Yesterday was my 10th #work #anniversary at @oxfordbrookes so I’ve made Chelsea Buns for tomorrow to celebrate. @jennaa0 doesn’t like raisins though so tagged is her special one… #ChelseaBuns #TearAndShare #TeamUX

I get home from a Friday to start the weekend to be greeted by This! .
…but more pleasurable a letter from #work confirming that my I am no longer considered at risk. ???? Just wish the poor pidgie hadn’t have been more at risk earlier… ????

What’s done is done. She all is said and done I think that I did my best… #milkshake #relax #work #restructure #interview

I’ve commandeered the office fan for my own purposes as we are down on numbers today. That acceptable Yes? #work #heat #uksummer #toohot

I think that this week at #work might be a shorts kind of week… #weather

Into the office slinky… #work #reportwriting

For almost all of this time there has been a bug in the system to do with the PHP setup that caused the server to fall over all the time and also stopped me from performing backups because everytime I tried I had to reinstall everything from scratch. But we muddled along, me and good ol’ HSSServer1. Sometimes I could go a week without it falling over, but sometimes it would happen daily, or more often, and I would have to run across the building and switch it off and and again.

At the last disaster recovery meeting I was asked what it would take to rebuild it as is, and I said we wouldn’t – we would hasten the migration of the websites. From today, we no longer have to bother it.

HSS Server1
2009–2017

The day it snowed at #work and festivities to see out 2017…

A little bit of #work prep for when we perform The Final Shutdown of the millstone that has hung round my neck for the last eight years… #server #decommissioning #theendisnigh

Ummm… very nice but spot awkward mistake! #newbuilding #work

#SuperWednesday #SiteLaunch #SausageRoll #Celebration
This completes the migration of the five core departmental websites with a five days to spare… #websibes #work #alliteration

Wilting… #work #toohot #tryingtoconcentrate

Something to end the week on in the sun! Started off on Monday really not sure I could migrate another two websites by 1 August, and ended thinking, yes, yes it’s doable (just)… #work #productive #success

Wahay!! @oxfordbrookes #BrookesVR has hit 1000 downloads! #happydance #work

Second website migrated, so a second sausage roll in celebration… ???? #work #websitelaunch

The Friday Commute. This was my route this morning up until the point where #TheHill forced me onto foot.i think you can understand why… #bikecommute???? #work #Friday @oxfordbrookes

#SlowGin to see out a successful day at #work.
Now, back to the novel. Where in wonderland did I leave Miss Amanda Jones?

#amwriting #work #TheNovel

I have been developing websites within the unversity CMS for about three years – indeed I launched the first mini-site to be hosted on it outside of the main site, and have since developed some other, not insubstantial sites (Do you know how many poems are in the Poetry Centre website? I do. Lots. And I migrated them all. I kept finding them hiding behind others, it went on forever…).

Today though, I passed a major milestone and migrated the School of Law website completely off the old webserver and into the sparkly new CMS. And you know what, it switched over pretty smoothly. I’m pleased. One down, four to go, and few more miscelaneous minisites and intranets and I’m done. Maybe that day of turning off a webserver that I really shouldn’t be responsible for maintaining is actually in site.

Onwards, then… to my self-imposed deadline of 1 May to get the other four core departmental sites migrated.

Website migration celebratory sausage roll! Yum!

One down, four to go… #websites #migration #work #cms

#1HappyYear Day 363: Sunset on a productive day of migration… #work #100HappyDays

Understandably I’ve built up a fair amount of TOIL this week, what with working a full day last Saturday finishing off the virtual tour, and then an hour or more at the end of each day making sure the email reminders were primed and ready to go for the following day… this all means that for my mammoth 23 days off over Christmas I only have to take 4½ days of actual holiday! Now that’s what you call a win!

Still dog-tired now though!! :-\

I’m also being inspired to write again. It now being four months since I subbed Mr Tumnal to a couple of publishers I’m now planning on finishing it up for a pre-Christmas Indie release. I’ve realised for this that I need to have a cover professionally made for it, and have contacted a few designers. I’ve already had some brilliant early sketches from Silviu Sadoschi, who has previously designed the cover for my friend, John Scotcher’s The Boy in Winter’s Grasp. I’ve also made contact with Alexandra Allden, the sister of a colleague of a colleague of mine. Talking to both Silviu and Alexandra have shown me that a professional cover design was not the prohibitive expense that I thought it was going to be, and have enthused me with the idea that I really can do my story justice, and I am excited by the prospect of working with either.

I’m also finding the need to get stuck into my next story leaching out of me. I’ve written short stories in the last year, but I’m finding my fingers aching to write the next novel. And here’s the thing? Which of my many ideas is going to my next? My natural home is one of magical realism, but the one I’m not sure if the next I feel closest to is magical? There’s a twist, and its a really good twist, but I’m not sure if magic lies therein. I guess that’s not so much of a problem.

