I’ve been an Application Development Consultant since I joined Microsoft in March 2006. Over the 3+ years I’ve had a lot of fun on this team and particularly enjoyed the shear breadth of skills and knowledge required to tackle whatever the customer requires. My CV is now a recruiter’s dream with all the keywords I can check off.

You may have noticed from the posts to this blog over the last year or so that I’ve been spending more time specialising in both development process and our business intelligence products, Analysis Services and PerformancePoint Server. I’ve certainly been finding more and more interesting work in this area; enough to start looking for new challenges.

To that end I’m pleased to say that this week I have accepted a role with the Microsoft Business Solutions team as a Business Intelligence Consultant. The team roughly comprises of SharePoint, Dynamics, BI and other related functions such as architecture and test skills.

There are lots of challenges ahead – in particular I believe to be successful the “business” part of BI must come before the technology. Also I’m really looking forward to getting into data analysis, visualisation and seeing how customer businesses make use of the information I’ll be able to give them.

So watch this space…

Canon Digital IXUS 860 IS - 1/200 to 1/640 second, f/5.8, ISO 80

Since I haven't posted for a week or so... This one is from the Zorbing on my stag day. Zorbing is... "a sport in which a participant is secured inside an inner capsule in a large, transparent ball which is then rolled along the ground or down hills". Basically a giant hamster ball rolled down a hill. Great fun though the harness Zorb (when the riders are strapped in) can be a little bumpy.

I created this composite in Photoshop.

This is the moment that Tony Blair moved into Connaught Square at the weekend during our engagement party. Unfortunately I didn't have a paparazzi style long lens on the camera so couldn't get a really tight shot.

Canon 400D, Canon 24-105 f/4L IS lens - 1/250 second, f/4, ISO 400

OK, I took a few pictures whilst we were away; approximately 19GB of pictures... Hence it's taken a little while to process and upload them all. Anyways, for those that are interested I've narrowed the selection down to 500 or so of the best ones and put them on Flickr. You can see them here.

The whole trip was fantastic, managing to fit a little bit of everything into the two and a half weeks away. We drove from Cape Town to East London and back then spent a couple of nights in Clarens, Free State. A total distance of about 2200 miles.

In detail, the trip looked like:

6^th April 2007 - 06:35 Flight to Amsterdam, arrive 08:55

10:30 Flight to Johannesburg, arrive 21:00

Airport Grand, Johannesburg Airport (The room was very small)

7^th April 2007 - 10:00 Flight to Cape Town, arrive 12:10

Nelson’s Guesthouse (Lovely place, great views, well located)

209 High Level Road, Sea Point, Cape Town, 8005 Tel: 021 4332602 Cell: 0728 752077

10^th April 2007 - De Oude Ryneveld (Right in the center)

71 Ryneveld Street Stellenbosch 7600 Tel: 083 2984 856 Cell: 083 2984 856

11^th April 2007 - Tranquillity Lodge (Great getaway)

130 St' Michael's Avenue, Nature's Valley, 6602 Tel: 044-531 6663 Cell: 0832 645221

12^th April 2007 - Stumble Inn (Fantastic theme rooms)

31 Princess Alice Drive, Nahoon, East London, 5201 Tel: +27 43 735 3532

13^th April 2007 - Inkwenkwezi Game Reserve (Really good private reserve)

15^th April 2007 - Stumble Inn (again)

31 Princess Alice Drive, Nahoon, East London, 5201 Tel: +27 43 735 3532

16^th April 2007 - Yellowwood Lodge (A little old fashioned but very nice)

18 Handel Street, PO Box 2020, Knysna 6570 Tel: 044 3825906 yellwood@global.co.za

17^th April 2007 - The Highstead Manor (Serviced apartment for 4)

Crn Highlevel Road & St.Johns Road, Sea Point'fresnaye' 8060

Tel: +27 21 4396040 Cell: +27 837 629121

20^th April 2007- 09:40 Flight to Johannesburg, arrive 11:40

Mt Rouge Guest House (Corrie du Preez) (Very peaceful)

152 Bester Street , Clarens, Free State Tel: +27-58-2561207 Cell: 0725129707, 0827827208

23^th April 2007 - 23:30 Flight to Amsterdam arrive 24^th April 10:20

24^th April 2007 - 12:05 Flight to London Heathrow, arrive 12:30

Claire and I have been seeing each other for 18 months now and I decided to make things a little more permanent so along with her birthday gifts there was an extra item... Actually I wrapped it in eight consecutive boxes to fool her into thinking it was just another present. When she got to the last one the ring itself wasn't there, only the empty ring box. At which point I said "you have to say yes first" and then she said yes!

