Andy's Blog

Now is the time for big decisions to be made, or maybe ever-so-slightly later due to waiting for the right time to broach the subject and people to be available for their views.

It certainly feels like I am running to stay stood still at the moment, so I have decided to fill up the iPhone with an esoteric mix of music and have a wander around the local park to try and get some perspective and clear the head.

“Shuffle” mode on the iPhone is an interesting beast at the best of times, flicking from Fleetwood Mac to Metallica and then onto early Genesis – try setting your mood to THAT mix!

Woke up a wee bit late this morning which meant that all spaces in the works multi-storey carpark were full, requiring me to find the overflow car park which I have never used before…. and it’s 10 minutes before work starts! Buggar!

Thank gawd for the herd instinct, just follow the car in front and hope he isn’t trying to find his way to Skegness. He wasn’t. Unfortunately where we did finally end up, the overflow car park, was a wee bit further than a 10 minute walk from the office. Double-Buggar!

However, the walk from car park to office in the bright crisp morning, listening to The Clash on my iPhone at full tilt was a rare pleasure. I think I may have to do that again!

Forecast for the day: Looking up!

Pop Quiz: What song was I listening to?

I seem to be doing an awful lot of waiting these past few days, but in a true digital age this waiting seems to be on several different media;

• Waiting for a work colleague to finally get back with the information you asked for several days or weeks ago.
• Waiting for a friend to appear online, in either MSN or facebook, to have someone [in]sane to talk to and relieve the boredom of you waiting (see above).
• Waiting for a letter to drop through your door with news that will be either good or bad.
• Waiting for Friday and the implications that this may have.

On the plus side I didn’t get a beating at Karate last night from my friend, for some cheeky banter last week.  In fact I had a fairly good class which is in stark contrast to last week.  However as my friend said;

I have a long memory, just you wait….

The mystery is over, and the deed done; I have resigned from my current employer!  Too many reasons into why this needed to be done, but even so it is not something that is easily or gladly done, rather as a thing of last resort.

That said I have a new job awaiting me in Northampton, MUCH closer to home, with more money and benefits… so I definitely have something to look forward to.

More later..

Next week should prove to be interesting as the natural conclusion to some things will come to fruition.  Mysterious eh?  All will become clearer sometime next week.

I am up in sunny Glasgow today for a meeting with one of our major customers.  Unfortunately the lady who does the flight bookings decided that I needed more time to ‘acclimatise’ so landed me here at 8am for a meeting that won’t start till 1pm.

I think I am starting to get the DT’s from too many shots of Latte’s whilst waiting in a nearby hotel!

Definitely in a bit of a ‘funk’ at the moment. All the responsibilities I thought I had seemed to be in the hands of others and nobody seems to have had the decency to explain why, what and how this all happened.

New ‘challenges’ are coming on-stream and the resources I thought I had have been moved elsewhere, and the people who moved those resources are asking how am I planning to support the new ‘challenges’? Good question!

I actually do enjoy challenges and given the reins I will run with any challenge, the position I find myself in now is kinda pulling me down. I have decided to just calmly follow the new world order and see how well they do my job for me.

Let’s see how this week works out….

As Robert F. Kennedy once famously said; “we live in interesting times”. Now as most of you probably know ‘living in interesting times’ is not necessarily the best of places to be. This, however, is definitely where we are at work.

A product that has taken an inordinately long time being delivered to the customer has now, on the eve of its launch, been shown not to be able to deliver what it promised…. by a country mile! Instead of supporting the 500 concurrent users it supposed to be able to do, it can only just manage 83!

For the past week teams of guys here, including my fair self, have been working around the clock to re-engineer the architecture and understand where it failed. But it doth seem that the Gods are against us. I present to you the prosecution against the Gods;

• At the same time the failure was found, the computer room air-conditioning has failed and now requires teams of developers to blow on the servers in an attempt to keep them cool whilst tests are ran.
• The only person who knew the local administrator password on the servers, at the hosting company, has disappeared on holiday.
• Key personnel from our Company also disappeared on holiday BEFORE the problems occurred (hmmmmm)

Not a huge list I grant you, but at the end of 18 hour days it doth seem somewhat suspicious to already paranoia ridden minds.

Ah well, I am in work on my lonesome trying to figure out the best way to cool down a server room which is slowly cooking servers…. as I said to my manager; “This wouldn’t be happening if we were using Linux”.

…his response was VERY rude!