Depressing

Well, the now-ex workplace is being disturbingly efficient. My final pay packet from them arrived in the bank this morning, and the payslip arrived today in the post. Along with my P45. Almost like they’re just pleased to see me go. *grin*

The payslip had it’s own depressing piece of news in it, though. Two month’s pay (one month, plus one month in lieu of notice) and 11 days accrued holiday pay. A very healthy gross sum. Then you look at the PAYE tax. Fuck. £2,700. Yeah, that’s right – over two and a half thousand pounds. In tax.

I hope I never see another tax amount like that. It’s just too depressing for words.


All done

So yes, my final visit to the London office of my now-ex employer came yesterday. It was only a fairly brief visit – a couple of hours to hand over passwords and the like, and discuss how my final piece of work had gone (migrating one of the sites Arsehole Boss had ‘created’ over to the company webserver set-up, instead of the shonky stuff he was using) along with some other small discussions and so on. And then lunch with the (also leaving) Finance guy.

All went well. The project I’d been involved in had gone fairly smoothly – and more importantly, on schedule – with only a couple of problems along the way. And those have been sorted, and documented for when someone else has to do something similar. But when all’s said and done, it went well.

And now I just need to prepare myself for Monday…


New Link

Still on the subject of photography, I came across a blog yesterday that I didn’t know existed, but that has been added to the photography section of my links straight away.

I didn’t know that Dan Chung had a blog – he’s one of the main photographers for The Guardian and I think a lot of his stuff is fantastic. Don’t believe me? Check out the first couple of shots here, or the shots of the famine in Niger.

So yes, I’m pleased I came across his blog, and intend to keep an eye on it from now on.


Bizarre

Yesterday I had a sudden thought. Not a common occurrence at all, but anyway.

Why not have a look to see if Cambridge has a Camera Club?

Thought I.

So I did a quick search, and lo, Cambridge Camera Club hoves into view. Great, that’ll be a good way to spend an evening once I’m there next week.

Um, no. Membership is now closed ’til September 2007. So what’s the point of that then? Photographers are only allowed to join once a year? Not even get a chance to see if they like the place?

Bag o’ crap.


Travelling again

Depressingly, I need to go into London tomorrow in order to finalise a couple of things with work. Bit of a bummer, although it does mean I can go and have a drink with the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) who’s become a good friend over the last year, as it’s his last day with the company too.

It’s actually been quite surprising to me just how much my stress levels and so on have dropped this week since sorting out leaving the company. This week has been almost a holiday, particularly in comparison to the last couple of months. I’m still getting up at the same time and so on – no point getting in to bad habits when I’m only doing this for a week, after all – and I’ve still been doing a lot of work, but at the same time, wow, it’s just nice to not be stressed or annoyed by dealing with idiots.

And yes, having Hound around has (in general) been quite relaxing too. OK, she can be a barky pain in the arse on occasion, but for the most part this week she seems to have quite enjoyed having me around as well, and she’s been calm, sleeping under the desk or in the corner of the office, and been very little trouble at all.

Hound asleep under the desk

Synchronised Data

One thing I’ve spent some time doing this week is sorting out my addresses, phone numbers, and all that gubbins. I’ve written about this before, but the situation is the same I had last year. Until recently, I kept all the address information I had in my Filofax, and that was it. I don’t like duplicating the data for birthdays and so on from one year to the next, but that’s still probably the easiest way of doing things.

However, this year I’ve got the XDA phone, which has a lot more versatility and data – hell, it’s a PDA with phone functions (and Herself will say “Told you so” when she sees me saying that) – which means that I can also store addresses, birthdays etc. in it. So that’s what I’ve been doing over the last couple of days, synchronising all the addresses, birthdays, anniversarys (where I remember them, or have noted them down) and all that, copying it over from the Filofax into Outlook, and from there into the XDA.

The good thing about this is that – in theory at least – I won’t have to do it all again. Ever. Of course I’ll still have to copy through the birthdays etc. year on year in the Filofax, but at least now I’ve got a good backup of them as well. Outlook will keep a copy in Contacts, and the XDA will be there too. In fact, if I push myself, I could even print out a full list of the birthdays, and just write them in the right places, rather than flicking between [Current Year]’s pages and [Next Year]’s ones.

In fact, My God, that’s now all almost organised!


Rechargeable

Absolutely Brilliant idea. Batteries you can recharge through your USB port. Fantastic.

I’m going to order some, I think.