Monday, February 14, 2011

The Mountain Road

Over to Manchester today for a seminar at the HMRC to talk about the new real time information reporting system that they want to bring in. Apparently they want the pilot schemes in place by next April - yikes! That's a tight timescale, particularly as we won't even be getting the final spec for the schema until the end of March.

The drive over was the usual crawl through the benighted village of Tintwistle which had the bad fortune to be situated between the end of the M67 out of Manchester and the start of the A628 over the Woodhead pass to Sheffield. It took at least half an hour to travel the two miles or so through the bottleneck, both in the morning and the evening. Lovely.

On the way back we were stuck behind a lorry and the guy behind me was itching to get past. He overtook me in a risky maneuver and then took a detour up a side road to try and beat the lorry. Five minutes later he was waiting to pull out again, just behind his nemesis. I could see him itching to get past all the way up the pass until he finally got to a two lane section where he could get past - only to find himself stuck behind another lorry just in front of the first one. I wonder what his blood pressure reading was after that ... much better just to cruise along and not stress about it, I think.

Plenty of OU work done over the weekend, including finally seeing off the dreaded Cisco course on the OSI network model. It was interesting material, but it was a real pain clicking through endless flash animations with non-resizable text. I downloaded the accessible version so that I could read the text on my Kindle whilst still being able to see the illustrations on screen, but it's not an ideal way to study I think. I also made a start on my next M255 TMA which looks like it should be straightforward.

No comments: