Under a rock

I've been in hiding for the past few weeks. Sorry.

We've found a house we are interested in putting a bid in for. It's a step up, so the nerves are jangling. All these questions; can we afford it, is it worth it, will we have the energy to do it up?

We need more space though, that's for sure. I was approaching the point of kicking off extension work to the house, but it's fallen by the wayside to this idea.

Don't want to jinx anything by saying more. Fingers crossed though!

So this weekend is gardening to get our house in a good state as we start thinking about selling it. Got a few estate agents in next week to price my house.

As Lorna says, watch this space!

Australian Pink Floyd

Went to see these guys playing on the 31st of March. Totally awesome. Few pics and a vid here, but the quality is very poor (sorry).

The stage was setup in the same type of form as the Pulse tour. Good light show, all in all costs around £25 per ticket.

I can't remember the entire play list, but included:
- Shine on you crazy diamond (of course)
- Another brick
- Breath
- Money
- Learning to fly
- Great Gig in the sky (Beautifully performed. My absolute favourite song of all time)
- Set the controls for the heart of the sun
- Pigs (Three different ones) - it wins my award for most freeky Floyd tune
- Us and them
- One slip
- On the turning away
- Astronomy Domine
- Comfortably Numb
- Wish you were here
- High hopes
- Time
- One of these days (I'm going to cut you into little pieces)
- Careful with that axe Eugene (ha ha!)
- The Wall

I know I've missed at least 3 more...

Highly recommended if you get the chance and are any degree of a fan. I'd go back to see the exact same gig again!

Synchronising data - Handy

(Following my post about Sync'ing data)

I've failed so far to get any of the Lotus Notes utilities to export to Google or Fumbol servers from within the NAG network (behind whatever firewalls exist).

Meantime, I've found a utility called Handy. It's able to take an exported Lotus Notes file and convert it into an iCal. Google calendar imports iCal's which suits my purpose.

The command line I needed was:

handy -a calendar_in -o calendar_out.ics -f dmy4/

The switches tell you:
-a : which file to use for input
-o : which file to create
-f : what is the interal input file date format

From there, it's fairly easy to import an iCal into Google Calendars.

The issues I have at the moment:
- Haven't tried to automate the Lotus Notes export. A quick search shows this isn't promising.
- I'd like to be able to export just a delta of the Notes changes. Again, doesn't look promising.
- The export benefit relies on me importing this iCal into Outlook at home to merge the calendars, or exporting my Outlook calendar to Google. Neither are my ideal.

I'm starting to think that this isn't something which is easy enough to do for the benefit it gives me. My goal I think may shortly change to simply exporting my work calendar to Google so I can view it at home.

Shame, I really like the benefit of a single calendar view... I hate giving up on goals! Grrr.

Parkour - when things go wrong

Awesome stuff this, if a little unhinged...

I first saw Parkour on Top Gear. James May was racing through Liverpool in a 205 against 2 parkour tracers. It was awesome. The parkour tracers won of course

Then came Casion Royale, with the opening chase scene. Again amazing stuff, unbelievable at times.

I didn't really know what is was called until recently. So when I found out, I opened up video.google.com, did a quick search and found a few gems (and more searching will show you many, many more).

Only then did I actually have a sicko moment. What happens when it goes wrong?

Clickty click. Here's what can happen.

Very impressive when it all hangs together, but my god that must hurt when it doesn't.

Linked in - a tool for interview research

This is a good post from Guy Kawasaki. He discusses using the LinkedIn tool to avoid asshole bosses.

The book this refers to The No Asshole Rule is something I had to order from Amazon. I find organisational theory and psychology in the workplace very complex and hard to navigate, I enjoy reading things which distil other peoples experience in little nuggets of knowledge.

There is a reason I wanted to write about this post from Guy. I see that his comments help give a backdrop for the comments I wrote about on writing your own interview questions. I consider that understanding how Guy explains the view of the asshole boss is kinda like taking a step back and looking at how others view yourself. See things from other people's point of view.

That's the core of my advice to help others become good at taking interviews. If you can empathise with the interviewer, you can win them over.

I've said this before:

• You are candidate 20 of 35. Make an impression, get inside their head (What Women Want, in a sort of non-Mel Gibson way).
• Engage with the interviewer and make them feel loved (i.e. not an asshole?).
• You get my gist, and the analogy doesn't take much of a beating to fall over... :-)

Still planning to blog a bit about the questions I've used / had asked of me and what I think of them. Busy with life at the moment though, not really seen the beige box for a while.

Anyway, rant over...