It’s the end of the fourth week in the new job, and after an overnight stay in Bath and trips to London, Somerset, Sheffield and London again, it’s good to have a bank holiday weekend to look forward to. And then next week it’s off up to the North East to meet another colleague for the first time and do some coaching.
The time has flown by - I must be having a lot of fun :)
It’s a shame that this First Great Western train I’m on atm (the 19:15 from Paddington to Swansea) isn’t going as quick. For once, it’s not the fault of First Great Western or their (in my experience, all too often unprofessional) staff, but after two hours we’re just pulling into Didcot Parkway, and not Cardiff where we should be. Hopefully we’re past the latest problem to plague this service, and it’ll be a much quicker second half of the journey!
This job is full of pleasures both big and small. One of the small ones today was to introduce one of my colleagues to the joy that is the Foyles bookshop in London. If you’ve never been to Foyles, it’s difficult to explain why this wonderful shop is different to all the other bookshops in central London (and, I believe, in the UK as a whole), but every time I get to show someone this mecca of books, the reaction is always a good one.
I managed to escape with just three books: one of the Wu style of Tai Chi, a replacement for my loaned-and-never-to-be-returned copy of the Principles of Effortless Power (another martial arts book), and the new book from Packt on OpenSER. That last one is going to live in the office, me thinks.
I also managed to escape the Apple store without a new Macbook Pro, but only because they didn’t have a 4GB RAM model to hand for me to take with me there and then (they normally do the upgrade in the shop on demand, but I didn’t have the time to wait the three hours they quoted for it). As much as I love my current Macbook Pro, I’m finding the short battery life (<2 hours on average) to be a bit tight on the longer journeys I’m now doing. The later generations can manage double that, which I’d find much more convenient. Ah well, maybe later in the year as a Christmas treat to myself.
The worst thing I’ve done so far was totally self-inflicted. I managed to brick my Nokia N82. As wonderful as Parallels is for running Windows on the Mac, never ever try running a Nokia firmware upgrade using it. I tried; the whole virtual machine died partway through the firmware upgrade, and the N82 was toast. (Wouldn’t it be great if Nokia had A/B firmware slots like digital cameras do? They could release firmware upgrades much more regularly and not be worried about silly folks like me bricking their phones). It had to be sent back to Nokia, and I’m missing it greatly. I hope it comes back soon! Then I can start loading Ordnance Survey raster data onto it 
Oh, we’ve just made it to Swindon. Maybe I’ll make it home today instead of tomorrow after all …
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