T O T K a t

My poor Macbook had a split case back at Christmas. I superglued the sliver back down; it was still attached at one end and was really very sharp. That lasted a while, but then parts of that shard came away. I was happy to live with that as it was working OK and not getting any worse. Until it did. The split moved further along and more bits came away. Shortly after that, a split appeared on the other side of the trackpad. I decided it was time to get it repaired; after much research online it appeared that the part was going to cost in the region of £100 and I could get the Genius bar dudes to fit it for me. Much cheaper than buying a new laptop that I just can't afford. So, on Friday I got me an appointment for the following afternoon (suprised I was to get one so quickly and easily).

Bimbling around happened on Saturday. Mooching around the London Transport Museum and then a realisation that we had 19 minutes to get from there to the Apple Store. Smartly jogging down Regent Street to the Apple Store got me and Mybook there dead on the time of the appointment. Checked in, I had a 15 minute wait to be actually seen; just like being at the doctors'. The genius checked Mybook in and sent it off, with no mention of cost. I was a bit hopeful at that point and when I looked at the repair docket, the charge was there "£0.00". *bounce* I was told they'd call me when it was ready, which would be 5-7 days time. I got a call the next day, telling me it was ready, and picked it up today. The new casing is all clean and not worn smooth. It feels new :o) I'm so pleased that it was done under some extended coverage or other. I've had this Macbook for a good while now, so I wasn't expecting it to be covered by anything at all. So, thanks Apple for doing the decent thing and looking after products with a design flaw even when they're knocking on a bit.

After the Apple Store, we did nip down to Namco for a bounce on the Euromix 2 (and the Euromix). Very fun. Very addictive. Can't wait to go again!

I had no summer shoes that fit me; ones that are nice and are suitable for work. So I bought some in the sales at Hobbs; £29 down from £129. I figured it wasn't an extravagance, despite the fact that they're red, gorgeous and have pretty heels. They go so well with a lot of my work clothes, which is handy. And when I wore them at work today, they were noticed and commented on.

No more frivolous spending now; strict budgeting is where it's at for the foreseeable.

It's been a long old 10 days since the Tuesday back after the bank holiday. I've worked all of them (though only really a tiny bit on the Sunday in the middle).

Since I started this job, I've been working towards two migrations: one for the test, part of development and the documentation environments; the second for the mail, file, print and domain services for the company. The former is hosted on hardware we own and run, but in our ex-parent company's data centre. The latter was wholly owned and run by our ex-parent company and that's what was migrated this last weekend onto our own, new hardware and services in a new datacentre. It was delivered 2 months early, under budget and with only a few snags to tidy up afterwards.

I am proud. Yes, the implementation work was done by my staff, but I put in months of planning, preparation, budgeting, recruitment and procurement to get it all in place. Yes, I publicly praised my staff, named and thanked them in an email to the whole company. Yes, various very important people in the company took the time to reply to that email, copy in all of my staff and thank them for the work and praise them on their professionalism. Yes, I am proud of my staff. Yes, I'm proud that it went really very well despite the lack of access and control we had over some parts of the work because those parts were related to infrastructure we don't own. But yes, I am also proud of what I did.

I'm still glowing from the 10 seconds the CEO took, to say thank you when I was making tea in the kitchen in the office earlier today.

Now there's a lot of work to be done to improve the state of what's been handed over to us and to make things better for the corporate systems.

Not to be forgotten is the other migration. It's as important, but less visible to the company as a whole. There are really only two people working on that, and it is very much more complex work than the corporate migration because of the time scales involved and the increasing extra demands being put on those people and the existing systems have killed all of the contingency that was built into the project plan. But once that is done, there's going to be lots of work required to improve the test and other services environments. And then there will be a whole lot more useful things I'd like to do for the company to make things better, especially for the developers, as well as the potential for more new projects coming my team's way. I'm so excited about it all!

And... still glowing!