I said I wouldn’t complain, but what the hell, it’s not like I’m going to devote the whole post to it. This 30-in-30 challenge is hard. When I started blogging I really thought I’d have all this cool stuff to say. Turns out I don’t.

I’m not going to broadcast my every thought on this blog (maybe I would have where it an anonymous blog) so that cuts out a lot of potentially amusing stuff. I don’t want an on-line diary (today I went to the shops and bought a box of Oatees, a frozen dinner and a box of Easter eggs …) and because I have put my name to my blog, I can’t blog indiscriminately about work colleagues or family. If any of these people were to find my blog they’d quickly realize I was talking about them / their aunt / their friend. I need to be happy to take full responsibility for what I write here, so I’m not going to exploit anyone else’s life or say nasty things about other people. A long story short, my blog idea pool is a bit shallow at the moment. I expect if I keep this up I will get better at generating ideas but in the meantime BlackMakros gave me a suggestion to use stumbleupon to help me find some ideas.

My third click today took me here:

http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/member/birthdayno1.php

I entered my birth day / month / year thinking that it’s unlikely that I’d even know the song or artist that was number one more than 28 years ago. I picked the UK link to honor my British heritage and what do you know? It brought up The Boomtown Rats – I don’t like Mondays. I love that song! It was soooo me in high school, a morbid teenager who hated Mondays something hectic. Still don’t like them much, but I’m less morbid these days. I love Fridays. I have a little song & dance I do on Friday mornings when I get in to the office, but I dropped the “kill-me-it’s-Monday” vibe a few years back. Still, I think the song rocks, and I’m so glad it’s my birthday song.

Hunny got Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen – not bad either.

I tried a couple of more recent dates – 1 Jan 2000, our wedding day in 2005, my last birthday – but nothing good came up.

The irony is, because of leap years I’ll be waiting until August 14 2017 before I actually have a birthday on a Monday again, but that’s cool. Monday birthdays suck.

If you are bored go check out the site & let me know what your song is …

Conversation between Hunny and myself earlier this week:

Me: Thanks for making me coffee every morning, but can you maybe make it a little less strong? (I recently swapped to coffee from tea)
Hunny: Okay… You don’t like it that strong?
Me: Nope
Hunny: I make yours strong because you make mine strong, so I thought you liked it like that.
Me: You mean you don’t like your coffee that strong?
Hunny: Nope
Me: Doh.

On a side note I have somehow managed to set winamp to repeat the current song only. It took me 20 minutes of the same song to pick that up. I have to click forward onto the next song each time, I’m listening to about 5 songs an hour at the moment. I tried rebooting, but that didn’t fix it. Will have to look through the settings…

I just completed my tax return. Yeah yeah, I know I’m cutting it fine, submissions must be in by Thursday. I really do have to commend the folk at SARS for their eFiling system. It works like a charm. I completed my tax return myself in less time that it would take me to drive to my (former) tax consultant. And I’m slow at these kind of things: I check and recheck everything several times. A good thing too, because I seem to have forgotten how to operate a calculator. I also say 5 at the same time as I write 3. Odd.

This is IT making a difference, and it’s really cool. It almost inspires me to get into IT. Oh wait, I am

On a related note we interviewed a candidate for a C++ developer role today. When I read her CV I though it odd that she’d want to move from where she was (SAP Admin) into C++ programming. To put it in less tech speak, that would be like moving from car sales into the workshop as a mechanic. Not a change someone would normally make. We went ahead with the interview anyway, she did okay, but she didn’t have any of the skills we needed. That was not surprising because she last did C++ at varsity and hasn’t coded at all in 18 months.

As we were wrapping up the interview she confessed that she thought she was there for a SAP Admin interview (makes sense – that’s what she’s been doing for the last 18 months). Somewhere between our HR department and the agency that submitted her CV they’d mistakenly submitted her CV to us as a C++ resource. The poor woman sat through the whole interview answering as best as she could and trying to sound keen on what we were offering. Considering that, she did a really good job. It doesn’t change the fact that it was a waste of her time and ours though.

Got me a plant to brighten up my desk space. A cute little cactus. Haven’t named him yet. Options so far: Tequila or Jack. What do you think?

