Its far to easy to lose an hour with all this clock changing business, especially when most of them change themselves and they change while you are asleep!  Thank god for simple technologies that you have to update otherwise i would have lost an hour today and not realised!  I actually realised just after lunch that the clocks had changed, I was actually on the right time as had been watching tv, just had missed the other hour!

So on the train today I was reading in the Metro about a lady who posted an ad basically looking for a bloke with an income above £500k, she go a response from a guy at J P Morgan and while I hate (bit of a strong word, mildly dislike) him for earning such a massive amount of money his answer is really very good!  Check it out - http://www.howardlindzon.com/?p=2725

Ok, so my new job means I have to try and dress smart which for all those who know me is a difficult task at the best times and I am happiest when wearing jeans and t-shirt.  Doesn't mean I don't scrub up well and for my new job I now wear a suit.  Anyway the only item I have not sucumbed to yet is the tie.  This is a crazy piece of clothing that as far as I can tell serves no purpose what so ever.  So I thought i'd look it up and one of the few things I could find was this entry:

 

"Ties evolved from cravats, as worn by the middle and upper classes and scarves by the working classes, around the end of the 19th Cent. They became popular when they were first adopted by the British Army, Officer classes as part of their uniform and these people carried the tie with them into civilian life. It became a badge of office in an office, for petty little bureaucrats who had ideas above their station. Their descendants are still with us today!"

 

The good thing tomorrow is that it is Friday dress down day, which means no tie pressure and also the end of my first 3 weeks.  It is also heading to the party season which is excellent news starting with paid for drinks tomorrow at our resident Friday hang out Bar Deux. Also get chance in the evening to meet up with the original Tesco gang for a few drinks. 

 

Just need to find a person to come with me to Vienna in a few weeks time and life is sorted once more!

 

 

 

Its been ages since blogging so have loads of random thoughts going round my head!  So going to end up with a load of blogs in one day!

 

Radioheads new album of bleeps is out now which you can apparently buy for free or as much as you like.  Apparently acording to Allan Mcgee one time indie pop king and bringer of Oasis this is the way forward as you can get albums for free anyway so why charge (said while releasing the Charlatans new single online for free).  Bands will in future make their money from gigs, hence Madonnas new multi-million pound deal for no records but probably endless touring and then retiring followed by coming out of retirement for one last tour - tickets only £500!  You gotta wonder what that means for CDs and music shops!  HMV and co will have to find a new download world to exist in!  It also begs the question!  How much do you pay for the Radiohead album, assuming it is actually quite good.

 

Apparently they had over a million downloads, if you assume that people each paid just £1 then that is alot of cash in a couple of days and that is before the boxset they are selling for £40!  Maybe there is method in the madness.  Also is you assume you pay £8.99 for a typical chart CD then how much of that actually gets to the band - most would probably go on marketing, distribution, CD printing, record company costs.  So if they tour with this album as well then they are probably quids in - doing it first probably also guilt trips a few more people into actually paying!  I tried searching for CD costs and just came up with a million blogs like ths discussing the album and pricing of it, so that is the marketing sorted!

 

They can probably also argue they have done their bit for the environment by not producing CDs etc...  So the labum is probably now a firm favourite in those circles as well!  You have to do your token green bit as a company these days afterall!  You don't want the polar bears drowning!  As great as it sounds that everyone has become green overnight I reckon most companies are just blagging it!  Stop selling shit food and expensive designer/supermarket clothes, get people on the treadmill and erase fat people is probably more of a mission that might solve climate change.  We could probably use the treadmills to power our house if we thought about it, an idea for the Dragons Den maybe!

So I have been two weeks in to my new job in the Big Orange and its amazing how different my world is now, so a typical day roughly goes like this, alarm goes off at 6.15, massive change from the 8am I could usually do and get to work but slowly learning to cope, Barney is helping me out by waking me as well!  So stumble out into the night and get the first of the freebies of the day - The Metro!  Get random train to work - still learning but I either have the choice of slow train and seat or fast train and luggage rack but haven't had to stand yet!  Its started raining and the leaves are falling so apparently all trains now depart a few minutes late!  No change since the Welwyn commute - in fact I still recognise some of the same faces from a few years ago!

 

Get to London to be greeted by the next freebie, this depends on the day, today was yogurt but without a spoon which isn't helpful; other options have been chewing gum, addidas gel and a free lottery ticket.  Depending on the day it is either the free lads mag or the Sports paper.  The amount of papers is stupid and must result in a small forest being destroyed on a daily basis (I did a store visit a few days ago to South Woodford and there were more papers on the train than people).  Every company is doing there token green gesture - reckon this would be a good place to start!

