Category Archives: Work/Career

Work/Career Related

TFL Updates to your email

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Work in London, Use public transport to get there?

If yes, then you probably want to keep uptodate with signal failures, suspensions and traffic problems. The best way to do this is on twitter using @TfLtravelalerts
 and while you’re at work you don’t want to be checking it and some work places block twitter meaning you’d be on your phone.

There’s also this thing called the Olympics starting soon – the opening ceremony is on Friday and the main events begin on Monday (though it looks like there’s been some Women’s football on today to kick the first events off).

Everyone who’s used it knows London public transport is challenging at the best of times and can be a right pain when things go wrong. There have already been more people travelling, problems today, and its expected to get worse with over 1 million extra people travelling every day.

Anyway, got this working yesterday and it seems to work really well.

Step 1: Create a new twitter account for this purpose
Step 2: Login to the new account and Follow @Tfltravelalerts
Step 3: Link your twitter account to a tweetymail.com account (free to sign up and you get full access for the first month). You will need to sign up by giving it your twitter details, then add the email address you want the notifications to go to.
Step 4: Add a timeline alert – default is to email you after every 10 alerts in 1 email. Unless you put a filter on this is the minimum you can have per email. It works quite well as tfl tends to post alerts quite regularly including many not related to your journey.

Government Coalition NHS U-turn

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Finally, it sounds like the news is out on what the coalition is going to do with NHS Commissioning.
Following the post election promises that the NHS was safe from radical reform the government unleashed a white paper that had more change than had been seen in 20 years. The big change being that Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), the guardians of the funding used to treat patients would be abolished following a period where many were in heavy debt (millions of UK£’s), and would be replaced by General Practitioner (GP) Consortia. These consortia would be set up from scratch and represent several GP Practices, predicted to total more than the number of PCTs.

The problem with this is that many GP practices did not want the responsibility of holding the purse strings, whereas others were keen. On top of this, the coallition government are very keen that the patient’s best interests are represented. The new U turn has yet another radical change to the commissioning of health care. Meanwhile, the PCTs are consolidating their debt by merging – something the former labour government recommended as part of their proposals. And while they do so more money is being spent on organisations which appear to have a limited shelf life.

We await to see what the full proposals will be and what they will yield.

Whatever Happened to…

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I don’t know what provoked me to start thinking about this sometime but it all started with me making a mental note of things that were going to be huge (particularly in the 1990’s) and then died a death. It started with a couple of things, and I sat down today and wrote a list. I also took the liberty of doing a google search for “whatever happened to” which has over 12 million matches.

Enough with the preamble
1. The first one that got me thinking was computer Voice Recognition
speech recognition
It sounds like a great idea to alleviate RSI and by telling the computer what you want to do as opposed to typing it or using a mouse seems much more userfriendly. Apple Computer developed a technology in the early 90’s as an extension to System 7 called plaintalk. It is now part of the system preferences of OSX and simply called Speech Recognition. It enables you to use a hotkey to talk into a microphone with certain key phrases and it will follow your instructions. I had mixed results when trying it, mainly due to the fact that it assumes you speak with an American accent. My impressions aren’t very good and it doesn’t like British English too much. IBM developed a program called ViaVoice which was supposed to be very good but expensive. I think the big reason why the whole thing never worked was it looks like you’re mad talking to yourself and doesn’t work well in an office environment. Just my 2 english pence!
Having said that you still get glimpses of it used in telephones for speed dials and I always think of the Odeon cinema hotline that asks you to say the name of the Odeon that you want to book tickets for.

2. Next up we have the paperless office!
paperless office
Having worked for the UK health service for 3 years I can categorically say this is nowhere near to even being a possibility, in fact the opposite has happened thanks to email allowing people the ability to forward pdfs and other attachments eg. this article. The internet now has more information out there than ever before and expectations are high on how much of that information we have at our finger tips. Net result, my desk looks like a pig sty and i never get to the bottom of any of my piles. So much for fax software and handheld scanners for electronically storing any letter or other piece of paper received by non electronic means. I am yet to meet anyone who seriously uses fax software, you can’t buy handheld scanners, those paper port scanners never scan things in straight and if you decide to use OCR you can get some unexpected results sometimes.
office flyer

