Mj’s Blog

Since the company I work for became global nearly two years ago when acquired by a US firm, I now have regular conference calls or ’stand-up’ meetings with my colleagues from the States. These are normally at the end of my day due to America being from 5-8 hours behind and involve various member of staff from different states/time zones. Coming from working in a one office London-based company to a global company takes a bit of getting use to. For one my working days seem longer due to a second wave of work or emails arriving later in the day, different working practices, different technology and different ways to communicate. One of these is conference calls. On my meetings I’m the only one from the UK and being naturally shy at speaking up at meetings, I sometimes find these calls really hard.

It’s weird because I have known most my colleagues for well over a year (a couple of newbies have joined as well) and they are all really nice (I count some of them as friends as well) but every week I still get a bit anxious before the call. The level of being anxious does depend on what I have to say or not to say - I don’t always have anything to add (which feels worse surprisingly). Even when I wish to ask a question for some reason I clam up and don’t say anything. Maybe it’s a fear of looking stupid. I also get ‘red neck’ from these calls, like my body temper rises with these calls. It’s also hard because you can’t see other peoples body language like in normal meetings but then again I wouldn’t want everyone to have web cams while on these calls. It must take practice and a lot of confidence to be really good at these calls - I’m off to look on Google for top tips on speaking up. Watch out everyone who knows me - here comes loud and over-confident me!!

Lesson 2 on my Open University course Design and the Web comprises mostly of theory on web design. This included design rules like download times, colour palettes, visual disabilities, type size, fonts, readability. The list goes on and includes a section on ratios, which quickly turned into a maths lesson. Oh bugger - maths. I haven’t done any real maths since school. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who found this part of the course an effort to remember and on the OU forum many people said that had to read it couple of times to take it all in. Back to maths and especially golden ratios. The golden ratio is 1.6 to 1. Here is what wikipedia says about it:

“In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.^“

To me this is blah, blah, blah but according to my course it is do with proportion and balance. Sorry but I feel this post is getting boring so I decided to quickly created a rectangle with nice looking curves using the golden ratio method. Now it might not be exactly 1.6:1 as it only took me 10 mins to create but I used the idea - golden-ratio1. Lesson 3 looks more exciting as I will be actually creating web pages. I had forgotten how dull maths can be - sorry Maths teachers everywhere!

This weekend is the Radio 1’s Big Weekend, which for those who don’t know what it is, this is a free festival-type weekend organised by Radio 1. This year was in Maidstone, Kent - I registered for tickets but with 500,000 people trying to get 30,000 tickets as well, I didn’t have a chance and promptly a few weeks ago I got the email to say I didn’t get any. Oh well, but I have been listening to Radio 1 for most of the today and had a quick look at the website - looks like it has been amazing weekend. Obviously the weather has helped - there is nothing like listening to live music when the sun is shining. Not that I would know this as I’ve never been to a festival!! Well, that is all about to change as I have tickets for the V Festival in August. It’s quite ironic that I’m going V (Virgin) as a virgin festival goer.

I always watch Glastonbury on the TV every year and would quite like to go but the only thing that has put me off is the toilet and shower situation - argh, porter-loos. Luckily, V is in Chelmsford so we can travel there without having to stay in a tent. If V goes well, you never know I might try Glastonbury next year but maybe hire a campervan instead of camping. We are planning on holding a Glastonbury party this year - listening to the music being played lived, drinking, eating and wearing wellies, what more could one ask for. Maybe the sun shining but the past few years it has rained a lot over the Glastonbury weekend. At least the wellies would come in handy…

A few weeks ago I wrote about my day at work so I thought I would write about today especially as it’s such nice weather here at the moment and you will be able to see that I didn’t really spend any of it outside! Woke up at around 8.30am and got in the shower, got ready (make-up and dressed by 9.20am), went downstairs for breakfast (wonderfully cooked by Husband). Dried hair and went off to ice-skating at Romford Ice Rink. The drive to rink always takes so long and I have to take lots of back roads as the main route has about 15 sets of traffic lights. Got to the rink at around 10.45, ah the cool air was nice at the rink. Skated for about an hour and half with all the teenagers. Enjoyed myself immensely as it was quite quiet at the rink so managed to whizz round loads and even practiced going backwards, which I haven’t done in about 10 years! Left the rink at 12.45 and drove home.

