20:35, Saturday August 23rd, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
I just applied for a Barclaycard. I have credit issues for some reason. I've never had a credit card and I've never defaulted on a debt of any kind. I have a student loan but no other forms of finance. I have no idea why I have credit issues, but I got refused for a current account twice with Smile and once with Cahoot a couple of times. I'm hoping that if I can get a credit card then I can just use it as a delayed action debit card and that will help ingratiate me with the non-high street banks. I think that the reason I've been turned down a couple of times is because the non-high streets have stricter policies regarding who they'll accept.
Anyway, if I don't get accepted for a Barclaycard I'll get one of the horrendous interest rate bad credit cards, like the CapitalOne one. I don't intend to keep a balance on it so what could possibly go wrong? :-)
Oh yes, Accenture didn't want me either. I'm quite sad about this. I had just been thinking about how good it would be to work for them. I could have asked for a transfer anywhere in the world after a bit.
Earlier Louise and I went up to Portobello Road in Notting Hill. I've never been there before. It's a famous antiques market. Today it seemed like just more of a market although there was a lot of antique stuff, old war memorobilia, Holmesian magnifying glasses, spoons, old cine stuff, a shop of crazy old sixties furniture, a gallery blasting Tone Loc and Wu Tang. All kinds of things. I think that all the real antiques trading is done in the early morning and that we missed it. It was pretty cool though and the rest of Notting Hill seemed very nice, even more ra! than Fulham. They were beginning to set up for the carnival - not as much as I expected though. I hope to attend aforementioned million-strong partay on Monday.
I joined Emusic today. I've had well over a gigabyte off them already. It's ten bucks a month if you sign up for 12 months. The selection is not perfect, but it's always going to be bringing in a stream of new music and it is getting better. They have enough stuff in the genres I like for me to be very happy (I'm particularly happy with the large amount of Mille Plateaux material available). Sure I'd like more Aphex Twin and Wu Tang Clan, but I just can't get it so never mind. DJ Assault it is.
11:03, Thursday August 21st, 2003 • feeling relaxed • no comments
Getting back into the routine of everyday blogging, it makes no sense to block blog activity until I'm ready to do the holiday post, that way leads to never blogging again :-)
Anyway, I just had a first round telephone interview with International Consultation MegaCorp Accenture. They are recruiting a fairly large number of software people to work on big projects within their technology services department (I think).
The questions focussed on my goals, they asked why I applied, as expected, but also a bit about why I might want to leave freelance and stuff. I answered all this pretty easily. They have big projects, I want to be part of a big software project team. The tricksy one was a question about mobility. The initial form had mentioned this and had ticked the equivalent of "Mobile? Of course!" But then she asked what I thought they meant. It was either going to be mobile within London, nationally or internationally and I gave her my views on each of them. I said I was happy to do international and local travel and I didn't rule out national travel completely, although I did imply that I wasn't raring to spend 3 months working in Newcastle or something like that.
As I get older it is easier to tell where my weaknesses lie. In this situation it's going to be the travel thing, though it's difficult to say what the competition will be like there. Also, they may well just think that I don't have enough experience for the role. My paper experience is not great, I feel it doesn't reflect the breadth and depth of my skills as a software engineer. I know I'm not the best, but I think I'm good enough to put my foot in the door and keep it there on a big project. My focus for my next career move is definitely to find something that will look good on paper and Accenture is nothing if not that.
