Tag: Work

Washington DC

At the start of December I was lucky enough to have a short trip out to Washington DC thanks to my companies annual awards scheme. A project I was working on was up for an award and hence our group, well half of it, was flown out to Washington DC to compete and celebrate with teams from around the globe. We didn’t take the top award but had a great time over the four days.

Day 1
An eight hour flight out to Washington was made easier as we were on premium economy (more legroom FTW) and it was an Airbus A380. It really is massive when you get up close to the plane and on take off seemed to trundle slowly along the runway before finally taking off. There is so much room on board, particularly headroom, that it made for a really smooth and easy flight. A coach from the airport and we were soon at our hotel in Washington and the biggest check in queue ever.

We were only a mile from The White House, Washington Monument etc so headed off on foot to take in the sights at night. It was colder than I expected and after a few hours a combination of tiredness, the cold and lack of food was taking effect. We eventually grabbed a pizza but not before seeing a lot of Washington. By the time I got to bed I’d been on the go for around 30 hours without sleep. Zzzzzzzzzzz.


Washington Day 1 on Flickr

Day 2
Out early and it was a gorgeous winters day in Washington. Plan was to visit a few museums and see the sights in daylight. We had around 8 hours as at night was the Awards ceremony. Managed to visit the Air and Space Museum, The Natural History Museum, The American History Museum plus a trip up the Washington Monument. All these are located around the National Mall and it was a great day. We also squeezed in a trip to Five Guys for a tasty burger.

Our awards ceremony was held in the National Portrait Gallery and it was a fantastic venue. A black tie event, we first had the longest 2 mile coach trip through rush hour traffic that took at least an hour – we really would have been quicker walking and given the number of us wearing kilts it would have been quite a sight. The whole night was fantastic with the only slight disappointment that we didn’t win being tempered by another group from Glasgow taking home a gold award. I was really pleased for them as I know a few of the team well and how much effort they’ve put in plus the impact their work has delivered. Another late night!


Washington Day 2 on Flickr

Day 3
Final day for most but not for me as I’d decided to stay an extra day to take in more of Washington. First half was really good – took in the US Capitol building including a tour, Chinatown, Union Station and then a mad dash back to the hotel marked half way point. Spotted a hawk as we walked around the city too casually tucking into some food.

One of the guys who stayed in Washington had an Airbnb in Arlington and as we wanted to see Arlington Cemetery we shared a taxi to his rental. The taxi was bizarre as the driver moaned about not knowing the street we wanted to go to, moaned about Arlington, moaned as he had to phone someone to find out the location, moaned that after the call he still didn’t know her he was going…basically moaned about everything. Even when I looked up location on Google and we guided him there he still moaned. A taxi driver with no sat nav and no map. What a cock. We then took the metro to Arlington Cemetery and arrived just as it closed – our first planning failure. We then decided to walk to the Pentagon down a cycle path next to the Potomac River and a major freeway. This wasn’t the best decision with hindsight as we got nowhere and ended up taking a very long walk to the Jefferson Memorial which was a nice reward as it was stunning at night. A trip to the White House again and then to a nice restaurant in Georgetown finished off the day.


Washington Day 3 on Flickr

Day 4
Final day and I wanted to do some shopping and also see the Space Shuttle over at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Centre. For shopping it was a quick hop on the metro to Pentagon City mall – it stops in the basement of the mall making for a really easy shopping trip. Amazingly I bought no gadgets, just some clothes at around half the UK price. It was a two hour trip out to the Udvar-Hazy Center which was close to the airport anyway. This was a lot better than the city centre air and space museum and had some great displays, topped by Discovery.

I was smiling like a fool when I saw Discovery. For many it will be Apollo or for the current generation it’s probably the Mars Landers but for me the Space Shuttle is what I fondly remember from school, watching the first launch and seeing it soar into space time and again and then the two disasters which took so many lives. There was lots to see at the Udvar-Hazy center and I enjoyed it far more than the Air and Space museum in the city centre which looked a bit tired. It was then back to the airport, a club class flight back to Heathrow and then finally a hop back to Glasgow and some pretty major jet lag.

Washington Day 4 on Flickr

Wrap Up
Washington is well worth a visit. Stay around Georgetown as there’s a great selection of shops and restaurants to suit all tastes and you are not too far from the metro which is a really easy way to get around. The museums are all good although a couple were showing their age. There’s lots to do and a lot of ground to cover so use the metro or one of the hop on/hop off tourist busses. The alternative is to walk a fair bit (which we did through choice) but you will quickly rack up the miles.