Things that stopped working with the office move

1. Power – my desk’s power supply didn’t work (Has now been resolved)
2. Network connectivity – couldn’t connect to network (Has now been resolved)
3. Phone – my line is completely dead
4. Clock – my desk clock that I set to Boston time (where my clients are) died during the move

Some observations about my new spot

• We don’t have any dividers between the desks yet, and the chick sitting opposite me sleeps. Sitting in her chair she just nods off for half an hour at a time.
• The aircons at the front door are freezing (they also seem to have only two settings: freezing or warm). They aren’t that close to where I sit (thankfully) but I feel like I need a trench coat to come and go from the office. One of the aircons in the ceilings leaks over one poor person’s desk.
• This floor doesn’t have a water cooler. Not good for my drinking 8 glasses a day ambitions.
• The totally open plan, divider-less layout forces people to me more friendly to one-another. You can’t make it to your desk without making eye-contact with at least 6 people, so you may as well say hi to them, or at least smile.
• I have a pillar next to my desk. I am the only person that has one. I’m thinking of decorating it.
• With some careful placing of cupboards and credenzas, I have been able to give myself a little extra space and some privacy. It must be that female nesting instinct.
• We have a passage wide enough for a 200kg person to walk down, but they wouldn’t fit into any of the cubicles.
• The newly fitted carpets still have a glue smell, and are two dense to roll your chair across at any great pace or distance.
• I am one whiney cow.

I’ll try to let it go now …

Confidence is a funny thing. If you don’t have it naturally it’s so difficult to gain. If you do have it naturally then it sticks like glue. Then there is the confidence that comes from naivety, which is what I think I had with my biking. You’re confident because you don’t know any better, then something bursts your bubble and you need to learn confidence all over again, one baby step at a time.

My head knew that there were dangers involved, but they didn’t translate through my body. I wanted to get on a bike, so I did it. Then I came off said bike, and now my body knows what it has to be afraid off. Not having a bike to ride for 6 months didn’t help either. Getting back on after 6 months was like learning all over again. The difference is that this time, I was nervous.

Speed doesn’t bother me much. Each ride we go on I start out slowly, but as my confidence grows I get more comfortable with the throttle. It’s the cornering that quickens my heart rate and tightens the muscles in my arms & shoulders. My eyes see the barriers I might crash into before they see the route I’m trying to take, and any good biking instructor will tell you that your bike goes where your eyes are looking… My brain has to remind my arms that I need to relax. I can almost feel those impulses traveling from my brain to my arms, telling them they need to relax so I can lean into my turn. It’s amazing how the human body works.

My confidence is slowly returning though. I could feel it creeping back into my veins with each kilometer traveled, each turn executed, each successful negotiation of traffic I did this morning. It was a glorious feeling: each time I didn’t panic when the road ahead wasn’t clear was a victory.

When it returns this time, it will be confidence that comes with knowledge and experience, and that to me is the best kind to have.

On Friday I gave myself a pat on the back and told you all how I hadn’t missed a day of posting yet, then I don’t post on Saturday. As I am my own commentator, then this must be commentators curse.

Will post twice today to make up for it.
The sun came out yesterday, I’d kinda forgotten what it felt like: that sun-on-the-skin thing. It’s quite wonderful, I sun burnt my arms.

Dartmoor (my horse) took exception to the sun, and spent most of his lesson yesterday trying to avoid any items that glinted in the sunlight. One more thing that causes my horse alarm: Light. Along with shadows, sudden movements, and noises, he’s pretty much got everything covered. We still love him though.

Last night we went to Moyo at Zoo Lake for my company’s year beginning function. We do year-beginning rather than year-end functions just to be different, and probably also because it’s cheaper. It’s always interesting to see your colleagues dressed up to the nines. Often you don’t recognize them right away.

Today we try out our new leathers. For Christmas I brought Hunny some biking chaps and he bought me a new biking jacket. We went to a custom leather place that had a six week manufacturing time, so we didn’t get them in time for Christmas Day. We went to collect them on Friday, will break them in today. I love the smell of new leather

That’s all for now folks, will post again later…

I’ve had a hard time staying productive at work this week. I’m getting work done, but I’m having such a hard time staying focused that its been taking me 10 hours to do 8 hours worth of work. Such a waste of daylight…

Of my new year’s reforms I’m having most success with this one, no lapses in the 30-in-30 yet.

Next best is the eating. I’ve being as good as I have ever been in my life as far as not binging, eating 3 meals a day, cutting carbs goes. I’m not 100% and I thinks that’s way over-ambitious for me to aspire to. I’m happy with progress so far.

