HereticSun

Yay! It’s December the 1st and that means I could open the first door on my LEGO advent calendar. Little bit confused about what was inside though as it contained a fireman with a Stihl saw. Does this mean I can expect a car wreck behind one of the other doors?

It’s finally done. The Seloc activity day video is now on youTube. Many thanks to Wispy for all the hard work he’s put in to make my stunningly inept driving look fun to watch. Enjoy.

Well it was my 30th birthday recently. It seems that Del must have taken out life insurance on me.

All started off innocently enough with what I thought was a few days away, but then on Thursday things started getting scary.

We arrived at Ellesmere Port and had a wander round the Blue Planet aquarium, spending quite a bit of time looking at the big tank which had in it various species of sharks including Nurse, Lemon, Black and White Tips and Sand Tigers, not to forget the rather large Stingrays. The largest Sand Tiger shark being 10ft long and about 30 stone:

Then she turned to me and announced that I was going in that tank!

But no, she wasn’t joking. A few hours later, after being briefed, kitted up and trained on how the use the scuba gear I was in at the deep end:

Someone could have let me know I was being stalked:

Still I managed to get out in one piece and with a huge grin on my face. This was attempt number one.

So having survived attempt number one, I was told that day two was to be a little more chilled out with a trip to the Knowsley Safari Park.

What she ‘forgot’ to tell me was that the day was to begin at the safari park with an hour or so of me doing an aerial assault course:

You get the idea. Anyway, that was attempt number 2. Survived.

With the adrenaline still flowing from the shark encounter (nevermind the assault course), I was rushed out of bed on Saturday early and shoved into the car to a dodgy converted steelworks near Rotherham.

After signing my life away for the third time in as many days, I was taken through into the main area and the guy pointed upwards saying “that’ll be you in a minute”. I just had time to look up to see a body come flying down in front of me.

Yes, having failed to kill me on the previous two attempts, she had me doing a 140ft bungy jump. Indoors.

I barely had time to realise what was going on before I was at the top of the building looking down through dry ice at the floor below. A long way below.

So that was attempt number 3. Once again survived. I am invincible

Well, it’s been over a year at “Connection 2″:http://www.connection2.com and once again it’s time for a change. I’ve been offered a job working for “Pentangle”:http://www.pentangle.co.uk/ which is owned by “Alun Rowe”:http://www.alunr.com/, a fellow “Seloccer”:http://www.seloc.org/. Things are looking promising for the future.

notextile. After failing at getting up early enough to join the Furballers in Guildford for a run down to Goodwood, we made our way down a couple of hours later. What would have been a glorious drive through some fantastic B-roads was somewhat spoilt by Sunday drivers whose idea of national speed limit was around 30mph. To top this, they accelerate to 40mph through the villages where the speed limit was 30mph.

Anyway, we made it to Goodwood without me losing the plot (too much) and wandered in where we found god knows how many millions of pounds worth of exotica – Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Nobles, Ferraris, Porsches, Aston Martins, Ultimas, Ariel Atoms. I was dissapointed at the lack of new supercars though. It would have been nice to have seen a Veyron or a Zonda.

This lead to a conversation about what IS a supercar now? Certainly for me Porsche are no longer supercars (with the exception of the Carrera GT). Perhaps this is because I see so many of them about. But also I think a supercar is something that is a complete beast. A car that is untamable, but on occasion will let you play along with the game. Lamborghini have held this reputation for many years now and that perhaps is why I have always loved them. With the Bugatti Veyron, there is absolutely no sense behind why they made the car, other than the simple reason of “to see if we could”. Porsche just don’t seem to have any of this ‘ludicrous-ness’. Don’t get me wrong, they are fantastically engineered cars and I respect them for that, but I think perhaps that may be their downfall in my mind.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. Have a look in “my Flickr gallery”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/hereticsun/sets/72157602008002983/ for some photos of a few of these beautifully crafted machines.

notextile. Nobody here in England would have a kebab for lunch let alone when sober – you’re just never quite sure what or where that doner meat has come from. However having just returned from Istanbul, I found myself eating various types of kebab at every opportunity. Mind you most of the restaurants in the tourist area sold little more than kebabs. Granted they were in vastly varied in their forms, but never-the-less still kebabs. For some reason eating this unknown meat in its home land seemed fine and it tasted fantastic (unlike many of the kebabs you get over here).

‘They Might Be Giants’ sang ‘Istanbul not Constantinople’ but I guess they must have been staying in a different area of the city to where I stayed. In this case Istanbul was most definitely Constantinople. Every direction you turned there was another historic building, from the Blue Mosque to the Topkapi Palace and the Basilica Cistern. Each of which still has such a sense of grandeur and sheer opulence, I imagine that all those centuries go, they must have been mind-blowing.

Four fully packed days in Istanbul and I only managed to see a small amount of the Sultanahmet, Seragio Point and Bazaar Quarter.There is so much to see, that four days just doesn’t do it justice. This is definitely a place to go back to for further exploration.
“Photos can be viewed in my Flickr account here”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/hereticsun/sets/72157603745289495/

Well I’ve proven it many times, that driving with the roof off in the rain is possible without getting wet. The trick is to avoid slowing down. So therefore it’s not in your best interests to get yourself stuck in a queue of traffic, as I did yesterday. I’m not sure what would have been the more amusing sight – me getting soaked or the old boys in their classic cars holding umbrellas in the vain effort to stay dry. Either way, you can only laugh.
But what is it about wandering round a car park and looking at the machinery that I and so many others enjoy so much that we do it rain or shine? Admittedly these aren’t your run-of-the-mill daily-hack get-me-to-work-and-back cars that I’m talking about. These are motoring exotica and classics. But it’s still a bloody daft thing to be doing on a Sunday morning.
The run down to this ’show’ was amusing in itself. My little S1 Lotus Elise trying to keep up with a Mosler just wasn’t going to work. Luckily for me, I had one thing to my advantage – the Mosler is the size of the Titanic. I’m sure if you were to look at Goodwood in a satellite picture taken that day, the Mosler would be as easily visible as the great wall of China is from space. So yes I did (just about) manage to keep up with that car if only because it couldn’t fit down some of the roads. It really is an awesome machine and its no wonder Moslers perform so well in races. They’ve got the power and speed to get ahead and once there, they have the width to prevent anyone from overtaking.

“Photos can be viewed in my Flickr account”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/hereticsun/sets/72157602008002983/

Well this year has just flown by and I’ve certainly been kept busy. Not much has changed on this site other than a facelift several months ago and some more photos added to the gallery area.

Work has pretty much kept me on my toes with some major changes happening alomost from the time I arrived there. We’ve had a split with our sister company resulting in half the network infrastructure needing replacing, installation of a Sharepoint server, firewall/AV/anti-spam replaced, restructuring of Active Directory and not to mention the migration to a new email server. All this on top of the usual maintenance of the network and user support. I had also taken control of the IT systems in our second office in Dublin.

Well after almost three years of working for “Stent”:http://www.stent.co.uk/ managing and developing a revolutionary new system that takes computers out onto the construction site, the time has come for a change. I shall shortly be taking up the position of Digital Services Manager at “Connection2″:http://www.connection2.com/. It has certainly been fun working for Stent. During this time, the project I have been managing has won both the Effective IT award in 2004 and more recently the “Mobile Data Association award for ‘Best Wide Area Application’ in 2005″:http://www.themda.org/Events/Page_Events_AwardsNight2005.asp. To give an idea of how much this means, amongst the competitors for these awards were T-Mobile and RIM (the company behind Blackberry) respectively.