Work, Cook, Gym......

Work is super busy these days especially today as our business unit has integrated into a new help desk initially all went smoothly but later on in the morning we noticed our HP engineers were not receiving any cases and also our level 1 team were sitting on cases for longer than an hour, so my day turned into a busy one with back to back meetings trying to get the issues resolved.

I've been contracting at my current business for quite a few years now and from April my job got outsourced to HP, I used to be responsible for supporting a site with 700 PCs on a split network 50/50 Email PCs / Production PCs since the take over I now spend my time looking after the production PCs however its not always that busy. I'm now destined to be an IT Project boy which I think could be a good thing at the moment it seems less technical than I am used to after all I have been working in IT Support for over 10 years but I myself can see that IT Support is a dying bread businesses everywhere are outsourcing support.

My job spec has no details apart from Project Gap person my role is to handle and transition anything that does not quite fit into the outsourced support models, for example I will soon be responsible for migrating physical servers to virtual servers and setting up a Linux server which I am looking forward to.

Well I think that's enough about work, as mentioned earlier Vicki is studying for her PGCE and I am now becoming a super cook gone are the days when I lived in Leeds and lived off frozen food I can now cook an amazing assortment of different meals, I would say my favourite and best is Thai Green Curry with butternut squash which we actually had this evening. Yum...

I'm currently training for a triathlon which I am taking part in on the 1st June a friend of mine suggested that I should sign up and I thought why not as I currently cycle 40 miles a week to and from work and running / swimming surely must be easy to do...

Ive been training for a couple of weeks now and I am improving in both running and swimming but I still have a long way to go until I can do the 400m swim and 4 mile run, so I have been going to the gym every day so far this week and will need to continue for the next few weeks, its not as easy as I initally thought

Its a hard life but I feel better for it........ The training part and cooking....

Its been a long long time..

I've neglected my blog only after 4 months of posting....

Life just seems so busy lately.

Vicki is currently studying for her PGCE to be a secondary school science teacher so bless her she is working all the hours possible and even into the early hours to prepare her lesson plans and university work so I'm finding now that I am doing much much more house work and even learning to do new things such as cook :)

Which is all not a bad thing; I guess its about time I started to help out more and I now make a mean Vegetable Thai Green Curry.

So my days go like this:

• Up at about 6am
• Make everyone pack lunch
• Check emails and do some work
• 7:30am wake up Chloe and start getting ready for work / school
• 8:30am Drop Chloe off at school / cycle 4 miles to work
• 9-5pm @ work
• 5pm 4 mile cycle home pickup Chloe
• 6pm cook tea / tidy
• 7:30pm more work

However the 7:30 pm onwards I'm quite zapped and have of lately been switching on the XBOX 360 and playing Call of Duty.

I've just signed up to do a triathlon for the 1st June my first ever, I figure it will be a perfect goal to increase my fitness I have noticed in the past my upper body strength is quite weak and I have always wanted to try out running.

The event begins with a 400m pool based swim in the Lutterworth Leisure Centre before heading out on a 1 lap 18km bike course. You then finish with a 1 lap 5km run to the finish line.

So lots of training ahead, Monday I actually ran 4 miles to work my first run since being at school and it went pretty well a combination of running and fast walking I made it to work in around 50 minutes, I'm just aching now and think perhaps for my first run I should have done less............

Quick theres a fire!

Yesterday afternoon I received a call at working stating that I had to get home quickly as our house was on fire and that the fire brigade and police were waiting to speak to me.

So I quickly dashed home with all thoughts in my mind mainly

• What did I leave switched? (The computers)
• Did I let the cats out?
• I hope the fire is not in the computer room as I need the CD Duplicator / Printing this weekend.
• My smart invites stock and CD's.

By the time I got home I was quite worried to what state the house would be in, and was rather relieved to enter the street and not see the fire brigade still putting out a fire.

It turns out some kids, put our green recycle bin near the back gate and set light to it, which then set the garage door on fire and started burning the stuff behind the door. Luckily there is not much in that garage apart from junk.

If only the message I was given earlier whilst at work was `the garage is one fire' I wouldn't have been so worried.

http://picasaweb.google.com/blueskimonkey99/Fire

Three posts in one day....

Cheers ArticFox, just downloaded Picasa2 and it allows you to post photos direct to your blog, and type the blog entry!

I had better get back to my coding, it's now officially 9 days until the launch of http://www.smart-invites.co.uk at the National Wedding Show @ the Birmingham NEC Stand A12 - for anyone wishing to pop along.

However 9 days to go and still lots to complete, we have just hired two designers to help produce our leaflets and posters and an extra coder to help code the billing system, I always find a tight deadline is always good to get you working hard, but maybe this deadline is too tight.

Things to do:

Print / Duplicate (in House) 1500 Demo CD's
Print 2,000 Ipod touch competition forms
Print posters & 5,000 Leaflets
Upload our brand new website and be-spoke user area - with some very very cool AJAX controls & Features.

Plus much more...

Picasa testing

ArticFox has just informed me that I have a Google Picasa account which is associated with my blog, so I've just headed over there to check it out at first.

I've uploaded a few photos but can't seem to work out how to make it add to my blog from the Picaso site :(

I did however manage to get a link to a photo I've uploaded and here it is.

Next up is to download the Picasa software to see if that can post a new image uploaded directly to blogger.

My new camera and flickr

I got a new camera a couple of days ago, a Ricoh Caplio 6 and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the quality of the photos.

I've also just signed upto Flickr (Finally), and as you can tell I'm testing out it's features...

Aaron

Being Rambo…

It seems and has been so long ago since I last blogged, a lot of this is to do with the upcoming wedding show for our new business idea still lots to complete and only 15 / 16 days to go. It’s my own fault I’m telling myself all those hours and days wasted away when I should have really been programming the new website.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time on Facebook, which I think is 100x better than myspace. Facebook is quite simply great but also creepy as any of your friends can spy on what you do without you knowing, and thus know what you get up to day to day I guess it’s kind of like blogging really.

The only thing I find annoying with facebook is the amount of application requests you get and no matter how much you decline them your friends shortly send you a request again Grrr.

Last weekend was a great one we went to a friend’s fancy dress party I of course decided to go as Rambo, which went down well, and I came 2nd in the competition for best costume.

We started off in an ex serviceman working club with plenty of cheap drinks to get us all in the mood, then at the end of the night about 10 of us went to a busy nightclub in Leicester where we got mobbed.

It was a weird one:

• Girls trying to steal my wig and gun – one girl actually nicked my wig and I had to chase her for 5 minutes!
  
• Guys feeling my muscles – weird I expected the girls to want a feel.
  
• People asking for photos with their friends.


• The DJ Announcing Mr. Incredible and Rambo are on the dance floor.

However it was a fun packed night and I am certainly looking forward to the next fancy dress event, maybe Zombie Slouch in Huddersfield – watch out Mr. Fox.