I’m back at work this week and with a vengeance: a six week engagement in London. The customer’s adjacent to Paddington station so I’m taking the train up via Reading. So far this has been pretty painless with trains on time and even getting a seat except on the section from Reading in to London. This morning the passengers were an odd mix of the normal suited commuters and the (Wellington) booted Reading Festival goers. The only slight annoyance has been that, so far, my 6:30 start in the morning has seen me getting up before Emma.
Archive for the ‘Work’ Category
Back to Work
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007Man of leisure
Monday, June 18th, 2007Today marks the start of two months of leave for me. (No, before you ask, IBM aren’t quite that generous. It’s a mixture of vacation and unpaid parental leave.) It will be a chance for me to spend some time with Emma and Christine and hopefully get enough sleep to avoid turning in to a zombie. (Maybe they’ll even be a little bit of time left over to start on that list of jobs longer than my arm!) I haven’t had this long off work since… well… since I started work, so it’s a bit of a scary prospect. I’m still debating what’s the right approach to my work e-mail. I can’t ignore it completely as a) there are likely to be some notes on the work/non-work boundary that I’ll want to see and b) I couldn’t face catching up on a two month backlog when I return. However, I also know that I could easily get sucked in to doing too much. For now I’m going to settle for ignoring the internal newsgroups and forums and logging in every few days to delete the circulars and forward on the questions to my colleagues who’ve graciously agreed to cover for me.
WSTC Day 1
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007My creative juices aren’t flowing today hence the unimaginative title for this posting (and if I couldn’t come up with a good title today, there was no chance I would be able to be inventive by day 5). Sadly, as an internal conference with significant IBM confidential content I can’t cover everything here but I’ll cover what I can. As Andy has already blogged, someone had the good sense to realise that we are a technical audience and the keynote speech was given by Jerry Cuomo, CTO for WebSphere. I particularly liked his demo around Real Time Java which showed garbage collection leading to breaks in a piece of music played with with a Sun JVM compared to the flawless playback when using Metronome GC in an IBM J9 JVM.
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Vegas (again)
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007I followed in Andy’s footsteps today, getting the 10 hour flight from Gatwick to Las Vegas for the annual IBM WebSphere Software Service gathering. With only just over 3 weeks until B-day I’m trying to minimise my time out of the country but it means I don’t have much time to recover from the flight before launching in to the technical sessions tomorrow morning. The buffet dinner this evening was a good chance to catch up with some of my colleagues from around Europe and further afield that I have worked with over the past year.
Picking locks
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007Generally I’m wary of Googling for search terms that are on the borders of legality but today I found myself entering the words “kensington lock paper clip”. I arrived in the office yesterday and discovered that my lock was mysteriously open but without the key in it and when it’s open you can’t get the key in. Anyway, I used a bit of coffee cup and sticky tape rather than the suggested loo roll and gaffer tape but it still did the trick in just a matter of seconds. (And yes, it did work equally well unlocking it once locked.) Now I just have to decide whether it’s worth ever using the lock again!
Great Tits
Monday, April 16th, 2007Britannia redeem themselves
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
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Rain stops tourism
Friday, March 9th, 2007I’ve spent the past four days in Turku, Finland, on work. Unfortunately there are no direct flights which meant changing in Helsinki and 7 hours travel time door-to-door on the way out and nearly 10 on the way back. I arrived mid-afternoon on Monday to blue skies and a snow covered landscape. Sadly, by the time I came to think about exploring the city the following evening, the skies had turned grey and the snow was rapidly disappearing from the streets under continual rain. The combination of cold and rain was enough to confine me to my hotel room.
Things didn’t improve a great deal on Wednesday either. Only when it was time to leave on Thursday did the sun deign to show its face again. It was by then too late to visit the cathedral and renowned castle. Nor, despite being closer than our last Finnish trip to Salo, did I make it to Moominworld!
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