Last day of the current contract.

My proposal to "The Ministry of Truth" a.k.a. Proximus has been accepted!

I'll be here for another 6 months (until the end of November). I'll be training 2 days a week and when not training working on their data warehouse.

The idea of giving the same bloody training course another 15 times fills me with dread - but the money is good and it certainly helps the weeks fly by.

Working here is like something out of 1984 or Gattica. My pass didn't work this morning, my supposed last day. I had to hand it in to reception and get a temporary pass. Someone who wanted to phone me couldn't because my phone number had been removed from the telephone directory, because my contract was not extended until the 11th hour. My identity has been dropped down a "memory tube". I just hope Proximus can find it again otherwise tomorrow I may not be able to get into the office and I will have officially ceased to exist.

Brussels 20km Result

1:51:09

I am thrilled and amazed!

The run itself was very much a curates egg. I had a high number which meant I started at the back. The run started and finished in the Cinquantenaire Park. We were marshalled in the courtyard by the huge arches - all 25,000 of us.

The cannon went for the start of the run at 3:00 but 5 minutes later I was still waiting to pass under the arches of the Cinquantenaire monument, 25,000 people is a huge hoard! I wasn't too stressed about this though because I like every other runner had a chip tied to my shoe which would time the moment I crossed the start line and finish line and my race time would be calculated on that, not the time on the clock when I cross the finish line.

What was a little confusing was the fact that the official start line was at the exit from the Cinquantenaire park, not under the arches where we started. I zeroed the GPS as I crossed that line and I was off - except I wasn't. I could only just jog along rather than striding out at the pace I had calculated. The number of runners was amazing and they all were running slower that I wanted to go!

The route was past the EU, down Avenue Arts et Loi, round the Royal Park, past the King's Palace (we all waved), left onto Rue Royale, past Petit Sablon and on to the Palace du Justice where we turned left, down into the underpass (which was airless and packed) and then out onto Avenue Louise and through 3 more underpasses until we reached the Park on the edge of the Foret de Soignes. We looped around the lake and passed the 10km point and then out onto Ave Franklin Roosevelt, and on to Chaussee de la Hulpe, and then Bvd du Souverain. It was only after the 12km point that the crowd thinned out and I was able to put a bit of a burst on for about 4kms where we turned onto Avenue de Treveuren. I then slowed down because I knew what was coming next; from 17km to 19km markers the Avenue de Treveuren climbs quite steeply. It is a swine!

At the top was the BMPH3 beer stop - except I missed it. I was looking the other way when I ran past it and so didn't pick up a beer that was offered to all Hashers running. I wasn't about to turn back and pounded on to the finish - even managing a bit of a sprint over the last few hundered metres.

As I crossed the line the clock read 2:00:04, but checking my GPS it read 1:51:16. I didn't believe it because I knew it had lost contact with the satellite on a number of occassions round the course, so I guessed I had done about 1:55. I had been very frustrated by the traffic and felt that I had not run well. My GPS had kept on cutting out, so I had no accurate idea of my speed or time because I had been relying on it to tell me this rather than using my watch and the distance markers.

After I had the chip taken of my shoe and received my medal I made my way to "Houser's" house. I was feeling OK, except my legs were incredibly tired. Once fully rehydrated I had a beer or two and then someone said "Let's check the results". Because of the chips in our shoes the results were being posted in near real time on the internet. I had convinced myself my time would be around 1hr 55 mins, so when the printout was produced I was stunned to see my official time was 1:51:09.

We had a very nice supper at Houser's. I kept everyone amused with a range of stories and everyone had a good time. The photos are on line at http://public.fotki.com/ForrestGulp/bmph3/20_de_bruxelles/

Generally I had a good run despite the feeling of being held up. My right ankle which had been bothering me with aches and pains and tendonitis all week and right up to the start of the run suddenly stopped hurting and was fine all the way round and has been fine ever since! I got a sore toe and I think I will loose the toenail but that didn't slow me down. I was very stiff on Monday morning and was moving like a very old man. Nevertheless I ran with the Hash on Monday evening (photos, with me with my eyes shut at Forrest Gulp's site http://public.fotki.com/ForrestGulp/bmph3/coppa_del_mondo ).

