There is hope for humanity...

Sometimes, just sometimes, in all the rubbish we hear and read about there comes a story to gladden the heart and moisten the eyes.

There is a little fella by the name of Fintan Morley-Smith who has a rare eye condition called retinoblastoma.

His dad, James, is running the London Marathon to raise funds for the Childhood Eye Cancer Trust.

I heard about this through Twitter, in particular Stephen Fry. As a result of a message from Fintan's dad to Stephen, and Stephen's subsequent Tweet, many people have donated to help Fintan and other childfren like him.

If you're feeling really brassed off, that life stinks and maybe someone owes you a favour, just take a minute, read about Fintan here and consider donating using the link to the right on my Blog.

OK, life may be **** but Fintan and many like him will have been helped by your generosity. Hold your head up (feel proud, it really isn't a sin) and realise how lucky you really are.

Thanks for reading.

Thank God it's the weekend

Had a naff week in work, which ended with me being told that someone else was moving into a role I'd been hoping to fill. But hey, at least my boss had the decency to tell me before anyone else found out.

Thing is, I've been working my diddlysquits off, doing even extra to put myself in the frame for the role.

I am ab.so.lute.ly gutted.

Still, no one died.

Now got to get myself into the right frame of mind for work... fortunately, I'm off next week so I can forget about all the rubbish for a week. All I need to do is just put my Out of Office on... :D

Have I brought Twitter to its knees?

There I was, updating my background... I'd picked a nice foresty piece off my PC, if you wanted to know... and was attempting to save it. All of a sudden it happened...

Twitter is over capacity!

What??

Have you people got no work to do? :-)

Finally, two attempts later (and choice of background changed), I am able to see my new background.

The morale of this tale of woe? Don't get so hung up over tweeting... Ooh, hang on, just got a new mess... yeah, be right back, just got to post a reply...

Must find the time to blog a bit more...

Crikey! First few days in and I am already slacking. Tsk.

Mind you, I was working from some ungodly hour yesterday morning, through to just after 22:00 GMT. I actually had my dinner/tea whilst dialling into one teleconf, such was the rush throughout the day.

Still, this leads me nicely onto an issue we hear a fair bit about nowadays: work/life balance. Is it possible to ever get it just right?

I am up early in the morning and, if I'm not driving, I roll into my office at 06:30 (no later than 07:10). I then stop for breakfast and a quick play (normally Star Wars or Dr Who) with my youngest son, and I am back in work at about 08:15. From then on in, it's pretty frenetic all day with calls and emails coming in pretty much constantly.

If I grab a bite to eat, it's normally a cheese roll. Coffee is made on the fly, while in meetings/calls.

Dinner/tea is about 17:30, after which I am straight back upstairs working.

If I haven't got a conference call, or the proverbial isn't hitting the fan, then I will try to make sure I am downstairs and ready to rumble with 'Junior' at 19:00-ish.

Once he's having his supper, I'm back on the machine working, and I nip in and say goodnight as he's getting off to sleep.

Then I'll be working until 21:00 or later (as happened last night).

I'm also studying later on, but taking time out to sit with my better half for an hour or so...

Weekends are spent as a family for most of the time but, if I am behind at work, I'll login and attempt to clear some of the more priority pieces. Again, study tends to happen at the weekends as well.

I do wonder as I actually type up the time I spend doing various things - this isn't a blog on how hard I work I hasten to add; I know people who work far harder than I do - is this what we really mean by work/life balance? Is it the 15 minutes here, or the half hour there spent as quality time (I hope!), as opposed to a full day just sitting around in the same room, that gives us the work/life balance?

A cold and frosty morning... brrr!

Well, I have been 'up and running' since about 7:10 this morning. This was a pretty late start for me, but then I was studying until the early hours.

I opened the curtains and lo and behold... heavy frost on the ground, and a whopping 1 degree C on the old thermometer. Unbelievable! Not because it's cold but because we've had high winds, heavy rain and quite mild temps, all within the last week. What is happening? Surely you're not telling me that Global Warming is messing with the weather as much as this?

All I can say is I am glad I live at the top of a hill!

Grammar we love you, grammar we do...

Well us folks in the UK (the ones who are old enough anyway) will remember the song by St Winifred's School Choir that topped the charts in 1980.


Anyway, I digress...


A funny thing happened to me as I was working away this evening. She who must be obeyed (yeah... right) called up from the kitchen, where she was sitting with our son as he typed up his poem for homework. Basically, the question eminating from the depths was "when you want to write 'the cow parachuted down to its cosy shed' is it 'its' or 'it's'?".



Initial reaction as someone who churns out loads of crud for a living on a daily basis was "It's 'its'"; however, panic began to set in mere seconds later and I dashed off a query into Google. Relief abounded as I confirmed my first thought. Smugly, I went to the landing, so as to reaffirm my opening reply "Yes, definitely 'Its'".



I suppose the main point of this post, other than to share my shamefaced admission that I had to check, is to wonder whether we do just type and hope that Word* (replace with wordprocessor of choice) will keep us on the straight and narrow. Because of spellcheck and grammar check, are we losing our understanding of grammar and punctuation?

Are we getting lazy over our use of written English?

Having a 'mare...

We all have them, I'm sure. Bad days, that is.

I woke up this morning, and even the old 'war wound' couldn't dull the spring in my step. Today. I thought, I am going to push on and get the tasks done that keep getting held up the JFDIs or PDQs that seem to crop up all the time.

You guessed it... 'same old same old'.

Now I am even further behind than I was close of play Friday, and I can feel the stress levels buildng. To be honest I would love to be able to delegate some of the stuff I get, but there's no one to delegate to. Help!

What I have come to realise over the years is the one thing I am very bad at is turning anyone away when they ask for help.

Still, generally I enjoy what I do, and I do actually like helping people. That doesn't mean I ain't gonna have a grumble from time to time though...

Umm... my first ever blog.

I noticed some of the people I know have really gotten into this Blog mentality, so I thought I'd try it myself. I'm not sure if what I write will be funny, serious, have hints of anger from time to time or just be plain daft.

I have to be honest, I always thought 'blogging' was another form of vanity, allowing those who have a BIG opinion of themselves full rein to tell us all how damn good they are!

But, over the last few weeks I've been trawling though the various blogs I've found and found that they are quite fun. I see blogging now as more of a psychological thing, a mechanism (to me anyway) that I can hopefully use to have laugh, let off steam and just mess about as well as let people know what I am up to. If it gives others a bit of enjoyment, great. If not...