Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Picasa

Downloaded Picasa yesterday, under the advise of one of the chaps from work (thanks Russ!). Initially all I wanted to do was created a screen savers for my parents new PC from some pictures my brother gave me of his holidays (he's not coming home for xmas so thought would be a nice touch).

Well, anyways, I'm very pleased and dare I say surprised with the capabilities of Picasa. I think its fantastic!. It takes the indexing and clever location finding functions of google desktop and mix's them with some of the neat functions of photoshop, all for free!.

Well worth a play, if like me you've lots of holiday snaps from distant shores....

Sunday, December 18, 2005

Editors

Jumping on the band wagon as I am, finally got round to buying the
'Editors' cd yesterday. 'The Black Room', in my humble opinion is
fantastic.... a dead cert for the Ipod play list over the coming months.

The Editors are kinda reminiscent of the high speed, guitar orientated
India that's doing the rounds at the moments. This places them firmly in
the same arena as Hard Fi, Kaiser Chiefs, and Kasabian. Unlike some of
the aforementioned the boys hail from middle england, which includes
Stroud no less!. Anyways now based in Brum, after at spell at Stafford
Uni its good to support local talent.

ps ... on the Ipod front. The Ipod mini I have is getting far more of a
hammering now I'm taking it running. Helps the motivation on these cold
nights I'm finding. As a result the average 5 miles I've been doing now
simply while away :).

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Work

Its that time of year to grumble about work ... if I'm really honest
I'm fed up!. I suppose I should consider myself grateful to have a job
given the upheavals this years, but I don't really. If anything my
career has come full circle again, and I'm now doing little more than I
was a year ago, only under less advantageous conditions. So really,
nothing but a giant leap backwards in my view.

Whilst I have to be sensitive to the needs of the business (as my salary
pays my mortgage), its frustrating to say the least. I've always tried
hard to push the envelope of were I am, push the comfort zone if you
like. The rationale being that by doing so it will thereby lead to
hopefully a degree of advancement. But, when that advancement is, and
has become cyclical in nature it hard to motivate myself to bother.

As an example, I've started to study for an MBA, the challenge to me at
the moment is not the study itself (although am sure this will be a
challenge at some stage), its more around finding a true application for
anything I learn. Its therefore making me ask why am I investing the
time and effort, equally why is someone else investing, as its currently
obvious little practical benefit will be felt.

In addition, I, like many of my peers are feeling the inequity of
work/life balance. The pendulum has swing truly in the favor of work,
and I can't honestly see this changing. The result is increased stress,
which I guess raises the question how long will I absorb this inequality?.

Ah well, I guess I am like thousands of other people, thoroughly p**d
off at work. Not sure I have an answer, but one to think about. Watch
this space ....