Rob's Ego Trip!

Today we moved Andy and James into the new satellite office in Birmingham. It's a serviced office that we are renting from another company that owns the building. I spent most of the day fighting with the network system to ensure we had enough access to get work done. It was surprising how long it took as there was an esoteric bug in the ADSL router that they have.

Sainsbury's delivered this evening and managed to forget a fairly large part of the order too :(

Today I managed to get up early and so was able get things done before the kids got up. Very useful, so I'll have to try and keep it up!

At work, we took delivery of the new laptop for Andy ready for starting our satellite office in Birmingham tomorrow with James. Tomorrow is going to be a fairly busy day as both Carl and myself are also going to Brum to ensure that everything is organised.

Today itself was a mixed bag as I mainly worked on a variety of bug fixes for various projects. I did manage to get in a little bit of design for Dawn though who was worried about the length of time a change request would take. I managed to distil the problem down to its bare bones and it turned out to be about an hour's worth of work, which was nice.

Oh, and Wispa is back at the local garage in Gloucestershire!

No new pictures today, so here's another one from yesterday :)

And so the weekend is over. This weekend was very busy for us with chores on Saturday and a visit on Sunday.

On Saturday, I caught up with my garden chores that had accumulated due to my USA trip and bad weather. I mowed the lawn, trimmed hedges and went to the tip multiple times. There's still more to do, but the garden is looking much better and is much more ready for the winter. Georgina cooked a very nice roast dinner also which was very tasty :)

On Sunday, we went to Warwick Castle to meet up with Tim, Clare and Teagan. We haven't seen them in a year or so and it was great to catch up with them. Teagan, in particular, is growing up and looking more and more like her mother which can only be a good thing. Warwick Castle itself was quite good, but the ghost tower event proved to be too scary for the kids. I particularly liked the displays in the Great Hall, like this one:

Finally made it to the end of the week. A relatively productive day as I managed to get some stuff done that's been waiting for a good few weeks now. And it was pretty much all billable :)

I also managed to get to the post office to pay in a cheque which was nice. It was a lovely day; better than most of August in fact, so I spent a little while sitting in the sunshine too.

Today I managed to get some productive work done. The tiredness that I've suffered from this week is clearly over. This is a good thing as I have a very busy day tomorrow!

The biggest news of the day is that I've been accepted to speak at a PHP conference in Manchester. I'm really pleased as I want to get the experience and more exposure in the PHP community is only a good thing.

Ben had his first forest schools lesson today. He seemed to enjoy it, especially having to wear the yellow all-weather clothes.

Today, I took both kids swimming on my own as Georgina had a school meeting about a school trip for Jon in the summer. Swimming was good as the boys behaved well with Jon getting changed both times on his own. Ben starts next week, so was quite excited and said hello to Mark, his forthcoming teacher.

At work we have started making plans for opening our Birmingham satellite office. The current plan is to start next Tuesday and then I'll be working up there two days per week - probably Thurs and Fri. As I had to leave early from work for swimming, I didn't get to take any photographs though :(

I managed to get out at lunchtime for a short trip to Ashleworth Tithe Barn. I didn't get any time to look around, so I'll have to go back!



The boys had their school photos today which look good. I had a good evening as I fixed a bug in Zend_Config (easy) and learnt a bit about merging with Subversion (complicated)!

First day back at work was a fairly gentle introduction. I didn't get much of what I wanted to do as there was a stack of little things that needed doing! I also managed to migrate our CVS server to another computer which is useful as we're retiring the old computer in 8 days!

At home, Ben had his first full day at school today and loved it. Georgina also got all the chores done much more easily today... not coincidentally! So all in all a very good day all round. I didn't get to go out at lunchtime, so will have to try tomorrow.

Having been away for a week in the USA, I'm now back. Today we took advantage of the weather and went to Hanbury Hall for a walk around. There's a set walk that takes around 40 mins or so which is just about the right length. The kids then had an ice cream and spent some time on the playground before we all came home again.

Today was a little frustrating as I failed to buy a new camera backpack for my trip. As a result, I'm taking my old one, but it's not as padded as I'd ideally like. We'll see how it goes!

I went down to London this evening to see my parents and to be in London ready for leave early tomorrow. I've had a good evening with mum and dad - mostly talking trains with dad :)

My last day at work before the conference was fairly uneventful. I managed to clear up most of the odds and ends that I wanted to which was good. I even sorted out some extra stuff for Carl to help for next week :)

Having trouble installing the database software on my laptop at the moment. I'm hopeful to have solved it soon though.

Today a new hard drive was installed into my laptop. It's really big! I'm sure that I'm going to get to at least June before filling it all up... As a result, I've spent the day re-installing the software etc and still have a fair way to go before everything is back as I want it.

Also, today I decided to check how much space was left on our main file server and discovered that it was a few hundred megabytes. So I also upgraded the hard drive in that machine to a bigger one that I had ordered last month ready to be done. So a task on "when I get around to it" list actually happened today - a big accomplishment!

