...that Microsoft received a shipment of spanking dual G5's? Not really considering that the Microsoft Business Unit seems to be actively developing updates to Messenger and Office. But were these computers destined for this unit or have the rest of Microsoft bitten the bullet and decided to switch too? I doubt it somehow.
Either way, this poor chap lost his job on the MS Campus but got his few days of fame!
I just got back from driving Simon back to his house near me in Bournemouth.
Driving along to the end of my road I spotted an electric buggy on the path on the opposite side of the road, 'sans' OAP. I was just gonna crack a joke about someone stealing an old man, when we drove past and caught sight of an old dear crouching in the bushes relieving herself! Fortunately I was concentrating too much on the road and caught only a glimpse, but poor Simon is gonna have nightmares about it.
So the moral of the story seems to be: 'Keep your eyes on the road'. Or maybe it should be 'When you've gotta go...'
My contract arrived this morning and I've signed & returned it, finally marking the end of my search for the first step in my career. Scary but exciting stuff.
I've been happily letting agencies know that I'm no longer available and making sure my CV is no longer visible on job directories. No more 'With-held Number' phone calls at all times of the day :)
Beers & Pool with Simon and his mate Jenny were all the better knowing I'm sorted now. Jenny has just landed herself a job in Bournemouth after returning from her travels down under, so it was a double celebration. Thankfully the rain held off for the walk home during which I had a drunk conversation with Pazman in New York, which was nice! Hopefully the weather will behave while I wander round to his to pick up my car.
I've got a confirmed start date now: November 3rd, 9:30am
But now it's time to head down to the pub to celebrate with Simon :-)
Today after months of ups and downs since graduating I was offered a job with MyEmployer at their Winchester office in their Smart Devices division. Woohoo!
After turning down an offer with NEC Technologies in August, I decided on several criteria for choosing the right job for me. Firstly, the job had to be mostly programming based, and preferably in C & C++. I wanted a broad exposure to programming at all levels from low level device drivers to user applications, preferably in a mobile device environment. I wanted to be able to apply as many of my final year modules as possible, and yet fill in the gaps where the degree was in some ways lacking. I wanted opportunity to learn structured software development methodologies (such as UML), GUI programming and modern IDE's (Integrated Development Environments, such as Codewarrior or Visual Studio).
The company needed to offer decent career prospects and low staff turnover, and good morale. Above all the job had to be interesting. I didn't want to be tied to a desk, so the prospect of a mix of office-based and client-site work, coupled with the variety of consultancy was very appealing. The office location also had allow me to get out at lunchtime and do everyday things like going to the bank, do a spot of shopping, etc. I didn't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere or having to drive to the nearest town/city. Flexible working hours and company sporting/social clubs were also a consideration if a lower priority.
Add these things altogether and you get the picture of the ideal job I was looking for, and fortunately MyEmployer satisfies all of these. I can't wait to start!
So now it's time for some words of thanks, for all the people who have helped me through the past few months: my old Uni pals, especially Special & Jimbo, but also BBF and Katie for their MSN chats; Brother Baz, for the manual on how to deal with Agencies and how to pick good companies; Mum, Dad & Gran for putting up with me all summer and helping me out with the old finances; And finally my wonderful girlfriend Georgie for being so supportive, encouraging and downright amazing in every way.
I'm gonna be tweaking the layout of this site tonight, so don't worry if it looks bonkers.
Techie entry time.
Most of the summer my iBook had been ticking along with precious little hard disk space remaining (<1GB out of 30GB), so in September I decided time had come to bite the bullet and sort out some external storage.
My main criteria were that the unit had to (1) use Firewire (iLink/IEE1394) to connect to my iBook; (2) was 'bus-powered' meaning I didn't have to carry around a separate power supply & (3) was as portable as possible.
This ruled out portable hard-disks built around a 3.5in drive mechanism (too bulky, most required external power supplies). Tempted by SmartDisk's Firelite drives (but put off by the high prices) I set about building my own for cheaper. A morning of googling and searching ebay later, I had ordered a firewire enclosure for £27.99 (incl. VAT & P&P) and an accompanying 2.5in 60GB Toshiba from Simply Computers for £129.84 all in. If I hadn't done a build-you-own, I'd have been looking at another £10 for a smaller 40Gb Firelite, or £60 more for an equivalent size. The enclosure is 138mm x 83mm x 20mm which is a perfect size while sporting a sleek silver finish.
Installation was simple (a couple of mouting screws to secure the hard disk on the firewire controller PCB) and formatting on Mac OS X painless. I now have a backup drive which can boot into OS X 10.2.8 (so that I can run disk utilities on the iBook internal HD), have freed the iBook of 17GB+ of music and have plenty of storage for digital photos (for when I can afford to get my hands on one).
The latest on the MyEmployer job is that they are going to give me an answer by Wednesday... so within 48 hours I should know!
