Some life changes....

Not kept this up in the last year or so....decided that the value was in anonymity and not sure what I would write without the cloak allowing me to abuse all and sundry. But, actually, my life's gone through a few changes recently, so I thought I'd jot them down...

1) I changed jobs: After 10 years with KBR (Halliburton) I sensed a general staleness, mouldiness even, and sought a new challenge. So I now work for Atkins (www.atkinsglobal.com) and jolly pleased I am about it too. There's a sanity about Atkins which I think is mostly about an English Exec and a focus on profit through strategy. It's all rather refreshing, exciting, challenging etc etc. And obviously I now earn megabucks more....well, no actually, but that wasn't the point of moving on. My CV is much happier for it and so am I.

2) I had another daughter, Harriet. Hatty, Etty, Harry, whatever. Three weeks early, on the 25th June 2006. So early that we weren't particularly ready and Al had only just stopped working, pleased her no end. Hatty was induced, which was all rather odd - we turned up at the hospital with an appointment to have a baby. And 10 hours later, we had one.

All very civilised, Al was even kind enough to have an epidural so I could watch England-Ecuador. Still vaguely shell-shocked and struggling to come terms with having a family, rather than a daughter to be honest. Rather delighted though. Clearly my focus was on having a healthy child and I was going to be very happy regardless of whether it was a girl or a boy.

But, actually, if you'd told me I could have two children and offered me a choice... I'd have had two girls. Since that's what I've got, I'm a very happy chap.

Posting from Houston

This is where I'm at at at the moment - the Houston America's Hilton. Never stayed here before, and rather nice it is too - free broadband in the rooms for my company and all rather clean and new and luvverly.

Nothing to do with this T&Cs stuff, and frankly it's nice to get a break from that, feels almost a holiday to be here away from that extraordinarily stressful exercise....

This really made my day....

Guardian Unlimited Sport | Cricket | Cricket: England ride high with Hoggard

Life not easy at the moment. I am an Employee Rep in a difficult consultation exercise over reductions in T&Cs that has angered more than a few of the several thousand people I work with. And I have been ill, on and off, for most of the last month - which hasn't made me particularly happy. Just colds and coughs and temperatures, but you don't need it over the Christmas period. And we are trying to keep the shop running with a reduced workforce and that's no fun either.

But....England won a fantastic test match yesterday and that's the sort of thing that lifts the spirits: I love a test victory snatched from an inevitable draw. I took yesterday off to deal with some domestic stuff and spent much of it glued to Sky Sports....not least 'cos I saw an England victory at 15-1 on Betfair and couldn't help but risk a couple of quid. A win wasn't likely by any means, but this side, in this series, with the grudges they brought to the pitch.....I though 15s very generous :-)

Bloody lergy

Stuck at home, not at all well. Daughter had a bad chest infection last week (got a GP out at 1am) and has handed it off to me. Which sucks really, I have more than enough to do at work at the moment. So here I am, at the keyboard, keeping up with work when I should probably be in bed.

The point of this

Got in touch with an old friend tonight, who has been reading this blog. Which kind of validates the whole thing really. Life is a tad up and down at the moment, and it's nice to be reminded that there are more important things than my existence on the internet: Shit, I haven't seen this guy for about 20 years!

Top piece of conspiracy theory

Don't lend it any credence but it's worth a squint. Flash is very good for this kind of paranoia.

Guardian Unlimited | Online | How to save your life

Very good article in the (excellent) Guardian Online section about the extent to which technology is enabling people to record everything they encounter in their daily lives. The diary as it exists in the modern world, which is something of an extension of the blogging concept: 50 years ago you might have kept a paper based diary, in the last decade, you might have captured your life in a blog like this one, or perhaps published to a static website to achieve much the same, in the future, increasingly, everything you do is recorded in a digital form, and if it isn't you can choose to make it so with a device that you'll probably have in your pocket.

The extent to which you'll want to make this public / restricted to friends and family / private becomes a significant decision, and software is likely to make this a critical part of the decision to publish. Seems to me that everyone will grab the chance to record everything they encounter as it become trivial to do so, and this won't be about what I record, but who I publish it to. Whatever....exciting times..... The Warhol 15 minutes becomes irrelevant as everyone grabs a lifetime in a morass of published lifetimes.....

Still not smoking (!) after 19 days, not a puff. So I have rewarded myself by spending three times what I would have spent on fags on underpants, shirts, TFT monitors and digital cameras. Something of an incentive to remain non-smoking, I have to remain fag free for another 5 weeks to fund all this stuff. But that's not, frankly, a bad thing.

Spent the afternoon at my sisters, as she hosted a 2nd birthday party for all the toddlers borne by the mothers that she shared an antenatal swimming class with. Not a bad do really, another of those that leaves you recognising how much your understanding of the world has changed for having a child....hundreds of toddlers charging around pursued by concerned parents, grins on the faces of all the Mums and Dads. I'd have found this a very non-grinning event before Abby...