Gareths Weblog

Time to wind down, clear my desk and draws an pack up my things. This is the start of my last week at GE Avitation Systems Ltd.

I will miss it, mainly the people and the 35 hour week, but onwards and upwards as Derrick Trotter would say, and social networks make it so easy to keep in touch. We will be moving back to South Wales, where Jess (my better half) and I are going to be building our own house, which in-turn means that we will be closer to our family and friends.

The house plans are finalised and applying for detailed planning permission is imminent, when this is all complete and building regulations approval is obtained, we’ll be ready to go. The design is from a standard floor plan that we found by searching the internet, but we have had modifications made so that it meets our desires. It has 3 bedrooms with dormers, on with an en-suite shower room, and a decent sized bathroom on the first floor which has vaulted ceilings. The stair case descends at the rear of the house in-front of a full height window, this combined with a sky-light should give a light and open feel to the landing and the stair case. On the ground floor, we have a spacious kitchen/diner to the front with a range cooker and extractor placed as an island and French doors to the side, a large living area with fire place and French doors to the rear. A good sized study, a utility/boot room, airing cupboard, boiler room, a cupboard under the stairs and a large reception which should receive some light from that rear facing full height window making it light and helping to give it a bit more of a feeling of grandeur.

My flat is pretty much market ready, and we have had 3 valuations, I have just a few more things to do, for example which is packing everything and moving it to Gwaun Cae Gurwen, where we will be building the house and changing my address with everyone. Hopefully everything will go smoothly though.

After having a bit of time off to move stuff and get things sorted I will be starting a new job in Cardiff Bay as Group Web Developer for Creditsafe, a company that provides information such as financial reports on businesses etc. I’m looking forward to the new role, it sounds as though there should be more opportunities to enhance my experience and advance my career with them as they are an expanding and seem to be doing well, despite of the economic crisis. I am going to need a more economic car for the commute though as it is a fair trek, I’ve been looking at a number of 1.9 and 2 litre turbo diesels and these seem the best option, anything smaller would probably not handle the wear and tear so well, and anything larger would probably be too thirsty.

A note to those of you who have read this far and use Microsoft XP. Microsoft are not releasing a patch for XP that fixes a TCP/IP vulnerability that could result in a denial of service attack or remote code execution. I think the marketing department at Microsoft could have had a hand in this as Windows 7 is due to be released on October the 22nd.

Anyway, that’s all I have time for now, I will update this as soon as I have a few minutes to spare.