What a surprise!.
Not.
Archive for 9 July 2003
All working again. Move along, nothing to see.
(Anyone know how to fool HTML into showing tags as text?)
We spent most of the morning looking at flats – including several in K2. It’s the first time I’ve ever paid it much attention, let alone actually been inside. The views are pretty spectacular – especially the marketing suite, which is up on the 15th floor and looks out over the city centre and to the south. It’s got two bedrooms and is on the market for 270k, which just goes to show how the property market in Leeds has lost its marbles. It’s a lot of money for a view.
As far as the rest of it was concerned, I was pretty underwhelmed. The two bed flats in our price range were – to put it bluntly – pokey. 684 square feet doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not by the time that you remove the hallway from the equation – that’s 684 square feet of floorspace, not usable living area. The furnishings ranged from “show set at Ikea” to “Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen on acid”, including the most disgusting diarrhoea-brown leather sofa I’ve ever seen. It might have looked good in the style magazines, but in real life it was just hideous. So all in all, K2 was a bit of a let-down, although I did like the idea of the car lifts down in the basement – it’s basically like a bookshelf-cum-rotisserie for cars. You drive into your slot and then the whole thing sinks down into the floor to make space for another two on top.
All of which means that we’re no further on, although I keep telling myself that September 23rd is a long time off, and panicking about housing at this stage is premature. For a while I felt like I could actually care less about this place, but once you start to look at the alternatives, it’s actually quite a good place.
Bugger. Problems posting from wBloggar and Zempt.
Insomnia strikes again. So I’ve been sitting at the keyboard playing Tranquility for a while, with the balcony door wide open and the sound of the river in the background. Very relaxing – I’ll miss it…
Another day at the Large Retailer, trying to make headway on the project. Some progress, but if change in this organisation is like turning around a supertanker, then trying to get hold of the people you need to talk to in order to get the information that you need is like wading through the treacle that the supertanker is sailing through. While having nicely delineated channels of communications and business account relationships makes for great organograms, it doesn’t half get in the way when you simply want to cut across the silos in the business and get answers from people…
In the periods between meetings I started downloading some of the background papers – the ones with all the equations. Suddenly a highly-quantitative project doesn’t start to look like quite such a good idea – I can’t remember ever having met a Poisson distribution before, let alone understanding it. Something tells me I’ll know a whole lot more about them by the time this has all finished…