Put some laundry on, had lunch of Gnocchi and tomato sauce (left over dinner from Thursday) and then we went to Lakeside shopping to get three birthday presents!! While at Lakeside bump in to Sister-in Law and her friends shopping - bumped literally as she and one of her friends are both pregnant. Arranged a night out for next Saturday as Husband is away on a stag weekend then. Then we meet up with really good friends who have just had their third child - she was gorgeous and so tiny. They had left the older two behind with grandparents but it was really good to see them as they live quite far away from us. After that we managed to get the birthdays presents and I acquired a headache. Even buying a top, white jeans and a necklace from TopShop helped with the headache - great. Got home via Somerfield (for beer and M&Ms for Husband). I’ve now drunk 3 glasses of water and one beer (as it is warm out), headache feels better. Well I better go now as I’m out with old school friends tonight and being picked up at 7pm - now do I wear my new jeans tonight!

The title is a bit of fib as I’m actually finishing off this post on my laptop (I had to send the text from my iPod by email so I could copy and paste it into here) but I did write most it on my iPod touch while on tube and train. Its amazing how quick my finger is at typing now on the touch screen keyboard. I love my iPod - never owning one before I knew the iPod touch was for me because it was more then music. I couldn’t get the iPhone because I was still tied in with T-Mobile so the iPod touch was the next best thing. My next mobile will a 3G Nokia so I can add an app to it and turn the mobile into a hotspot thus making my iPod online. But for now I have to make do with just being online at home and at work.

I now listen to music everyday to and from work which I haven’t done since I had a Sony Walkman as a teenager. Listening to podcasts is great while on the train. I use the clock so I can find the time out quickly on the west coast or central time in the states while at work. I can check the weather though its not always the right. Other offline things are the notes (which is what I’m writing this post on), checking emails that I downloaded while at home or old emails that need a follow-up. There is also a photo section but I haven’t experimented with that one yet. So I can do a lot until I get access to wifi. My next thing to check out is third party apps so I can get things like the BBC iplayer or viewing youtube clips offline.

It is also so well designed and sleek that I just love it. This is my first piece of hardware from Mac so I think my next laptop will be a Mac and all because of my lovely iPod touch.

An email today at work took me back in time and I felt like I was nine years old again. I had that awful feeling of low self esteem (or that no one likes me feeling) as my friends went out for the day without asking me to join them. Perhaps this is my earliest memory of feeling like this and for some reason it still gets me now and again. It’s a bit like when a certain smell can trigger bad or good memories. Missing out on a team meeting to look at designing new pages for our website due to poor planning and budgets made me feel like this - everyone else is going (to San Francisco) except me! It might sound like I just wanted to go for the shopping, which would of been a bonus (not the 11 hour flight) but I think it’s more of not feeling included. I know it’s nothing to do with me but I did feel fed-up earlier today.

I will have to thank Jo for her chats earlier today while I was ‘annoyed’ about this - it helped vastly and a bit of retail shopping at lunchtime improved the afternoon a lot. An email from our website architect saying sorry about it helped as well but I still felt down about it and reflecting on everything I do. I wonder why I feel like this sometimes… it is hormones, lack of sleep, lack of chocolate or being in the office on my own for a day and a half?? Writing this has helped and now I feel silly for feeling the way I did and feel embarrassed for posting this bit of depressed writing. On a lighter note the Cosmo, dark chocolate and listening to Pete Tong on Radio 1 is helping. I think the studying will have to wait until tomorrow. Here is a picture of the bluebells growing in our garden, they cheered me up no-end.

It’s amazing what a bit of warm weather can do to the people of London. Today, according to the BBC website was a barmy 24 degrees (73f), which was apparently warmer than San Francisco. While walking to work I noticed a number of things different about the streets of London, for once everyone seemed a lot happier and politer. The number of flip-flops out there is amazing - men and women! The train and tube was busier, this must be due to the warm weather and everyone is leaving their cars at home. The streets are busier where people are walking instead of getting the bus. More cyclists on the road (which is a nightmare for pedestrians trying to cross the road). The funniest thing I saw today was a women cycling down Farringdon Road, she kept her hand on the front of skirt to stop it blowing up without knowing that it was blowing up from behind and showing the world and all the taxi drivers her big knickers!

Another thing I noticed about today was the lack of phone calls at the office - so many people must be off because of the nice weather. If anyone is a ‘friend’ on my Facebook page then you would know that I was the only one in the office today which meant I had to answer the phone. At 10.30am I had my first phone call which was a sales call for our office manager. By midday I had one other call which was a sales call again. After lunch - around 2pm I had a number of calls from the CEO to clients (most of them US based) then after 4pm it died down again. The only way to keep me from going mad by the lack of company was by ‘chatting’ with many of my colleagues - thank you Skype!