What is it about the rain at the moment? It was pouring down all the way to work and didn't stop until gone 3! This weather is not helping my plan of going for a walk at lunchtime at all.

Today was an odd day as I ran of disk space on my laptop at about 10am and simultaneously one of our servers ran out too. It took over 2 hours before I was able to start the day and I've only got 3GB free space on this computer at the moment. Tomorrow, I'm going to Tewkesbury tomorrow morning to have a new 320GB disk fitted. I wonder how long it will last...

The boss was back today so we had a long meeting - 10am til 3pm... Still we caught up on all the projects and sorted out some new processes to make life easier. As a result I didn't get much else done all day though. More importantly, I didn't get out at lunchtime to take some photos, so this is a picture of the meeting table instead.



Today was also the day that Ben started going to school in the mornings. He still doesn't go all day as they believe in breaking in the kids gently. Though I'm beginning to think that this is more for the teachers! Ben enjoyed himself and still looks very smart in his uniform.

Today was a particularly lazy Sunday. As we were late to bed last night, this morning was very quiet :) The kids played with their trains and I finished sorting out the laptop that I'm taking to the US. After lunch, Ben had a party to go to at the community centre. For this one, I took him. As I barely knew any of the other parents, I had a quiet two hours watching Ben on the bouncy castle/slide thingy. Ben really enjoyed himself as there were friends there from nursery that are now going to other schools. He enjoyed the catching up and the running wild around a big hall!

Today was an uneventful day. As is our wont, we didn't get up especially early which was nice. In order to help use up all the plums that we ordered in error from Sainsburys To You, I went to tesco to get the bits required so that Georgina could make plum ice cream.

The rest of the day was taken up with preparing an old laptop for my trip to the USA that's coming up soon. I also went into town to try and get some dollars, but discovered that I needed id. Not a totally successful trip! In Worcester, there was a charity abseil going on, so I took a photo:



This evening, Georgina has gone out with some friends to celebrate a birthday, so I'm home alone and sorting out paperwork for my trip.

Today was the last day with just me as the entire management team and on the whole, the week has gone very well. We didn't get a site live as hoped as our client, a design agency, failed to communicate with the client in a timely manner. Never mind - it wasn't our fault or problem, which was nice!

As Andy and James have recently joined us, we decided to go down the pub at lunchtime to celebrate. We don't do this often enough... once a month would be a good goal to aim for I think! As I didn't go out for a walk today on my own with the camera, this is a photo of the pub:

Today was one of those days where the plan went out of window within 10 minutes of getting into work. Clients have caused quite a bit of juggling of priorities today, but we got all we needed to get done and have planned tomorrow, so I'm fairly happy with my performance. Certainly managing projects and clients is a full time job and all the other stuff I need to do has been ignored this week.

It was such a complicated day that I didn't get to take time out of the office for lunch today. Also, it was pouring with rain over lunchtime which didn't motivate me! Of course the sun came out later in the afternoon and
this is the nearby picnic table where one day I may actually eat my lunch!

The big news today is that it was Ben's first day at school. Obviously we took photos! His school has a "settling period" system so this week he's only going for the afternoons and it's a few weeks before he's going full time.

It was quiet in the house this afternoon!

He seemed to enjoy himself as he came back with chalk dust on his face and told us that he played with Lego. Jon was also back at school today and seemed to like his new teacher, which was good. He has been a bit worried about schools starting as he's in a new class which is a mixed years 3 and 4 class. So far, all is going well.

For the first time in a very long time, I didn't take my lunch whilst sitting at my desk working. Today, I went to St Margaret's church, Corse and took a few photos. Of course, it rained. Then the sun came out, so it wasn't all bad. The church is actually a long way from the village. It's the other side of the A417 and down a long winding road. As I was driving down, I was beginning to think the sign was wrong!

When I got there, I had a walk around and took a few photos. Mainly I just wanted to get out of work and put a camera to my eye. I didn't get any fantastic shots, but it was good to be not thinking about work.

Now that the complicated summer months are over, we've started exercising regularly again and it's a killer! Three times a week, you'll now find us using exercise bike for half an hour each. During this time we watch something that's been previously recorded on Sky+. Today, it was Top Gear - the Bullet train race episode. I have to say that I like the look of the Nissan GTR!

In other news, the boss is away this week, so I'm in charge! This means that I'm 99% project manager this week as it seems to take that much time to keep the clients up to date and the rest of the team on track with what they are doing. This isn't a problem and I quite enjoyed heading off a problem with a client by altering stuff around the keep him happy. There's a couple of tight deadlines coming up that are going to require clients to approve stuff quickly, so I expect they'll be delayed though!

Jon also seems allergic to sleeping this evening. it's nearly 9pm and he's still awake. Tomorrow is not going to be a good day I suspect...