Well Thumbed

Traditionally, Friday is known as “bacon day” within my department. I’ve been following a low-gi eating plan for the past few weeks so I’ve been abstaining but the craving for a good bacon sandwich on thick doorstop bread is hard to ignore. This morning, after realising that I’ve lost over 4kgs, I decided that a treat was in order. Being nowhere near payday, a shoe-shopping spree is out of the question and so the next logical fall-back is bacon.

Alrighty, a toasted bacon, cheese and tomato sandwich it is with a pint of fresh orange juice.

On my way to the office, clutching bacon sandwich in a white-paper bag I found myself daydreaming about the contents of the bag. That thick, toasted white bread, smeared with butter, a slice of cheese, layers of bacon and a fair helping of tomato. By the time I got back into the office 10 minutes later, I was almost trembling with anticipation.

I carefully opened the white bag, unwrapped the sandwich and just before I picked it up to eat it, I took a quick peek inside the layers. It was with bitter disappointment I realised that my favourite diner had managed to leave the bacon off my baconey guilt fest.

Yes, that’s right. My bacon sandwich was fried-pig free thus making it simply A Sandwich. Some kind soul suggested a whip-round when they heard my gasps of disappointment but by that stage, everyone else had guzzled their own bacon-rich feasts and there was nothing but a few crumbs left.

I’m never having a bacon sandwich again.

Well, isn’t Wordle a source of sheer awesomeness? Hap tip to Leon for pointing it out.

Click on the image below to see this post transformed into a word cloud of epic(ish) proportions.

I’ve just bought a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones. They arrived yesterday and despite being the wrong colour, I can safely vouch for the coolness of said product.

One problem is that I’m not altogether impressed with the length of the cable. The standard cable length is 0.6m, which is fine if you’ve got an iPod shuffle that gets clipped onto your sleeve but it’s a bit of a pain for us Nano owners. In the package you’ll find a 1m extension cable with a clunky connector which makes the whole thing look more like Frankenstein’s monster and less like the cool, slick headphones they’re supposed to be. Having said that, the rest of the world has been all but muted and now nobody else has to deal with my poor taste in music when I travel to work. All I can hear is music and the rest of the world is now nothing more than a low woosh,

Not even the ear-splitting, permanent damage inducing DLR can penetrate my wall of rubbery silence now!

I’m starting to think that sexism is still alive and well in the workplace. Either that or I’m really, really stupid and just not worth listening to.

So, what’ll it be?

After endless problems with getting O2 to activate my Blackberry Pearl correctly (or, at all), I eventually lost all patience, demanded my PAC code and terminated the12 month contract 11.5 months early. Off I went to Vodafone with the idea of getting another Pearl. I got quite far into the process before I realized that the Pearl is pretty hard to type on and that O2 are the only stockists of the highly coveted iPhone 3g in the country.

Well, that changed things a little. A couple of phone calls to O2 later and I have a shiny new one waiting for me in store. After standing in line and watching 2 other people getting their iPhones, fighting with Customer Services and an outbreak of tears (come on, who hasn’t cried when trying to deal with Customer Services?), I have my iPhone, brought to me by $boyfriend.

My, what a lovely little device. It looks a bit big when it’s turned off but when it’s on and proudly displaying its home screen, it really is the perfect size. The set up and activation was a breeze and all I really had to do was put in my sim card and job done.

Of course, the first thing I did was install a Google app, a Facebook app and the Wordpress app so that I can post to my blog from anywhere. Unfortunately, it’s now starting to rain quite hard and my baby is too new and precious to get wet…

Ahh, the fabled girly evening. These are the things that the boys dream about, right? Pillow fights in our knickers and practicing our snogging techniques on each other, if the girly evening consists of more than one female. If it’s only one of us, we’ll probably spend the night painting our toenails, conditioning our hair and cleaning the kitchen, right?

Wrong. I’ve just spent a wonderful evening alone hacking together nasty little bits of javascript to make this spiffy, slick AJAX contact form. Well, sort of spiffy and slick except for the massive failure on the form validation side. Yes, that’s right folks, I spent the entire evening scripting things using Nano (blegh). I would fix it up tonight but my eyes are the size of saucers and I’m afraid that I’ll never stand up straight again, so I’m going to paint my toenails instead.

The biggest question mark in my head at the moment is not whether to invest the time and effort into getting an MBA but whether it’s worth attending the school that’s within my monetary and time constraints.

Whilst Cass is listed as one of the Top 50 Business Schools, it also costs upward of 35,000 GBP for the two years and requires one long weekend (Thursday afternoon to Sunday) a month for 21 months.

The University of Westminster is accessible, affordable and certainly an achievable time commitment for 2 years but I’m left wondering whether it holds the same prestige as the likes of Cass, London Business School and INSEAD. Isn’t one of the main attractions of an MBA, apart from the salary increase and the knowledge injection, the people you’ll be rubbing shoulders with during your studies?

I’m not in any way intimating that UW students are undesirable classmates - after all, I am potentially a future UW student - but I am wondering whether they’re quite the caliber of those of any of the aforementioned institutions.

Hmm…