It’s been a while!

Well actually 3 (almost 4) years since I last blogged here. So it is high time to write some new content for my personal blog and perhaps change the nature of the content.

When I started blogging (on Blogger) many years back it was mainly a technical blog on Data Warehousing with an Oracle slant. A lot was drawn from my experience working as a manager at a global IT management company. Over time I migrated my blog to wordpress.com but carried on writing technical stuff on topics such at deadlocks, partitioning, DWH design and modelling interspersed with non-technical stuff about gardens, kids and holidays. When I joined Rittman Mead I took the chance to copy the technical stuff to the company blog (but leave it in place so any links might continue to work) Most new technical stuff is published on the company blog as it has a bigger readership. The odd April Fool posting appears here, partially so that it less likely to be believed, which was an embarrassment we had one year on the company blog where a vendor cited our ground breaking methodology; we had hoped that people would realise that we could not make ETL faster by making the data flow down hill and get a performance boost from gravity.

In the past years there has bee a lot of change in my life. My children have grown up, graduated and work for a living with a place of their own, I have moved to a cottage near the beach (just a bike ride away or 5 minutes in the car) I can commute to London if I need to. Amsterdam (by air) and Northern France and Belgium (by road) are even shorter journeys. The house and garden here are still in need of love and care and the next few years of free time will easily be consumed by various projects around the house. The occupants of my house have changed too. The core “family” is KG, my New Zealander partner and Tosh, the Burmese-cross cat with loads of attitude and claws. Sadly Rob, 65kg lump of New Zealand Huntaway passed away; the Robster was taller than me and had a bark that could carry for miles. He was also well travelled – he flew over from New Zealand to live with me (OK he was KG’s dog and came with her!)

 

So, my return to personal blogging has started – I will write on technology occasionally, especially if it does not fit with my corporate stance, but mainly it will be about life here, and the odd social rant where society is on the wrong path.

 

But for now, bye-bye from Ham Sandwich.