A whole new year!
Well, not a bad xmas all said and done. I was only off work for 3 days (plus weekends of course!). Since everyone else in the department has partners/kids I decided to stay in to cover work. There were just three of us - me, one of the IT trainers and a girl on the helpdesk.
It was OK though, since I was the only engineer in I had to pretty much stay in reserve in case of an emergency - which meant I was only allowed to do quick little jobs and not take on anything that might commit me for too long. I do have a pager but it wouldn't look too good if I had to walk away from a job half-done - after all most end users don't really comprehend that the IT infrastucture goes any deeper than the equipment directly in front of them.
And since nothing did go wrong I spent most of my time mooching around the office. I took advantage of the time to bring my home PC in and spent a whole day backing up everything onto dvd. The next day I hijacked a projector, brought in my PS2 spent the rest of xmas playing playstation games on a 70" screen projected onto the biggest patch of blank wall I could find! Nice!
Xmas day itself was the usual family stuff - a bit livelier than usual due to my two nephews (ages 7 months and 2 years)
New years was pretty good - dinner party with all my friends who were back in town (how adult of us!!) with Simon the chef cooking a fantastic meal.
New years day spent mostly in bed. The next day went sneaking back into work to steal that projector - set it up in my mates flat with surround sound and watched all 3 extended Lord of the Rings films one after the other! Only a few days into the new year and already one (slightly geeky) ambition filled :)
Now for the more important ones!
It was OK though, since I was the only engineer in I had to pretty much stay in reserve in case of an emergency - which meant I was only allowed to do quick little jobs and not take on anything that might commit me for too long. I do have a pager but it wouldn't look too good if I had to walk away from a job half-done - after all most end users don't really comprehend that the IT infrastucture goes any deeper than the equipment directly in front of them.
And since nothing did go wrong I spent most of my time mooching around the office. I took advantage of the time to bring my home PC in and spent a whole day backing up everything onto dvd. The next day I hijacked a projector, brought in my PS2 spent the rest of xmas playing playstation games on a 70" screen projected onto the biggest patch of blank wall I could find! Nice!
Xmas day itself was the usual family stuff - a bit livelier than usual due to my two nephews (ages 7 months and 2 years)
New years was pretty good - dinner party with all my friends who were back in town (how adult of us!!) with Simon the chef cooking a fantastic meal.
New years day spent mostly in bed. The next day went sneaking back into work to steal that projector - set it up in my mates flat with surround sound and watched all 3 extended Lord of the Rings films one after the other! Only a few days into the new year and already one (slightly geeky) ambition filled :)
Now for the more important ones!