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Sun, 05 Jan 2003

author Tim location Golders Green, Greater London, England
posted 09:27 GMT section Europe2002/Europe/UK/England/London/Working in London 1 ( all photos )

Happy Birthday Peter! ( 15 photos )
I think I've used that title before, however this time it's for a different Peter - my brother, who is celebrating his 21st today. I hear it all went well, and a good time was had by all. Congrats mate for making it through!
The main news of late people have been asking about is my job. As I mentioned the other day, it is for a company who have the contract for the imaging component of the Central London Congestion Charging. What this actually means is that as you drive into London on several key roads, your number plate is photographed, sent to the data centre where I work, and processed to extract the numbers from it, and packaged up for forwarding on to other people who then check whether you owe money.
What the main part of my job is is running a couple of servers who are responsible for storing these little packages of pictures and information permanently on what is effectively a bunch of over-grown CD burners. This is for reference in case anyone ever wants to dispute the fact that they were driving along that road at that time.
I am also there to help out the other fifteen members of the team who are effectively "Windows guys" with any questions on the running of the UNIX servers. I'm producing some documentation on the systems, since, as I arrived, there was precisely zero. Nobody knew how they had been set up. This makes for a challenge when at least three different companies and their staff have had access to the machines in the last few months and could conceivably have put anything at all on there.
That said, I actually have someone else to help do all this, who started the same day I did, with basically the same job description. The strange thing is, we actually solved a Windows problem for them as the first thing we did - that's supposed to be what they are the experts at!
What makes this job really challenging are couple of little details:

It's just going to be an interesting job, fine for the two months I am contracted for, but probably not too much more. I work roughly 8:30 - 4:30, and it takes about fourty-five minutes to get there, which isn't too bad.

To other matters for a little bit, the other morning Taija claims she saw it snowing when she was up at 6:30!!! Nobody else is sure if she is to be believed, but it certainly is possible - it's about three degrees max here, and everything is covered in ice for most of the day and all night. Here's hoping we see some more soon!
Liz's nursing registration appears to now have travelled from the Registration Board to her Agency, where it has now been mis-placed somewhere. Great. She is hoping to have it through soon, as she is now home alone all day during the week, and wants to get out and do things. Once she has it, she can either get some shifts with her current agency (although there aren't many going over Christmas, apparently), or she can leave them and apply for a full-time job directly with a hospital.
Margaret is back with us now after a mostly-successful trip to Dublin for the week, and is staying here last night and tonight. Then she's back to Beckenham (South London) for a while before returning here for one night next weekend then flying home to Sydney.
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