I bet I got a better Xmas pressie than you!

OK I think this will beat all comers, because for Christmas this year I got ... the INTERNET, yeah the whole INTERNET.

Talk about amazing, take a look at the picture for proof.
And the thing I think is most amazing and you just don't realise until you hold it is how light it is.

Thanks to Claire, Ed and My Dad, Brilliant!

Xmas Party

Yesterday was the Christmas Party.

The theme this time round was 'seedy chic' No idea what that looks like so I went in a black suit and shirt. Still I don't think many other people knew what it was either. The costumes ranged from country gentlemen, to playboy bunny, to father Xmas and Rod Stewart.

It was quite a quiet affair (well no not quiet, the music was loud just that not much gossip worthy happened) but we still managed to drink the 6000 GBP bar tab in a couple of hours.

Had a look at most of the picture taken and nothing embarrassing there...which is good!

One Year

Hurrah

Managed a whole year in this current job.

I think it's secure in this current economic climate but I thought the last one was secure as well!

Focus for next year will be learning the latest versions of all the technologies I use (mostly Microsoft C# 3.5) and not getting in too many arguements with the management.

A top time in turkey

After the disaster the was last years trip to Rhodes (so bad I couldn't face blogging about it) this year I went to Turkey for a week and had a brilliant time!

The rule at work is that you have to use all your holiday days before the last calendar day of the year. So I found that I had 7.5 days left and so needed to take a break or lose the benefit (the current company is OK but I wouldn't go so far as to give them another weeks worth of work for free).

So I had to find something to do and after a bit of a hunt round to find a early ski holiday I went a bit random and book a adventure trip to the Daylan part of Turkey.

I book through a company called SpeedBreaks and for a very reasonable price of less than 500 GBP. The trip included
Sea Kayaking (quite tiring fighting the tides but nice and calm)
Canyoning (climbing over rocks and jumping in pools)
Trekking (quite a long hard walk finished off with a nice swim in the sea)
Water Rafting (grade 3-4 bonkers! very gung ho, nearly turned the whole boat over (had it on its side) but a brilliant time was had by all)
and of course Drinking beer

The holiday was arranged for single travellers with about a 50/50 male/female split also nobody knew anybody but in the end we all got on well and had a great laugh. I, like most of the others on the trip where a bit worried about being with a complete bunch of strangers but the whole thing was so well organised and the locals very nice so we were at our ease from the start.

It's a great time to go that bit of the world (its the end of their tourist season so the place is really quiet) as its nice and sunny, not too hot and a great deal better than the rain and the cold that we left in the UK.

Now what to do with the day and a half I've got left...

Meeting the famous

Well Wallace and Gromit and that's soooo cool!

The people from Aardman visited the office to talk about the creative process and brought some examples. Well I think that's why they were there. For me and it seems most of the others it was just a chance to hold Wallace and Gromit and get your picture taken!





It was brill and a major case of child like giddyness affected everyone there.

Replacement iPhone

WTF I mean WTF!!!

The new iPhone not more than a few weeks old has died on me!

Last Friday I was just accessing the calculator (I was doing my tax return, fun eh!) and it crashed and wouldn't come back to life. It's not like I was even doing something very unusual, the calculator app is one that comes with the phone and not some dodgy bit of software I downloaded.

Now this is quite a problem for me as I currently have no other way of staying contactable. I don't have a land line in the flat since the British Telecom farrago last year. so having it crash at 3 pm on a Friday is a bit of issue.

OK, not war and famine scale issue but still annoying.

So fortunately the apple store is a couple of streets away from work and so it was straight back around there to sort this latest out. The process was pretty much the same as the last time with people not quite believing me, pressing buttons, then giving up and handing me on to the next person.

In the end, what they call a 'Genius' called Judith give me a new phone and a short lecture on backing things up.

I got most of my settings back when I sync'd the new phone to itunes so and was able to meet up with my friends at the weekend. A lovely little trip to one of the City Farms where we found a eating place to rival the best in the area.

Its been three days now and the phone is still working but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Windows and Boilers

I sorta fixed the boiler by switching thermostat and fuses around so its half working. I'm getting the top element working but that's fine as its a big boiler.

I won't know more until I can get some more fuses. For some reason the thick cartridge fused that go in the fuse box are not easy to come by in central London, even in hardware shops (the temptation to say 'fork handles' was almost overwhelming!).

On the good news front. I got a knock on the door the other morning before I left for work. It was the building manager to say we are getting brand new windows put in, hopefully before Xmas. So that should be nice, warm and add to the value of the flat. Checking back we've been paying into the window fund quarterly for 3 years so that's one bill I'm glad to see go.

Bloody Boiler!

Unbelievable I definitely think my flat is out to get me and knows I've put it up for sale.

It now appears that the boiler has stopped working at some point during the weekend. I was so bombed out from being up all night on Friday I didn't really notice until I tried to get a shave on Monday morning.

Fortunately I don't need hot water for my heating or washing clothes just for the bath and doing the dishes. So I've been to the gym (as they have OK showers) and not eaten in. If it really has broken then I'm going to have to get a new one and that will invalidate my HIP energy certification (and cost 250 GBP to get a new one) and my HIP is really the only reason the flat is still on the market.

