Gerard McGarry

Cyberscribe tagged me a while back to answer this 'Fines' meme that's been doing the rounds. Partly out of fear of what I'd discover, I've delayed on answering, but today I got a chance to tally up my personal score, which is... drumroll please...

£390.00

Which is slightly less squeaky clean than the 'scribe and his £360.00 fine. Now, if the fines were based on the number of times you'd done certain things, I'd be bankrupt right now. As I suspect most people would be.

Well, not Dudley exactly, but the lesser known nearby town of Kingswinford. I'm sitting at the top of a squat, five storey building, looking out over the houses and surrounding countryside. It's as flat a landscape as you could imagine outside the Netherlands...

I'm getting tired of Google.

We've had a faithful relationship for years, but it's time to jump into bed with some new search engines. Try some new positions.

Google's been getting embroiled in a bitchy scene over the last twelve months. People are complaining that their 'Don't Be Evil' mantra is a sham, and lately they've taken a hard line on paid links while at the same time allowing millions of sites to run their AdSense and AdWords products. They're rightly being accused of double-speak.

I have decided, for no particular reason, that I'm going to limit myself in the titles I use on this blog.

OK, that's a lie, there are about three reasons I could give you for limiting my post titles:

Every now and then I get bits of information from home. Usually it's my mother giving me an update on a long-forgotten neighbour or acquaintance. Tonight it was the death of someone I went to school with.

Michael Duffin was one of those guys who was in and out of my social circle throughout school. The kid I remember is probably a very different character to the man who was murdered in the early hours of Saturday morning. Nevertheless, the brutality of people and the fragility of life make you stop and think.

I recently got a Pownce invite from Raj Dash. From the little that I know, Pownce is one of those new fangled web services that allows you to tumble blog (or micro blog). Basically, blogging without all that nasty thinking, categories, search engine considerations, or even the dreaded making money online.

Stream of consciousness blogging for want of a better term.

It's been a week of challenges in the new job.

Running as part of a distributed, multi-site network is the part of the job that I knew I would thrive on, and that's exactly what's happening.

Because our staff spend their time between various sites both in the UK and abroad, they're mostly laptop users, and mostly connecting to different parts of the company network.

The new job's going exceedingly well. Do you know what the best part is? I'm feeling engaged again. The work I'm doing is directly helping people and they're genuinely grateful for it.

I hate to have to say it, but toward the end of my time with CFR, my work had become less than challenging.

This came into sharp focus for me today as I visited a site in Doncaster that was having problems. While I was looking forward to going to the mainland, inwardly I was a little worried that my hardware skills had become rusty.

Well, today was my last day at Cleaver Fulton Rankin. I had worked there as IT Manager for almost 8 years. It would have been a full 8 years in September.

Leaving a job after such a long time is an odd feeling. On one hand, you've been there so long that being anywhere else seems alien. You're part of the furniture, one of the old-timers. On the other hand, there's something refreshing about a new start. All that history, years of developing a network and resolving problems, are at an end. A new challenge is on the horizon, new system, new people.

I noticed that the last entry on this blog was in March. A long time ago in blogging terms!

The last couple of months have been frighteningly busy, with web design work coming in to the point where I'm turning work away. I'm also having a bit of a blast with the music blog.