Well we’ve been to woody bay, so my must do list can now be ticked off, it’s now early afternoon, and everybody who can has gone to off to have a nap.

Woodybay, was quite special. We arrived just on high tide, and after around thirty minutes of watching the waves we decided it was probibly safe to stay and have a bit of food, the sound of the sea was fantastic, and we spent a bit of time debating weather the best bit was the noise of crashing wave or the sound of the pebbles being dragged back down the beach as the water retreats (for the record i like the pebbles while caroline preferes the crash).

john was like me the first time i went to woody bay, climbing on the rocks and just looking at the sea for ages, we had to drag him off too, only with the promise that he could come back later, when the sea was out a bit and more rocks where on show.

Then we walked back past the house Ruth wants, last time it was on the market it sold for ?1 million, so it’s a bit out of our price range. The problem with the property on this bit of the island is, not so much it’s price point, but how you would earn the living to pay for them, i don’t think there are many software enginneering jobs going on the island (although with telecommuting maybe one day!), so we would pritty much have to come morgage free and then work in a cafe or something to make ends meet; not exactly the recipe for a ?1 millon house.

well we got here, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Daisy was fantastic, because i had a late panic about traviling on a easter weekend, we left ours at 7:30. We had a bit of a panic when arriving at carolines, we found them still in bed, but they are seasoned family travellers so they where up and packed in about half an hour.

we then proceeded to bomb down the motorway, and made more headway then we expected, and Daisy just slept, our new car is miles better than the rover for motoway driving, all was fine until we hit portsmouth, were we hit back of the traffic going to the fancy shopping centre the’ve built next to the ferry terminal.

the weather is fab, as ruth will always tell you, it’s always sunny on the isle of wight. i thought she was streaching it a bit given it’s only march, but it’s been nice all the way down and as soon as we got near the island, all the clouds dissapeared.

i think Caroline and John where impressed with the island, we drove the direct way so we haven’t done the pritty sea route yet (through shanklin and ventnor) but we still passed quite a number of nice houses. John read a Times article a few months ago that said the south of the island was a the place to buy houses, so now their here they are looking out for at all the for sale signs, i think we will visit an estate agents tommorow, window house shopping is quite fun.

Today has been like a military operation, not a very good one, but still a military operation, and I’ve never packed so much stuff. When it was just the two of us, we would pack two bags, and maybe a bag of technical gubbins (camera, camcorder, laptop) but this time we have an entire dining table full of stuff, with some to spare.

being a true nerd of course the laptop is the last thing to be packed, only this year I am going to remember to take the power supply!

It’s the second easiest way to tell if someone is from Liverpool (after listening to them speak for 5 seconds), ask them about colomendy, every one who has been through school in Liverpool since the early sixties, will have gone to colomendy.

I went in ( ….. Looks at calendar…. Does some working out on his fingers….. ) 1986 at the tender age of 10. My abiding memories, are of the cold smelly dorms, and the incredibly cold river that the teachers made us stand it, to collect ’samples’ for some educational purpose. I am almost convinced they found the exact spot where the water was just deep enough to spill over into your whellies.

There was a bit of a farm, being a townie this may well have been my first visit to a farm (although I may have done rice lane city farm at a much younger age), and again, it smelt, oh and it was cold.

it was definitely the furtherest I’d ever traveled without my parents I remember the double Decker bus journey quite well, it went on for hours with increasingly bored school children running amok, looking back don’t you feel sorry for the teachers?

anyway what prompted this random trip down memory lane? Well it appears that after 66 years, the council have finally got around to doing the place up!

It would appear that almost simultaneously Ruth and I have completed paying our student loans off!!! We have finally shook of the shackles of student debt, and now have ?80 a month more to go towards the shackles of home owning and child induced debt

People, who know me, will already know I have a bit of difficulty keeping positive about work sometimes. Recently all sorts have been going on in work, and the cumulative effects are starting to get me down.

It would appear that through misfortune rather than management, i have ended up on a project that the department would rather didn’t exist, except it has to exist for us to function. It’s an uneasy place to be in, with as I see it only one logical conclusion, buy in a replacement. Now that won’t work well, because you have a lot of factors and business rules in place which mean an off the shelf system technically will as likely fail as anything else, but from a business point of view, a supported ‘big’ company solution is better than an in house dependent on programmers solution (the logic is programmers can leave, but a big company will always be there).

I’m trying to lighten my mood with nice pictures

Now at the moment most of this is circumstantial I will admit, but the evidence is there. Whenever we talk about this, we are assured that the highest level’s of the university have bought in to our solution and we have the full backing of the executive. except when we need to change even the smallest thing, we hit delays, lack of resources and sometimes refusal to change and almost always we get no political backing to change things.

now, reading between the lines on several projects it looks like we are going to be replaced, again nothing has been said, but the signs are clear to see. Personally I think the university has bought into the ‘concept’ of what we are doing, and wants the business solution, unfortunately they are not consulting with us, after all we’ve spent five years fighting with this.

i would think the thing to do, is keep us on board, and have us implement your off-the-shelf product, but I suspect that isn’t going to happen, in fact I think it already has happened, we have acquired funding to implement systems that technically clash with what we are doing.

The documents doing the rounds are coupled with a business brochure for a company selling software that is almost but not quite entirely unlike what we already do. The best case scenario is that we have bought this conflicting software to ‘compliment’ what we are doing, again without consultation this would be a nightmare, more likely they are anticipating a small side step where two systems run in parallel slowly phasing out the in-house solution. For the more ‘business stable’ product, all I can say is good luck trying that.

We went to the zoo, yesterday! We like the zoo, it’s a nice trip out and you get to take it at your own pace.

Yesterday was as much about going out with friends as it was looking at the animals. Daisy is far too young to even notice that the thing on the other side of the fence is strange (Daisy thinks daddy’s strange) , but that didn’t stop us from having a good time. I do feel sorry for the ‘normal’ animals; like Chris said, people flock to see things like the monkeys and penguins who are all hidden away, while some of the animals, are jumping and running about with hardly anybody watching.

today, is lunch for friends followed by a house full of people to watch the Derby, it’s great on these occasions to be neutral, I haven’t decided who I’m going to support yet, it depends which sofa looks the comfyiest I suppose.