I am still a bit sore in the legs and probably won't run again this week, but I think I will be out running in the week next week. Eric, my training partner who had a disasterous run finishing almost 2 minutes behind me, is keen to enter further races. I'll see how I feel once I get over this one before committing to any more pain.

My official certificate showing my official time which is 7 seconds faster than my GPS time. I guess I didn't switch it off fast enough once I crossed the line at the finish. As I started towards the back of 25000 runners and finished 10082nd I passed around 15000 runners - and each one of them seemed to be in my way!

The Sportstracks maps show the full trail though I had to tweek them a bit because of the loss of signal, particularly in the park. Curiously according to Sportstracks I ran 20.26km. The race is called "The 20km of Brussels" but I've been told that it is actually 20.6km. Perhaps the difference 370metre discrepency is the length of the Cinquantenaire Park!

A Blast from the past - December 2000

Bitter sweet memories for any of the Ealing crowd... I came across my long neglected website that is still in one piece and with some photos from our trip to the London Eye back in December 2000.

http://uk.geocities.com/amcfadyen/LondonEye1.html

Where I live

Thank you to all my friends who have signed up to my Yahoo 360 site...

Now I'll have to find something interesting to write about. The problem with blogs is that they can quickly become:

a) a year round Christmas Card letter with endless showing off

b) become a boring diary of trivia

c) a whinge list

I hope I can avoid all of the above now I've got an audience. I think though, if it is alright with you, that I will pretend you are not there at all.

I've been told unofficially by my boss that I will get the training contract, so I am in Brussels for another 6 months.

Now I will have to find somewhere to live, as my current apartment is up for sale along with the rest of the house it is in.

I am currently living in the ground floor of a large old 4-storey house (pictured above) that belongs to an English couple, Jim and Olga. Olga is a friend of Janet's sister, and that is how I found the place. The apartment is right in the centre of Brussels in a region called St. Gery. St. Gery is a little like a miniature version of Covent Garden in London there is an old covered market that is now an exhibition centre and bar and hundreds (and that is not an exaggeration) of bars and restaurants and is also the Chinatown of Brussels so there are quite a few Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants in the area too.

I guess I am right on the frontier between the trendy part of Brussels and the grotty part of Brussels Everything trendy is to the North and East, everything grotty is to the South and West.

The apartment has been broken into twice. They smashed the front window the first time but ran off before they nicked anything. The second time 2 weeks later the burglars climbed the scaffolding on the building next door and came in through a dormer window in the roof. They did over the whole building. Jim and Olga lost quite a lot. By the time they reached my apartment I think they must have been tired and worried. Tired by their climb and search and worried because they couldn't get out as the front door was deadlocked and the back garden is surrounded by a 12 foot high wall. Eventually they climbed out of the window that they smashed on the previous occasion. Fortunately they opened it this time as it had only just been repaired. I lost about €35 from a collection of Euro coins but that was all. I had hidden all my valuables after the last break in and they deemed my p.c. to be too old to be worth nicking.


(interior shot - my kitchen, dining room and garden)

I have some colourful neighbours – on one side I’ve got a house full of Polish builders who are living in the house as they rebuild it – they are very noisy with power drills starting at about 8am most week days, but it ensures I don’t oversleep – beyond them the neighbourhood gets posher. Some nuns occupy the next house and the rest of the street in that direction, towards St Gery is very well to do. On the other side of the apartment things run down hill rapidly. The house next door is subdivided into 8 apartments and beyond there things get more and more ragged with communal kitchens in basements, bunk beds visible from the street in tiny grotty apartments, loads of letterboxes in every front door, most of which have mail hanging out of them and then suddenly you are in Place du Jardin du Fleurs that has a nice fountain and a couple of restaurants, one of which is terribly terribly posh.