So I'm growing a beard again!

Aaahhh!

Oktoberfest

I did some thing slightly crazy at the weekend (only slightly crazy)

I helped out at the SCIFI London Oktoberfest all-nighter, which is where alots of fans of anime, zombies and really bad movies (plan 9 bad) stay up all night and watch films and drink lots of red bull. I helped with the handing out of the red bull and ice cream. I got to watch a couple of the MST3K movies and a very very bad scifi movie Xmas special, which with the lack of sleep seriously messed with my head.

I got back to the flat about 10ish on Saturday morning and then did nothing complicated the rest of the weekend.

Land Registry - WTF!

I don't know what it is about my flat but nobody seems to be able to manage the accounts correctly. After the saga a couple of years ago about a missing payment which I had paid, I could prove I had paid and the management company didn't believe me for the best part of two years.

Now for some reason my parents names have been registered on my flat as the owners!
The management company, and its a different lot from last time, say they did a land registry search on the flat and it came back with my parents names as the owners.

Huh!

So they closed my account opened one in my parents names and sent them a demand for payments because no one was paying into the new account. This is because I was still paying in to the closed account by standing order and they were letting me! So they sent a arrears demand for non payment which when we found out about this and I rang them up.

'Hello, what are you doing?'
'We did a search on the property and your parents are the legal owners.'
'No they are not and have never been connected with my flat in any way.'

The one exception being I used their address as a billing address while I was letting the flat out

'Well you will have to talk to the land registry and get it fix, We need a correct land registry form to change our accounts'
'OK can I have a copy of the land registry found you have then'
'Certainly I'll email it over'
'Cool'
.
.
.
.
'Er this is a search done on my parents property and not my flat!'
'Oh'

Honestly this is just one of the reasons why I want to sell my flat because I think its been cursed by the daemon of poor administration.

The Temple of Smug and the Blue Smarties

OK so going to Apple store was a strange experience and not a little annoying.

So I'll admit with 'brand new broken headphones', I wasn't in the best mood to sample the 'Apple Experience'.

You walk into the place, which is bright and full of lots of stands on which you can try out all there lovely tech, trying to work out where to go to get help. The are absolutely no signs to point you in the right direction.

I guess the idea is to talk to one of the assistants wearing the bright t-shirts (all the colours you get in smarties but the looks of it) but they were all already talking to customers. So I headed to the tills figuring that was the best place.

This was a mistake, after a lot of waiting I got to talk to someone at the till wearing blue and this 'Blue Smartie' said I had to go upstairs and talk to someone wearing an orange t-shirt.

OK so upstairs I go...Excuse ME! I say to the first Orange Smartie and explain about the headphones. 'Sorry Sir you want the orange shirts over there' he says point across the room. 'OK', breath deeply. across to a group of Orange Smarties behind a counter who are doing there best to ignore the customers about them. I explain again to one of the girls and the others disappear quickly.
She has a listen to the headphones and my phone and it is at this point I start thinking she might have some sort of hearing problem. She turns the sound right up to max so I can hear the music clearly from two foot away!

'I don't hear it' She says
I think I may have gone momentarily cross eyed at this point.

'OK turn it down a bit and try 'All you need is love'' I say taking the phone back and trying to find the Beatles track (Beatles to the rescue as they have lots of stuff happening in one speaker or the other). Except of course itunes made a right hash of it when importing the songs and it takes me an age to find it listed under 'Various Artist'.

So now she sort of agrees with me and asks me what I want to do.

'Can I have some working headphones? or get them fixed?'

'Er I'll see' and off she goes to look in the draws behind the counter. It's at this point I start to take in the rest of the things on this floor. I'm stood by a stand of accessories for the iPhone including about 500 pairs of headphones. Surreally down the far end of the floor there appears to be a lecture going on and about 50 people are listening to the Author/Comedian Charlie Higson talk about, I think, James Bond.

So Orange Smartie comes back and says 'Sorry we don't seem to have any headphones in stock".

I look at her, She looks at me. I look at the 500 headphones, She looks at the 500 headphones.

'oh'

Taking a pack we walk back to the till and she tries to ring it up on the till. I thinking this is now sorted and I'll soon be out of here.

No, she's not allowed to put the transaction through and we have to go downstairs and find a Blue Smartie. This takes some time as Orange Smartie won't interrupt any of the Blue Smarties that are talking to customers, ie all of them. When we finally get a Blue Smartie but he's not senior enough either and they both disappear out the back of the shop.

After a bit Orange Smartie comes back with a Black Smartie (and I thought they were a myth!) and Black Smartie has the special secret wrist movement or possibly key card to complete the transaction.

Done it! Orange gives me the headphones and as I head for the door says to be careful with them. Fortunately I've been in the store for half and hour at this stage, I'm too tired to get angry and just leave.

In their defence they didn't argue about the headphone and did just replace them but there is a little invention called a customer service desk that they might find useful.

Time to circle the wagons

For the first time last night with the collapse of B&B and the failure of the wall st rescue fund I detected the first real note of panic in the coverage. Up till now the BBC has been quite calm about the whole thing but last night they started to say that it was going to all get alot worse.

