Some things, but not all, and not quite the ones I wanted

Christmas and the New Year, Kate, myself and two friends (Tash and Chris) went off to Arosa in Switzerland for a couple of weeks snowboarding and spending quality time together. It was epic and my 'boarding has improved massively (as I found out at the Lecht a while later - but more on that later). There was a decent amount of snow and some unbelievable conditions, although on Christmas Day the falling snow, which did give a wonderful surface, meant visibility was only about 10 feet and you couldn't see where the edges of the slopes were. Fell over lots, only big falls a couple of times though.
Spending time with Kate was marvellous, but the two weeks went too fast, as always happens.

Into the new year and Scotland had the coldest winter in decades, for which there had been a 1 in 7 chance of a colder than average winter for the northwest of Europe. People forget that the seasonal forecast is for large areas, not specific places. Some people think that the forecasts ruled out cold winters, but if you roll a die there is a 1 in 6 chance of getting a 5. No matter what the outcome, there was a 1 in 6 chance of getting a 5. But there's got to be someone to blame, hasn't there?

Moving on.

Work was quiet, so I managed to take the opportunity to use the service transport to the Lecht for a days boarding. Conditions were a bit icy in some places but generally awesome and it was the best boarding I've ever done. Also the longest session, for which I paid the next three days...
No photos of that, so you'll have to take my word on it.

Been working all the jobs we have, observing, forecasting at both stations, forecasting on the big desk; also found out how much my job is worth in the private sector. Turns out it's LOTS more than we are paid. Government say we should be paid just under median market value but the market is based on what we're paid. Go abroad (such as Australia) and you can get even more. Even with the exchange rates and cost of living, lots more. Not for me though, not yet anyway.

Friend (one of the Sarahs) has been in hospital a lot recently, she's got a rare form of MRSA called PVL MRSA (I think), so she's been in isolation having her system cleared, the rare times she's been out of hospital we took her dog for a bit of a walk on the beach.


Turns out I've got a lot to learn about taking photos in snow. Been recommended changing the exposure settings.

The house move has been delayed, partly due to weather slowing things down, but also problems with planning permissions; and still no news about the potential job development, but might hear next week, or the week after. Having said that I've started becoming an NVQ assessor, it's even more work that doing the sodding NVQ itself! The first assessment went ok, once I'd finally finished the write-up. Hope to get that finished by the end of summer.

Back to Exeter next week for more training, but now it's off to work for the night.

Tests, results and things that make you go wow.

Morning all,
I'm not a fan of paying for things, as a general rule, but sometimes it's necessary, and the TV licence is one of these. I'll go through periods of thinking "why pay if I spend most of my time watching advert funded TV?" then I catch something like "Planet Earth" or one of the BBC things that has no obvious market but is done to educate, inform and entertain; and I'll think "OK, it's fair."
Anyway, what's been happening? Possibly the biggest news for myself is that I took and passed my Advanced Driving Test!



I was a bit disappointed with a few bits, mainly my acceleration sense and cornering, but I was really chuffed that to be rated highly on observation and commentary. From what some of the Advanced Driving UK folks have said, it's pretty unusual to get a 1 on commentary so I must have been pretty good. :D
I've also taken the first module of my ECDL, passed that as well. I'd be somewhat embarrassed if I hadn't passed it. I'm going to try to get at least a module done each week, depending on work and when the assessment centre can fit me in.
Still waiting to see if I'll be able to get any money off my car insurance, but I did the course to be a better driver, not to save money.
Aside from that we're still waiting for our pay deal to be approved by the Treasury, this is the deal from July last year and includes our new role profiling, which is also delaying us finding out how we can progress in the job.
Went to see Star Trek last weekend with a mate from the mess and it was FANTASTIC!!!!11!!one!! I went squee and w00t (difficult to pronounce zero but I did it!) and had many geek joy moments (which I call geek-gasms). I'm tempted to use some of my budget to see Angels and Demons, purely for scientific curiousity of course, but I think that can wait.
Made it into the mess on Friday, it was a families happy hour so the rowdy behaviour was delayed until later on in the evening and ended up making sure a mate got back safely to their room before crashing on the sofa. I think there should be a rule that any and all sofas must be comfortable to sleep on, or if not, a sleep-able one must be provided! Woke up with one hell of a crick in my neck.
Chatted to Kev in the US for a bit last night and he told me about a little something he and Beth put together:



Which made I laugh!