3. Removable storage (Data, Music and Video) – what on earth happened with this! I originally had them all separate but they’re kind of related.
removable media
Let me list a few:
Floppy Disk replacements such as the SuperDisk (LS120) and Zip disk
Sony’s “SACD – Super Audio CD
Laserdisc
Mini Disc
Just to name a few! I’ll start with the floppy disk replacements because i was so close to yelling at my co-workers when he burnt two files to cd which totalled 1mb onto a CD-R when the computer was a wintel box and had a floppy drive. But i restrained myself and said nothing. My point is that since Apple released the iMac Rev A which was the first commercial computer not to have a floppy disk drive (and others have followed suit though in more limited numbers often having an interchangeable floppy & CD drive) people are more confident that a computer will have a CD drive than a floppy drive. It is ridiculous to waste 99.9% of a CD’s capacity, and there are now more variations than is needed. Iomega came close with the zip drive until they hit a snag with the click of death problem, and Imation tried to market the LS-120 but it was horribly slow. I tend to email/ftp files these days and tend to bank on being able to get an internet connection as everywhere there’s a computer there seems to be broadband internet! Occasionally i’ll burn a CD or for larger files i’ve got my Firewire/USB external drive that i should use for backup but don’t as I haven’t had the time to use any backup software (whoops!)

SACD – what the heck is that you are probably asking. Basically it was meant to be higher quality than a CD and instead of an album taking up 500-700mb it would be 4.7Gb – so a DVD. Thought up in 1999 by Sony & Phillips. I have never seen one in the shops and doubt I ever will – it was a complete disaster as it came out just before a program called napster appeared. There’s also a format rivalry with DVD-Audio and like all Sony Products it uses some copy protection which I wouldn’t want to touch with a bargepole – oh, and i’d hazard a guess that i wouldn’t be able to notice any difference since i can’t tell the difference between a 192kbps mp3 and the original CD!

Laserdisc – this was originally patented in 1958 but didn’t appear till the 1970’s but you could still buy them when I was young. I don’t know anyone who owns any or even the player. The nearest I’ve got is a DVD that was made by being copied off a Laserdisc of Star Wars Episode IV with Chinese subtitles. Haven’t seen anything laserdisc related for about 20 years.

Another audio format the minidisc – you still see them around for recording purposes but record companies did try and sell albums on mini disc. It must’ve lasted about 2 years at most, and I haven’t seen them since. I like to record gigs from time to time but record on tape as that’s all i’ve got. I thought about minidisc but they’re expensive and it’s still a pain to transfer to mp3 because sony never made it easy to do so as they are incompatible with Magneto Optical drives and vice versa which use the same technology

4. My final one comes from one i saw on the google search above… Virtual Reality
virtual reality
William Gibson predicted it in his book Neuromancer in 1984 though the credit on wikipedia seems to go to Damien Broderick for his 1982 book The Judas Mandala. Pure and simple – what happened to it? It died a death somewhere in the mid-90s and hasn’t been heard of since

Last Couple of weeks

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I haven’t posted anything new on here for a couple of weeks cos it’s been a little bit hectic both socially and workwise. It was a long weekend two weekends ago and I ended up doing four days drinking in 10 pubs with a few mates.
Then the next weekend was the first day this summer where it’s actually been nice so I took advantage of it with a trip to see a bloody shakespeare play Titus Andronicus at the London Globe Theatre – it’s an almost exact replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time in nearly the same location

Afterwards I ended up in a party till 4am full of Greeks, Spanish, French and Dutch

Which reminds me a blog update: I’ve installed another wordpress plugin a while back but thought i’d mention it, to keep the spam out. It’s called Spam Karma 2 and seems to be doing a good job.

Monday afternoon saw Sri Lanka win the second test against England levelling the 3 match test series 1-1 where the first match was a draw. This will give the Sri Lankans huge confidence as England are currently number 2 in the test rankings. England on the other hand have a tough few months with the one day series coming up where they have not done so well and a test series against Pakistan.

Monday night was the first gig for French Car and the Bulimic Wizards who have been around in some shape or form for 10 years but have never played live. They have now made 4 albums as an unsigned band. It was a good gig with a strange combination of people there

I heard this morning that Mars Chocolate bars sold in the UK are going to be renamed “Believe” for the duration of the world cup to encourage fans to believe that England can win the 2006 Football World Cup which starts next week. In other world cup related news, I drew Ukraine in our office world cup sweepstake – somehow i don’t think i’m going to win the grand prize of £100 (Ukraine are 40-1 outsiders!)

