Private Thoughts Made Public

What to write? I just realised I haven’t made a post on here all week. Why do I suddenly have nothing I want to get off my chest? Why am I suddenly happy to go several days without wanting to connect with the outside world?
I think one reason would be the new IT Manager at work, Paul. He’s definately hit the ground running, has taken control of the situation, and knows what we need to do to drag the company kicking and screaming into the 21st century. He’s appraised the situation with our hardware, our software and our connectivity, and has been busy on the phone all week to various people and putting together a proposal for the board as to where we want to go.
The first thing he’s going to sort out is the internet connections in the shops and at head office. Apparently we’re signed up to a standard home broadband account at the head office, something which I wasn’t aware of. (I knew we had broadband of course! I just didn’t know it was a home account and not a business one). He’s talking about upgrading it to a leased line with a box at each end which would let the shops connect quickly and securely with the server at head office. He also wants to bring the email and ftp functionality into head office rather than farming it out to a third party company which is what we do at the moment. He wants to standardise on hardware, kick the Win98 PC’s into touch, get in extra servers to handle emails and share the load on the main server, and many many other things besides.
We’ve been through the new shop system with a fine-tooth comb and identified about 50 outstanding issues which need to be looked at. Most of these are not new to me, and a lot of them I’d already highlighted to the development company, but as yet they haven’t fixed these issues. He comes across as being a man who knows what he wants to achieve and knows how he’s going to achieve it. And he’s done all this without stepping on my toes or making me feel like my contribution to everything over the last few years has been worthless. As it stands at the moment, I’m very impressed with him (and also, I must admit, a little in awe of the guy. He’s 8 years yougner than me and so much more sure of himself than I ever was, without coming across as being big-headed or arrogant). It will be interesting to see how many of his proposals the board will accept, and how much money they are prepared to spend, although they are aware of the company’s need to move forward. I’m sure his head is spinning as much as mine is at the moment!
I’ve been getting home in the evenings completely mentally exhausted. Unfortunately I haven’t been out on the bike all week, something wchich I hope to rectify over the weekend. I could do with a couple of days to recover from the intensity of the last two weeks…
I saw my son again last Wednesday. He’s coping well with the television ban because the side-effect of not being able to sit him in front of the box for a couple of hours means that us adults have to pay him more attention. Not that he’s exactly starved of attention to begin with. I had a text message from the ex on Wednesday urging me to get him to read me a book, as his reading skills are coming on in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately (for me) when my mother picked him up from school she took him to see my aunt and he read the book for her instead. Consequently, he wasn’t much in the mood for reading by the time I got to see him. I did, however, make him promise to read for me this weekend.
The eBay auction my parents are running at the moment can be found here, unfortunately no-one’s yet seen fit to make a bid. There’s still time, though, you’ve got until Sunday night to put in an offer. I’ll try to convince them that putting one auction up and not attracting any bids isn’t the end of the world (at least you don’t owe eBay anything if no-one bids) and we might put something else up at the weekend. See how it goes.
Well, for someone who didn’t have a lot to say, I certainly managed to fill this screen without any problems, didn’t I?