I really like it here, but all the same, I think my next apartment may be a little more upmarket than this one.

Oh by the way if you want to buy the house, then here are the details...
http://www.immoweb.be/EN/Global.Estate.cfm?IdBien=738736

My job

I am asking a lot of old friends to sign up to this blog thing so I thought I would let everyone know what I am doing at the moment.

I've been working in Brussels for Proximus, the market leader mobile phone company for 15 months now as their Data Architect. I am responsible for the Proximus Concept Model (PxCM) an enterprise data model. To most folk this would probably be the most boring job in the world, but it keeps me entertained. The pay isn’t great but as I am learning new stuff almost every day I don’t mind too much.

As part of the job I have written a two-day training course in the fundamentals of the enterprise data model called the “PxCM Vocabulary”. I thought it was going to be given to the other members of my team, some 20 people or so. To my surprise my boss decided that 350 people needed to attend the course! I’ve been training 2 days a week for the last couple of months.

My contract with Proximus was due to expire at the end of this month (May) at my instigation. I was finally getting bored of the concept modelling and I certainly was very bored with the training, despite getting rave reviews from almost everyone who attended the course. I had planned to go back to England and do nothing for a couple of months and then see what came up.

About a month ago boss came along and explained that they were finding it almost impossible to find someone internally or externally to replace me and was I interested in tendering for the continued training. I told him I wasn’t interested and he said something along the lines of “Every man has his price”.

So I submitted a tender for the training at a fairly high price. If they accepted it the rate was high enough to compensate for the boredom and physical strain of training, if they rejected it, fine too, because I didn’t really want to do it anyway.

I was told my price for the training was “ridiculous” and they went out to tender for it. When the tenders came back in Proximus started talking to me and tried to beat me down.

At almost the same moment I had a sudden change of heart – perhaps the subject of another blog, and I decided I wanted to stay on in Brussels. I resubmitted my tender, this time with a 20% discount and a proposal for consultancy at Proximus for the additional 3 days that I wouldn’t be training. In fact this put up my overall price but they didn’t notice that – I guess because the consultancy would come out of a different budget.

I was dragged into my boss’s office at the end of last week and accused of blackmailing them! I told him I thought my price as a reasonable one and reflected the true commercial price for this kind of training “That’s where you are wrong, because HTTelekom Ltd (a well known company in the field) is offering a price per student that works out cheaper than you.” I was stunned. It turned out that they had been much more expensive than even my original proposal but had also been asked to re-tender and had come in cheaper than me. My boss said he wanted me to give the training, so I said “What would you suggest is a suitable amount for me to charge for the training then”. To my surprise he named a figure, a figure about two and half times higher than my current rate but still a bit lower than my tendered price.

I said I would go away and think about it. Back at my desk I wrestled with Excel and the information I had just been given and applied the rates I had been given to a “per student” price and a very round number dropped out of the formula. I had discovered my competitor’s price, and all my boss wanted me to do was match it. I then recalculated the total value of the contract with a per student price and the consultancy added in, and depending on the rate they want me to train the resulting value of the whole thing is within 5% (plus or minus) of my original price!

The problem they had was they couldn’t calculate the difference between my per course price and my competitor’s per student price. On top of that they were morally offended at the prospect of having to pay me, a lowly contractor all that money!

Anyway I resubmitted my proposal with the new pricing on Monday and they have immediately followed up with some clarification questions, so I’m feeling quietly confident that I’ll be in Brussels for the next 6 months and well paid to boot.

Fingers crossed, I’ll be training 2 days a week, and when not training I’ll be working on their Teradata data warehouse project – something I’ve been wanting to do for over 6 months and I get to stay in Brussels, a very civilized city.

Enough writing. Today is a public holiday, and so now I'm off to "A La Morte Subite" for a very large Geuze beer and something to eat for lunch.

