This week, and welcome to it…

Had a very busy week, but not really at work. The client has brought me on site not to do work, particularly, but to keep me from being put on another project. He’s promised to pay my employer once the budget is approved in Head Office. This could take until January. In the meantime, there’s no way to start anything meaningful, so I have been sitting around reading technical documentation, eating lunch in the Big Investment Bank’s cafeteria, which is very sumptuous, and trying to look busy.

Meanwhile, we had Deanery Synod on Tuesday night. It was a joint meeting between Camberwell Deanery and Southwark and Newington Deanery. The focus was to be on crime and the Church’s response to crime and disorder. Some people from the Constabulary were due to join us, but through some oversight (not ours) they were never confirmed. So we had to talk amongst outselves. This got quite teejus quite quickly. The new Area Dean and his Camberwell counterpart hoped that we would do this again next year. Unless we run it, I’d say let’s just have a social event and have done with it.

By Thursday I decided that I’d better talk to Vodafone about renewing my phone contract. I had my heart set on a Blackberry, and that’s what I got, BlackBerry Curve 8310. However, it does seem a bit daunting and I haven’t as yet had enough time to configure it properly, although I have received a call and made a call. I gather it can be connected to my btinternet.com email account but haven’t succeeded in doing it just yet, and the software installer rots.

Did I say that the software installer ROTS???

Last night we went to a new Thai restaurant in the same premises as an old Thai restaurant on Old Compton Street. It was surprisingly good, even though the portions were smallish. The gado gado (Indonesian/SE Asian salad with peanut dressing) had bok choy as the vegetable, which was a bit…um…unusual but it tasted OK. My Thai green curry was very nice, and we got home satisfied. HWMBO had Singapore laksa (a kind of curried soup with chilies, seafood, chicken, noodles, and the like) and, when asked, he said that it wasn’t authentic. I believe that anyone who opens an authentic Singaporean restaurant in London would clean up just with the expats’ custom. Why has no one done this yet? Or has someone done it and we haven’t found out about it yet? Enquiring minds (and stomachs) want to know.

I had a call from a recruiter about a new job. Unfortunately, it was with another Indian outsourcer. I am not enamoured of being in a frying pan so to jump out into a fire is ill-advised. I doubt whether I’ll go for an interview but we’ll see what transpires with that. The last interview I went on also came back disappointingly: not because they didn’t like me, though. The finance director of the company has now decreed that there is no money to hire any testers or test managers for at least six months. It would have been cheaper and more polite to have conveyed this to the people who interviewed me BEFORE I went for the interview. I suspect that their internal processes are more chaotic than indicated.

Now we’re off to the Serpentine to see the Matthew Barney exhibition. He’s married to Bj

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