Facebook

Facebook is one of those things that sometimes I wish I’d thought of myself. (One day I’ll write about the idea I had that was three years ahead of the market and instead of making me millions got me screwed over).

But there are good and bad sides to Facebook. Good in that I’ve met some cool new people through it, good in that it enables a whole bunch of me and my friends to keep in touch easily and also good in that when I’m a bit bored I can go Facebook surfing for a few minutes.

The bad side mainly comes down to two things, the endless stream of apps that people want you to install and then some people that you add as a so called friend, I find the two are closely connected. Recently  a couple of people that I went to school with and that I haven’t seen or spoken to in 15 years added me. Now don’t get me wrong it is great to catch up with people, but from one person in particular I have had a couple of requests every day to ‘rate their sexiness’, ’see my sketch of you’ or some other application. To then make it even funnier the same person sent me a message asking what I’d been up to for the past 15 years and insisted on me telling them everything. That could take some time depending on the level of detail I go into.

The anally retentive part of me tries to keep my FB profile tidy and not too cluttered, so adding little apps is a simple no. Yes, call me cantankerous and a grumpy old man (after all that is what is says on my key ring), but I know what I like and I like what I know.

As for the 15 year update, I’m now up to March 1994. I feel it could take some time to get to the present day and with some of those years being patchy in the memory department it might take a very long time indeed!

117 miles

The M25 motorway is 117 miles in circumference and on Monday this week I actually drove all the way round it. This is not an idle boast (despite having never done it before), but merely the start of a reflection on the busy week that I have had. In fact I would go so far as to say it has been ‘a week from hell.’

Bearing in mind I live in Oxfordshire, I was not best pleased to have to go all the way to Kent on Monday morning for a meeting with a customer. But, they are a customer, they pay my bills and it was the only time the two people I needed to see would be in the same place for some time to come. With the fact that it was going to be a Monday morning firmly in mind I agreed an 11am start time. With traffic it would ordinarily be about 2hrs 45mins, so I gave myself three and a bit hours and took four and a half. I was so annoyed, the little bit of fog seemed to make people forget how to drive and I got stuck everywhere.

I then had a meeting in Harolds Wood with another customer that didn’t finish until gone 7.30pm. For a couple of weeks I’d been having conversations between the customer, their outsourced IT department and my IT guys about some systems that weren’t working. It took me going down there to prove that it was their issue rather than ours. I shouldn’t admit it, but watching their IT people realise it was them was priceless.

The drive home was quite fun, as the northern part of the M25 was quiet at that time and I was home by about 9.15 where I managed to get something to eat for the first time in the day, take the dog for a quick spin round the field before I crashed out and slept the sleep of the dead.

I was going to write about this on the train on Tuesday, but then this happened, and  the week went crazy after that, as anyone who saw my Facebook and MSN status messages will attest to.