And finally, I’ve been receiving a lot of invitations this week for people on myspace wanting to be my friend. Of the 10-15 who have invited me, I have known only one

Disaster Strikes & Keychain!

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I haven’t been updating my blog recently for various reasons.
Firstly, with my new job I haven’t had as much free time as I had before, there’s been a lot of cricket on (England v India, South Africa v Australia and Sri Lanka v Pakistan all at the same time), and then on Thursday evening a bit of a disaster happened.

I was making a copy of the Greatest Game (see last blog post) for a couple of mates, as Sky Sports had repeated the highlights and i’d recorded it on DVD-R, so with my DVD burner i was able to quickly make copies. I was just testing the disc had copied ok in Frontrow (which had a kind of hacked installation to make it work on my mac) when it got jammed on fast forward. I couldn’t stop it, force quit frontrow, switch applications or anything, leaving me with one choice: Force restart!

9 times out of 10 this would probably have been fine, but this time something went very wrong – instead of the lovely boot panel “Welcome to OSX”, what I got was this at startup:

I left it till Friday before doing anything as I had a far more important “executive meeting” at the pub and thought it should be a simple case of archive and reinstall OSX. However, on friday, i tried booting up from the install DVD and it wouldn’t even do that. My biggest fear… Hardware fault sprang to mind. Out came the toolkit to take things apart and find out where the fault was. To confuse things further, I was able to boot into OS9 and could see the hard drive there – this suggested something else was at work, and it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

While taking things apart i narrowed the problem down to the OSX hard drive which for some reason, when it was on the ATA bus it wouldn’t boot into OSX regardless of the startup media. So, i needed to replace it and Saturday morning is the computer fair in Central London. With a wad of cash I went there to fix things up while not causing too much bank balance damage.

It was a successful day, and for £147 I came back with two new hard drives, and a Firewire 400/USB2.0 enclosure
For the internal, I replaced the faulty Maxtor 120Gb with a Seagate Barracuda 120Gb – I wasn’t particularly bothered about the brand
For the external, I purchased a Maxtor 300Gb with 16Mb Cache – this would serve two purposes: 1. To recover what I could off the faulty drive, and 2. To actually be a backup drive

Here’s what the enclosure looks like sat atop my mac (the white box behind with all the Green LEDs is my ethernet switch, and you can see part of my cannon scanner to the left of the picture):
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Apologies for the quality of the photo, I took it with my 1megapixel camera phone and transferred it by bluetooth, as i couldn’t be bothered to get all the cabling out for my proper digital camera!
I think the silver goes quite well (it was also available in black) and at £20 for the enclosure including Firewire and USB cables i thought it was a bargain.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, 2 1/2 days later (copying 100Gb worth of files several times), everything is nearly back to how it was and I recovered all my data. Just need to reinstall a couple of GUI tweaks, Dev tools and reinstall a few add-ons again.

I will decide later on in the week whether to try and fix the old Maxtor hard drive and use it as my second internal hard drive, as currently I have the original 20Gb drive there. The extra 100Gb would be very useful and allow me to free up a fair amount of space on the OSX drive. Plus 120+120=240Gb which is less than the 300Gb external drive, so I would still be able to back it all up.

Just before setting out for the computer fair a package arrived for me in the post from my good friend MacHeadCase
It was a very useful gift, and it is now on my keyring:
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us
It joins all the other junk I have on there like my Pentium Processor that I drilled a hole in
It’s not just a keyring of a lizard, it’s very cleverly shaped tail and foot act as a bottle opener. Given how much I like beer it will almost certainly be of great use for times at a party when there’s bottled beer about!

New Job

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Finally, looks like I start my new job on Monday – really looking forward to it
Had my handover today as my final day in my old workplace – new person seems to have picked it up alright – most of the handover consisted of me rambling about my 3 years of working for the NHS and what the job entails and then left them to it. But even to the last minute I had bits of information to offer. I could’ve spent 3 days doing that handover and still not passed on even half of the info I wanted to.
On my way home had a voicemail left saying my future boss had forced the occupational health clearance through today and even with just the one reference received so far I could start beginning of next week.
So Chase Farm it is for me – can’t wait! It’ll be working in the Informations department as a trainee Informations Officer with the prospect of being a proper member of the Information team. I’m gonna be doing MSSQL, Oracle and Access with the potential to be using Business Objects. It’s the M$ version of things but it’s better than working in Admin which I’ve been doing the last few years.

