London Life

Well the week is over already. Come to that, so is half of the weekend! Where does the time go?

It’s been a fairly busy week at work; my new workstation finally arrived on Wednesday and I’ve spent most of the rest of the week setting up the virtual machines I need. It’s going to serve a dual purpose. As well as some of the machines being configured for penetration testing of our network, I’m setting up an entire test network which will emulate the main features of our corporate network. This means that, at long last, we can test out new software and new policies without running the risk of damaging the live network.

Also on Wednesday, my new TomTom arrived. I’d been talking about buying a SatNav unit ever since my nightmare journey up to Bedford a few weeks ago and, last weekend as I was in the depths of my technophilia, I sent an order through for the TomTom Rider – the version of the product designed for bikers; it’s waterproof, comes with a Bluetooth headset rather than an internal speaker and has a couple of extra bike-friendly routing features. The rationalisation for spending the money on it is two-fold: firstly, unless you know all of London VERY well, it’s just not possible to drive and navigate yourself effectively – even with a pre-planned route printed out beside you. Secondly, I’ve been cycling to work less and less in recent months because I so often have something on in the evening after work. Self-navigation is even harder on a bike, so I don’t want to ride to the event, which means either coming back to work after the event, getting changed and then cycling home (which typically adds an hour to the journey) or skipping the bike altogether and training it into work on a Travelcard. With SatNav on the handlebars, that isn’t really a problem any more; so long as I have some semi-decent clothes in my panniers that I can put on over my cycling gear (and some deodorant!) I can cycle wherever I need to be AND come home via the most direct route. Result!

So anyway, most of the week was mundane, but we had dinner with John G and Nick B from the Chorus last night, so that Brett and Nick could talk over some aspects of Chorus business they are sharing. It was a lovely meal in their lovely house (when I see their place, the desire to buy ourselves grows!) and it went on until the small hours. Something we must do more often!

Today we have been doing some metaphorical spring-cleaning. Brett, who is struggling to keep up with the workload of both his job and his various Chorus responsibilities (well, mostly Chorus stuff, actually) really needed to get organised and be a bit more efficient in his handling of paperwork, so it’s been a day of tidying desks, sorting through piles of paper (and binning large quantities of it!) and relocating the filing cabinet into the spare room, now that it is truly spare again. Brett still has a day or so’s work getting on top of the mound of his paperwork, but already the organisation feels good.

Tonight we’re off to party with another Chorine; David W’s 40^th birthday party is on at some fancy-sounding spot in Mayfair. Tomorrow we have brunch in Wimbledon planned with Ping and possibly even an afternoon of cycling with Jeremy F, who has recently bought himself a new bike. Should be a fun-packed day!