I noticed something interesting today. First let me tell you that I love crisps. Two packets of crisps and a chocolate from the vending machine would often be my whole lunch. I could also and probably have eaten a big packet of chipniks with a tub of dip for dinner … I hadn’t eaten crisps for 2.5 weeks until this morning, such dedication! (Power outages have also helped: a couple of times when I’d made my mind up to go to the vending machine there was no power) Today I got myself a small packet of plain salted and scoffed it down in 0.57 seconds. Then: I felt ill! It was weird. I have heard heath-nuts talk about how junk food makes them feel ill, but I assumed they were just rationalizing. I think next time I’ll have to have some dip with my crisps, a nice creamy one to make my tummy feel better …

It’s possible I have lost some weight, but I’m not checking. The measly 0.5 kg’s of last week was pretty depressing so I’ve decided to wait a good while before weighing again.

The morning person story is failing miserably. In this rainy weather I’ve been getting up on average half an hour later than I was last year, so I think I get a D- minus for this one. The sun’s starting to rise noticeably later now also, so this is going to be a real struggle for me. I suspect I may need to change my nice gentle alarm tone to something more violent that gets the adrenaline racing. Maybe sirens or somethings …

SO that’s this weeks summary. Maybe tomorrow I’ll think of something more interesting to write

I work in IT, an industry known for squeezing as many people into a space as is possible. This usually happens at the expense of privacy, and we get used to that, but we get used to it.

I don’t need huge amounts of office space. I’m a bit of a neat freak when it comes to my desk at work. I am also a hoarder by nature, but I manage to keep my loot tidy and in it’s space.

Tomorrow we move into new office space. It’s in the same building, just down one floor from where we are now, but it’s also smaller. Our average cubicle seats four people and is 6m x 5m in size. Our new cubicles are 5m x 4m, still seating 4. That’s quite a bit smaller. And that’s for people lucky enough to get a full cubicle. My three man team is out of luck: when the planners realized they couldn’t fit our department into the space as originally planned, they discarded one cubicle and slotted the desks up against the entrance of other cubicles.

One of those random desks is now my new spot  Not only am I right by the entrance that the whole department comes and goes through, I am also in a thoroughfare to another cubicle. For a person that dislikes distractions when I’m concentrating, this is not a good thing. Oh, and did I mention I’m right by the printer also?

In addition, our cubicle dividers that used to extend about a meter above the desks are being replaced with translucent Perspex dividers about 30 cm’s high. My question: Why bother? Oh, and they haven’t arrived yet, until they do we’ll have no dividers at all.

You can tell this annoys me. It shouldn’t. Professionalism should mean that a desk doesn’t affect my work, but this makes me sour. They’ve pretty much removed my privacy and taken away my ability to personalize my space: I have insufficient desk space to put anything that’s not necessary, and I can’t pin my jokes, calendar or team building paraphernalia to the new dividers.

If I take this to its full conclusion, it removes my personality and makes me a cookie cutter resource just like everyone else – I’m not sure if that’s what the company was after – and puts a damper on my desire to go to work in the morning … That sucks.

There was this tree, right? It was wide and leafy and very green and it was in the middle of a small island in the middle of an oasis in a desert. On the top of the tree there was a thick 3m long pole. One end balanced on the top of the tree somehow – it defies physics – and it ran parallel to the ground. On the other end of the pole was an upturned black dustbin, on which I sat holding a small white bucket.

The pole was rotating, from above it would look like one of the hands on a clock. It was moving slowly at first, but when I realized that there would soon be an earthquake beneath the island, I convinced it to move quicker and quicker, until it was spinning at a dizzying pace. When it had gained enough momentum I flung myself, with my dustbin and bucket, as far as I could. My plan was to get sufficient distance between me and the coming earthquake.

I then discovered that if I remained sitting on the upturned dustbin, holding my white bucket, I could fly, or at least remain afloat. If I got off the dustbin or let go of the bucket I would fall. I traveled for miles across the desert this way until I cam across a white castle. Somebody was throwing a party on the roof of the castle and I stopped to investigate. I discovered that the hostess was my mom and she was dressed in a white linen outfit. She encouraged me to stay and enjoy the party, but I quickly got bored and decided to move off. I jumped off the wall of the castle onto a construction site below, dragging my bucket and dustbin with me.

I was a multi-storey facebrick building that had no roof yet and I was on the top floor. The windows had steel window frames but no glass. It started to get overcast and I looked around me and saw that the scenery had changed. My construction site was in a forest surrounded by incredibly tall trees. I walked over to the window, pushed my dustbin through the wall and climbed out the window with my bucket. I wasn’t quick enough to get back on my dustbin and I started to fall from what turned into a great height. I was falling faster and faster: trees whizzing past in front of me and the walls of the building to my back.

As I hurtled towards the ground it occurred to me that if I hit the ground at this pace I would surely die, so I slowed myself down and landed on my feet.