Believe it or not, I’ve been working for my current employer for 20 years¹. Loyalty like that is a rarity these days (or could I just not find anything better elsewhere)? Anyway, they’ve given up on handing out watches and simply give out gift vouchers instead (although a generous amount, I should add).

I’d been thinking for a while of replacing my aging TomTom One v2 – I was attracted to the larger screens and IQ routes features on more modern versions. I thought I’d get a TomTom One XL IQ, as this covered the bases, although secretely I’d have ideally liked one of the better models. Well, these vouchers were all I needed to upgrade my aspirations! I could use my vouchers at Halfords, and as they had a sale on at the time, it sounded ideal.

After much searching of reviews and looking at specifications, I narrowed it down to the TomTom GO 540 or the 730.

The 730 is the more “up market” model, but is the not the most recent. Halfords were actually selling this cheaper than the 540.

However, the 540, or more precisely the 540 Live, had one thing that I wanted and that the 730 lacked – voice control. My new car has a very steep sloping windscreen so to secure it in its ideal position at the bottom of the screen would put it out of reach. Of course, you still have to press an on-screen button to activate the voice control but the purcahse of a bluetooth remote would eliminate the need to even do that.

Anyway, I weighed up the reviews and general pros and cons, and finally decided to go for the 540. The Live services (at £7.99 a month) are steeply priced but offer regular traffic updates, amonst other things. After now using the 540, however, I feel compelled to try and find the money each month to pay for the Live services.

The only thing left bugging me is the on/off technical support from TomTom – they’ve often responded to me quickly on most questions but when it comes to swapping over the map update services (that I’m paying for) to the new device, they haven’t responded in over a week – even when I’ve updated the support call with a prompt.

At this point I thought I should make mention of a website I came across whilst searching for reviews. TestFreaks pulls together reviews from all over the ‘net – important technical publications as well as user reviews. I hadn’t come across them before and have now bookmarked them for future. In fact, I’ve even created a Firefox search engine for their site as well, which is available from my download page, as well as the MyCroft site.

Update: And now a mention from TestFreaks. Thanks!

1. yes, yes, I started when I was 12 [↩]

An apt description of my drive to work. Thankfully it was early and traffic was light. I took my time and drove carefully. The snow outside is a lot, lot worse than at the beginning of the week and it’s continuing to come down.

Unfortunately, it was all let down by selfish drivers. On icy roads the last thing you want is for other drivers to not indicate properly, causing you to have to brake unnecessarily. Or to tail-gate you.

You’d also expect other drivers to take the weather into account with regard to how they react to other drivers on the road. So, when I was coming down a hill about to take a tight turn onto a junction, you’d expect other drivers to expect that manoeuvre to potentially go a bit, erm, wrong. Which it did. My back end slid out and I did a nice wide arc towards the junction. So why in the name of blither did the person coming up that road towards the junction not hold back? Why did he drive right up to the junction, right in my way? Thankfully I gained control and missed him. But even my mid-slide gesture for him to get out of the way was met with blank looks. Unbelievable.

Anyway, at work in one piece. The snow has now stopped and it’s beginning to thaw already. Apparently warm rain is due.

And during all of this, the Vodafone and Orange mobile networks have been flaky (probably due to the number of texts and phone calls). O2 appeared fine, however.

Some time ago, probably a few years now, the company I worked for removed individual bins from under their desk and replaced them with recycling points dotted around the office. These consist of a series of bins where items can be separated – different bins for different areas, but usually, at least, a general bin for “miscellaneous” disposal. Even at the time this seemed a little odd because it might going out of your way each time you want to throw away an apple core, sheet of paper of paper cup¹. Of course, there’s probably 2 reasons for these changes…

1. They have a third party contract for cleaning. I suspect not having to empty individual bins around the office saved them quite a bit of money
2. It’s environmentally sound

Which of these you think was the priority depends on how cynical you are I guess.

Anyway, I brought in my own bin for general waste. I provide my own bags and empty it myself. Recyclable materials I take to the appropriate bins. It remains environmentally friendly and doesn’t cost anything more for cleaning costs.

None-the-less I have been hassled by management ever since. Yesterday it happened again with a threat of confiscation² so I’m taking it home. I’ve had enough. I’ll just pile my apple cores and yoghurt pots up on my desk. Nice. And one more hit against my work morale.

