Surrey again

The Gorse Fox was in Surrey again today. Interestingly the project has finally got a new Programme Director - and it is someone GF used to work with back in the late 90s. It was nice to see him again and will be nice to have someone at the helm who can distinguish between a large muscular area at the bottom of the spine and a hinged joint in the arm.

Meanwhile the saga of the person unhappy with the appraisal ticks on. GF has been archive emails from each of his former team... typically about 40 emails over the year. Not this person, though. 385 emails in six months! Rarely has he come across a more joyless, and cantankerous individual who seems to revel in confrontation and offence even when none is there. Said individual was born in the wrong time. Said individual would have been better suited to being a shop steward in the 1970s.

Out and about

So the Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen headed for Brighton. The Silver Vixen had an appointment to fulfil and the Gorse Fox killed some time wandering around the shops. Once back together we settled down for a coffee and plotted out the rest of the day.

First stop was JB's American Diner where we planned a light lunch.

This didn't quite work out. To start with, we headed the wrong way along the front before realising we had missed it and turned back. Then we settled down with the menu. Something light. Maybe a club sandwich? Would that be enough? We decided to have a starter.

Mistake. The starter was big enough that GF left half of his. When the club sandwich turned up, GF marvelled that one waitress could carry it alone. It looked as if it would need at least two people - or one person with a trolley. Silver Vixen had ordered the same and was finding it difficult to see the Gorse Fox over the top of hers.

Needless to say, we did not finish.

Next stop was Bersted Park and an opportunity to touch base with the developers of the new house. Clearly all is still going well and it was nice to catch up on all the latest news. We now know who our neighbours will be. Indeed, it turns out that we met them on one of earlier and spent quite some time chatting with them.

Pre-retirement Practice

PrP continues today. The Gorse Fox and Silver Vixen plan to head across to Brighton.

Transfer

As you may remember, Gorse Fox is in the middle of a transfer. Whilst Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Spurs have shown no interest in his services, another Division within Starfleet has made him and offer. This is finally going through and within the next few days he should be part of the new organisation.

A by-product of the transfer is that he no longer has to worry about being a manager for a number of professionals. His access to the sensitive HR systems has been revoked, and his old team have been scattered to new managers. Some residual responsibilities will peter away over the next few weeks. As much as the Gorse Fox cared for his team, he is not sorry to lose the extra responsibilities.

Controversy

Whilst the Gorse Fox and Jasper awaited yesterday's return of the Silver Vixen, the door bell rang. Jasper scurried to the top of the stairs and watched and GF opened the door to nice lady clutching a handful of car stickers.

There is to be a public meeting to consult on the development of new houses nearby. Would the Gorse Fox put a "NO" sticker in his window. The Gorse Fox paused, smiled and entered into a debate.

• With the change in the make-up of the family and the migration of people to the South, and continued immigration - people have to live somewhere.
• The Government have imposed house-building targets on the Regions, and the Councils have to comply.
• Given these two imperatives - and the extensive building that is already under way elsewhere in the District, why should the houses not be built here?
• Fontwell has the advantage of being on the intersection of the A27 and A29, and has a nearby railway station at Barnham

This caused an intake in breath. Well, she explained, there is an old Roman road, and have been historic finds in the area - and the Secretary of State declined permission 19 years ago. More pertinently the proposed development would radically change the nature of the village - doubling its current size... and what about the recent flooding?

The Gorse Fox discussed each of her points and commented that he wished her campaign well, and was encouraged by the community involvement that it engendered - but could not support the proposition. She then said that what was needed was someone like the Gorse Fox on the Planning Committee of the District Council.

The problem is that planning decisions are so emotive as they change the perceived quality of life of those affected. In practise GF suspects that in most cases this is really just a period of adjustment and adaptation - but people do not like change. They do have to realise, however, that people need homes and we have an ever growing population - and the fragmentation of families means that we need disproportionately more homes than the population growth would suggest, traditionally.

Quiet Saturday

The Silver Vixen was out with her coven (as she will be tomorrow, also). There was a regional event at Chichester - so they all headed off for their jamboree.

Gorse Fox made use of the time with a trip to Rustington and a look at the Mini garage. Once back, laden with the appropriate brochures, GF started to put together a comparison of the vehicles that have made it to the short list. As you so often find, when doing these comparisons, it can throw up some surprises. Ostensibly the Honda Jazz looks like a great little car, but seems to attract an insurance rating of 17, whereas the Toyota Yaris and Auris only attract a rating of 7 or 8.

Whilst there is a clear leader in the selection of the main family vehicle - the small run-about is proving a challenge.

