(see what I did there?)

Well, I’m no longer at Nomura, taking a week off, then off to pastures Blue.

I have mixed feelings on leaving. The people at Lehman (and Nomura) have been great and a pleasure to work with and I’ll miss them, but the job itself wasn’t quite right for me, so I am pleased to be moving on, hopefully in the right direction.

There are some other definite advantages to moving to Barcap:

1. It’s a five minute shorter commute, so only about a 15 minute walk now.
2. They don’t have a subsidised staff restaurant, so I’ll have a fighting chance of losing some weight (though see point 1 for less exercise)

So another chapter in my career ends and a new one begins.

So we went to Pirate’s Beach Club in Tekirova, Turkey for a bit of sun and to catch up with some of my in-laws.

Warning, the link above has very annoying background music – music they played a lot at the resort itself.

This beach resort is unsurprisingly themed on pirates, although thankfully more Long John Silver than Sumalian, and it’s not really in your face – just everyone wearing stripy shirts and a hanky on their heads.

The resort primarily caters for the Russian market and so everyone except me was Russian and all the staff speak Russian, although a few did speak a bit of English too.

This was fine for my family, but a bit weird for me, especially as all the events and activities were in Russian too (but very very good). Fortunately, the weather was nice, I had a good book and the bar was free.

Mostly, though, it was great to catch up with my sister-in-law, who I hadn’t seen in eight or nine years and her daughter who I’d never seen. I do quite like being an uncle.

Travel notes after the jump…

Continue reading »

We’re off to Turkey!

Mother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece are already there (a beach resort near Tekirova, apparently) and we’re heading off on Saturday to meet them. I’ve never seen niece before and haven’t seen the others for a few years, so very much looking forward to it.

I’m also half way through serving my notice in my current job and start my new job on October 12.

All in all, makes for a relaxing time

We’re off to Antwerp this weekend, and once again we find ourselves in Belgium during the Belgian GP but without going to the race.

Anyways, I like Belgium and am looking forward to another hurtle through the French/Belgian countryside, then a day or so soaking up the Leffe.

Hurrah for bank holidays!

The UK Met Office received a lot of flak for predicting a ‘barbecue’ summer, with many people deciding to ’staycation’ in the UK rather than go abroad.

It’s true, there hasn’t been a great summer so far, and now people are cancelling their stay-at-home plans and panic travelling to the costas.

But the weather is now improving and I think this is a cunning plan on the part of car-loving weather predictors.

This sudden exodus is freeing up the more interesting roads, in particular of caravans.

So, well done Met Office. Do you think you can pull the same trick next year?

I was in Scotland last weekend and rented a car from Hertz.

I had booked a “Hertz Compact 4-door car” as I would be carrying passengers, but what I ended up with was a dodgy 3-door Vauxhall Astra, although I didn’t really bother to count the doors until I got underway.

My dad tells me that rental cars usually have fewer than about 13k miles as they get pretty well shagged after that, yet mine was showing over 33K and only 18 months old.

It felt old and abused too, with some worrying mechanical noises from up front. Anyways, it didn’t break down, so I suppose no harm done.

However, today I get the invoice from Hertz, on which it claimed the mileage when I collected it was 3989 and when returned 4083 and that I’d done 94 miles.

Bollocks.

I’d actually done 280 miles according to Kate (my TomTom) and used 44 litres of fuel (about 23mpg!)

So not only did Hertz give me a gas guzzling, under-doored, ageing piece of shit, but they lied about it on the invoice.

I wonder if all car rental companies are like this?

Last month, we took a break from the madness of work and headed over to mainland Europe with Herman for a two-week tour of seven countries.

It’s taken me a few weekends to sort out all the photos on Flickr, and whilst I’ve posted a few notes on Facebook, I’d thought I put up something here to round it off, mostly disconnected thoughts on travel related topics… Continue reading »

The last few weeks have been quite difficult for me.

Work has been generally unsatisfactory as there is way too much support/management and not enough hands-on development work. This was made worse by my boss taking a couple of weeks in Asia followed by three weeks on holiday, and all this at a particularly busy time.

Net result? ultimate responsibility, 60+ hour working weeks and being permanently on call.

Well he’s back now, so at least I no longer have to cover his role and generally having an extra body in the team spreads the support load around a bit more.

I even had yesterday (Friday) off in lieu of the bank holiday I had to work a couple of weeks back. Very nice turning the raspberry off

Good news now is that I have one more week in the office, then two weeks off on holiday. Hurrah!

We’re going on a Euro road trip, in part, inspired by the Top Gear search for the best driving roads in the world.

Itinerary goes something like this:

• London -> Luxembourg -> Geneva -> Nice+Monaca
• Nice -> Menaggio (Lake Como) – staying 3 days
• Menaggio -> Davos – staying 3 days
• Davos -> Baden Baden – staying 3 days
• Baden Baden -> Spa -> London

The six days in the lakes/alps will see us visiting Col de Turini, the San Bernadino Pass and Stelvio Pass as well as many other interesting bits. The trip up through the Black Forest is supposed to be amazing too.

All in all, should be eight countries/principalities and something between 3800 and 4000 km

Can’t wait. Herman’s quite excited too

Hurrah! Bank Holiday long weekend!

Oh wait, it’s 6am and I’m working. Got shed-loads of stuff to do today.

Fortunately, I’m only on call tomorrow and have a few system checks to do. No stress. It’s just the last chance to prepare everything for the big MSCI rebalance next Friday.

Monday, I’m in the office all day.

Why do they call it a ‘bank holiday’ when everyone has a day off except banks?

I’m also creeping up in weight. Am now 103.5kg, so up about 2kg from low of a few weeks ago.

The last few months have been very busy at work. It’s not just the long hours, but the lack of genuine free time during the evenings and weekends.

I manage and support a system than runs from Saturday afternoon through to the following Saturday morning. All maintenance and upgrade work happens in that window on the Saturday.

When I do get a bit of free time, I just want to chill out.

So it’s fortunate that this weekend, I have no work scheduled (thank’s Rich!!), it’s Eurovision and that’s an excuse to revel in silliness and have not a care in the world.

At least until that Sunday 3am bing.