Digging Deep: Focusing the Picture

It's weird. I sometimes see life as a movie or a set of photos and I'm sure that some of you may have seen it this way before too. When life's busy, we get a lot of action, drama or comedy (maybe even a bit of horror) but when life calms down ever so slightly, it becomes less exciting and the movie slows down and becomes boring. Its good to have some down time in life to give ourselves time to rest and reflect but becoming to relaxed can make us lose focus in our lives.

I believe that our lives aren't here just so that we can live them. We need to find ourselves an aim, a purpose and try to achieve it. If we have too much of a busy life, we might get caught up in it all and forget about things such as the goals that we've set ourselves to reach certain checkpoints on the way to reaching our aim or purpose. Similarly, we can be too relaxed and become idle - unable to bring together energy to even attempt to reach our goals. Here, the right balance needs to be found. We need to right mix of activities in our lives so that we're not too busy and that we're not too relaxed.

Think of it as a photo that you want to take with a camera that you have to focus manually. Too much and the image is blurry, too little and the image is blurry too. But somewhere along the way, there is just the right setting for focusing the picture. The right setting that will achieve us the best image possible. We just have to finely adjust our lives to get the right setting for reaching our aims and goals - whether they're personal, academic or professional.

For me, I think I aim to make life worth it and to enjoy the world but also to achieve the best I can. I personally find it hard sometimes to find the right setting for life. Sometimes I feel that I have too much on my plate and sometimes I feel that I'm really just here to sit around and wait for something to happen. I admit that there is still a lot of work to be done before I even get close to finding the right mix in life. And I don't think there is a right or wrong way of achieving the right mix. As long as we're pleased with life and we're not feeling stressed, worried or useless, we're pretty much at the right setting.

Life Flash: Recently...

Wow. 2010 is officially my year for not blogging. Its now June (so, we're almost halfway through the year) and I've only written 12 blogs! Maybe the creative side of my brain has gone a bit mushy since I've started Uni? Who knows. Today's blog is really just a rant so enjoy...

Anyway, since my last blog almost two weeks ago, I've still not finished writing up about my trip to Switzerland although all the photos are now on Facebook. There are over 600 photos and took me quite a long time to upload especially when our internet is breaking up half the time.

Last week, my first web design project went live at http://www.slac.org.uk/. It is only written in HTML with some Javascript and may look a bit boring to those who are IT savvy and more artistic than I am, but it is good to see something that has taken almost a year to plan and write, finally be put to use!

Now, I'm not a very sporty guy (but I was sports captain at school!) but England's performance in the World Cup this year does seem a bit rubbish. The first game that I sat down and watched all of was the England vs. Algeria game and what a waste of my time that was! I wish I never sat down to watch it! But being British and all that, I still have my fingers crossed for a winner of a game on Wednesday.

The coming week should be interesting as I deal with the people from BT Broadband who have royally screwed up with our internet. After four years of complaining, they finally decide that there is actually something wrong and that they'll try and fix it. I'm not putting my hopes up though. I'll probably still have an unstable connection this time next year.

I also begin to lose my Saturdays again as I return to my usual shift at work. I'm actually quite glad that I'm working here than in Coventry because I'll actually get paid here. That's right, my employer has screwed up my pay owing me over £300...I won't be going back there in a hurry!

Anyways, that's it from me for tonight. I'll hopefully have something more interesting soon. Maybe something special. Look out for it soon! For now...

Travel Notes: Switzerland (Day 2)

So, first of all, sorry for leaving this blog so late. I've been back for about three-four days now but I've still not written this whole trip up yet.

Anyway, Day 2 was my first full day in Lucerne, Switzerland. The day started early at 8.30am and meant that I had to get up at 7.30am - a time that I'm not accustomed to getting up at, not even when I'm at Uni. The day started out dull with an overcast sky and drizzle which is typical whenever I go abroad.

The walk from Raphael's place to the University was pretty short - 5 minutes max - but offered some stunning views of Mount Pilatus and the mountains surrounding Lake Lucerne. Even on the dull day that it was, the view was still amazing! The University itself was modern but the structure of their day was much different to what we would expect here in the UK. Lessons lasted 45 minutes and their day was very packed compared to the number of lectures a week that I have!

In terms of what we did at Uni it was all pretty admin-like. The morning consisted of an overview of the week ahead, preparing for and understanding the simulation and a trial round of the simulation for us to familarise ourselves with the program and decisions we needed to make. At this point, you're probably wondering what simulation this is and as much as I would have loved it to be a flight simulation, it wasn't. The simulation is designed to simulate a marketing environment in which the decisions we made as a marketing team would affect the financial position of our company and its products. At first I thought it would be pretty simple but to be honest it was rather hard! In the afternoon, we were meant to have two presentations from marketing people from leading shoe companies in Switzerland, however, they were of very little use to us because they were delivered in German!

In the evening, the weather improved a bit and Raphael and Malik offered to take me and Belinda on a sightseeing tour of Lucerne City. Lucerne City consists mainly of two parts: the old and the new. The old part has some wonderful character and was even better with the setting sun breaking through the dark grey clouds. I'm not really a writer so I'll let you see for yourself...

After about two hours walking the city streets, we decided to go for a drink. It was here that I discovered that a Malibu mixer cost around £7...and that this trip was going to be an expensive one...

Travel Notes: Switzerland (Day 1)

Well, I've made it safely to Switzerland after a pretty eventful but smooth trip. Arriving at the airport at just around 12pm, check-in took 15 minutes but clearing security only took 5! Heathrow Terminal 5's security team are really working hard to get things right and for the first time, I passed a detector without it beeping. BA754 to Basel was a rather bumpy flight and being my first British Airways flight, I wasn't impressed with the interior of the Airbus A319s. However, I must say that the level of service provided was better than what I expected.

Arriving in Basel was an altogether different experience. We arrived into an almost deserted airport with too many gates/stands and too few planes using them. There is also a complicated systems to separate out visitors to France, Germany and Switzerland because the airport serves all three countries. After collecting our bags and having bought our bus tickets, we found the busses pretty easily. It wasn't until the bus was supposed to leave that we found out we needed to validate them at the machine. This left me running to validate them and looking like a crazy chinese man.

The train journey from Basel SBB (me and Belinda have no idea for that stands for) to Lucerne was much different than usual UK train journeys in that their trains are much more quieter than ours! In addition, the train journey gave us some amazing views and a chance for me to finally fall asleep. Arriving in Lucerne, the rain was tipping it down. Its hard for me to judge what I think of the place because I haven't spent much time in it yet but I'm sure that I will be able to find out in the course of the week.

Having just arrived back at Raphael's apartment, I'm feeling tired and not too keen on starting the week ahead. The place I'm staying at is better than what I'd hoped for and I'm grateful for that. Along the entire course of today, I've learnt not to go abroad without a foreign dictionary and that McDonalds are much more expensive abroad. A meal today was 13.30CHF which is equivalent to £7.94...

Tomorrow is the start of a busy week and by the looks of it, an expensive one too! I hope to have more blogs during the week but for now...

Aviation Notes: Volcano Disruption Coverage

We are covering the Volcano Disruption here and will be trying to update the page as soon as new information are made known to us. Below are some useful links.

Eurocontrol for the latest European airspace reopening estimates as well as briefings for aviation professionals
Met Office for the latest ash cloud forecasting
NATS for the latest UK airspace reopening estimates

Passengers are advised to contact their individual airlines.

Follow @marcusnugg for latest real-time updates.