arotau

I’ve formally finished my IT work now, and have a pile of books on financial markets, derivative pricing and trading to read. Over November I will be studying, attending courses and eventually sitting the Securities Institute exams to get my SFA registration.

Mim’s not been too well the last week, but seems to be on the way to getting better now. Yesterday we went to see Hero, which wasn’t great but did at least get better as it went on. I’m sitting here listening to R.E.M.’s new album, Around the Sun. Not much other news at the moment…

I have five GMail accounts to give away. In case you don’t already know, GMail is Google’s webmail system, with 1Gb of email space and the best webmail interface I’ve seen. Email me if you’d like an account — first in, first served.

This is a photo from my phone’s camera (which is why the quality is terrible) of my new desk at work. The keyboard even has a fingerprint scanner in it!

Andrew pointed out a cool application called Synergy for making separate computers share a keyboard and mouse (I have a KVM switch under my desk, but it’s not as easy to use).

On Friday, we had Dave and Rach over to stay for the night, and had a great time catching up with them. They’re the first people we’ve had to stay since getting married. Earlier I had spent most of the day at a Community Links voluthon, where our team from Barclays Capital won a prize for raising the second-largest sum of money donated in the Voluthon. Part of the prize was a copy of a new book they are publishing called Change the world for a fiver, which has some useful tips on simple things people can do to make the world better (e.g. “Learn basic first aid”, “Give blood”, “Recycle your old specs”) and some less useful ones (”Seize the moment” — nice, but pretty vague).

On Saturday, after Dave and Rach left, Rhianon came round briefly to get a flat contract witnessed, before we headed over to Andrew’s flat for lunch. Tom was there too, and after lunch we headed off to the London Aquarium with them. The aquarium was a little disappointing, with only two big tanks (one of which was full of Atlantic fish, and considerably less interesting than the shark tank). The plus side was a tank, obviously more intended for children, where you could touch the backs of stingrays as they swan around.

When we got home we finished watching Star Wars: A New Hope (having got the trilogy boxed set on the day of the release).

This morning we went off to church as usual, and should see Andrew again at St Helen’s this evening.