British Museum

Today Jack and I started our local explorations again with a trip to the British Museum. There is currently an exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors on but tickets need to be booked a month in advance or we would need to queue at 7 in the morning. There is so much else to see that we will have to come back for that one.
The place is huge with the main courtyard covered by 3,500 glass triangles. We spent about 3 hours walking around, of which 1 hour was a guided tour and still didn't manage to see more than half of it. We enjoyed it though with the highlights being the Rosetta Stone and the mummy exhibits. Might even book tickets to see the First Emperor exhibition for next time.

We also managed to find a couple of Geocaches which I had pulled off the web before we left. Found count is now 10.

Also Tony came home today after nearly 3 months in Mozambique. Good to have him back.

Chasing the dream

So after much stargazing, I turned down the job of Test Manager which I would have struggled with and would not have taken me down the path I want. Instead I enrolled in the MSP course which is a week long, intensive course aimed at programme managers.

I have started to play around with my MBA course and my first actual subject will start in mid March.

The downside of doing this course is that I will not start looking for work until March and only have a month then until I am off for 3 weeks to head back to Australia.

HSMP - The new rules, a new plan

When I originally planned to move to the UK, it was only to be for 2 years. There being a lot of world to see and only a limited amount of years to see it, I thought that 2 years would make sense so we could move on and see more.

After being here for 6 months, I realised the folly of such a thought. There is so much to see from here that I thought we would probably need to do at least 4 years to do it justice. This fit in nicely with the visa requirements. Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) means that you no longer have to apply for a new Visa and shortly after you can apply for naturalization - a passport. It was my hope that Jack and I would be able to achieve this and so be able to return whenever we wanted.

Last year, however, the rules changed. Now you need to be here 5 years for ILR and 6 for naturalization. I don't want to be here that long, so that plan is out the window. I have made a few good friends here, but it still doesn't feel like home.

There were 2 major objectives for the move, travel and career. We have certainly traveled quite extensively since we have been here and still have more to do, but the career has been ignored for the most part. It was too easy to get simple programming jobs where the demands were less onerous. Now I have started getting more qualifications under my belt. I have applied for, and been accepted into an MBA and completed my PRINCE2 Practitioner course.

Do I chase my dream job or take the easier path and just continue coding?

Geocaching attempt 2 - Success

This weekend Jack and I went out again. This time we were armed with a Garmin GPSMAP 60CX. Heading back to the first of our missed sites from last weekend and armed with a clue, we quickly found our first cache. It is no wonder that we missed it originally. The car GPS had put us about 200 metres from the actual spot and the cache was the size of a small nut. The cache unscrews and inside was a tiny slip of paper.

For the rest of the day we wandered around the Isle of Dogs and over to Greenwich. We didn't find all the caches we searched for, racking up 4 finds for 7 attempts. The non-finds were frustrating but the finds made up for it. It was a good day out and we only stopped as it was getting cold and dark.

Sunday we picked up Steven and Robert before heading to Kent for some geocache fun. Starting at Leeds Castle, we managed to dodge the blue rinse brigade using publiuc footpaths and made our way to the first of the days caches. It was an easy find but a much longer walk back. The next one was just down the road and again we managed to find it quite easily. The difference between finding a nano and a normal cache is amazing. The bigger boxes were much more exciting for the boys to find and all three finds of the day were off tracks in the woods.

Will go out again soon. Very addictive.

Stew & Jack 7 - Geocache 3 (still some we have not found.... yet)

Geocaching attempt 1 - Failure

It's been around since 2000 and I have known others who have done it and reported having a blast. Finding hidden packages (treasures) using GPS coordinates. Geocaching. Having a spare weekend with no-one to visit (the Brehauts were in Dublin) , Jack and I decided to have a go. We jotted down a series of coordinates from the Geocache website that were within walking distance, checked that the GPS would accept these coordinates (a ViaMichelin 970) and headed out the door.

The first cache was only a 10 minute walk away and encouragingly, the GPS pointed to the area indicated on the website. As it was our first attempt I had deciphered the clue and read comments from other people who had recently found it. The last person to find it was only 3 days ago, so this was also encouraging.

To my dismay, when we got close, I realized that the GPS was, in fact, pointing to a spot on the nearest road, which was quite a way from the path I believe the cache was located. Trusting to my local knowledge and the hints, we spent half an hour scouring the area to no avail. The GPS was useless as it kept telling us to get on the road and even my phone GPS was no help.

Eventually we gave it up and as it was so cold, did not even attempt the second on my list. I am now looking at getting a proper hand-held GPS so that we can try again.

I was astonished at how many there are in any area. There were at least 20 within walking distance of my place which make me wonder just how many are out there.. waiting to be found. If you register with the site, you can see that it records how many finds a person has made and there are plenty that number in the hundreds. Thats a lot of time searching in strange place.

Geocache 1 - Stewart & Jack - 0