Julie's Boggle

Today was a fun change – no work because I’m on a course . And it’s for the rest of the week too.

As courses go it seems interesting enough. The topic is UML (or Unified Modelling Language) which is very much the sort of thing that if you don’t recognise, you probably don’t really want to know any more about it. Suffice it to say that it has been on my list of “objectives” (agreed by my manager) as something to do for quite some time.

Like all big firms, A&O makes use of these big corporate training companies that charge an arm and a leg for courses like these. I know we have some sort of bulk discount set up with them, but when I went online to book it initially, the price they sell it as is £1640. Ow! That’s £400+ per day. The very, very cheapest you can get it for is £625 (I think A&O paid about £1000) but that’s when you sign up to do 8 courses in one year!

Anyway, there’s obviously a lot of demand for it – the registration room was teeming with people at 08h30 when I arrived.

“Learning Tree” (our ‘international’ American course providers) have a massive building across the road from Euston station. Very handy for transport (I got there in about 25 minutes) and a plush interior, but not in such a nice area as it turns out.

After an excellent lunch in their 7th floor restaurant, I wandered out to get some fresh air, and rapidly discovered the rather seedy neighbours.

Across a small road, the very next building to them houses a large club called *Secrets* – where, judging by the signs up outside, one suspects that some things are actually not as secret as one might wish… From a distance, the next shop looked like it had more potential: *Euston Bookshop*. But approaching the door, you could see that just inside was a discreet curtain made of lots of coloured strips, and a poster on the opaque window saying “Videos and Magazines swapped here”. Hmm. Maybe not.

There were a couple of dingy corner cafes and newsagents, and then a DVD-video shop with gleaming black windows promising adult material inside. And then the cycle of dingy retailers started all over again. Ah well, time to turn back anyhow. Back into the sterile environment of gleaming desks and smooth-talking lecturers, and away from the gritty reality outside the front door.

It’s been a slow process but tonight we finally got through the last 2 of the theory sections for our Sports Diver qualification. Dave, our dive coach, has generously given up two of his Monday evenings (we had one last week as well) to come and give them right here – so convenient! Tonight we had a full lounge with three other dive learners come to listen to Dave as well.

So now we’ve had all 6 of the lectures about being Sports Divers – which are all about taking things a bit further technically; but also about leaving newbie status behind and becoming a more responsible member of the diving group.

Having done that, we’re left with the Test (to see how much we took in), a pool session, and two or three practical sessions in the quarry. And once we’ve passed all those, we can finally claim the second rung in our climb up the BSAC qualification ladder!

I know I mentioned I’d put up photos of the new windows but time ran away with me again. I had in mind that I’d get round to them right after I finished the custom header graphic I was playing with, and – you guessed it – that didn’t actually happen.

On the plus side, I had an entertaining few hours designing the current header graphic using a package called Gimp. (That’s its logo on the left.) For those not in the know, Gimp (or “The Gimp”) is an open-source (i.e. *free*) Photoshop alternative. It’s an amazingly powerful tool with loads of features – just like Photoshop – but I’m still in the bracket of rank beginner when it comes to stretching its capabilities.

A small catch related to the finished header is that it does make the overlying text look rather clumsy… But I’m saving that fix for another day.

We had a very entertaining night-out yesterday, hosted by one of the guys in Tom’s team at work. It was a Russian evening, replete with genuine Russian dishes and lots of vodka (and schnapps and grappa for good measure).

Our host Artem is one of the younger repo team members. A graduate placement, who seems to have a real heart for entertaining all his friends from work (and a few stray spouses as well). Aside from a very long night spent on the preparations on Thursday, he’d also taken a half day on Friday, all in aid of preparing the delicious spread to treat his mates.

When we arrived, we found the table was already fully laden with the first course which was all the cold dishes. There were three tasty salads, with mayonnaise as a unifying theme – all completely novel to me, a plate of open sandwiches each laid with three small fish; slices of salted, raw fish fillets; preserved mushrooms which were quite unusual, and gherkins. There was yummy rye bread on the side, and glasses of Russian champagne to accompany it.

I was starving when we arrived (Tom had been running late after being part of an interview team at work) but even so, the first course made quite a dent in my appetite. The next course was Russian soup – borscht – a tomato-based meat and vegetable soup – a meal in itself! – which it is traditional to stir a dollop of sour cream into.

Following that we had a bit of a breather to work up our appetitites again, before the main courses began.

The first of these was a potato and meat dish: slices of potato in some sort of white creamy sauce, baked in a tray with slices of pork. Then there was “cabbage and beef” – which was actually a delicious sauteed cabbage and onion base, again with a strong tomato overtone, with chunks of meat in it.

And *lastly* – for those of us with the space to fit in one more main course – there was a chicken and rice dish. This reminded me of biryani because it was a basmati-style rice dish with no sauce to speak of. It wasn’t hot, but it was deliciously seasoned and with a fragrance of cinnamon. For the serious appetites, there were chicken drumsticks in it. All in all, a fantastic repast which left most of us collapsed on the couches.

Artem had also stocked up on some good quality vodka (which came in regular, blackcurrant, or honey & pepper), and certainly the smoothest I have ever tasted. This went down well amongst the guys in a series of tosses which probably didn’t do it justice.

Right before hometime, we got to see the closing dessert course which was a frozen cake. Its Russian name translates as “log”, and it is literally a swiss-roll shaped block of chocolate, biscuit pieces and chopped nuts which gets sliced up. Mmmm. (Oh come on, There’s always space for pudding!)