So we are engaged and I couldn't be happier. To answer the question everyone has asked so far - we don't have a date yet as it seems these things need a little planning and you can't just rock up to a church. I will keep you posted but for now we are off out to celebrate...

I celebrated my 35th birthday at the weekend with dinner at  The Club Bar & Dining in London. Interesting place but I expect we may see it appear in the next series of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. We waited forever to get our food; items we ordered were "out" when the meal arrived and had to be swapped for other choices; the food was cold and we were even told that the chef had burned the potato gratin which had to be swapped for fries. Our complaints, alas, fell on deaf ears and we didn't even get one of the many bottles of wine (which was the only item available for most of the meal) knocked off the bill. The music volume was such that you could hardly talk to the person next to you. The place has only been open for a couple of months so I hope they get things sorted or it could be a short life for them.

Despite the above, it was really nice to see everyone and I had a really great time. Thank you too for the gifts.

Claire and I have just returned from two weeks in Sardinia at the Mark Warner Abamar resort. It's been a while since I have had a summer holiday abroad and this was a welcome break from work. We had a fantastic beach, sailing, windsurfing and I learned to scuba dive too. For those that wanted there was tennis, water polo, aerobics and spa facilities.

More on the scuba in a later post but in the meantime I have uploaded all the pictures to Flickr.

The hotel was full board and the food was excellent but we did manage to leave the resort a couple of times to visit the local area. Pula is quite a small town with not much around. However, Cagliari (the capital city) is much larger. The bars up in the old city are great for a sundowner.

If you like a beach holiday with plenty of optional activity then this is a great holiday to have. Also, if you are single then this looks to be a great place to meet people as there were quite a few who had come on their own.

The results are in and we came 18th out of 60 in our class with a time of 13 hours, 48 minutes and 2 seconds. Not bad considering there was no wind, we missed the tides and 42 other boats retired. I took a few pictures which you can find in the gallery.

I'm part of a crew taking part in this year's Round the Island race and we had a training day last weekend. The weather was foul on Saturday with rain and cold; on the Sunday it was too nice with sun but unfortunately no wind either. It did give me some time to take a picture or two though. Still we managed to get some sails up and practise. Next time will be for the race on Saturady 3rd June.

I've just got back from a weeks skiing in Val d'Isère. This is the first time I've been and have to say I'm hooked. It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be or maybe the ski school (Oxygene) was suited to my preferred learning style.

The first few days were very sunny so the slopes got a little icy in the afternoon but on Wednesday the snows came and we had fantastic powder to fall into. By the end of the week I was actively seeking out blue runs and even got onto the odd red.

See the photos for more... I'm the guy with the red and black jacket on - thanks for the loan Craig; I guess I need to hit the sales and get my own for next year.

OK, the cat is out of the bag. I'm leaving Exony to join Microsoft as an application development consultant. The decision to leave Exony was extremely difficult given the interesting work they do but the offer presented was too good an opportunity to pass on. I would just like to thank everyone for making Exony such a cool place to work for the last 6 years. I wish you all the best in the future.

I've just got back from a very relaxing week on a farm in Cornwall with friends and am not looking forward to returning to work. I guess it has to happen though... Anyways, I have a large number of photos from the week but as yet no captions.

In addition my camera also takes pretty good web-sized movies so here are a couple of my favourites:

• Cally and Angus showing off one lunchtime
• Angus attempts to blow bubblegum

I have some pictures of Ryan and I DJ'ing at TJ's party. Koan also managed to take a few but none of me playing - was my music that bad?

That’s all for this year. I’m off to London to spend Christmas with my folks. Merry Christmas (or whatever occasion you are celebrating) and a happy New Year. See you then.

Christmas is only four weeks away so as usual I've been asked what I want. I hate this question. Mainly because I never have an answer. I'm very lucky in that I don't usually want for anything as I'm able to just go and buy it. I realise that not everyone is fortunate enough to be in this position. Also if I want a Ferrari I can't afford one but you get the idea.