So, with the long weekend to go it’s back to full time work again – gonna be a bit of a shock. I think in the back of my mind I half wanted it to take a couple more days so I could have a few days off, but at the same time I am very glad that I don’t have any time where I’m not getting paid.

Ups and downs of the last 24 hours

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I don’t really know what to call this entry because it’s really just a summary of the past 24 hours – i’ll come up with a title at the end
Saw my fave band last night Serafin for their first gig in about 2 years. They’re struggling with the mixing of their second album at the moment, as well as having problems with label since Warner Music bought Taste Media.
But it was really good to see them live again, even with all the problems and they’re great guys – if i hadn’t been working would probably have gone out late with them

Fast forward to this morning a little bit tired having not got to sleep till 1am and running late, despite knowing that I was low on petrol. On my route to work I’m driving along and see the most humongous mile long traffic jam on the dual carriageway. Fortunately it turned out to be just a van that had broken down in an inconvenient place. The petrol gauge was pretty much on the zero line, and i kept debating whether or not to stop for petrol since i was going to be late anyway. I decided i would risk it and fill up on the way back. I thought that that would be that but five minutes away from work a cyclist jumped the lights and i have to slam on my brakes stopping inches away from them brakes squealing. At that point i really felt maybe i should just turn around, go home and go back to sleep. Surprisingly was only 15 mins late and no one noticed cos my manager wasn’t working and everyone else was in meetings! Decided i needed a lazy day at the office and spent much of the day messing around on the internet chatting about yesterday’s gig and trying to find loopholes in the computer system at work’s network for no particular reason!

But back to last night, the drummer from Serafin wants me to design a website for their side project French Car and the Bulimic Wizards. Currently, I am hosting their three albums on my webspace but it’s just there to let people know about the band’s stuff. It’s not a proper site or anything. Designing web pages is something i’ve done for a long time, but i have mostly done sites for me except for a couple i did years ago one for a friend of a friend’s business which isn’t there anymore cos i think he forgot to renew his web host or something. The other was for a company my dad was working for. That design has also gone after they contracted it out to a professional company (rather than me doing it in my spare time in between exams at uni!). But my point is that it feels really weird to do this as a project for a friend aswell as for money and I haven’t got the foggiest what to charge even ignoring the fact that it’s for a friend. I’ll have to do some research on hosting & domain name companies as to which are the best to go with and then i’ll have to see whether or not i have the software to make what he’ll ask me to create. My sites are simple clean, reasonably W3C compliant and easy to maintain. But maybe that’s what he’s looking for – we’ll have to wait and see!

Graphics Card Woes & Strange Books

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I haven’t posted anything new on my blog the past couple of days as I’ve been a bit busy
It’s my dad’s birthday this weekend, so needed to do a bit of shopping. He’s a very difficult person to buy presents for, but I can usually find something in the wonderful shop Borders Books – that’s the US site, as they don’t have a UK site, because they sell online through amazon
They have a couple of shops in Central London which are huge 4 or 5 floors full of books, CDs, DVDs, Magazines, Coffee Shop etc. and I always find something I want to buy there.
After about an hour wondering round on wednesday I found a good book on Italian Cinema which would do as a present, but I also found some extraordinary books in the Travel writing section, including several books written by skateboarding legend Tony Hawk which I can’t find a trace of online.
I also bought an intriguing book by Jonathan Margolis, a journalist from the Times newspaper called Mob_Log. It is a “book” showing scenes taken on the author’s camera phone, following his initial prediction when the first camera phones came out in 2002 about how they would change the world. The scenes are photos that nobody would take on a normal camera. The photos are funny, thought provoking, satirical and an insight into life. That probably gives it more credit than it’s due, but I ccouldn’t resist buying a copy at £5.99 (much cheaper than the list price).

Still in Borders book shop, I had a call from my agency to do some work at my old workplace – a different department, and pretty good pay. It’s only 3 days a week, but it should get me by until I can sort out a full time permanent job. I started there yesterday, and it’s a real mess, but I think I can handle it. It’s in the Psychology department, but with a bit of luck my interview next week should go well.