Entry for 24 May 2006

Tomorrow is a public holiday in Belgium – Ascension day and as a result we get a day off which is no big deal when you are paid by the working day...

I've spent the evening enjoying a bottle of the excellent wine I bought last weekend (a Sauvignon), reading a good book, "The Time Travelers (sic) Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger and listening to my MP3's which range from The Manic Street Preachers to Bach by way of Bjork, Pink Floyd, Gregorian Chants, opera, and Mozart.

While not reading, drinking or listening I've been uploading a few photos that I hope you will enjoy. There are some nice shots of the Goodwood Revival from last year as well as some of various holidays. As time and bandwidth allow I'll load up some shots from Barcelona, as well as completing the set from Slovenia, and Venice. I've managed to load all the ones from Janet and my summer holiday Austria last year. It was very wet in Salzburg, but St Wolfgang was wonderful!

And so to bed...

Hash on Monday 22 May 2006

It was a very wet Hash yesterday out of town at Genval. The run site (starting point) was at the Railway Station, so I took the train... It was late but apart from that it was really easy and cheap. How far could you go on the trains in the UK for €2.65 (£1.82)? I had a very nice ride of about 30 minutes for that price!

Everyone else arrived by car. There was a small turn out - though not as small as my run last week. The trail was advertised as 8kms, but my GPS says it was about 6kms.

There were loads of clouds around at the start of the run and it had rained earlier but the RA (Religous Advisor) who is responsible for keeping the run dry assured everyone it would remain dry - and we believed him!

Halfway round the heavens opened and it lashed down for about 15 minutes - just at the very moment the RA, who had bumped into an old friend, went indoors and had a beer with his long lost chum....

The rain stopped as soon as we got back to the runsite - most of the slower runners had turned back when the rain started but we were missing 2 of them. One of the hare went off in her car to find them and soon as she turned the corner the appeared from a nearby bar where they had been sheltering!

I ran fairly well despite having a toilet seat (the Hashit) strapped to my back the whole way round the course (if you are awarded the Hashit you have to carry it all the time until someone else does something stupid and gets awarded it). Worryingly my right ankle was sore through-out the run, so I think I will rest it for the rest of the week as Sunday is the big day - the Brussels 20km race.

Managed to unload the Hashit - a new runner got it for not having any Hash gear on...Tough but fair to my mind.

Photos of the before and after of the run can be viewed at http://public.fotki.com/ForrestGulp/bmph3/run_954_-_genval/

Entry for 21 May 2006

I'm just back from another run around the city centre and 3 times round the Park in front of the Palace - the GPS shows a total time of 41 mins 33 seconds for 7.65kms which is disappointing as I have run that course in 38 minutes... Only 1 week to go before the big 20km race!

I went to a wine tasting yesterday with a few friends from the Hash at a wine merchants in a village close to Waterloo (www.espacevin.com). The wines were very good and for their quality ridiculously cheap. I ended up buying a dozen bottles of mixed French wine for €69. I got chatting to one chap who owns a vineyard in the Loire on the Cher River (Alain Marcadet of the Domain des Chezelles) and he said his Sauvignon sells for £30 a bottle in restaurants in England - I bought 2 bottles from him for a total of £7.50.

What turned my head was that he said he was planning to sell his vineyard for €800,000, but would be willing stay on to show the new owner the ropes if necessary. It sounded wonderful until he said he works 70 hours a week!

As it was mid afternoon I made good use of the spitoon though it was a tragedy to spit out some of the wines. Despite that I couldn't remember my PIN number when I came to pay!

I ended up buying the following

From Domain des Chezelles - Touraine:
2 x 2005 Sauvignon Blanc @ €5.50 each
2 x 2005 Rose de Touraine @ €5.00 each
4 x Gamay de Touraine Marcadet @€4.90 each

and from a new vineyard:
4 x Mas de Fadan @€6.90 each (Cotes de Ventous, Rhone)

The Mas de Fadan was a nice fruity red wine and I just couldn't resist it because its name looked so much like a misprint of mine!

