cakes, sweets or jaffa cakes, working in an office can seriously damage your waistline!

Exigency In Specie