Aidan Williams - High Acuity

I had a cold throughout most of the bank holiday weekend and my girlfriend kept me indoors – not the ideal way to spend a long weekend! But at least I’ve recovered now and we spent time together.

I saw Spiderman 3 with a friend on bank holiday Monday last week. We bought tickets in the royal circle of the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square where it premiered. I’ve heard lots of mixed reviews of the film, but I really enjoyed it. It’s identical in style to the first two, so if you enjoyed them, you’ll enjoy this one. Definitely worth seeing in my opinion.

My company gave me my Above & Beyond Award gift at the end of last month – thank you! – a 30Gb black iPod video with a dock. I love this thing! Finally I can store and listen to all my music on a single device, as opposed to having to pick and choose a few songs with my iPod nano. Although it has made me realise that I have 10Gb of music and since I buy most of my music on iTunes, I’m a little concerned about how much money I’ve spent on tracks over the last couple of years. I converted a couple of movies and TV series to iPod format, too and the quality is fantastic. The battery life isn’t brilliant when you watch videos, but since I recharge it with the dock at work, it’s fine.

Both Groove Armada and The Cinematic Orchestra released new albums last week – I haven’t had the chance to listen to either properly yet, but I’ve heard a couple of brilliant tracks on each album – ‘What’s Your Version?’, ‘Paris’, ‘Love Sweet Sound’ and ‘From The Rooftops’ are standout tracks for me on Groove Armada’s ‘Soundboy Rock’. ‘Breathe’ and ‘Familiar Ground’ are my favourites so far on The Cinematic Orchestra’s ‘Ma Fleur’.

It doesn’t update too often, but the Central Google Webmaster Blog is a good site to bookmark if you’re into SEO.

Wow it’s been a crazy December, but it’s been great so far!

I had my appraisal at work on Thursday, with the two directors and the HR person. I was promoted from Lead Web Producer to Web Production Manager, got a raise and got the highest bonus in the company again for the fourth appraisal in a row (since I joined).

We had a fantastic company Christmas party that was a black tie Oscars themed night – everyone looked incredible. We had six Oscars, each voted for by everyone in the company: Best Dressed Male, Best Dressed Female, Biggest Drama of 2006, Biggest Chancer of 2006, Best Comedy Moment of 2006 and Most Profitable Person of 2006.

One of my team members, Oleg, won Best Dressed Male and definitely deserved it! I somehow won Most Profitable Person of 2006, so in my speech I said “I’d just really like to thank God, and my team! Chris, Oleg and Michele!”.

It’s amazing to think that this company was 20 people at the Christmas party last year and now it’s 40. The company has grown 100% year on year since it started, not always in terms of the number of employees, but always in terms of profit, and the career I’ve had in the company would seem like a fairy tale if it all hadn’t been so much hard work. Yes, the company has done well and I’ve done well at the company and so have many others, but we’ve all worked extremely hard for the company to do well and we’ve all earned it.

Don’t get me wrong! We know how to have fun at work, during work hours and after work hours, but we also know when we need to work extremely hard. It’s the fun we have that helps us to knuckle down to work when we really need to.

However, if I had failed in my task of creating the best production team on the planet, I would have been putting my entire family at risk – that’s just the way we roll at my company. Tough, but fair.

To celebrate another fantastic year, I’ve ordered myself a new laptop: I went to the Apple Online UK Store and ordered myself a new 17″ Macbook Pro and maxed-out on every option. 2.33GHz, 3GB Ram, 256MB Video Memory, 8x double layer SuperDrive, etc – although I did opt for the smaller, faster hard drive – I’ve already got a great external hard drive. It won’t be here till the beginning of January, but that’s fine!

Apple really should be paying me for promoting them – I’ve got 8 people in work and 4 people I know out of work to change from PC to Mac and buy Macbook Pros, over the last year.

I’m not a Mac fanatic per se, but I do like them a lot and how easy everything is with them. For me it’s about how much I enjoy using the operating system, as well as my own personal productivity and how much more work I can get done on my Powerbook than I do on a PC. But I do have a couple of friends who love their PCs and won’t even think of touching a Mac – which is fine! Each to their own.

Great Christmas moment:

A couple of weekends ago I had a great Christmas weekend with David and Will; eating, shopping and visiting the Christmas markets in Covent Garden. We met at Oxford Circus and when I stepped out of the tube station, it was snowing (real ice flakes). They were coming from the top of the Nike Town building and three acrobats were suspended over the Oxford Street/Regent Street intersection via big white balloons, floating/dancing to some mystical sounds that were being projected out into the streets.

It was a Christmas parade and soon afterwards, a group of elves (yes, real elves) came walking through the streets, playing drums.