4 Days in and its all peachy.

Apart from not understanding how to catch trains properly for the first 2days, everything’s going pretty well. The team is switched on, and the work is interesting so its all good 🙂

What I do find a bit puzzling is that other than Sheffield station there’s no way to find out which trains stop at your station, or what time it will arrive. Where there’s more than one train stopping at your destination you have no way of knowing which one will be quicker other than to ask. Even Sheffield’s fancy display board doesn’t show you the arrival times, but it does, however, show you which stations the trains will stop at.

So for instance, although there are trains that go direct from Sheffield to Leeds these can take up to an hour and 40 minutes. However, the cross country trains that start at Plymouth and end in Edinburgh also stop at both Sheffield and Leeds and yet only take 50 minutes. The trouble is you have no way of finding that out other than asking, or being a regular and already knowing!

It all seems a bit odd to me. Anyway, its no longer taking me 3.5 hours to commute! Yay!

As for the work, it does seem there’s more ASP.NET that I expected, but the data that’s driving the site is pretty interesting to work with, and because we’ve got a pretty switched on Oracle developer it’s making my life really easy! He has complete control over the organisation of the data, and if we need something that he hasn’t thought of it’s a simple task to ask him to add it, no politics involved which is a great relief.

T-Mobile Internet

For the T-Mobile internet dongle, apart from the  slightly patchy connections whilst on the train I’ve actually used less than 80mb, which is pretty good really. I was thinking that I’d be going over my tariff limit but on reflection i doubt I’ll even come close.

That 80mb consists of email, some web research and a bit of online development  i.e. uploading files to a couple of my sites. I have noticed that as soon as the connection is made, the tmobile connection manager’s transfer count starts climbing and reaches 160K of transfers, without me actually doing anything. my daughter has borrowed it too, so I was expecting the whole allowance to be used 😉 but she only ended up using 28mb for a whole night of the usual facebook/bebo/tagged rubbish !

So, Good news I dont think I’ll end up going over the limit at all!