I wiill be covering a lot of ground in this post, so to enable people to pick and choose should they so wish, I will be starting with the trivial stuff and dealing with more serious matters later.
The cricket season is over, with Warwickshire (county champions and losing fnalists in the CB40) and Hampshire (winners of both limited overs competitions – the CB40 and the T20) taking the honours. Derbyshire have brought to an end the longest spell in the second division since the two division structure was introduced by winning the second division. Also congratulations to Joe Root and Nick Compton (the latter following in his grandfather’s footsteps) on being named in the test squad for India this winter. These two will fill the gaps left by Strauss’s retirement (Root, an old fashioned Yorkshire opener with a first class double century already to his credit) and Pietersen’s fall from grace. The World T20 championship is under way in Sri Lanka. The hosts marmalised Zimbabwe in the first match, while Australia spearheaded by Shane Watson (3-21 off his four overs and 51 off 31 balls) accounted for Ireland. Afghanistan, whose presence at the tournament is a minor miracle in itself, made a brave though losing start against India, winning themselves many friends in the process.
Virgin Media have earned themselves several demerit marks in my book. I had passed the first two stages of their recruitment process and was all set to attend the assessment sessionin Peterborough when that was postponed due the assessor being ill. A week later I was told that they were looking to reschedule the assessments and asked about my availability for the following week. I then heard nothing for two weeks, at which point I phoned the agency who were handling the vacancy and was told that they (Virgin Media) had filled the vacancies with internal candidates. The person I spoke to at the agency did have the grace to apologise for the fact that I had not been inforned of this.
Last week I spent a day at Learning Works’ centre in Spalding. Spalding is a small market town set in the flattest expanse of land I have ever seen, in deepest Lincolnshire. Getting there for the start of the working day involved catching the 6:55 bus from Lynn, which should have arrived at Spalding bus station at 8:18 but was delayed ten minutes by roadworks on the way in to Spalding. Learning Works’ Spalding Centre is in a building that was once part of a huge factory that dominated the entire town, which means that there are no windows, which makes it a very curious place to work. Unlike certain organisations I could name Learning Works did pay my travel expenses (a mere bagatelle of £6.80)
There is a major database project in the offing at Learning Works, which if they decide to go for it, they would have to pay me for. I cannot reveal any detail about this project beyond that, and the fact that to enable me to work on producing a prototype database with complete security they will either be provding me with one of their laptops, or with a copy of the full version of Office 2010 to load on to my laptop.
Enjoy these photos from my archives…
aspiblog 