1. and odder still as 2 of those 3 items they don’t recycle – not food waste, including tea bags, or paper cups [↩]
2. how does this work if it’s your own property? [↩]

Remember me saying how things seem to keep going wrong at the moment (of the “it’s going to cost me money” sense)? Well, today is another such day.

I get to work to get a very early phone call from my wife. The shower’s not working. The light on the pull switch is on but the standby light on the shower is doing nothing.

So, I ring an electrician who says that it is, quite probably, the shower so I should get a new one and then ring him again and he’ll come around and fit it. Now, I don’t want it to be a big job and I don’t want new holes in my bathroom tiles, etc, so I decide to plump for the same shower (or as near as damn it) – a Mira Sport Max. I ring around the local DIY shops and none have it in stock. The local plumbers merchant don’t have it “but could order it”. Bum. My plan was to get one today and get the electrician out tomorrow.

Anyway, if I can’t get that model I’d get something similar so confident, I’ll get something at least, I ring the electrician back to ask him to pop around. “May be able to do this week – maybe last thing Friday”. Oh. Well, I’d ideally like a shower earlier than that, but it will have to do.

Meanwhile I’m chatting to my work colleague Ganesh. He asks if I’ve tried ScrewFix, a company I’m aware but haven’t bought from before. Sure enough they stock it. Great, I can get it for next day. Even better, I’m told, there’s a depot just around the corner. So I visit and pick one up.

Well, the day’s getting better I guess. The stress of the shower has already stopped me eating.

Then a van driver backs into my car in the ScrewFix car park. No damage is done other than a small ding in my number plate, but I take some details anyway (although he seems strangely reluctant to give any).

My colleague had also said that showers were dead simple to fit in, so I should do it myself. Yea. Stupidly, I tried it. Well, I say “stupidly” without meaning it – because I did it! One fitted shower, all working. Better than the original.

However, I have a dinged car and I’m lighter by £240 (yes, that’s how much the shower cost!) plus petrol. At least I don’t have to pay the electrician – which reminds me, I should cancel his visit. After we’ve tried the showers in the morning

If you didn’t know already, I work in IT support. I started off, briefly, in my career performing mainframe development. However, being a creative sort, I soon got tired of programming dull batch applications, all of which were similar to the last. The one highlight was learning about DB2 and being sent on various advanced SQL efficiency courses – nerdy, technical but brought out the analytical side of me.

But I moved into Support. More specifically, EPOS support. One of my managers was, shall we say, not a “man” manager. His inter-personal skills lacked but he was very technical and so, whilst still getting on with the “day job”, allowed you to perform side-projects that could tax your artistic side. One of those projects won me an award for IT Excellence.

As the IT department changed, the EPOS support and development teams were merged. But as emphasis on making money took over the support team was whittled down to… me. And my manager, now a different person, had no time for me or my work. I was desperately unhappy.

So I hatched a plan – I bypassed various levels of management and sold it directly to the director of support at my company. He liked it and I moved out the team (now known only as a development team) and back into a support team “proper”.

New people, new desk, new things. And for a few months it was exciting again. But now, I’ve realised the work is still dull, easy even, and nothing I haven’t done a million times before. When in my previous team I tried the escape route – but 18 years at the same company didn’t make me saleable. It just made me stagnant and the few job interviews I had went badly. I want out of support now. Ideally, I’d like to get into web development – something that’s still new, exciting, cerebral and interesting to me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many websites I’ve worked on, I have no commercial experience. And I don’t own multi-hundred-pound development tools – I write everything in code, by hand. Personally, I think the latter is the better, but what do I know?

Actually, no, what I’d really like to do is go into teaching. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. Sadly, I don’t have a degree so the doors are firmly shut (no matter what my experience is). One option, in time, is to take an Open University degree. That’s certainly something I’ll consider. In the meantime, I’m back to the job hunting – but I’ve learnt my past lessons of going to recruitment agencies, so will be avoiding them this time.

So, if anybody would like to offer me a job (and with a family and mortgage, I need something permanent), you know how to contact me. Google, are you listening?

Meantime, I feel like I’m doomed to wander the planet alone forever. Like the Incredible Hulk¹.

1. The Wedding Singer [↩]