So I left Borders, and thought now was as good a time as any to get a new graphics card which I’ve been putting off for ages. Following the Stevenote on tuesday 10th January (the day before), I thought that I would be trading in my Frankenstein Mac for something newer, and the Graphics card will more than likely be the only thing I upgrade before I do so.

The previous week I’d gone into the Apple Store in Regent Street for the first time and asked around to see if anyone there could make any recommendations without much joy. They suggested Micro Anvika – a computer store that has a few branches in the area. They’re an apple dealer, but also sell PCs. They sell a lot of accessories, and I’ve bought stuff from them in the past.
Armed with a bit of info on what I was looking for – an AGP card that supports Core Image on OSX 10.4, and a preference for ATI, I thought that a Radeon 9600 would be a good card and fit the job.

Micro Anvika have two shops opposite each other, the first one I went to said they do the card but didn’t have one in stock, however, the other branch did. The assistant in the 2nd shop was very knowledgeable, and asked the right questions. He helpfully told me they had one on returns, and would get me a discount because it had been opened, but was still brand new. The customer who bought it before didn’t realise his PowerMac G5 had PCI express, so it hadn’t even been fitted to a computer. Everything looked good, £150, a good spec Radeon card, AGP, supports Core Image. I was excited, and soon I would get some better video playback performance in quicktime, take the load off my ageing processor. I got home, shut my mac down, pulled the old card out, and straight away I saw a problem… the new card would not go into the slot as it did not have an extra notch in it, even though they were both AGP. I looked at the manual, which was helpfully for the old version, the 9600 Pro Mac Edition. The one I had bought was the Radeon 9600 Pro PC & Mac Edition. Unbeknown to me, and due to lack of adequate research, ATI had seriously messed around with the specs inbetween. This card was a 4x AGP only card, unlike the previous version which was 4x/2x AGP. My AGP slot is 2x – and after much exhaustive searching, it seems that the higher spec card, the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition is 4x/2x AGP, but Micro Anvika do not sell this one. It’s probably also more expensive.

Irritated, and having put my old graphics card back in, a GeForce 2mx with 32mb VRAM, I booted my mac up. While i was looking at the innards of my mac, I’d pulled out my extra USB ports PCI card and forgotten to put it back in, so shut the mac down again to put it in. Everything back together. Pressed the power button – nothing – PANIC!!! What had I done. I changed the mains cable – again nothing – more PANIC!!! Those who have read about how I built my mac up will know what a mess it is inside with custom wiring – anything could’ve happened. I realised pretty quickly that the power supply was not at fault as when i plugged and unplugged the power cable i was still getting a little spark which was good news, as I do not have a spare. My immediate suspect was the dodgy wiring, and that in setting everything back up i’d dislodged something. Straight away, I pulled out the dodgiest part – the logic board power extension cable which I had used initially to allow the use of an ATX power supply. Once again I tried to power my mac up, with no joy. In a moment of inspiration, I remembered that when I came back from holiday the clock had reset itself to the default January 1 1972 or whatever it is – and that in some mac models, if the clock battery fails, it will sometimes refuse to allow you to boot up. I pulled the battery out, and for no real reason put it back in, pushed the power button and it started up. A sigh of relief! I was back to where I had started, but will probably need to buy a new clock battery sometime this week.

But, I still had the problem that I had spent £150 on a graphics card that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get back to the shop that day, and decided that I would go back on Friday (today) after starting work on Thursday. So, this morning before I went back I did all my research, and even though the shop assistants were knowledgeable, I hoped that they would give me a refund. I spoke to the assistant who had sold me the card, and he seemed baffled as to why it didn’t work. I explained the problem referring to the manual which did show a card that would fit, especially after I explained several times that my mac had an AGP slot, and was a G4 as the system requirements said – it fitted everything on the box.

Here’s a site on AGP compatibility which shows the importance of the AGP key.
The important diagram is this one:
AGP Keys
AGP 1x/2x runs at 3.3V or 1.5V and requires cards with both notches, while AGP 4x runs at 1.5V or 0.8V and only needs the one notch (the 0.8V uses the 1.5V part). AGP 8x runs at 0.8V, again requiring just the 1.5V notch
Wikipedia summarises it quite well on thei Section on AGP Compatibility
I think I am now an expert on AGP formats!

