Gerard McGarry

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.

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.

Haven't posted here in a while, but there's a lot of good stuff going on with Unreality TV and I wanted to share it here.

Unified Themes

Unreality TV has experienced some excellent coverage in the news recently as a result of the Jade Goody/Shilpa Shetty race row. Lisa's taken a lot of calls from radio stations, TV and newspapers looking for her take on the situation and to find out what our readers are saying.

Wow. Drupal 5. Launched today, installed this evening. I've got to say, this platform raises the bar for me. Drupal always seemed to go to great lengths to be user unfriendly. However, with this release, they've tidied up the back end, explaining what most of the functions are, which is brilliant. They've also got a darned sexy new theme which you can colour customise with a neat little colour picker and which then regenerates the CSS and graphics files on the fly.