As well as my purchases I was given a bottle of Chilean Chardonnay to welcome me as a new customer.

A nice way to spend a blustery and wet Saturday afternoon.

18 May 2006

This is turning into a habit...

Second day of training and it went supremely well.

In the lunch break I went and viewed an apartment just round the corner from the training location and off the Grand Sablon. The location was spectacular, as were the kitchen, balcony and living room - but the bedroom was as wide as the double bed in it and the bathroom was outside the apartment and down a flight of communal stairs! No - I don't think so; especially as they were asking 900Euros plus admin and cleaning!

I think that if I stay in Brussels (subject to a whole load of things) I will have to bite the bullet and spend a lot of wonga for somewhere nice. My current apartment is a bit basic, but it is dead centre of town and right on the edge of a very dodgy neighbourhood - two break-ins so far! The rent is really cheap because it is through a friend of Janet's sister. I think to find anywhere nice I'm going to have to dig deep...

Again a rest day from running - though I think I'll have to get out tomorrow evening.

17 May 2006

No run today....

Today I had to give a training course, something that I have to do 2 days a week. This one was particularly memorable because it was interupted by two personal physical problems. Firstly despite, or perhaps because of, all the running I've been doing a short (0.50km) walk carrying my (rather heavy) p.c. without a jacket and tie I arrived a total ball of sweat. My shirt was soaking and I had to go to the Gents to towel myself down and take my shirt off to cool down before I could start training. Then to my horror after an hour a small shaving cut on my chin re-opened and I was oozing blood for sometime before one of the students offered me a plaster. I took it and ran back to the loo and applied the plaster to my chin and spent the next 2 hours lecturing with a band aid across my chin - not a pretty sight.

I've tendered to carry on the training I'm giving beyond the end of the month, but occasions like this make me wonder if any amount of money is worth the ritual humiliation of being a lecturer....

On the up side I've just come back from an excellent dinner with my upstairs landlord and landlady Olga and Jim who decided to serve up Haggis and Scotch thanks to their recent trip to Scotland - wonderful...

Tonight's run - 16 May 2006

Just back from a 14.65km run in the Foret de Soignes. The picture shows the route, courtesy of my GPS, an excellent software package called SportsTracks (freeware) and Google Earth. In fact the track shown is from last week (Wednesday) as my GPS refused to talk to the satellites tonight. So despite the trail showing a time of 1hr 18mins I in fact ran it in 1hr 17mins and 21 seconds. I felt a lot better at the end of the run than last week, so the training is paying off. Margaritas in Barry (Hash Holes) garden afterwards, until it started to rain – God I feel good!

Entry for 16 May 2006

The Hash last night was a little disappointing. My co-hare was late, so I set over half the trail without him.

We met up in the Park and set the trail to the Beer Stop and home together. We were out of time, so I had to get him to set the short trail that joined my long trail in the Petit Sablon alonawhile I waited for the pack to turn up at 7:30.

I waited and I waited - eventually there were 4 of us and it was about 7:45. Suddenly 4 runners arrived. They had managed to go to the wrong square. The run was from Le Place du Nouveau Marche aux Grains, but they went to Place du Vieux Marche aux Grains, fortunately only 200 metres away.

As the pack was very small, and because we started over 30 minutes late I decided that we should only run the short trail, so all my efforts on the long trail were wasted. Nevertheless everyone enjoyed the runm but I still managed to get awarded the Hashit for trying to award it to the Religious Advisor who was so late that he missed the run completely...

More photos at
http://public.fotki.com/ForrestGulp/bmph3/run_953_-_city_run/

First Blog Entry...

Don't know exactly what to write in a Blog - perhaps something will occur.

I'm setting a trail for the BMPH3 tonight. This is a picture of the proposed route...