Transport

With retirement a few months away, Gorse Fox has been considering the future of transport for him and the Silver Vixen. Do we really need two executive vehicles? What sort of mileage are we likely to do? and What sort of vehicles do we need?

If we assume we would still require one "family" vehicle for longer journeys and for carrying things about, and that this should have a flat loading space for the Silver Vixen's sewing paraphernalia, then that's one probably decision.

If we assume that we still need a second car - then that only needs to be a small run-about. As such it needs to be practical, and most of all, inexpensive to run.

With these criteria in mind we headed off to visit the showrooms of Toyota, VW, Skoda, Honda, and Nissan. Wandering around, it was soon clear that the decision was not going to be easy. There were plenty of vehicles that met our requirements. We returned home with a pile of brochures to wade through. There is research to be done, and test drives to be arranged.

London

For a change, the Gorse Fox's work dragged him to London. A relaxed start ment there would be no parking at the railway station, but in anticipation he asked the Silver Vixen to drop him off.

Once in town he had to deal with some investigatory interviews in response to a complaint received about a member of staff. This can be a bit tense, so he approached with a degree of apprehension. As it happens it went remarkably smoothly - and when he asked said individual to read his notes and agree them - she even commented what beautiful handwriting he had.

Silver Vixen, meanwhile, is helping out with an after-school workshop for children wishing to learn how to sew.

Network Monitor

The Gorse Fox had a fairly good day in the office. The various PMs seem to have taken on board the various lessons of yesterday and were working until late last night to try and bring things together. GF left them to it and got on with documenting further parts of the programme.

By early afternoon GF was finding the office environment less than conducive for work, so packed his bags and headed home. Once there he managed to complete the documents he was working on, and take one of the regular management calls.

Meanwhile he has now got the Raspberry Pi  sitting on the desk an acting as a network monitor. Though it displays a somewhat simplistic view of the network (using jNetMap) - it does at least show colour-coded map of the network status - with regular updates.

Normal service

The Gorse Fox headed for Surrey. Normal service had resumed. Half-term holidays were at an end and the Gorse Fox's journey increased by 30 minutes. At least it was predictably so.

A cluster of Starfleet colleagues arrived from Poland or the Czech Republic (He should know which, but got conflicting answers form his usual colleagues). They were there to work closely with the team, but also for the Gorse Fox to give them a quick "sheep dip" on how programmes such as this should be run and how they should be structured. This went down very well and they suggested GF should visit their base and run the course there for their colleagues.

Journey home was unusually quick. Quite a surprise given the morning's journey.

Code set

Maybe computer code is like jelly, and it needs to set.

The code GF downloaded yesterday and had trouble firing up worked first time this morning with no attention from the Gorse Fox other than pressing the key. Bizarre.

Good work day. GF has to deliver some cut-down course material over the next day or two, so he has spent the day going through in advance to ensure he is familiar with the flow. Heading up to Surrey for the next couple of days.

The Gorse Fox burst into life and continued with his modelling and with some tasks for the Raspberry Pi. The former was very successful, the latter less so. As GF has a stored image of the Pi, he was able to roll-back to a clean image by blowing the image onto a spare SDCard.

Urban-cub and Pistol Pete came round for a couple of hours. It was nice to have a chat over a cup of tea, It is clear that Pistol Pete had not been enamoured by his first exposure to the Ikea store yesterday. Certainly, our use of the catalogue, ordering online, and having it delivered saves endless wandering back and forth in the store and queueing at the checkout with a pile of stuff you cannot then fit in the car.

Fontwell Park had one of its big race events, today. We had decided to go to The Old Stables for dinner, so timed our visit about an hour before the last race. This proved to be the right approach as the restaurant was beginning to fill up and get boisterous by the time we were paying the bill to leave.

Chatting

The Gorse Fox has been doing some more modelling. In order to work out where his printers can go, it was a matter of digging out some models from the 3D Warehouse. This proved less successful than expected - there are no canned models of his Canon printer and the canned model of a similar Brother printer is scaled incorrectly (i.e. the printer is over 6.9 metres wide... that's almost the size of the house).

GF set about building his own models. Though not engineering drawings, they are close enough to be recognisable and they are drawn to the correct scale.

Slowly but surely he's getting to grips with this lark.

We managed to get a video-chat with Cousteau-cub. It's been quite a while since we have managed this, so it was a lovely interlude. The season seems to remain very busy for them, and she has been diving - despite her current discomfort. The medication she has been taking seems to be managing the worst of the symptoms - but diving two days in a row has left her very tired. She has managed to take some excellent photos of the whale sharks that seem to have taken up residence in Koh Haa.