I just need to get my pen out and place the first mark down and write.

It’s been a long ol’ week, and not just because of the second 10-hour day at work, but its over now, and I’ve even got an old office chair I was able to take home with me in order to fulfill the requirements of the homework setup…

I’ve also now applied for my bus pass. Work offer an interest-free loan system so that the cost of the annual season ticket – a MegaRider Gold Plus with Oxford SmartZone – is spread out across the year and taken monthly directly from my salary. Hopefully it should arrive sometime next week when I’m on holiday, ready for my final week’s work of the year.

I’m still coming to terms with the not being able to drive the car (which I am still the policy holder on my insurance for but not a named driver on!), but I am also kind of looking forward to the adventure. I should be able to further smash my reading targets for the next year, and hey, my climate footprint will be going down. Who knows, it could be fun… (well until I’m standing in the rain and the dark at a lonely bus stop…)

Still, I feel a bit more confident about things now. My boss has been brilliant about my news and is supporting the idea that I should be able to work from home home more regularly to complement me getting the bus mostly. And I’ve resolved getting to band. Neil, our new conductor, lives, like our last two out near Northampton and is able to drop by and collect me on the way to band so that’s good.

Something that I did find a bit much to deal with today was the bombshell news that my brilliant boss is not going to be my boss for much longer. Come February she’s leaving us for a new job elsewhere. For me, this is just at the point when I really glad that with things how they are, that I had a nice supportive boss. I really didn’t deal with that very well at all, and all but burst into tears in her office! Which was okay, because she is understanding like that.

I wouldn’t say I was a highly experienced or adept WordPress designer but I have learnt a thing or two about how it works over the years, and I do have all number of instances of it working in various ways in my main work, my freelance, and personal life. Today, I was able to bring all of these influences together to fix the faculty news pages quickly. It was just an added bonus that in doing so I was also able to solve a problem on both this personal blog, and the Abingdon Concert Band website.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/08/autism-career-ladder-workplace

Penny Andrews has recently been employed as a graduate trainee librarian at Leeds Metropolitan University. She beat over 200 people to her post, despite having Asperger’s syndrome, dyspraxia and cerebral palsy. Andrews’ employers have more provision for disabilities than most, but she feels that her circumstances should not be the exception, saying there is an undiscovered workforce out there, with ‘a pool of untapped talent’ among people with autism

By 8 o’clock the snow had started to fall, and by 10 o’clock the inches were mounting up. by 2 o’clock in the afternoon work was beginning to close already because of the weather. I had definitely made the right decision; being far more productive at home than I would have ever have been had I gone into Oxford and spent however long on the road trying to get home again.

When Emma got back from work – her last day at Bicester Vets – we went out again and she drove me to the butchers in Launton to get our meat, I had a walk around the local park in the snow before retreating to the warm indoors to wait for the shopping order to arrive which arrived only 2 minutes late! Tomorrow, we will have to venture out to get our veg from the market, and if we can, a new bale of hay from Fringford. A walk in the snow would be nice. I think my favourite image of the day was the one above of the witchhazel seemingly flowering out of snow.

I love snow.

After getting home and doing the shopping order for Friday, I made sure I grabbed some sofa time to read a couple of chapters before making dinner. Next up, I just need squeeze in a bit of writing time to Mr Tumnal and I will have rescued the day.

Far from being a serious affair of tightly kept secrets, from the start we were all keen to piece together who might have whom. Everyone knew who had Kirsty; Amy knew who I had; both Claire and Robert had strayed over the set £3; Emrys had admitted to his containing two presents with 2p change; I had let slip that mine was exactly £3 and not purchased from a chain store; and Nicola’ s had been purchased with Danish Krona.

The steak and ale pie that I had was delicious. It would have been nice to have a washed it down with mulled wine but I was driving. All in all a very nice way to end the working year…

~ During the course of the day I take in a parcel for the house across the way, and when they come round to collect it we discover that we have friendly neighbours. Emma talks to them a bit and through them, and their keeping of three large French lop-eared bunnies , we learn of the existence of Fringford Feeds when you can get a whole hay or bale of straw for under a fiver.

~ After I finish work foe day, we use the time going for a short drive to Fringford to stock up on hay, and coming home via Launton to go to the butchers, and then finally into work to collect Scooter. Scooter is now wearing a contact lens to protect his eye whilst it heals.

~ Had to squeeze in a visit to see Auntie Helen at the vets in the evening. The graze on Scooter’s eye had got worse and Emma has been on night’s this week so I had to take him. Part way through the consult Emma arrived on her way back from seeing Lily and her sister. Scooter needs to come back in tomorrow for an operation to remove a flap that has developed on the surface of the eye.

