Long time no speak

It's been a while since my last posting. This lapse can be attributed to a number of factors....Maxime's baptism (yes he is a real person not just a fictional figure), a hardware failure and the final throes of yet another RFP.

Having to cater for and host 35 people at home is one of the most tiring experiences I have had. Admittedly we (I) could have started planning things more than 1 day in advance, but it was tiring nonetheless. I spent my whole Sunday answering people's question about where to find sugared almonds and rose wine, whilst worrying about how untidy the house was becoming (remember earlier personality disorder). Getting a flight to set off to Helsinki on the Sunday evening was exactly what I didn't need, but that's the job I suppose. The good news is by the end of the day, the wee man had been christened and everybody had eaten as much Tiramisu as they could (key performance metrics for all baptisms in my family).

As for the hardware failure. Quite simply PointSec is the spawn of the devil. Our encryption technology for all laptops is great in principle, but when it prevents you from using the standby or hibernate feature of the laptop it's more than frustrating. A full boot every time is ok if you're sitting in the office and have to do it once at the start of the day, but when you're constantly travelling, waiting 5 minutes for XP to work out where it put all its configuration files each time is enough to make you want to kill an air hostess. Stupidly I did use the "hibernate" feature once and as a result it made PointSec fall over and my whole laptop unusable. Thankfully I had done a backup 3 weeks earlier but trying to frantically courier laptops between France, London and Finland was an administrative overhead I really did not need as we moved into the final stages of the Finnish RFP.

The project in Finland has been very busy with lots of many late nights. However what has been nice is that because we've been down selected, we are able to get lots of access to the client to get the information we need to fine tune the solution. I've spent large spells of most days up in the Nokia offices with a range of clients. A far cry from your typical blind RFP stuff with a single Q&A session before final submission. It's reminded me that what I really enjoy about this job is listening to clients to try and understand what they need and what they want. My role has been more client relationship person and requirements gatherer rather than solution architect. It's made a refreshing change.

As for my personal pipeline...it looks like it could be another RFP in Sweden for the month of July with the possibility of a longer term role in FS in the UK starting up gradually over the summer which would take me to the end of the year. Sweden in July has certain attractions I have to confess....:-) In the more immediate future, it's the French National Show Jumping Championships this weekend so I'm looking forward to representing the south west of France up in Paris at the Haras de Jardy.