50 miles covered over four days
50 miles covered over four days

Our tours around the city meant over 50 miles were walked and blisters were gained but we did see a lot more than we would have done on a bus or especially the metro. I loved the four days and was really pleased to pack so much in, especially seeing the Space Shuttle. Achievement unlocked.

Togaf

I’ve spent the last week in London on a TOGAF training course. It was an enjoyable course and marks a bit of a change in career direction which I’m looking forward to. Before that though, some thoughts on the course.

The four day course took place in central London, in fact a stones throw from Buckingham Palace in the wonderfully named Stag Place. The venue itself was on the 27th floor which offered fantastic views over London.

Early Morning London

The hotel I stayed in was a wee bit way from the venue, right on Shaftsbury Avenue. If you’ve not been to London before you won’t know the location but it’s right on the edge of Chinatown, Soho and Covent Garden. This meant for great restaurants every night but my room was over looking the street and it just never got quiet. On the first night I hardly got any sleep and picked up some ear plugs so the next three nights were bearable. The room was also quiet small, with a tiny sink in the on suite. The worse thing is that four nights stay cost over £800. Shocking but I guess that’s London rates for you. It was clean and centrally placed – that’s about the best I could say as long as you take some ear plugs!

I have to mention each of the restaurants we visited. All very different and all extremely delicious and all found via Yelp on the iPhone.

The first restaurant was Punjab in Covent Garden. Despite the waiter spilling my beer over the table the meal was excellent and a good start to the week. Just look at that starter above – mmm – lovely.

The second night was at Patara – a great Thai restaurant. The mains were great but again my starter was a real highlight (picture above). Third night was at La Perla – a mexican pub/restaurant that did messy but tasty food with massive portions.

By Thursday I was stuffed what with the big meals at night and the great lunches on the course. We went into Taro which was a busy Japanese restaurant. I swore I wasn’t going to eat much but I did – just look at the sushi – fantastic! My weight will undoubtedly pay for this. It’s a shame that the view and food was let down by the heat in the room. Warm first thing, by lunchtime it was getting too hot but it just couldn’t be cooled. By mid afternoon, especially after no sleep, it was hard to stay awake. Dry subject, little sleep and a really warm room.

One nice part of the week was the distance between hotel and course. Far enough away that the walk was meaningful but not far enough away to force us onto the underground. That was only used on arrival and it was a pain due to closure of circle line – our train was swamped with people and it was so damn hot. While walking around I was surprised by how many Boris Bikes were in use. Looks like a popular scheme and one thats easy to use.

As for the course itself, it was good but TOGAF is a fairly dry subject – have I said that already? The best parts of the course were the group exercises although our team was helped by having a powerpoint and sales guru on the team – not my area of expertise! Our team even one the prize – a pen each. Easily pleased.

All thats left to do now is to do the exam in the next few weeks and I should then be TOGAF certified. Eh? Enterprise architecture is the path I’m starting to follow which will be heavily influenced by TOGAF. A long way to go and much work to do but I look to have a pretty interesting couple of years ahead of me. There’s a lot to sort!

Balance

I like my work. I really do. It’s been a year now since moving jobs and it’s worked out well. I enjoy the variety in my job and the challenges it brings. However I’ve been doing some pretty dumb things recently and I need to make some changes.

Dilbert

Now it isn’t as drastic as the Dilbert above but recently I’ve felt like I’ve no time to myself. I’m over committing and not allowing myself enough time to complete tasks. I’m not saying no!

That’s really the issue.

I’m not saying no and over committing. To such an extent that I assume my weekends as normal work time. Sure, I can get that done by Monday knowing fine well that the task requires a full 2 days. No problem, I’ve got the weekend coming up. As I said I do like my work so at the time it makes sense. But it’s crazy. My own time for doing what I want to do has fell away in the last month. Game playing has slowed, blog updating non existent, exercise has fell away, I’ve knocked back a hill walk as I felt too tired (really I had work to do) and I’ve fell behind on a few other things I’ve supposed to have done around the house. I’ve not even got near doing any iPhone programming either.

Time to change. Time to take on tasks and set realistic time-scales and claw back some me time. Hopefully that will help the sore heads which have been more frequent in the last three weeks and also help with the weight loss which has stagnated. Not getting worse but not getting better.

This is just common sense and something I’ve been saying for a while but not actually doing so I’m posting here to act as a kick for me. To get things back in proportion. To find a balance.