So how am I effected? well, the flat isn't selling, one person viewed it last week but no news from that. I starting to think maybe giving up on the selling front and do some major DIY on it instead. Maybe looks at putting it back on the market next year. As for any shares I had, well they where worth buttons at the end so there wasn't much to lose out on. I had both HBOS and B&B shares, I'm quite surprised I didn't have Lehman Bros as well!

Ambushed by the Estate agent

OK they got me!

I've dodged the decision for weeks but they got me on the phone today and ask about dropping the price.

The market is dead and all the business with free stamp duty and the other government breaks don't seem to have any effect at all on the London market. To be fair there aren't many places under the 175K in London so it never was going to help much.

Basically the market is falling and so my original price now isn't getting anybody around for a viewing. I sorta plan to hang around until the market bottoms out as a percent down turn in all prices will end up in my favour as I plan on getting a bigger place in the same sort of area.

I agreed we would try it on the market for 10k less than is currently is on to see what happens. I'm not sure I would want it to go much lower yet as there is a smaller flat in my block on for 10k less than that.

Perhaps I'll do some more to fix it up and try and justify the price different a bit more.

Knee Update

Well I've been ticking along nicely for awhile now with my knee. It has recovered from going around the alps and all that climbing.

I works fine with a bit of creaking when I try and crouch down, I still can't quite bend it all the way back so my heel touch my backside but then again I don't think most normal people can do that any way. It makes a noise like crunching cellophane and still needs a bit of a push to unbend. I can do the standing on the bad leg and then doing a bit of a crunch down (an old exercise from my physio back at the start of the year) but not as good as the other leg. I just have to keep exercising it everyday.

As far a pain goes sometimes it will have a dull ache for days at a time but not much else. I think that's cause by the way I sleep, on my side with that leg resting on the other one.

Gym is now mostly concentrated on core muscles again with v sits on a core board and now with twisting and holding the positions for a count (5 normal) which REALLY causes the muscles to burn! We have upped the weights quiet a bit and the press ups he tries to make me clap my hands between each one now, which is well hard!

iPhone Update

Apple release a new firmware the other day to fix a heap of bugs. the iPhone is a bit better now and hasn't crashed on me for a while.

However I've been hit by the legendary poor apple build quality and the headphones only go up to about 10% volume in one ear (yes I did try some other earphones and the iPhone itself is fine). So after talking to a selection of the brain trust at Carphonewarehouse (where I bought it), they couldn't help (Apple won't give them any spare bits) and I now have to go to an iStore.

Joy!

Google Search All

Maybe this could be classified as a thought on modern philosophy.

I tried putting *.* (the find any file term) into Google and got back

Your search - *.* - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.



Now I know I won't get the whole Internet back but surely I should get some matches!

Vodafone Music Awards

Party with Lewis Hamilton and Neil Walker!

After years of working in IT I've finally worked on something that resulted in a good freebie. We been working on various vodafone campaign websites and to say thank you they gave us some free tickets to the Awards show. There was a good little line up of different bands, each playing 1-3 tracks.
They included
The Ting Tings (great stuff starting the show and the second time I've seen them this year)
James Morison (a bit quite)
The Pussy Cat Dolls (quite literally bonkers and I guess one of the reasons Lewis Hamilton was there (the other being the amount of wonga vodafone sponsor him)
Estelle (good LOTS of confetti)
Will Young (I think I went to the bar then)
Primal Scream (I was jumping around like a right nutter and can't really believe I've now actually seen them live!)
and some others that you couldn't really hear over all the media types (and us) talking.

We spent the evening by the VIP section and about 5 meters from Lewis Hamilton and Family. He's smaller that I imagined but then again he has to fit in the car doesn't he.

The other 'interesting' person there was Neil Walker, a friend from many years ago at Uni. Completely random chance meeting, except for the fact he is an executive at Vodafone, so may not that surprising. We had a quick catch up and he brought me a beer which was nice.

I've decided I quite like freebies...

Happy Birthday Mum!

iPhone

What a fashion victim I am.

I got a new phone and yes this will come as a shock to people that work with me it's an iPhone.

Yeap I've bought an apple product after work with Microsoft products for so long.
I'm not really anti Apple or pro Microsoft not like the religious fanatics you get on the subject (mainly in the Apple camp in my experience).

So what's it like? well it looks nice the shinny blackness and the touch screen goodness. It's definitely the future the GPS function is cool watching yourself move around on the map is very 'Spooks' also the 16GB ipod with videos is good.

On the downside it's not really a finished technology I guess they rushed it
to market as it crashes, locks up, drops phone connections alot. I've crashed it completely about 4 or 5 times in a week.

The main culprit seems to be the itunes software that it has to connect to in order to get the music off a PC. Something to do with the applications you can install on the phone and the security checks that the software does. Most of the time this kills all the installed applications and clears the all the music off the iphone.

So I got it more or less working and stuff installed and as long as I don't try connecting it to itunes I should be OK until a patch comes out for the phone.

Birthday

Happy Birthday to my Dad and Happy Aniversary to Him and my Mum...
:-)