As is customary, it has been ages since I last posted.  If you follow me on Twitter, you will have seen most of what I’ve been up to.

Navin and I waiting to go up in the plane, to then jump out of it again!

First up, was my skydive. I jumped out of an airplane at 12,000ft (~3,700m), was in free-fall for about 45 seconds (to about 4,000ft) then opened the parachute.  This all happened at a tiny airfield in Headcorn, Kent with two friends from work, Chris & Navin.  When sitting on the egde of the airplane, with my feet dangling out over England below, I could see all of London to the North, and the coast of France to the South.  Very cool!

Next up was Gillian’s MRes graduation, which was somewhat thwarted by Eyafjallajökull, the Icelandic Volcano.  Unfortunately Gillian’s parents spent the graduation itself stuck in an airport in Belfast, unable to get to London to see the event.  Hopefully we won’t have similar problems when her PhD gradation comes along in a few years time.

In June, we went on a two week trip to North Eastern Europe.  The trip started off in Stockholm, where we saw my sister, Tierney, complete the marathon.  After a week in Stockholm we went to Tallinn, with a day trip in Helsinki.  We had a great time, but does mean I’m all out of holiday now until Christmas. Long slog!

Anyhow, that’s a very brief catchup. Got quite a few things lined up in the coming weeks and months, so hopefully I’ll manage to find the time to blog about them!

It has been approaching 4 years since I last had a blog, and my life has changed exponentially in that time.  4 years ago I was a Computer Science undergraduate at Edinburgh University, stressing about exams and coursework but generally leading a pretty relaxed life.  Now, fast forward to 2009 and I’ve been in the world of work for nearly 3 years as a Project Manager for Citi, one of the worlds highest profile financial institutions – working through the middle of a recession and the worst period of Citi’s recent history.  What a contrast!

I don’t plan on making this blog about anything in particular, but rather I am just going to write about subjects which interest (or annoy!) me at any given time.  Don’t expect literary excellence or anything as well crafted as the excellent Stephen Fry’s Blog.  My life is neither as interesting, nor am I as talented as Mr Fry!  I shall probably write about technology a fair amount, as well as things I’ve seen and done recently.  I hope the posts will flow and you’ll get the gist of it!

At this juncture, I must apologise for the plain look of this Blog.  I have been looking to integrate it into the same style as the rest of adrianlovell.co.uk, but I’ve several stumbling blocks.  The first, and by far the most significant, is that my code for the styling of the main site is not yet complete.  Everything looks ok for most people, but switch into Internet Explorer 8 and you’ll instantly see how I’ve cobbled some of it together in the hope of cross browser compatibility.  In addition to that, WordPress is proving very stubborn when it comes to integrating it to an existing site.  It’s a great stand alone product, but it’s modules are not as flexible as I would like.  From my limited experience with it so far, I am struck by the sheer number of values which are hard coded into it, rather than being available as global variables.

Anyhow, check out my Twitter page to see what I’m up to at the moment and I look forward to blogging shortly!