Tin Cup

We had another trip down to Roodlea on Friday for a round of golf and some eats afterwards. It was another really good day and despite my handicap being cut I managed to win. Again. Oops. Now the handicap will be well and truly butchered but to be honest it’s about time someone else had a chance of winning.

Managed to snap a couple of videos while I was there, one of them pretty funny too. Sorry Tom.


Golf Lessons – The Chip Shot from Ian D on Vimeo.

Other videos can be seen on Vimeo in HD or at Flickr here, here and here as well as the full photo set on Flickr.

We’re hopefully making another trip down in August. The course we visit is Roodlea Family Golf Centre and it’s perfect for us. It’s 18 par three holes which makes it manageable for those of us (me me me) who don’t play golf. Highly recomended.

Office with a View

While it may be common for lot’s of people I’ve never really had an office that’s had a good view. Take this week for example?

Snow!

That was Monday when the snow was at it’s heaviest.

What a difference a day makes

This photo is from this morning – a glorious start to the day. So why I am so impressed with view? Well, below is what I looked on to for the past 5 years.

Old View

It’s grimmer in real life! It’s great to be able to look up from the laptop and see blue skies. The mind drifts away to other places although you soon get brought back to reality. Lovely.

Head in the Cloud…

…and other shorts. Been pretty busy since switching jobs. Enjoying getting my teeth into Oracle tools again although once thing that is VERY frustrating are Oracle application installers. Unless you have full admin rights to your Windows client then installation is a pain. In fact I’d go as far as saying installation is impossible. At our work our rights are pretty limited and even with what are called ‘developer rights’ you don’t have full client admin. It made installing Oracle, BI Publisher and a couple of other tools a nightmare last week.

To get round it I now use a VMWare image at work that I full rights over. Installations are now almost painless…although then you get caught up in some nasty bugs. Hey-ho. Performance isn’t ideal either but at the moment I don’t have much choice.

Anyway…head in the clouds. I’ve moved away from a couple of desktop tools to some hosted options. The first issue was tasks. I’ve been using iGTD for around a year now and it’s been great. A couple of time the syncing between machines got a bit screwy but it was easy to recover. There’s a big but though – I could never see my tasks at work as they were separate and in Outlook. Not ideal. So I tried Tracks and installed it on my domain. It was a lovely app, did most things I wanted but I couldn’t find a couple of key features and I had to hack in things like e-mail support. Then I remembered the milk.

So I know GTD using Remember the Milk. I can get access to my tasks and lists from Mac or PC and in future they look to have a fabby interface for iPhone users. I also like being able to subscribe to tasks in iCal and the Google Calendar plugin is excellent. Sorted. Just need to do the tasks now.

I’ve also got my own wiki installed now. Helps me have one area for notes, procedures etc. I tried a couple of hosted options but preferred my own MediaWiki install with plugins.

My final ‘find’ was Zoho. I can’t believe how feature rich this set of applications are. Very handy and they also have a wiki…I just don’t believe that my firm won’t ban access to these app’s eventually.

I guess what I’m realising is that putting more info on the cloud rather than on the desktop is a reality, is pretty easy for all and that it’s no longer a pipe dream. Not a startling conclusion but it’s been good to take more advantage of some of the web 2.0 app’s than normal.

Anyway, other stuff. Burnout Paradise is a cracking game and one that shouldn’t really be missed. I haven’t played as much as I would want to over the last couple of weeks but the few sessions I’ve played have been great. It does the online side of things really well.

Sold my old amp on eBay. Quite pleased getting £150 for it. Still to post up some thoughts on the Onkyo 705 which will probably take another couple of weeks but so far it’s been excellent, especially Blu-Ray. Thank goodness one of these formats has emerged on top. Hopefully that will lead to better hardware and cheaper prices.

Apple updates – there’s been something new in the store every Tuesday this year. The Macbook Pro updates today were pretty small – increases to processor speeds, hard disk sizes, graphics card’s and the addition of multi touch which I guess is more extensive than the current model’s use of two fingers on the touchpad. I’m pretty pleased as the laptop I bought 15 months ago hasn’t really changed much apart from the expected speed increases. I still have no regrets with the hardware…touch wood.

Finally, a rant. I do wish Virgin Media would piss off and stop calling me about their inferior TV service. While I’m happy with their broadband reliability (although not always with speed which can be pathetic sometimes) I really hate when they try and sell me TV and even maintain they have a better HD service than Sky. Liars. Better package – don’t make me laugh. Well, they eventually do but only after annoying me. I’ve asked a few times now never to call again but they still do. Time to take the matter further.

when I am through with you there won’t be anything left

Did I say finally? If you recognise the quote you’ll have been watching Damages. If not, then try and catch up with it via downloads as it’s the bet thing on TV at the moment.