The Planet Earth program has just started to feature Ascension Island, and it's a bit weird to think, "I've been there." Not for long, I think I've spent about 4 hours there in total, but even so, it's an odd sort of thought. I'd like to go back, but not for too long, the routine there would probably numb me after a while. Maybe a couple of weeks before heading back south.
If anyone is on Facebook please find me and join my Viking clan! PLEASE! I've only got a few chieftains on it and I'm getting picked on! You don't have to do anything after joining. Wow I sound lame.
Anyway, last night I was watching Eurovision at times, while flicking over to NCIS and a few other channels, and realised that I didn't know where the hash key is on the Mac, turns out I'm not alone, it's alt+3 which gives # but it's not shown on the keyboard and the "easy" way to find out that was suggested involved going through half a dozen menus, none of which was exactly obvious. And yet that still makes it more logical than some of the bits on the new system we're using at work.
I did find myself twittering the contest, reading other tweets, texting a friend in the Lakes, using the interactive services (sing-a-long-a-eurovision, the translations were brilliant!), chatting with a mate in the US and generally being an interactive sort of guy. We're not friendless, it's just most of them are hundreds of miles away.
Well there's a Green Day special about to start on TV so I'm going to slap the surround system on loud and enjoy it!

Identity

We had another directive at work telling us that we shouldn't put any information on the web that could allow anyone to identify who we are or where we work.
OK, fine, I can see why, but given the work we do, and who we work for, sometimes this rule doesn't make sense.
Take my mate Simon for example, he's on the BBC at times and has a photo profile on the BBC homepage. I've been on "national" radio - admittedly it was Falkland Islands radio but was still broadcast across the Islands. It did result in my being recognised by voice in Stanley (woohoo, I'm famous!!!!) but back here I'm much more anonymous.
I don't think anyone would mistake me for an official viewpoint about anything, in fact I'm pretty sure I said as much in one of the early entries, but I'm not going to blatantly state who I work for. Besides, I'm sure I've been oh-so-subtle and no one could possibly guess... ;)

The new marketing slogan for the north of Scotland

Randomly at work we were discussing press-gangs and one of the guys was saying that they were very active in the local area for the Navy. He pointed out that you needed experienced sailors and couldn't just grab people whilly-nilly in London, rather you had to come up to places like this where "the streets were awash with seamen."
At that point the conversation descended into fits of laughter...

Drained

At work, regional guy went sick so I stepped up and took over the regional desk. Means I was working "above my level" again covering pretty much everything happening in Scotland. Actually not as bad a deal as it sounds, I've done a shift on the desk before, but this time I was also looking after the local stuff as well. Partly, this was a great challenge; partly this was a pain in the arse.
I like work that stretches me, which is part of the reason I went down to the Falklands, but conditions were grim. I ended up playing that plate balancing game of watching the weather, doing everything I could to keep the guys informed and try to find options for them. Isn't exactly difficult, it's just tiring.
I've just got home after a shift that lasted 12 and a half hours without proper break (my choice, so doesn't break the European time directive) and I'm on early shift tomorrow (which does). Again, my choice to do the early start, the other station forecaster offered to swap start times but I felt like holding the moral high ground.
Ended up riding home in a shower with wet roads kicking water all over, which wasn't all that much fun - the showers were due to finish an hour before I left but the low pressure went a bit too far north (gave us the stronger wind as well) and they continue now.
Doesn't help to get back to calls from banks, insurance agents and the like. There's a limit to how often I can say "no, I don't want to insure my house with you," or "yes, I sorted that out ten days ago, yes, with your company, yes it's on your records. Have a look, yes I'll wait.....yes, that's right, ten days ago. Yes. Goodbye."
On the plus side, it sounds like Obama is using Barlett's speech writer and the Prodigy are playing Rockness this year. Don't know if I'll be able to get tickets, or if Mr Obama will be able to carry out his plans, but I think he's got a chance.
But with the lack of better things to say I'll grab a bite to eat and hit the sack. Night all.

