I had a strange new year. It was lovely, but a bit weird. After dribbling over to Victoria to see a few people, we decided that it would be good to find somewhere in town to watch the fireworks. Hesitantly, we ventured out at about 11:30pm. Myself, I had a quaint picture in my mind of sitting by the river in an isolated spot with a great view of what was going on. Reality, however, had other ideas.

After establishing that Parliament square was closed and that lots of drunk people weren’t happy about this, we decided to go to St James Park to find a friendly bridge. In the end, we got a partial view of the fireworks, which was still quite good considering that half an hour before we were somewhere warm. Oddly, we were surrounded by large numbers of Americans who seemed to be trying a little too hard to be happy, and not necessarily always succeeding. One seemed to be bitter that she had been waiting there for “over an hour” and that me coming along with moments to spare with my “big” and “noisy” camera was “annoying”. I thought better of saying anything back just in case she decided to bomb and then subsequently invade my face. I made up for it by loudly forgetting the words to Auld Lang Syne whilst the assorted foreigners looked on with mild amusement and, in some cases, fear.

The wonder of work is back with me now, and I have at least 2 flowcharts in my peripheral vision. I think both must be important.

edit I’ve decided to never ever ever ever again work with Sharepoint / Infopath. How can something with so much promise turn out to be so crap? Actually, “so crap” makes it sound not so bad as I’m used to ranting about things. However, Microsoft have managed to invent something that makes the phrase “easy to use” even less truthful than “oceans are dry”.