Work: Exchange of Offices

Since I started my new job on the 15^th of January as a search engine optimiser, we had been residing in an office suite around 30 minutes walk away from me and a bit closer to Leicester city centre. However, since it was beginning to get a bit crowded – there’s my boss, MSSC (my sweet shy co-worker), BRCW (bike riding co-worker) and myself in an office around 15ft by 10ft – add into the fact there’s desks, computers and whatnots: then it’s pretty crowded – plus the business centre we had our suite in was, to put it politely, not too well maintained and cleaned.

Anyway, my boss managed to find us this much larger office (around 25minutes walk away from my house – but in the opposite direction) and we booked the move for the 1^st of April. It had been nice and sunny the past few days – but, wouldn’t you guess it, on April Fools Day it decided to rain like anybodies business! The move still went ahead (after all, we had a moving van and everything booked), and we managed to be back up and running by 1pm: not too bad (that includes moving all the furniture, reconnecting the computers and getting the internet connection up and running). The new offices are extremely nice, spacious, warm and quiet and I think we all like it there.

Oh – and there’s some good news as well. I’ve managed to make a couple of sales in the last few weeks for a number of our higher end search engine placement and optimisation packages – I’m very pleased about that as I’m not particularly into “sales” (I’m more techy orientated). And I’ve also got around 3 companies interested in reselling our hosting and search engine placement services to their customers (and, as 50% of our current business comes from resellers it’s looking good!). On the negative side, combined with the office move and everything, it put me around 2 weeks behind with my workload which wasn’t very good – but I’ve just about got on top of things again and should be able to spend some more time working out how to get GPG signed emails working correctly on one of our servers (so I can work with “Nemesis” to get the Nominet signed emails working).

Ah – and there’s another bit of bad news. Just before the office move, we purchased the Linksys Wireless router and PCMCIA card so that we could do presentations in the new office buildings conference room whilst interacting with the internet from our main office (around 60m away). However, we’ve got a problem that because of strengthened glass (which has metal wires running through it which helps block radio waves) and a couple of large walls AND various high powered electrical switchboxes between the conference room and the office it means that the wireless connection isn’t reliable. If we stick the router in the ceiling space AND open the conference room door we can get around 26% link quality, but even that changes as other doors are opened and closed – we just need to boost the signal ever so slightly to get past these difficulties, but doing so without additional expense is hard (best idea we’ve had so far is to run a long network cable through the ceiling space to the reception area – just below the conference room – and stick the wireless box there).