~ After a pleasant evening at band playing Christmas music I get home – after a short diversion through Chesterton because of a car accident on the A41 – to find Emma, far from getting ready for work, lying sprawled on the floor in front of the sofa having fainted with exhaustion – the night shift’s having caught up with her. There is no way that she can go to work tonight, having just fainted and so I have to phone up – and wake – the bosses to let them know.

Today wasn’t all bad though. I learnt some sign language from Kirsty, which was fun. I can now ask someone what there name is and tell them mine. I probably can’t understand anything they say to me, but you know, baby steps and all…

Had a particularly good blow at Abingdon Concert Band tonight, which included playing mostly the right notes in the mostly the right order and almost at the right speed. I even played piccolo in not only Beauty and the Beast but also Pirates of the Caribbean and was heard in a not objectionable way. Which is encouraging. And hey, as a band we were even playing so well that Sunday’s extra-rehearsal has been canceled. Here’s to a nice weekend to get out in the country instead!

Due to a high solar storm, the Northern Lights are apparently particularly active tonight. I’ve found this really cool website for forecasting where and when you will see them. You can even sign up for twitter text alerts for it.

It’s not the end of the road – there’s testing to come – but its an encouraging start.

For the record they do go wrong, both of them. One is old and slow, and refuses to be backed up and the other decides to go unreponsive for no apparent reason. I have been lumbered with two of them because one ones ASP and runs PHP. It should be possible to have both on one but could I get the two systems to play nice. Could I heck?!

So, I spent the day with my old boss, completely reformatting a spare, new, server that we happened to have sitting idle, and started from scratch setting up everything that we would need to have the two systems running nicely together. Hey, and guess what it all works. I haven’t got so far as setting up the websites in duplicate on it, but the technology works. But, I would have been lost without IT guidance as to what to do which has proved something to me – I can build websites and problem solve code at that level but when it goes beyond that to hardware configuration, I just don’t have the brain for it.

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And I had a good chat in the kitchen at lunchtime and even got a bit of writing done. Now I have to tell a bit of Amanda’s story – the life of the imaginary wife of Mr Tumnal.

Of course I had the classic moment of, towards the end of the morning I was struggling to fix a niggling bit of code, so I left my desk, went downstairs, wrapped up warm and donned my walking boots and shovelled snow for half an hour, came in, had lunch, and went back to it … and fixed the problem. Brilliant!

I love days like today.

Currently I’m plotting finding some quality time to devote to Mr Tumnal and his story over the Christmas break.

I guess its not every day that one gets paid to visit dodgy download sites 7½ hours a day. Thank ye for Firefox Adblock though!

2. Over the next month I will be spending 5 days out of the office on training courses. 2 days in London learning how to project manage, and 3 days in Milton Park, AbingdonDidcot – 1 learning how to use Microsoft Project, and 2 days learning about XML Schemas…

3. Applied for a few webby designery jobs last night. This evening I got home to find that one of them – a web design agency in Swindon (yes, I know, Swindon!) – liked my CV very much and would like to interview me (Yayy!) however they had two questions, one was would I be moving from Bicester or commuting, and the other was that this was a fairly junior position with a salary in the mid to late teens and was this alright. I replied saying that:

If I were to be offered this position, then although I might in the short-term commute from Bicester to Swindon, I would be looking to move nearer.

For your information, my current salary is £xx,xxx.

They can read into that my answer and make their own decision. Still at least the CV and letter works!4. Three critiques so far to chapter four of my novel over at CritiqueCircle. Those that have read it seem to like and seem to admire my slightly odd/brave style and think that against the odds I pull it off. That said, they seem to be understanding it pretty well, seeing as I seem to have made a slight oversight and failed to post chapter two!!

5. Bella seems to have made friends with one of the neighbouring cats. They were both on one side of the street when I got home, and had both gone and sat under a car on the other by the time I had got to the other. Arthur meanwhile, was keeping guard outside my garden…

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Next step is to contact my union rep and see if they are the kind of person that I want to accompany me to meetings, and then to play the equal opportunities card I think. Hey, that aspergers has got to be use for something – I know my current job is done for, but there are other one’s out there in the company that have got my name on it….

On the rumour mill, I have heard that apparently one of my interviewers (we shall call him Edward, the UK Production Director) thought my presentation was very good, and that my interview technique is much improved an polished. What that means, lord only knows, but I obviously put on good show.

Whatever the result of this, I’m glad I did it. I have learnt some valuable new skills, and done something that I have never done before, and I should feel very proud of myself.

I also have an interview for the Electronic Editorial Office Coordinator job which I applied for just before Christmas. Tomorrow, I am going to have a Manuscript Central demo by a friend and colleague (on the Social Committee), and then on Thursday I have a phone meeting booked with Bill to discuss interview technique.

So what was that about letting the grass grow under your feet?