Squeezing Up

So the end of the week felt a bit hectic as there were lots of things waiting to be done when I got back from the seminars.  Most of it is mundane management but there is one issue that is an old problem coming back to haunt me.  It’s simmering at the moment; just remains to be seen whether it boils over or fades away.  Not sure how soon I’ll know either.

Had rather hoped to spend today exploring London Open House Weekend, but in the end we used the time to empty the study out ready for Rosie to move in.  Some rationalisation was done but by and large it was mostly squeezing everything up in the other rooms.

One upside was that I found some archive CDs with some really old stuff on them.  I spent a nostalgic few minutes browsing through my old university files and chat logs of years gone by.

We gave up reorganising some time after five and spent the evening on the sofa watching Lord of the Rings and Casino Royale.

Interesting Times

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster over the last twenty-four hours.  Yesterday evening Brett came home from a Chorus Membership meeting with the news that his new boss had messaged him to say “it wasn’t working out” and that he’d effectively been fired little more than a week after starting.  It seemed to be part of a pattern as he’d been employed with a two-week probationary period and, the day after he started, the other programmer (who’d started the week before) got canned.  Similarly, a new guy had been taken on just a few days before Brett got the heave-ho.

As you can imagine, last night we were both a little bit depressed.

After a bit of a morose start though, today improved for both of us.  Brett had a fairly positive ‘exit interview’ and spent the rest of the day sending out CVs.  I sat down with the household expenses spreadsheet and found that several expense-cutting decisions I/we’d been putting off were now quite easy to make.  We are in austerity mode for the time being.  It was good to realise that, even if we won’t be living it up much, at least we won’t be homeless or hungry in the foreseeable future.

I spent most of the rest of today visiting a seismic survey company’s datacentre in Weybridge as part of a marketing freebie by the people who designed and built our new server room.  It was an opportunity to look at how new, greener thinking is being applied to datacentres and is resulting in huge savings on the power bill for cooling your systems.  It was an interesting afternoon and although I won’t be rebuilding our datacentre any time soon, it was a good catch-up on the technologies and trends.

Had a piano lesson tonight and it went well.  Oddly though the piece that I have almost memorised and can play very well for pretty much everyone, I kept tripping over when I played it for my teacher, and yet the one I’ve been struggling with all week went pretty much okay.  Go figure.

Got another jolly tomorrow; off to spend the day at Microsoft talking about Unified Communications with Tandberg and Vodafone.  Should be another solid geek-fest!