TorchLight

… I need Help!

As you may have noticed, it was my Birthday yesterday, and my first day back in the office today after 5 days off.

So, I did as is expected, and brought in lots of nice Fresh Cream Cakes from Tescos for the people that I share an office with. And when I say “lots” I mean two packs of 4, and three packs of 2 cakes of different varieties!

However, as you may know from other previous posts the guys I share an office with don’t actually report to me any more, and unbeknownst to me had been sent to different corners of the country by their new respective managers, leaving me alone in the office with more cream cakes than I know what to do with!

I had one with Coffee this morning, and another with my Lunch, just to try and make a dent. I’ve grabbed most of the causal visitors who happened to walk past, and I’ve still got half of them left!

There’s no fridge here any more, so I can’t save them for tomorrow…. HELP!

I am sitting here waiting for the Postman to arrive.

I’m hoping he’ll bring lots of Birthday cards & Prezzies, for yes, today it’s my Birthday!

I went out for a meal with the Family on Sunday, and apparently I’m getting a day out at the Zoo soon from my little sister.

Birthdays seem to have lost their lustre to me these days. Today is my last day away from work, back tomorrow!

I’ve had a couple of days off last week and this week, and true to form, when should they decide they want to deliver my nice shiny new car? One of the days I’m off, in other words TODAY, that’s when!

You can probably see already where I’m going with this post, can’t you!

They promised a delivery today between 9am and 1pm, so like the good chap that I am, I’ve sat patiently waiting for them all morning, having had the old car cleaned out, devoid of all personal effects, and ready for collection since yesterday!

And of course now it’s getting on for 2pm, no phonecalls, no messages, NO NEW CAR, and I’m going stir crazy waiting here like a lemon.

I’ve decided to give it until 2o/c then I’ll get on the phone and give them what for, as I need to go out and do some shopping etc (which I COULD quite easily have done this morning, had I known it was going to be an Afternoon slot!).

Why oh WHY do they promise a vague timeslot like between 9 and 1, and then NOT KEEP IT? I wouldn’t mind so much if they’d phoned to tell me there was a delay!

So in the meantime I’ll keep jumping up to see if they’ve arrived outside every time I hear a vehicle slowing down outside, and keep watching daytime TV instead! BAH!

Hmm, hopefully this Quiz is a little better….

Please give it a go, and let me know your scores below! 

• Film & TV Faces & Trivia (II)

Ok, so my Politics Post didn’t attract much response! I wonder if anyone’s still awake out there!

Hopefully this will prove a little more interesting! I’ve been known to publish little Quizzes from time to time, usually about Films, or Famous people, and I’ve discovered a new way of doing them which allows me to make it a little more interesting!

Please have a go by clicking on the link below and post your scores below!

Films & Faces

Oh, and please let me know what you think!

And not British Politics for a change.

I’ve been discussing with a colleague about US Politics this morning, and as conversations are prone to do, we’ve ended up covering quite a wide range of topics.

From the perspective of a (semi) interested bystander, it seems to me that Politics in the USA is far more about the individual than the political party and this seems to me to be the diametric opposite of UK Politics.

We’re probably all a bit fed up of hearing on the news about the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for Presidency.

I am a huge fan of the West Wing which I found to be absolutely first class entertainment, and while I’m not qualified to talk about it’s realism, I found it to be believable! Thinking about it in hindsight though, the politics portrayed in the show seemed to be focused around the role of POTUS (or President Of The United States so brilliantly portrayed by Martin Sheen) and his beliefs and ambitions rather than those of the party he stood for. This thought is reinforced in my mind by the impression I get that the current US campaign is to elect the person and not the party. I know that once the Democratic nominations are over, there will be yet another fight between the respective nominees the Republican John McCain and the Democratic Victor, but again where does the party politics fit in? The individuals just appear to be affiliated with a party, although I’m sure they’ve had a previous fight to win the support and backing of their respective parties.

In British Politics it seems that the Party (and indeed the people) have more influence over their party leader. Indeed I would be inclined to argue that given some of the characters (or non-characters) that we’ve seen leading our nations parties in recent years it would seem that they’ve been deliberately chosen for their facelessness!

Spitting Image used a brilliant caricature of John Major in their satirical series several years ago. He was “Grey”, largely to reflect his apparent lack of personality.

In my personal opinion, many of the leaders of the political parties since his time have been equally bland, and have just been figureheads for political parties that are somewhat out of touch with the people.

So fellow Bloggers from both UK and US, do you think that I’ve got the right impression? It would be interesting to see if other UK bloggers have differing opinions from our US friends!

An interesting anecdote, my spelling checker doesn’t recognise Obama, and suggests “Baa” as an alternative!