3D

In the Gorse Fox's first "retirement practice day"  the morning was spent considering the new furniture that Silver Vixen wants for her hobby-room. Wading through the 3D diagrams GF had prepared he started to fill his shopping basket on the Ikea website.

This prompted the question - "What are we going to do about the study?"

This is not quite such an easy problem to solve as, though we down-sized last year, we need to down-size further, and into an L-shaped room with a large alcove. This would take some serious consideration.

We ran some errands whilst the problem processed in the back of the mind.

Back home, the Gorse Fox launched Sketchup and pulled up the 3D-model of the house. Initially simple blocks were constructed to represent different items of furniture or pieces of equipment that would need to be found homes. We came up with various combinations, but eventually hit upon a plan that would actually make the most of the space and provide a significant amount of storage and workspace.

The blocks were discarded and GF spent the rest of afternoon building accurate representations of the desks, the drawer-units, the storage units and so forth.

The desks will be the problem as GF will have to trim down one of the existing desks by about 6 inches to make it all fit. (And yes, he really did order the bright red EXPEDIT units from Ikea).

Oh deer.

Well, we nearly had venison for tea.  The Gorse Fox was driving home from Surrey and as he wound through the South Downs near Fryan's Hanger two deer raced across the road in front of him. He dimly saw their shadows in the lights of an oncoming car and hit the brakes. The first deer made it all the way across. The second, a full-grown adult wasn't quite so lucky and theGorse Fox's car knocked it over.

The GF's heart sank. It is not nice to hit such a magnificent creature. GF unbuckled his seat belt to go and see if he could do anything to help - but as he did, the deer got back to its feet and bounded away up the hill.

GF doesn't need incidents like that to keep him alert - listening to his books is quite enough stimulation, thank you.

TGIT

Well, working only Mondays through Thursday the Gorse Fox can say Thank God it's Thursday and therefore the end of the working week. It has been a very fruitful day in the office and GF has achieved much. He decided that there was limit to collaboration and adopted a more dictatorial approach today. He finished off with a clear email to all the team telling them eaxctly how he expected them to proceed. He doesn't foresee any problem in his absence.

Method

In Starfleet we have something we refer to as "Method". This is the means by which we should structure most projects. Indeed there are variations of the "Method" to address most problems and situations with which we deal. There are always, however, some people who think they know best and try to fly solo.

The Surrey project is just such a case. It has now been running for nearly 6 months and in an effort to create some structure GF ran a workshop to impose the disciplines on the "Method". At the end, all involved conceded that this should have been done 6 months ago - and expressed regret GF was not on board at that time. (Frankly, given the project he was working on - he too regretted he was not on-board).

Today would have been the GF's grandfather's birthday. A wonderful friend and inspiration. Sadly missed.

Fine

It was a fine day for the Gorse Fox. Half-term meant the commute was 30 minutes shorter and that tends to put a spring in the step!

In the office GF was introduced to a number of colleagues from Germany and South Africa. Amongst them were a couple of silver backs both of whom looked significantly older than the Gorse Fox. Indeed he wondered why they were still working as they were clearly well past retirement age. A feeling of uncommon pleasure suffused his being on discovering that despite their looks, both were five years younger then the Gorse Fox. Obviously the ministerings of the Silver Vixen over the years have allowed the Gorse Fox to maintain his boyish good looks!

Smirking again

The Gorse Fox has now booked his remaining vacation. This means that with the exception of one week, when he is teaching, he is only working 4 days each week until the early of April. Indeed he has viewed the remaining time until he retires and realised that he could (using the cluster of Easter and Spring Bank Holidays) actually do 4 days a week from now until retirement date. (Though he probably won't).

GF is heading to Surrey again tomorrow.

Baking

Well not really.

The Gorse Fox was actually playing with his Raspberry Pi for much of the day. Like most computers - the initial set-up is one step that tends to go fairly smoothly. From then on you have to install the various components and software packages that enable you to use the machine the way you wanted.

As you would expect, the Gorse Fox has been painstakingly documenting this (so that he can easily build more Raspberry Pis in the future) but it is clear that his attention to detail is not always matched by those who provide the products he requires. So it was that GF ground to a halt - unable to work out the instructions in the supporting manual. Question has now been asked of the community that supports the code. And so he waits.

Was hoping to catch Cousteau-cub online to get the latest news from her trip to Trang, but didn't manage to catch her.

GF has been looking at his vacation records and realises that he can take a day off each week from now until April (when the Starfleet vacation year finishes).