While rifling my paperwork, I came across an invoice for a laptop bought in 1999 (from a company based in Guildford that is now, thankfully, defunct) which had the following spec:
How did we survive in those days?*
(* well, that machine didn’t for long - or rather it did until I poured a glass of white wine into it)
Time to start the new year facing the future. I was ‘credit crunched’ at the same time that Terry died which was the epitomy of the ‘double whammy’. Alternatively, fate was being generous and I didn’t suffer the ‘bad things come in threes’ effect, though it might have been close as I was a possible suspect for having TB but a chest x-ray disproved that one. Another possible candidate is someone ran into the back of my car a few week ago. However, the damage was minor and they admitted responsibility so it was something of a no-brainer.
In the meantime I’m job hunting, visiting friends and enjoying my new Acer Aspire One 150 netbook (which I got for Xmas). I’ve also kept in touch with friends and Terry’s family in the USA. I’ll be keeping my SkypeIn number for Madison.
I’ll also being updating this site more often. Consider yourselves warned.
I’m back.
I can’t thank enough all the people who’ve helped me during this. All of Terry’s affairs are now sorted (as far as I am aware) and now I have to re-invent myself. My compass is spinning.
Long time, no posts, no explanation.
See a rolling 24 hours of images from my webcam. Guildford doesn’t get anymore exciting than this.
Ack! If Skype once more randomly switches its SkypeIn privacy settings to ‘calls only accepted from contacts’ then I will throw it out of the window. Unfortunately, that means the laptop it’s on ends up going too. Before working out what was wrong, I had visions of having to deal with Skype customer support who, despite SkypeIn being a paid service, still state it could be up to four days before you get a response.
Don’t get me wrong - normally I love Skype as it’s an integral part of keeping my long-distance (4000 mile) relationship going. I just always get a sinking feeling when it goes wrong, as it could be another x hours of my life wasted dealing with (where x is usually > 2).
If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
And so it goes with philosophy - which is both good and bad. The good part is obvious, the bad part is when you’re itching to study a particular work. In my case it’s Heidegger, specifically Being and Time - which I’ve heard is the most amazingly original philosophical work of the 20th Century. However, opinion has it that due to it being such a dense and complex book that builds on the ideas of Heidegger’s predecessors you have to study Nietzsche (e.g. Beyond Good and Evil) and Husserl (e.g. Logical Investigations) first…
… and before you can read them you have to have read Kirkegaard (e.g. Either/Or)…
… and before you can read Kirkegaard you have to have read Kant (e.g. Critique of Pure Reason)…
… and before you can read Kant you have to have read Descartes (e.g. Meditations on First Philosophy).
I think you can get away with starting at Descartes, if you have already have a good understanding of classical and mediaeval philosophy. Alternatively, just read Sophie’s World instead.
Maybe after all that, I can then move forwards to Existentialism and eventually Semiotics (as I see Organizational Semiotics as the next big thing in project management).
BTW trivia note: Sophie’s World is set in Norway and I was co-incidentally in Norway the first time I read it (Mjølfjell, to be precise).
It snowed a bit today. Only a bit.
Not much again recently, as my new job has been keeping me very busy. It may be the extended Easter bank holiday weekend but I’m actually doing some work tomorrow, so I can always stay one step ahead.
Just finished reading Girlfriend in a coma, another Coupland classic. Very intense - kind of like reading an extended issue of Adbusters. I well recommend it.
More recent recommendations: do go see The First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum; don’t go see King Tut at The O2 (overpriced and disappointing).
Otherwise, as my default Linux installation, Fedora Core 6, is getting somewhat old (the way to tell is yum updates come back empty) and I have the luxury of dual hard-drives in my machine, I thought I’d try out Ubuntu 7 first. However, it has only confirmed that we still have a way to go. It is indeed much better at installation and hardware detection but it had problems automounting my iPod and, always the killer, handling proprietry media formats is still a nightmare. Even when it comes to MP3. It is, unfortunately, why I still have to have a Windows box to fall back on. Maybe Ubuntu 8 or FC8 will ameliorate my cynicism.
I’m now employed as a project manager working for a company in Guildford (that is shortly to move to Woking), but spending most of next week at the head office in Leeds - where I will take the opportunity to meet up with Daryl.
It all happened quite quickly. In response to a Jobserve entry, a recruitment agent contacted me on the Monday. I had a phone interview with the company on the Tuesday, followed by a face-to-face on the Wednesday. By 5pm I had been told I’d got the job. Even the CEO emailed me to say it was the quickest hiring they’d ever done! I suppose that should make me feel special.
Anyway, they specialise in agile PM which will be a ‘challenge’. Also, I may well end up working on site across the South East.
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