With one day left on my contract in London, I have started taking photographs of colleagues and places - and writing a lot in my notebook.

Hopefully it will be something to look back on in years to come. I have no idea if I will be back in the city soon, or ever again.

You can click on any of the photos to see a few notes in Flickr (and of course the larger version).

Blogged with Flock

It is Monday morning. I have 4 days left working in London. In a strange sort of way I am going to miss the people I work with - for the last 10 months I have spent more time with them than I have my “real” colleagues. I have come to know them, like them, and value both their experience and friendship.

When I was first seconded to work in London, it was for 5 days to hand over the source code of a colossal system that I was one of the “inventors” of. Those five days spent commuting seemed like a marathon - 4 hours each day squashed onto a variety of over-ground and underground trains to travel from leafy Marlow in Buckinghamshire to Bishopsgate, in the heart of London’s east end.

Continue Reading »

For some reason, Christmas isn’t happening in our house. Neither of us have any will to do anything remotely connected with Christmas. We’re wondering if it’s because all of our attention, effort, money and thought has been directed into the adoption journey over the last few months - which will all happen of course after Christmas.

We haven’t got any decorations out yet, and have only today begun Christmas shopping. On the way home Wendy held my leg and said “cheer up?”. I hadn’t realised I had been down, but I still have this cough (7 weeks, and counting), and I guess it’s sucking the fun out of me.

I haven’t bought Wendy anything for Christmas yet. I either have to order something off the internet tonight - and pray it arrives in time - or go out in London at lunchtime this week and find her something. I have NEVER been this unprepared for Christmas before.

We even had a conversation earlier about not putting any decorations up this year - we are not going to be here either at Christmas or New Year. It seems a bit pointless to put lots of things up when we are only going to be here for a couple of days. We finally decided to put a tree up on Tuesday.

While Christmas shopping earlier, we picked up “Guitar Hero”. I’m not going to try and describe it - I’ll let you watch this YouTube video instead…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlvMkvTLO8Y&rel=1]

I’ll post a photo of Wendy stood in the middle of our lounge with the Guitar soon. It is a sight to behold.

We were given a 20 minute video of our future children last night by their foster carer.

Words cannot describe the enormous grins wrapped across both of our faces as we sat watching it along with our social workers last night. The children we had so far only known by names, conversation and social workers reports are becoming much more real. We spent a couple of hours listening to their carer’s stories - the little things - the things that matter. Who likes what to eat, what so-and-so said yesterday, their favourite books, their favourite colours, the songs they sing.

Notice I am now referring to them as “our future children”, rather than “our prospective children”. The opinion of the adoption team is that barring an administrative cock-up, the matching panel next Friday is pretty much a formality. I have still to wrestle with how much information I ever let out about them in this blog - I hope you will understand that I may never share their names, their sex, or even their ages - or certainly not for several years.

The children will be told about us at new year. We are preparing scrap books, and a video telling them all about us, our house, our family, and our life. At the moment they are the only ones who don’t know we exist. Their foster carer’s excitement is palpable - she wandered through our house saying “oh my god - they are going to love this”, over and over again.

It’s suddenly becoming much more real, and much more exciting.

I promised to post some photos of our fish, and here they are…

There is a story behind us having a fish tank so suddenly. As part of the adoption process, we have had to fill in the pond at the end of the garden. Several years ago, when we first dug it and were enthusiastic about all things to do with ponds, we bought several fish - Golden Rudd and Green Tench, and released them into the wonderful world we had built.

Continue Reading »

The reason for so few blog posts - and so few comments from me on other’s blogs over the last several days - has been the finale in the saga of my body’s defences versus every cold and cough type virus in Great Britain trying to attack me.

It would appear (and I don’t want to tempt fate) that I am finally getting better.

The worst point was probably last Friday - when I was coughing so violently it gave me a headache so bad I didn’t know what to do with myself. My body effectively shut down in the early afternoon - I went to bed with my clothes on after lunch, and didn’t wakeup until lunchtime on Saturday.

