Two of the things you discover when you set out on a change of career, is how many friends you have got and how much real use you are after your years of effort.

Well I’m still working my way though the discovery of the latter (although initial work loads are looking good) but as far as the former goes it turns out that I am a very rich man,

Along that line a shout out goes to Mike Smith of the Turtle Partnership who took the time out when I was on site at their offices to pass on some tips that he has from his years of experience in running a consultancy / business.

With the tips came a book called The Perfect Consultant which made for interesting if slightly eye popping reading, a short book (barely more than a pamphlet), every page contained stuff I should not only know but act upon, think of it as an expanded and professional version of Working from Home by the Oatmeal, From finding Work and clients to behaviour and dealing with harsh decisions, this book seem to deal with it all.

This book looks like it will live up to is boast of “All you need to get it right first time” so thanks again Mike

We had all been missing the first Tuesday club by Information Security Solutions during its couple of months hiatus so were really pleased when it announced this month’s event would be going ahead.

There was a new sponsor in Arxan who did a fine job doing active tours and trying to talk to everyone without a sales pitch, particular credit goes to their tech (I have his card but am not publishing his name, it is a security meet up after all) who worked his socks off handling the huge variety of questions that were fired at him while only drinking water 🙁 , on a side note I had not even heard of Arxan before this meet up despite coming into contact with both their clients products and having mobile security issues which they could have really helped with, this was defiantly a “Ooooo” moment and exactly what the 1st Tuesday is for (I spent the trip home reading their web site)

As normal conversations varied wildly from the minutiae of users rights to privacy on a corporate network in various different countries through to Gandhi’s life and achievements (especially comparing his self sacrifice compared to modern leaders), though that makes it sound far more high brow than it was,

I had a great time as normal and this was an excellent night for learning new stuff and meeting one of the serious players in the mobile security.

(Yes I always take a picture when people are facing away)

After helping a client Project manager with a cheap long term “snapshot” style of backup involving some western digital Green Hard drives, some Rsync commands and the very nice anti static drive cases by Wiebetech I find this email in my in-box

On my desk this morning that was hardly clean,
The miraculous hard drive fairy has been,
And in the middle of the night,
Left a gift of tera bytes.
How thoughtful of the kind fairy to think,
Of the need to use the superb rsync,
To provide the back-up strategy I craved,
Means all my data will now be saved.

Sometimes even PM’s can be cool