I’m sitting here mulling over some technology boggles!

PC Memory

It seems daft to me that 32-Bit Windows will only recognise about 3Gb of Memory, despite the fact that the PC BIOS will recognise more.

There were workarounds involving paging for the old 640k limit in MS-DOS (and yes, I’m old enough to remember that!)

Why do we quote speed in Megabits and Size in Megabytes?

I think that if we used a common measure, it would be more meaningful, people would instantly have an idea how long their 2Mb spreadsheet might take to send over their broadband (For those that are interested, 2Mbit/Sec based on an 8-bit byte equals 256 kilobytes per second, so theoretically 8 seconds on a 2Mbit line assuming there is zero background traffic and no contention).

Graphics Cards

On a nice whizzy new PC, with the latest and greatest uber Graphics Cards, doing SLI, why can I only use one screen, whereas if I use exactly the same card in non-SLI configuration I can run up to 4 screens?

Madness!!

I’m just playing about with “Windows Live Writer” as a blogging tool. It’s a tool that will let you create rich blog posts offline in a wordprocessor style application and then publish them to your blog.  It’s supposed to work with WordPress, so let’s see…

It lets you do all sorts of interesting things with your posts, including making “Polaroid” style pictures out of normal boring pics, include Maps, Tables, and other funky things.  Wonder what it does if I tell it I want a map of Ipswich…

Anyone else tried it?  or use any other tools to publish your blog??

… my new Car is delivered to the Dealler tomorrow.

I’ve actually had this car for over 3 years (and over 50,000 miles) now. It’s a company car on a supposedly 3 year lease, (which actually ran out on 23rd March!).

I’m replacing my current Vauxhall Vectra SXi CDTi 1.9 120BHP which looks like this:

With a Vauxhall Vectra Design CDTi 1.9 16V 150BHP which looks like this:

It’s a slightly different colour, and better all round spec. This one is a 16V engine, and has an extra 30BHP for the same engine size, better Air Conditioning, automatic headlights and rain sensitive windscreen wipers, 6 Disc Autochanger CD/MP3 player, etc. I won’t go in to the full spec here!

Unfortunately, and for some reason I can’t fathom, they won’t deliver the new car now until the first week of June. Apparently they “aren’t allowed to do deliveries between the 20th and the 1st of each month”. I’d been hoping that it’d be delivered earlier, and have had my current car emptied of all my personal effects and reasonably clean, (and deliberately low on fuel! lol, Mr Tight Fisted here) for the last week or so just in case I got the call to swap it over in the meantime.

Meh!

Today was, as the title of this post suggests, a difficult day.  No, in fact a very difficult day.

For me it was the end of an era.  Maybe the start of a new one, but nevertheless the end of something very precious to me.

For the last 8 years I’ve had a management role of sorts for a large company, in which I looked after a small team of technical individuals that looked after Networks and more recently Voice systems for a large company.

I’ve mentioned in various posts previously about some forthcoming changes in my role, and they were announced to all and sundry today as part of a greater restructure.

As a “professional manager” I was required to sit at the table, and smile, and throw my weight behind my boss and my colleagues as the announcement was being made, and even take the flack from some of my old team afterwards, and all the while I just wanted to get up and go for a walk outside, or take a trip to the pub over the road to drown my sorrows.

My team is no more, I am teamless from now on.  The guys that used to work for me have been realigned to work under other IT Managers, and their work split up.

The reason given was that we want to align our overall Infrastructure team with the ITIL method of Infrastructure management.  So instead of having small teams grouped around Desktop,  Server,  Midrange systems, and “Comms” (encompassing Voice & Data Networks), we now get a first line, second line, and third line support team.

I am behind what my boss is trying to achieve, but today as I watched the look on the faces of my former team my heart was being torn up inside.  Many of them I recruited directly, and others I’ve worked with for six or seven years.  I think most of them truly like working for me as they know that as long as they play straight with me, I’ll support them and back them 110%, so I’m sure they are feeling much the same way as I do right now.

Instead I get to take a higher level role researching, strategising, documenting, designing, planning, and overseeing things as part of a very small strategy team.  If I need resource to get anything done I’ll have to go to my managerial colleagues and ask them to give me resource.

The new role for me should be more interesting and less stressful.  More of the stuff I like and less of the stuff that I don’t like, but even so I do feel quite … what’s the word?…. depressed maybe?  that everything I’ve spent the last few years building up can be swept away and rolled in to other teams just like that.

So there, it’s all over bar the singing now, what’s done is done, and tomorrow is a new day.   I’ll go in to work tomorrow, and hand over my HR Notes on my team to their new managers, and start splitting up the projects list so that the work can go to with the team members.

Sorry bloggers, another work post, but hopefully for the best in the long term!