We said our goodbyes and dragged ourselves away around 23:30, mostly to make sure that we didn’t get caught out by the late shift of the Underground service knocking off before we got home. The first part of our journey was on the driverless Docklands Light Railways (DLR) service back to the City centre, and then onto the Central Line which got us to Shepherds Bush around half-past midnight. Probably within about 15 minutes of the last train.

So all in all a great evening which was my first introduction to at least half a dozen Russian dishes – and all in the comfort of a London apartment. And the lovely Artem has promised to do it all again in the summer with a completely different menu. ‘Na zdorove’ to that!

One thing that occurred to us while we were shivering without a conservatory during a cold snap back in early December, was that the windows in the study are *also* prime candidates for heat loss…

Considered as a whole the study windows, as they were, had few redeeming features. Aside from being single-glazed, they had wonky handles, no locks, and very badly scratched glass on the outside where a previous tenant had attacked them with a vicious scourer (wire wool?) to clean off what we presume was an extremely tenacious creeper. So while Steve the glazier was over, measuring up the conservatory, we casually asked him for a quote on replacing them. And having spent Christmas mulling it over, we decided to go ahead.

So fast-forward a few weeks, and voila, new windows!

All done in just one day [after the conservatory delay, we had quizzed Steve on this one in advance!] leaving just the complex atmosphere of organic volatiles permeating every room in their wake – reminding me of the summer vacation I spent working at the glue factory. This must be from the white rubbery sealant they squeeze into all the gaps – do they get high putting it on?

The new windows match the conservatory ones quite closely, in colour, handle and general look. i.e. they’re sparkly white UPVC frames, nice solid handles and latches, and double-glazed. In some ways, they aren’t *quite* as I expected them to look though. Not in a bad way, just in that they have so very much in the way of “frame”.

It’s hard to describe but you can see when I put the photos up on the weekend. I’m sure I’ll get used to them – and the whole effect will be changed all over again when the curtains go up again.

Now I’m thinking that this room needs painting…

At 08h00, it was -4°C out this morning – frost all over our new conservatory roof. As an interesting comparison, it was 2°C inside the conservatory (which is essentially unheated given that we keep the kitchen door closed) – and 10°C on the inside of the kitchen windows. So does this mean that double-glazing gives you 6° protection, and triple-glazing takes that up to 14°…?

On a whim, we decided to take our car to be cleaned at our favourite car wash this afternoon. (It kind of needs to be a whim in this case because getting to this car-wash is a bit of an excursion – so just needing to have the car washed is not normally enough of an excuse. Of course, we were also giving our tired battery some extra charging time!)

It is no coincidence that this car wash is in the car park of The Royal Oak – a large pub which does pretty good food… The pub itself is in Farnham Common, outside of London’s famous orbital motorway, the M25, in Buckinghamshire. It’s a lovely, fairly rural setting – and not a bad drive from Shepherds Bush – but at 35 minutes door to door, you can see why we don’t pop out that often.

So after leaving our car with the friendly attendants, we settled back for a lazy Sunday lunch washed down with a pint of Speckled Hen and followed by a stroll into the village nearby where we cased out the Real Estate shop.

After goggling at the number of “spacious family homes” going for £500 000 on average, we wandered back, handed over our £25 for the car wash and valet, and headed back to London with our sparkly car…

Thursday evening was Tom’s “VP drinks” party at a local bar-restaurant called the City Golf. (For reference, the pub has seemingly nothing to do with golf, and for the South African readers, it has nothing to do with VW cars either!)

Hosting big drinking functions is a bit of a tradition at GS. Especially for once-off promotions like being made a VP. To keep costs down, Tom clubbed in with the 5 other guys on his floor who had also scored their VP promotions (actually in the London office, they are now “Executive directors”, but they appear to prefer to be Vice Presidents, like their NY colleagues.) The clubbing together idea saves money on friends they have in common, but it does make for a very large gathering to bankroll.

After deciding on the venue, Tom had left the rest of the organising to two of the other guys. Of these two, Kieron – a man who is the life and soul of every party – is particularly fond of kareoke, so that was decided on as the main form of entertainment for the evening.

As parties go, it was pretty good. The venue was spacious, the snacks were plentiful, and the drinks were free. (Ok Tom, the drinks were on the VP’s.) The kareoke singers did their bit to keep us entertained, even if some of this left us wishing we could hold a glass and cover our ears!

The singing was kicked off by a lusty rendition of “We are the Champions” from Tom and his fellow VPs, and after that the guys from Tom’s team couldn’t seem to stay away from it.

My Amazon order from a few days ago got delivered this morning (we took the free shipping option which adds on a day or two). The guy from despatch came wandering over to my desk, carrying this humungous box. No jokes, it was about 50cm long, 30cm wide and 30cm high and as light as a feather. Inside, held securely in place by a plastic film, was the 3-pack of Palm styluses that I’d ordered for Tom. In a moulded plastic pack, about 15cm long, 8cm across and 0.5cm high.

So having received the styluses in a box that could comfortably hold around 300 similar packs, I had to walk over to my pigeon hole to get part two of the *same* order: a paperback – in a snug cardboard sheath. Does packaging come more amusing than this?

Computers are just wonderful procrastinators. They deftly sneak away with your free time without you even being aware of it. In their quiet, unobtrusive way they provide so many, many things to fiddle with – and 1001 new distractions branch off for each one of those.

I’ve finally done something with the arbitrary author text that this theme came with. Replacing it with one of my favourite pics of Tom and I on Chesil Beach last summer (I’m really glad Sam persuaded us to have it taken).

Not much time left now though as I’m off to home group in a minute (Tom’s already left for his first Alpha session at the pub).

So far I’m still frustrated at how difficult it is to tweak the font sizes that came with this theme that I chose, but I guess I’ll just have to press on – until I get to the point where I understand all the style stuff well enough to do it myself!