In the meantime I've been 'selected' to attend the ULCS Graduate Select recruitment event in Islington next Monday, for jobs in consultancy, IT and finance. Hopefully I won't need to go, but should things not work out with MyEmployer at least there is a plan B.
Well it seems all your 'good lucks' came in useful: the interview at MyEmployer went pretty well today and the company and job is exactly what I'm looking for. First impressions of Winchester: all good. Town centre seems really nice and quaint, plenty of shops, pubs, etc. and not too much traffic. Train station is nice and central too, so trains might be the way to go. There seems to be a broad range of accommodation in the area, from student digs to houses. I've picked up a couple of local rags to browse the letting adverts. Parking in the town centre is a bit of an issue though so a commute from Bournemouth would not necessarily be a long-term solution. Winchester is an ideal position for visits to Weybridge, Guildford and Bournemouth which are all an hour's drive away. Which is Nice :-)
Overall, I can definitely see myself being happy in this job and location. Now I just need to wait for the verdict from MyEmployer, which I should hear in the next few days or early next week.
My MyEmployer interview has been arranged for tomorrow, so keep your fingers crossed for me at 11am!
... does it take to change a light bulb? Or rather a light fitting? Well this afternoon it took me and dad three go's to get the wiring the right way round on the new spotlights in the landing. Two hours of stretching, pulling, twisting and a bit of swearing. The first time we wired it up, it stayed on permanently, the switch had no effect. The second time the switch again had no effect, but this time it stayed off. Third times a charm and now it works fine, but we have been cursing whoever wired up this house and thought it'd be clever to have 1 green wire, 2 black wires and a red wire!
Still no news from MyEmployer to finalise my interview, but my swotting continues!
I've bagged an office interview with MyEmployer next week. Still waiting for a time & date. An agency is also contact Samsung in Staines about a graduate position in handset development, which also sounds promising. I'm off to Weybridge for the weekend, have a good one everybody!
Chatting to beebs this evening, I realised the word 'bothered' had dropped out of my vocab since moving home to Bournemouth. So I've made a mental note to drop it into conversation at least once a day. This fantastically expressive word must be preserved, nay spread.
Special will soon get his wish it seems with regards a Windows version of iTunes. Several reports of an Apple Event next Thursday point towards the roll out of the iTunes Music Store for Windows, complete with an iTunes port to Windows. This invitation seems to confirm it, and just like Panther, Apple has beaten it's promise of 'by the end of year'. If the success of the iTunes Store for Macs is anything to go by - even just within the US - the potential for market penetration is enormous. International rollouts are being held up by legal matters but I'm sure the US succes will encourage the Music Industry to get their collective arses in gear. The flexibility of Apple's digital rights management will please Windows users I'm sure who are locked into Microshaft DRM technology and all it's over-zealous protection. I just hope they can keep up with demand for iPods because sales are surely going to explode, and I want one as soon as I can afford one!
Oh yeah, at 5-a-side this evening we won, I scored 4 goals and it was a great run out! Makes up for the lack of Oldboys action this weekend again. :-(
For a while now I've been using the rather excellent Kung Tunes to upload my recently played songs in iTunes. You can even search Amazon for the album title by clicking the name. I recently unearthed a few CDs copied from the pub I used to frequent and later work in, right in the heart of Nuremberg, Germany. I'd already imported most of them into my iTunes library, but found a couple of gems that I'd overlooked due to lack of hard disk space at the time. Finneghan's clientele included the guys who worked for the Stereo Deluxe label and they regularly topped up the CD collection with chilled gems such as the Future Lounge, Bassic Instinct, Jazz Boutique, and Ascension Dimension compilation series. Nice. Special is a fan too, he used to educate the Chancellor's crowd with the chilled grooves after we came back from Germany.
But of course right now I'm listening to 'Duncan Wilson' (real name Judge Mental) on SBN via Sky Digital channel 878. The on-screen programme describes it as "Breakfast - The perfect antidote to wacky breakfast radio. Join Duncan for your wake up call." How random, no-one could describe him as anything but wacky! See the J-Team link on the left for plenty of reasons why! Anyway he's just about to play me Chemical Brothers, The Golden Path. Which is jolly nice of him :)
Simsy boy has uploaded a few photies from the Oldboys dinner the other week, mostly from the drunk end of the evening. You can't tell I'd come back from holiday the day before can you? Not with this halo!
Apple today confirm the release of Panther and updated their website with lots of goodies outlining the many features of the updated OS. Today also saw the release of updates to iCal and iSync, which reminds me I must tidy up both my Address Book and Calendars sometime.
I've spent this evening pruning down my jobs by emails from the various online careers directories (see left). I had several automated searches producing daily emails from various directories, but the search criteria were producing significantly overlapping emails which inevitably lead to reading fatigue and eventually laziness. By re-defining the criteria and limiting each website to a single email I should be able to more effectively discover appropriate jobs as they are advertised, without getting overwhelmed with 10+ emails (some with over 100 jobs a day, and most of those were re-posted rather than newly posted). Well that was a boring paragraph wasn't it? Ho Hum.