 

Random walk down Grays Inn Road gets me to work, I am getting bored of this and have taken several diversions which have resulted in finding random green spaces including a field of mini goats!  Get to work and grab breakfast and then start the day.  This is supposed to be started by the recording of my daily greeting on the phone - the most stupid idea ever.  We are supposed to sign in, which is fine and then record a new message daily.  There is then a person employed to check we are doing this who sends out emails each week to say which department is worst - obviously this is IT.  It is an idea only beaten by no email Wednesday.  The fact that nobody remembers to sign in and therefore have no greeting would be instantly be improved by a person recording a generic message which could be changed if not in the office, or maybe even a selection of messages which could be played!  My computer by this point has booted up displaying the retro Windows 2000 screen, we are apparently being upgraded to XP next year and Vista probably in 2100.  Must remember to replace my 'I love Microsoft' badge with a 'I love Solaris 10' badge, must also remember it is not a sequel of a sequel to a George Cloony film.

 

The world is much more different to the last orange building where the lack of process and drive to do as little testing as possible is replaced by the word test at every phase.  This is great for me, there is component test, build test, integration test (3 cycles), Pre-production test (2 cycles), V&P test and then operational testing.  You can not get more opposite but am keen to learn how to do things old school (well the Accenture way)!  Anyway I am documenting the current process at the moment and recommending where to take the online testing.  So meetings and documents are the order of the day.  The biggest decision of the day to date is where to eat, the basement canteen, the rooftop canteen, the 7 Eats, the 5 Prets, the Starbucks, Macdonalds, Costa coffee, countless pubs although bar Deux is the current friday favourite due to the hilarious arguing in Polish between the barmaids; You can really eat in a different place every day for a year!

 

Hometime, still not embedded in the project work yet so take leave on time, another random walk to the station, possibly meet a friend enroute for a drink or two or ten in some cases!  Get choice of 2 more free papers!  You get offered them every two feet by a random seller so they are hard to avoid.  Anyway it is good to know what disaster Britney has encountered today and where you could go if you could be bothered!  So much culture but so much desire to get home also.  Angus was right about two things, you never end up doing anything and you have black bogies! 

 

Train journey back is fine, always a seat and usually fast, I can be home for 6.30 if I get the 6 train home.  The office is moving to Kings Cross in a few years which should reduce the journey time by another 40 minutes!  Getting home earlyish, i'll be able to play footy with whoever is left at eJ come bonus time this year.  I am back for Spooks though... more progress reports from the Big Orange to come!

Seem to be getting into the swing of this running lark having completed the Harpenden, sorry the Herts 10k run!  I ran it in a time of 46 minutes (came 150th out of 2000) which isn't stunning but considering the terrain, cross country with a small mountain half way round and a finishing uphill battle, I consider it a good time.  I even got to see Frank Bruno and a famous Russian runner whose name is unspellable but sounds like spitting!  Anyway the plan is definitely to start doing more runs especially as I am playing football less due to the new work!

The Great North Run has been completed by myself, Angus and Paul.  We all did really well and it was good to have the whole weekend together exploring Angus' haunts on the east coast!  Saturday was spent exploring the delights of Seahorses and Banburgh castle eating fish n chips and walking about a marathon in the process, which might have not been the best preperation!

 

I have now run further than I ever have in completing the GNR.  In fact my last blog was my first training run back in July and considering I have probably only completed a 8-9 mile run a month since my time of 1.53hr is fairly impressive.  The breakdown goes a little like this:

 

Mile 1 - 7.51

Mile 2 - 7.56

Mile 3 - 7.52

Mile 4 - 8.13

Mile 5 - 8.36

Mile 6 - 8.18

Mile 7 - 8.18

Mile 8 - 8.56

Mile 9 - 9.19

Mile 10 - 8.57

Mile 11 - 9.12

Mile 12 - 9.21

Mile 13 - 8.32

327m - 2.01

 

All this was done at an average pace of 11.2k/h and hitting a top speed of 27.6k/h (randomly on mile 2) burning off 1612 calories during the course of the run.  Number of toilet stops enroute was 0 but the number before was roughly equivalent to a night in the pub, about 8 times!  The power of Lucozade and water during a run is great - I never normally take water out when running which is probably stupid but must toughen the body up for the proper run!  Photos for the day are all on Facebook.

 

The actual timings from the GNR web site reveal I was actually beaten by an Alison Hornby who finished 2 minutes ahead of me!  If my race number is anything to go by I started in 38453th and finished 7805th.  That means I overtook a shit load of people enroute!  Angus finished in 2hr 11 mins (18258th) and Paul finished in 2hrs 29 (20479th).

 

The only problem on the day was escaping Newcastle which took about 4 hours, it probably would have been quicker to run the whole thing again than do what we did which was walk about 5 miles, then get a ferry and then the metro home!   Starting a new job the Monday after was not the best plan i have ever had either!  Walking from the station to work which is about 15 minutes and then trying to get up to the 6th floor was probably the biggest challenge given the state of my legs after the race!

 

Its all done now, the only bad thing was not getting sponsorship for!  So I have signed up for two more races and another half marathon next year for which I will get lots!  Welcome back to the world of blogs!