Now I might have mentioned this before but my grammar and spelling are pretty crap - when I write these posts I have to re-read them about three/four times before I can publish them, while making corrections to my grammar as best as I can. Studying for my OU course has now brought this back to my attention as my first piece of ‘published’ webpage was moderated and curses, my grammar issues came up. The layout and the basic linking throughout the page were fine but he spotted one grammatical error in my explanation of why I’m doing the course. Not sure why I’m so rubbish at grammar and spelling, surely these are basic things I should have learnt at school. Was my school (senior and junior) so bad that I didn’t learn where to put a comma or the learn the difference between bought or brought (without really thinking about it). Then again I never did learn the ‘times table’ either. Can I blame my parents for this lack of knowledge or am I just too stupid…

From now on all my coursework on my OU course will go through my ‘editors’ that I use for sending out company-wide emails and I have dug out ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ by Lynne Truss on grammar that I have had on my bookshelf for ages. The 100 Big Read got in the way so I have never read this but it was highly recommended by my colleague. Spelling I’m not sure what to do about this as I use spell check on everything - God bless spell checks. Back to maths - the other day I tried to recite the times table while running. I got as far as 4x before getting out of breath and decided that concentrating on my breathing might be healthier! I think my running is improving (finally) as managed to do my usual run and got halfway round without feeling too knackered. Can’t wait to feel like that all the way round my circuit.

These don’t happen very often but to have a bank holiday weekend in Essex (UK) which is sunny, warm and not raining is really rare. I think this is what is used to be like when I was younger. I spent my weekend on Mersea Island - a small island in Essex which is reached by a causeway which floods at high tide. We are always forgetting this until we get within 2 mins drive of the island but only once or twice have we had wait for the tide to turn. Thankfully there is a pub just by the causeway which is rather handy. It’s great to spend a few days on the coast - Mersea doesn’t have miles and miles of beach but what is there is nice. I even managed to go for a run on the beach yesterday (lucky there is lots of wet sand to run on otherwise it could of been hardwork). My in-laws have a caravan on the island and that is where we stay when we go down there. Here is a picture of West Mersea.

On the Saturday we went to Dedham which is just outside of Essex, in Suffolk for a walk to Flatford Mill (Constable country). Flatford Mill is a beautiful place, you can see why Constable painted so much around that area. We had a nice lunch there followed by ice-cream while watching lots of families trying their hand at rowing on the river. Saturday night was spent at the clubhouse on the caravan site - the average age was 55-60 with the exception of me and Husband, one girl of about 25 and the young polish couple who work on the site. As you can probably tell it was a barrel of laughs but the drinks are cheap! On Sunday we went crabbing on the west side of the island with our nieces along with 50 other kids and adults who had the same idea. Met up with good friends who have a parent who lives on the island, it was really nice to catch up with them. After catching over 30 crabs (I stood and watched, playing around with a dead fish head was not my idea of fun) we all went to a local bar and had beer and ice-cream (the ice-cream was for the kids!). A bar-b-que in the afternoon rounded off the weekend for us as we drove home late afternoon. A picture of Flatford Mill below.

Today is a lovely day here but I’m indoors studying for my OU course. I’m really enjoying it and whizzing through the coursework. Only an hour or so to go on that and then I think a nice cold beer will be fully deserved!

I feel knackered from an afternoon of studying. I took today off as holiday as my Open University course has started and I thought it would give me a head start. Had a nice lazy morning, got up late (well 30 mins later then normal), went for a run/walk/run, got showered and dressed, had breakfast while reading last weeks Sunday Times, went out to the local shops for a browse and brought lunch. Got back, checked emails (couldn’t help myself!) and got down to the course. Read the booklet called ‘READ-ME-FIRST’ which seemed like a good place to start and then downloaded all the software which included Firefox. I’m already using Firefox and this managed upload a lower version then I already had so then I had to upgrade it again! Now I was all set for Lesson 1.

Lesson 1 on Design and the Web went really well and I discovered a new site called ‘Web Pages that Suck’ - had a good laugh while looking at that site! Took a couple of hours to get the first session done so I was quited pleased with myself. My eyes felt really tired from the studying but I was glad that I had started it. Decided after this I would go on the OU email/forum system and bloody hell, loads of students on the same course have done loads of stuff already! Now I feel slightly miserable that I’m already behind. I’m away for a couple days this weekend so I can’t get anymore done until Monday - hope the weather is crap so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on some sunshine (sorry everyone in the UK!).

Not sure if I will post anything tomorrow or Sunday as I said I’m away - are bloggers allowed holidays? Happy Bank Holiday weekend to everyone in the UK!