I've sent another email to Customer Systems to find out why the hell I haven't heard anything about my application since mid-August. Some of these companies are foolish in the way they treat applicants, they must have little regard for the power of word-of-mouth. If by tomorrow lunch I haven't heard back from MyEmployer with regards my Interview on Monday just gone I'll be getting in touch with them too. But I'm not agro with them, I'm just impatient! I'm really banking on this job to come up trumps, I'd be gutted if it don't get the chance to have an office interview.
In linkage news, I've added links to uni buddies Barney, BBF & Adam. I've also uploaded my MSc module in Multimedia Systems coursework: Video Applications over 3G Networks, which I used to wow NEC in my interview and will be the ace up my sleeve for the MyEmployer interview (fingers crossed).
I've got another 5-a-side footy game lined up with Si and his buddies tomorrow night and I'm waiting with baited breath to see if I'll get a game with the UniS Oldboys on Saturday.
Anticipation builds in the Mac user community for the forthcoming update to the system software, Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). In particular I'm looking forward to the revamped Developer Tools which have been renamed Xcode, which includes a number of groundbreaking features and tight integration with Mac technologies such as Rendevous, Apple's zero configuration networking implementation. I'm hoping to start flexing my programming fingers once again with this free IDE after upgrading.
Within the OS itself, I can see myself making the most of the new Expose feature, which makes the most of graphics cards to aid navigation of multiple windows. Here is a Quicktime demonstration. Across the board improvements in speed and stability are always welcome, together with enhancements to Safari and iSync.
Apart from the sneak preview on Apple's website, most of the rumour sites have a number of insightful previews, such as Mac OS Rumors, Think Secret and AppleInsider. Mac Rumors believes an Oct 24th release date is most likely, which is only a couple of weeks away.
After a year of using Mac OS X (10.2 "Jaguar") on my iBook there is no way I'd go back to using either Linux or Windows, which I was required to use for my 4th Year Project by the sponsoring company. As a personal computing platform my Mac does everything I need it to. And it does it very well, elegantly and reliably. And by the sounds of it, Panther will make my iBook do it all better.
After an action-packed weekend, my telephone interview with MyEmployer this morning went really well I think. With a bit of luck I should be heading to their office in Winchester for an office interview soon, fingers crossed! The job seems really interesting, a Graduate Developer role in their Smart Devices division mainly doing Symbian OS and Nokia Series 60 development.
After last minute dramas with their tickets, Special and Katie managed to make it along to the Astoria to see Chicane on Friday with me and Georgie. In pretty small & raw venue, the crowd gradually grew and the atmosphere with it. Support from Futureshock got most of the crowd going but we weren't particularly enamoured with them. The fact they were using a Powerbook to part-power their set was cool though. Chicane took the stage at about 9ish and performed a mixture of old classics and new songs from the forthcoming 'Easy to Assemble' album, which was due out before the gig but has been put back to a 2004 release. The Bongo dude was pretty amazing and the new Mark Morrison-lookalike vocalist gave a good performance. Most of the female vocals were drowned out by the rest of the musicians which took the shine off the performance. Only a handful of the songs really got the crowd going crazy, including the encore of Don't Give Up, and the overall performance wasn't up to the exceptional standard of Faithless at Brixton in April '02, our previous venture up to London. Overall, an enjoyable night and good music, and we're now looking forward to Moloko at Brixton Academy on November 22nd.
After crashing at my brother's flat near Tower Bridge, Saturday afternoon we hit the shops of Oxford Street where Georgie completed her foxy outfit for the Netball social on Wednesday, and Special found a rather nice coat for those cold winter walks to work! The weekend was topped off with a bit of a sparkie reunion in Woking at Emily & Gerald's new house, where Jimbo, Justin and Simon and I enjoyed a fantastic spread of home-made Chinese food. Mmm :) A pub quiz with Georgie's pals in Walton was the icing on the proverbial cake, and if it weren't for a couple of career-quiz teams we would have stood a pretty good chance of grabbing a top spot.
After a disappointing week on the jobs front, including being informed that the Panasonic Mobile job is 'on hold' (whatever that means), this morning there is finally progress to report. I have a telephone interview confirmed for Monday morning with MyEmployer, for a job based at their Winchester office. Having already passed the telephone interview stage for their Manchester office I have that experience to draw on, but the next few days are going to be spent doing some lengthy preparations to maximise my odds.
This weekend I'm off to see Chicane at the Astoria with Georgie, Special & Katie. We'll probably crash at my brother's empty flat Friday night then go shopping for an outfit for G's netball social next week. Then on Sunday we're having a bit of reunion lunch at Emily & Gerald's house in Woking, after meeting up last Saturday in Channies.
There's no game for the UniS Oldboy's 3rd XI this week so that means the ground has another week to soften up and gives my blisters acquired on Tuesday at 5-a-side football a chance to heal. I really need new Astro boots!