Painfully true

I was thinking about Twitter, I mean Obama, Neil Gaiman and Schlock use it, but I think Ctrl+Alt+Del has hit the nail on the head for me. Okay, Mr Obama only updated until he won, and that does somewhat reek of plugging into the zeitgeist, but none the less...
Also on the "painfully true" side of life, we've been receiving some odd faxes at work, a pressure and a correction (getting the value that you read corrected to sea level) on a blank bit of paper. We thought it was from Garvie range as we were expecting observations from them, faxed across every hour. I had a thought, prompted by Dilbert, and yes, the guys at range head had been faxing the observations the wrong way round on the fax.

On a different note, one of the blogs I follow has had some brilliant posts recently, Amanda Bauer's AstroPixie blog had this to say. And I can't top that really.

Well, almost.
Head over to Schlock Mercenary soon (especially if you are eligible to vote in the Hugo Awards!), Howard Taylor has put up a pdf of a Schlock book up for consideration for a category in the Hugos and we lucky people can benefit from his largess by getting our grubby mitts on a book of comics in handy pdf format.
If that's not cool then I don't know cool. Now please excuse me while I listen to Mantovani and crochet a cardigan in beige!
Or, as it's Wednesday, check out Girl Genius, xkcd, Penny Arcade and Kimono's Townhouse.

The moon's upside down!

I had a blog entry written out but now that I'm in the cyber cafe I thought I might as well just bang one out (jokes to the usual address).
Well, here I am.
Managed to get pretty much everything organised before I flew out, the flight was long and rather boring, although watching the sunrise over Africa was brilliant. We stopped off in Ascension Island and I got to leave the cage to meet the local Met guys, briefly, before we were herded back on for the next part of the trip.
Arrived after about 18 hours on the plane and got a quick tour of the base and the office.
Limited to what I can actually say about the base but it's pretty good, there's a long corridor from our living area to the main mess (about a mile long) and it's a bit chilly at times - glad I brought my down jacket.
I'm sat in the cyber cafe right now, something dad didn't have when he was here, and soon I think I'll nip to Oasis for a cup of tea and a cake. Life can be pretty civilised at 52 degrees south. It's cold mind, but then it is winter, we had a day of glorious sunshine but most of the time has been dull and drizzley. I'm expecting snow this weekend.
Erm what else, oh we've got a 33m heated swimming pool, a climbing wall, a great gym (had my induction after work this morning - 3 minutes of the timetable being read and the pti asking "everyone seen the rules before? Right see me if you need anything else.") a cheap bar (whisky costs about a third of a the price of a chocolate bar :D ) a bowling alley (the pins are on cable - it's hilarious) that I got invited to on the first evening - great but I was dead on my feet by the end, library, couple of shops, few places for tea and coffee, a cinema that shows some fairly recent shows, and all this is just inside the mess complex.
I've had the landrover training and been hooning about in the works van as much as I can and I've come to realise that I like defenders! Hoping to get off the base at some point this week but I'm working this weekend when the rest of them are going off to Stanley, maybe next time. There's often chances to go on flights which I'll grab when I can but not just yet.
Work wise, it's harder than back home and different with more briefings and different conditions. Different products too. I was worried that I couldn't do it for a bit but I think that was just the newness of the situation. I need to speed up production but that'll come. Work also, like most sections down here, has a cat. He can be a bit annoying when he's begging for food but it's nice to be able to take a couple of seconds pause and say hello to him. I'll stick up some photos of Krusty, and other things, when I can.
It's the little thing that keep throwing me, I went outside and thought "Hang on! The cloud's in the wrong part of the sky and the wind's going the wrong way! My forecast is rubbish!" Then I realised I'm in the south and the sun is in the north. I'd automatically lined myself up and got it epically wrong. I also don't recognise ANY of the stars down here yet. Okay, apart from the Sun, but we don't see our local star much. I think I've seen the southern cross but need to check on that.
In general, I think I'm going to like it down here, but give me a week of work in evil weather on my own and then ask me...