The weekend basically didn’t happen for me. I spent most of it coughing, unblocking my nose, taking headache tablets, or sleeping.

It’s now Monday night, after another day spent huddled up in the warm (apart from a trip into sub-zero town earlier for food - cheers to whoever invents the weather), I am contemplating returning to work tomorrow. This entails bringing some of our house back online - like ironing some clothes, packing my work bag, and so on. It’s going to take most of the evening. Neither of us has done any of our “normal routine” for days while we have been ill.

At the moment we are both on the maximum dosage of over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. In combination with lucozade and cough medicine, it seems to be working slowly.

I have never been ill for so long in my entire life. November hasn’t really happened - or the start of December. We have done nothing to prepare for Christmas yet. The decorations are still in the attic. It doesn’t even feel like Christmas.

Tomorrow morning I face something of a vertical hill. I’ll be back at work with a week and a half until the end of my contract. There will be problems to solve, documentation to write, and handovers to prepare. I need to be well. I haven’t been for well over a month. I need a clear head. I need energy and drive. Quite where I’m going to find them are anybody’s guess.

The nice man from the post office arrived at our door yesterday carrying a parcel from Amazon. Unwrapping it revealed the Western Digital “MyBook” we bought last week.

It’s a 500 gigabyte external hard drive - and it’s fast. The main reason for buying it is video editing. Upon plugging our video camera into the Macbook for the first time last week, we discovered just how horrific raw digital video file sizes are.

We were informed that the remaining half of the Macbook hard drive could carry in the region of 1 hour of video - and that would have been before attempting to create a DVD image. Suddenly a whopping great external hard drive seemed like a good idea. The biggest surprise was how reasonably priced they have become. Storage is indeed cheap these days.

Another surprise has been just how capable and easy to use iMovie 08 is on the Macbook. Until we had the video camera we had no reason to use it - but have been both amazed and delighted so far. Of course this means Wendy can confidently get creative with the various video clips we record in order to make an “all about us” movie for our prospective children.

Now we have all the hardware, we just need to learn how to make an interesting short film - an entirely different (and new) skill.

We are both at home ill now, and made to feel even worse by the knowledge that we missed Wendy’s work’s christmas party last night - which was held at Pinewood studios in among all the James Bond props. Dress code was formal. Apparently it was a brilliant night.

I’m totally blaming the London Underground for both of us being ill. I have never been as frequently ill as I have been during my stay in London in my entire life. We both have continual headaches. We both ache all over from continually coughing. Neither of us has slept properly for days.

Last night I lent down to pick up a cup off the floor - and my nose filled with snot in about a quarter of a second. And you know all these lozenge type things they advertise on television? They are all crap.

That’s all I have to say about that.

This marks the first time I have written a technical post in the blog since I “crossed the streams” (in true Ghostbusters fashion) a little while ago. Many of you will be unaware that I work as a software developer in the daytime, and like many other developers I know, it’s more an obsession than a career.

I find complicated things interesting. I like to know how things work. Don’t panic - I’m not talking “like to know how things work” in the same way that Sylar might in “Heroes” - I’m just talking about a fascination in complex/beautiful/clever things. It probably also explains why I like mathematics, and why I dislike slapstick humour.

Continue Reading »

I discovered a new video podcast this morning - Webdrifter. It’s part of the Revision 3 network, which also put out Diggnation and GigaOM.

The lastest episode sees the host, Martin, visit 91 year old Allen Michael - the founder of the One World Family Commune. They talk about Michael’s belief that we are all derived from extra-terrestrials, and that those beings are still in contact with him today.

While the show is firmly tongue-in-cheek, I couldn’t help wondering while watching it how different people would react to it. No doubt somebody with conventional religious beliefs would look down their nose at the ageing hippie in the film. They may openly criticise and/or laugh at the commune’s views.

Why?

Being judgemental is not an instinctive behaviour - it is learned.