He then got his boss who initially appeared very knowledgeable wearing an Ixus t-shirt he was clearly showing off all the skills he was trained in. He was nearly onto the right track, but was convinced, like I initially believed, that AGP 2x and 4x were the same type of slot, and suggested that it was only AGP 1x that was really different. The only other Mac AGP card they did was the Radeon X800 which was much more expensive and very definitely only AGP 8x. I could tell now I was gonna get my refund as I started mentioning cards like the Nvidia FX5200 and they said they didn’t do them for macs. The assistant who I originally bought it from now blamed Apple for putting some strange connector on my motherboards that wasn’t a proper industry standard and gave me a full refund. Success! Great relief. I’m not sure if I’d just walked in and said I bought this card and it didn’t work because my board is 2x and the card only supports 4x that I would’ve got my refund.

So, my next challenge is should I look further into whether there is still a graphics card that I can buy which will fill the purpose, or concentrate on what my next computer should be, as that will come with a top spec motherboard, graphics card and everything I want. I still can’t decide what that computer should be

New Year’s Eve

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Happy New Year Everyone!
2006 here we come – hope everyone had a good celebration & all
I quite enjoyed it this year – it had everything that was required – went to a house party with my former uni mates, plus some of their friends
Until midnight it was going surprisingly well with no damage to the house whatsoever – which is pretty impressive for a combined new years and house warming party
It didn’t go badly wrong but it certainly was a bit of a change when the cheapo “Champagne” or more accurately Asti was being drunk shortly followed by the Fireworks….

Ok, I will set the scene, the house is my ex flatmate from uni’s and letting off the fireworks are his two mates from school and himself.
Starts off fairly well, though the fireworks are obviously the extra value cheapo set, but they make a few bangs along with some pretty fountains
But when one of his mates set off a rocket directly from his hand which went flying into the garden of the house two doors down you could tell that something mad was a brewing
He then proceeded to light fireworks while about 3 feet away from one that was going off and lit one and threw it into a corner of the garden
I think about that point most of the group went into the kitchen to watch from the safety of indoors
But, then one of the fireworks had blown a hole in the pots they were using to set them off and the nutter set one off which was pointing in the direction of everyone else and was not well secured. And you guessed it… it was in the pot which had the hole in it!
Firework goes whirling round to shout of it’s coming this way
Those that hadn’t gone inside (like myself) now ran for the kitchen door, which only made it worse as the end of the firework flew out, bounced off the patio, through the kitchen door. All the while it was chucking black smoke and sparks bounced off peoples’ legs (including mine) as we ran further into the kitchen!
Eventually it went out, fortunately causing no injuries and we can only be thankful that the kitchen had a stone floor rather than anything expensive or flammable as it was now covered with firework debris on the floor and up the walls.

I dont think anyone could quite believe what had happened, and on reflection how lucky we all were. A bit of soap and water and the floor and walls were good as new and the last two fireworks were set off by the other two to a muted applause.

After that everyone needed a few more stiff drinks and 2006 had arrived!

The rest of the party went well, apart from the cream carpet getting covered by several red wine stains which just had to happen. Amazingly no breakages, which was very impressive considering the amount of alcohol that was consumed. It all ended at about 3:30 in the morning and we all laughed about it in the morning.

On an unrelated note, i got an interview letter for one of the jobs i applied for, and with a bit of luck i feel confident that i can get the job
I think i’ll be celebrating some more tonight *raises glass* cheers

My Last Week

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It had to come one day – last week was my last week working in the NHS job i’ve been doing for over 18 months
I had planned to have a new job sorted – but things had been tougher than planned and having the time for work, socialising and applying for new jobs hasn’t been easy and realistically never happened
What i’m going to do is look to take an extended christmas/new year holiday and put my feet up for a few days. Even after a day and a half i feel better – i think knowing that i don’t have to worry about anything at weekends has been a weight off my shoulders
Have spent most of today getting application forms out, and yesterday arranged to go to my old agency in the new year.
I’m not worried yet, and there should be some good jobs out there for me. And while i’m waiting on interviews i can also spend a bit more time on my blog, website, wiki, php, mysql and all the stuff i never get the time for