The best kind of gifts are those that you wouldn't think of buying yourself. By that I mean the kind of gift that never occurred to you. For example, my father is as much a Manchester United supporter as I am and a couple of years ago he was given an old (circa 1930's) replica United football. Genius.

Unfortunately, the reverse is not quite the same. I nearly always ask my family what they want. Is this because I don't want to disappoint? Or maybe I don't know them well enough to come up with something as I've described above. I guess I have a bit of a reputation within my family for buying strange gifts when left to my own devices. The meditation kit I bought my mother a few years back was probably the pinnacle of weird presents but I like to give people the opportunity to try something new.

I guess there is always the usual options that are a good bet for me - DVD's, CD's and books. You can never buy "all you want" with those. For some reason I never receive books though. It's strange as my house if full of them so it's pretty obvious I like to read.

Help me out here, leave a comment with suggestions on how to answer the question above.

I've been really busy with work lately which means no time to investigate bloggable things. It's a shame because I'm doing some really interesting work with Excel, Web Services and OLAP. Maybe when it's released I'll be able to find something that doesn't give away Exony IPR.

In the meantime, I was trying to remember a time when I had nothing to do. Not just work wise - I have a permanent backlog of things I want to look into or code up. New API's, new technologies, new techniques, new books are all stacking up. Add that to the Golf Web Application I'm writing and the 200+ feeds I'm subscribed to and I think I have enough to keep me busy for the foreseeable future. I think I have a solution though - apply Scrum techniques. The backlog of things is large but the priority of individual items varies depending on an number of external forces. Sometimes they may no longer be relevant when I get around to doing them. I constantly re-prioritise anyway but having a sprint goal will help give a measure of progress and avoid being overwhelmed by the full list. Four weeks is too long for a personal process so I'll start with a single week at a time and see how things go.

As a separate note, why is Halo 2 being released in the UK two days after the US? We Brits are going to have to listen to the Yanks harping on about it for a full 48 hours - torture!

Last night was excellent. We were at The Fire House, a private members club just opposite the Natural History Museum. There was a good mix of people, mainly from public relations and fashion which makes a change from the computer and telecoms people I'm normally with. I had a very interesting conversion about crisis management with a PR guy. The principals are similar to software management - know the facts and act early.

Sometime later I was also talking to an IT teacher about the problems getting kids interested in computers (not games). We discussed blogging and how it could provide the kids with a chance to create their own online content. This would get them involved with something they could own and have a reason for wanting to do; certainly more interesting than home work. They would also be practising their writing skills at the same time.

Many drinks later, we left at about 3am and grabbed some food to soak up the alcohol. Head was a bit sore this morning but a late lunch at The Wolseley on Piccadilly helped a lot.

A quick shot with my new camera of where I spend a lot of time. Somewhere I can go and geek out in peace and as you might expect it's full of things I've collected over the years. In fact, I never take anything off the pin-board, just put new stuff over the top. The most used item is well within reach - my MSDN discs (top shelf, blue case). I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books (third shelf) and the Addison Wesley "Object Technology Series" (second shelf). There are loads more - I have piles of books all over the house as you can see to the left of the laptop. There are also thousands of records (bottom shelf) mainly from the 90s when I was into mixing. On the wall to the left (out of shot) there is a huge map of the world which is great for getting some perspective and yes, that is a giant poster of Sarah Michelle Gellar - it was a leaving gift from Sony. The FHM calendar is replaced with whatever I get given each year. There is more to the right which you can see in the panorama.

Maybe this could start a new meme (assuming someone like Robert Scoble is kind enough to pass on the thought) - where do you blog from? (Send me a trackback so I can find you).

[Edit: I was about to post and remembered that there are two passwords and a couple of addresses on the pin-board so I've edited them from the picture here and in the gallery. Thats what the smudges are.]

According to this survey, my personality type is The Discoverer: "Your distinct personality, The Discoverer, might be found in most of the thriving kingdoms of the time. Your overriding goal is to go where no one else has ever gone before. Regardless of the number of available natural problems to be solved, it is not unusual for you to continually challenge yourself with new situations or obstacles that you have created. You are an insatiable explorer of people, places, things and ideas. You thrive on constant change and anything new or different. On the positive side, you can be creatively rational as well as open minded and just. On the negative side, you might be an impractical and indecisive procrastinator."

Sounds about right...

(Link to survey via Sells Brothers -- Chris's Home on the Web)