New Start

First day of new job. Now an IT geek at work and not just at home! If the first day is anything to go by then I’ve made the right move. The day flew by compared to the last few months of my old job. I know all days won’t be as good or interesting but hopefully they will be more common than not.

The next few weeks look like a steep learning curve back into Oracle development especially round APEX and getting all web 2.0 with it. Should be interesting. Also nice is that instead of having a window that looked directly onto a large shed I’m a bit higher up in a different building and get a wonderful view of Glasgow. On a nice day like today it was stunning.

More Quickies

  • I prattled on the other day about backups and how SuperDuper is now out for Leopard. Since then Shaun Blanc has published a superb post on Bulletproof Backups. It’s a great read like most in his Mac Software Reviews (Coda is a great example).
  • Open source is good. Usually. This list of 50 Proprietary Programs and their Open source Alternatives has already delivered a couple of nice programs that I hadn’t heard of before. For Windows, Mac and Linux users.
  • Everyday Shooter is finally out this week for European PS3 owners. It’s only about 4 months after the USA release and while I appreciate it can take time to add languages the delay has been pretty sucky. Looking forward to it all the same. PS3 has got a great crop of arcade style titles now – just need to sort out their full price catalogue.
  • This week is my last week working for engineering at my current firm. From next Monday I’ll be working in IT, mixing analysis with a bit of hacking. For my sins I now have a laptop at work and boy do I miss my Macbook when I’m using it. I don’t think the hardware’s really to blame. It’s Windows. Well, maybe it’s both. Wireless on the PC is really flaky so much so it’s blue screened a few times, something I hadn’t seen in a long time. Sleeping/waking is also an issue for the PC compared to Mac. Even though the PC is newer and has a better spec than the Macbook it’s really slow in day to day use, probably down to the security software on the PC and stuff like Becrypt. It will be interesting to see how it pans out over the next few months but in 4 days it’s reinforced my Mac loving opinions. Still, looking forward to new job. In fact, I can’t wait!
  • New Leopard update out tonight. Lot’s of fixes (> 300 Mb download) and just when you think thats the last update there’s some new graphic drivers to grab as well. Nice to see them addressing stacks list view and transparent menu bar (some of the biggest grumbles on Leopards release) in that they are now user options. Should have been there for Leopards release but shows how tight it’s original release date probably was. Impressive how quick the update is to download when you think about how many Mac users are downloading it right now.
  • Any good backup software for Windows? Need something to back up work laptop.
  • New Sony Ericsson Xperia looks like a great phone. Loving that screen resolution.
  • FancyZoom – nice effect for images that’s easy to add.
  • Frustrated with the amount of sites blocked at work. A well as the pron, torrents, e-mail, IM and normal stuff you’d expect it now extends to social networking sites (Facebook etc) and also Twitter, every hosted WordPress blog, anything to do with games and the playing/buying/reviewing off and some real oddball sites including some on Oracle. Bizarre, frustrating but I guess I’m at work and should be…working?

It’s Been a While

Not posted much recently. A horrible man flu bug has got in the way of things recently but feeling better now. It got in the way so much that my new amp has been here a week now and it’s still not out the box. I picked up an Onkyo 705 to take advantage of the new audio formats now on offer. Looking forward to setting it up this weekend.

Thats assuming I’ve not been blown away – the wind has been pretty bad over the last few days. Just some snow to look forward to now. Joy!

Two weeks left before I start my new job. Can’t wait. Starting to pick up new work already and it’s looking sufficiently different, exciting, new and that’s before I start. Will be coding again when I move jobs and I’ve started to mess around with APEX in my own time – pretty powerful package and you can get a lot done with very little effort, or so it seems.

Weight loss continuing at an OK pace. Lost the Christmas gains and creeping towards 2.5 stones lost since last September. Back on to the badminton also although the calf is tightening every time I play. Not good.

Trying MarsEdit, loving CSSEdit, wondering why I didn’t use 1Passwd sooner, resisting the iPhone with it’s new tariff’s although now that I’m contract free I’m finding it more difficult than ever to resist.

Loving seeing Tory Derek Conway getting caught with his nose in the trough. I can’t understand why we can’t sack MP’s who are obviously abusing the system.

Anyway, another gale’s whipping up. Time for bed (not sleep – got the whistling wind to listen to).