work

it’s desk moving day today so it’s good bye to my old desk:

and it’s good bye to ash, sara and sally:

rarely a day goes by in the modern office without some minor disaster of some sort. despite insolating ourselves in cotton wool as per the health and safety rules and regulation we occasionally manage to injure ourselves.
today, it was the turn of receptionist Laura to become mangled by the paper shredder. upon hearing of her injury i instantly put the first aid procedure in to place and phoned our first aid warden called Pete.
He ran up the stairs, inspected the damage and then applied a plaster to the very small paper cut.
pete had a very good bedside manner and returned to check on laura 5 minutes later.
luckily everything turned out fine, but i shudder to think what could have happened if i hadn’t been there to phone pete …

i’m moving office on friday and today is the last day on the 3rd floor. on friday i descend to the 1st floor. i’ll miss the height of the 3rd floor, but i’m sure the vertically challenged 1st floor has a lot to offer.
here is the current office – i sit in the far left hand corner.

it was the office christmas party last night. my camera is a bit duff in low light so i didn’t take too many shots, but here are a few:
jane and i (left), herve (right)

will, jane, me and herve (left) and Boy 34 (right)

i’ve made it my business to stalk boy 34 whenever i see him at an office do. jane told him off for ruining the website which was good of her ! Like any good employee he blamed his boss

the dti have an anti-scam site which is quite nice.

click cup for link
public service blogging at its best

UK law and the lawmaking process is quite complicated. however, there are some excellent government websites to help you find out what’s going on.

Read More »UK law

the hotel i stayed in (and where the conference was) was called the Hotel Espanade. it was very nice indeed. here is a picture of a hallway and my room.

rumour has it that this is the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled his baby out the window ! i’ve not been able to confirm this (jacko’s lawyers aren’t answering their phones at the moment for some reason)
there was some celebrity thing going on as there was a camera crew out the front of the hotel. I suspect it was some German celeb and i wouldn’t have recognised them anway. so i took a photo of the camera man instead.

i was invited along by two colleagues for a meal and some drinks in the evening which was very good. it was weird going back to Berlin after only being there is September and i was quite impressed with myself for remembering how the different bits fitted together.
here are some sites (including a little bit of Christmas)

(this is the outside of the inside). i did pop in to the church and there was an organist doing his thing which was very nice.

so, what have i been doing for the last day and a half ?
well, i went to a leaving do at oftel as some of my old colleagues from when i worked there are leaving Oftel.
here are my good friends/colleagues Phil and Keith. They mentored me when i first joined Oftel and i owe them tons for all the info and background on technical stuff they provided.

not pictured are roy and roberto who were also leaving.
i caught up with a few other people i hadn’t seen for ages including this chap called Ally who i used to work with. it’s brilliant when you bump in to people you haven’t seen for ages.

unfortunately i only stayed there for an hour as i had to rush off to get my flight to berlin. i had a real bad case of Beer Bladder on the way to the airport as there weren’t any toilets on the Heathrow Express. i managed, but only just !

esther is now officially sponsored by BT Wholesale. she seems very pleased about it.

i’m on the edge of another mad week. i’ve a day trip to gatwick today for a meeting but i’ll be back later to update the blog !
update: journey time to gatwick 2.30 hours. journey time back 3.20 hours. British trains are a bit rubbish.
when i got to reading people were very annoyed as we had been sitting outside the station for 30 minutes waiting for a platform to be free.
to cheer us up, all the computer screens showing the train times were broken, but had been replaced with pretty rainbows.

and to finish it off, i’ve just sat down at my computer and a ceramic table lamp has fallen on my head. all in all an average day (but i finally see the light)

the 2nd presentation at the OIF went fine again this morning. yesterday’s topic was quite exciting and was in some ways a 30 minutes blog-type thought thing.
Today’s was about how Internet providers business models work in the UK for both dial up and broadband access. Highly boring.
Interestingly, the projector blew up once i’d finished presenting which lead to an impromptu 20 minutes coffee break ! This is becoming a habit … perhaps i need insurance.

you may remember i spent all tuesday writing presentations ? Well i got to present one of them this afternoon.
i think it went well. there were a few smiles and people seemed to enjoy it. i’d turned down the lights so low that i couldn’t really see people’s faces so couldn’t tell if anyone had fallen asleep (i used light switch setting number 4 if you are noting these things down)

the picture on the left shows the auditoreum.
the picture on the right shows some of the best technical brains in Britain trying to reboot a computer and get the projector working. it broke down when a poor chap was just starting his presentation. Hoorah for technical problems.
I’ve on more presentation on a different subject for me tomorrow and then i can relax for the weekend !
What’s that ? you’d like to see the presentation ? well, you’d best go to their website and look there then

here i still sit, 15 hours after i started this morning, still working on those presentations. one is pretty much done, the other is still some way off.
i’m in meetings all tomorrow so probably won’t get a chance to update the blog (or the presentations) until tomorrow evening (UK time).
yeah – finally finished one presentation and nearly done the other. It’s 23:41 so i best get to bed as it’s nearly time to get up for tomorrow :-/

i’m working from home today, so no exciting london street finds today i suspect. i’ve gone for a 5am start as my mind is more active at this time of day. and the house is absolutely silent.
the downside is that it’s very chilly and i’d still really like to go back to bed.
i’ve got two presentations to give this week (to the NICC Open Forum and the Oftel Internet Forum). [the oftel website seems to be quite broken at the moment and even spells my name wrong which is nice]
Today i dedicate myself to their construction.

i work on the third floor of my building and it was with some surprise that i saw this man walk straight towards me from a few metres away outside the window.
it’s ok for him to levitate – he’s wearing a tabard.

if you look to the left of the picture you can see my head reflected in the incredibly clean windows.

a load of techies met up in our conference room yesterday. they brought a couple of switches and a load of yellow patch cables as techies love nothing more than wires, ethernet and IP.
they probably all sat there communicating with each other in total silence (except for the clickety-clickety of techy fingers) using protocols and applications we can only dream of. i suspect they didn’t even have computers – perhaps they’ve all got techy combover hair which when parted reveals a nice RJ45 socket.

i used to be a techy. but now i’m just regulatory. (i still secretly loves wires)

i love excel. it’s official. here are some sites that i love because they too love excel. i’d write my blog in excel if i could. actually, i could. i could write it in excel, save as csv then upload in to the mysql database. mmm.
MrExcel
ExcelTip.com
Buy the MrExcel on Excel book. i’d recommend it even if you never do any excel. share the shortcuts. love the application !

my job is regulation (this story only get more boring …)

Read More »what do i do all day ?

i’m working from home today and i got a shout that it was time for lunch. i went downstairs to find that rather than just the usual two children at the table, there were in fact 4 ! I suspect this might be a ploy by jane to try to convince me that we need more children in our life.
conversation was inspirational. i made everyone listen to New York funky hip hop. they seem to enjoy it judging by their dance moves. i ate my food as quick as possible then ran back to the quietness of my office !

here is ash. he’s a serial winner. he is holding 4 free meal coupons which he found in crisp packets.
what is his secret ? being an all round nice guy probably.