grinding and crunching of glass

Work -
And another week. It has been an odd sort of week, rather than trying to grab things by the scruff of the neck to sort them out, I have been trying to focus on tidying up my current post, ready for taking on a new post in the New Year. So less meetings and appointments, and plenty of tidying up emails and filing the important ones. Also trying to step aside and let other people lead on things that normally I would have, really not something that comes naturally to me.

Went along to what might well be my last meeting for a favourite project. It is good to be able to tell people in person that I will be moving on, it seems a lot more straightforward than just bouncing their emails later. Someone I had been working with, suggested that maybe I was one of the new breed of civil servants, which is quite flattering. I rather suspect that I tend to do things the way that I think that they should be done, and if that happens to accord with current thinking, then it is just lucky. Anyway it is great project, that I'm delighted to have played a part in, and it should be on a firm footing for the future, which is all you can really hope for.

Friday- a day long presentation of research findings, which was marred by being held in one of the most depressing facilities I've ever seen. It had obviously had a fair bit of money spent on it, all glass, and stainless steel. Which sounds grand, and it certainly did have a certain wow factor, but glass sliding doors always scare the bejeezus out of me, casually close one, and you get a great grinding and crunching of glass, as it closes unpleasantly. The accoustics were also pretty dismal. It was the usual 9.30 for 10.00 but for once it was absolutely packed when I got there at 9.30, and it got busier from then on.

All in all pretty interesting, I liked the social research stuff more than the more quantitative stuff like the economics.

Well? -
Still full of the cold, like death warmed up on Tuesday, though I don't think anyone noticed! Quite a few interesting emails on my personal account, from different pies that I have had my finger in. It is intriguing how a little effort here and there, builds up over the years.

IT Geek -
Now that I have diagnosed that it was a problem with the external hard drive, getting the new laptop set up, and backing it up, is really pretty straightforward. It has been running on Tiger for a week or two, so now I have installed Leopard. I've got a new external hard drive, and put four partitions onto it, one big one, and three small ones. I'll use the big partition for TimeMachine and back up to the others using SuperDuper once it is Leopard compliant. Clearly the learning lesson for me here, is that small baby steps, one thing at a time, making sure everything is working fine before trying anything else, is the way to proceed with IT.

In fairness - now that the moody external hard drive is out of the equation - leopard seems to be running just fine, TimeMachine is trouble free, and I'll need to reacquaint myself with the various new features that Leopard brings.

Also in fairness - the tech support for my hard drive seems fine, they got back to me a couple of times and I'm just waiting for details on how to return the hard drive to get a replacement.

It is tremendous fun doing a real Victor Meldrew routine bemoaning the failings of the modern world, with comic gravity, but I would prefer honesty to comic splendour.

With luck my family tech support role should now diminish. I tend to take the view that IT is a means to an end, though recently it seems to be taking up hours, and I'm not getting much beyond doing family IT geek stuff each weekend.

Writing -
Someone suggested that I should be writing more, currently feeling a bit beseiged, a myriad of small tasks on one side, and on the other a desire to create something of such jaw dropping perfection, that I never seem to get anything done.

There is probably a benefit to just jotting down a blog full of mince, in that it at least gets you writing something.