OK, so looks like Penny is getting a dog bath on the way home. She absolutely stinks!

It was The Duchess’s birthday last weekend and the first time in 3 years she hasn’t been laid up with an infection.

I got her a few pressies, including a Beeviver kit to feed any exhausted bees she comes across on her dog walks.

However nothing matched the lovely lemon tree our fab friends Chris and Holly got her, something The Duchess has wanted for years.

Not only that, Holly also baked us, I mean her, a chocolate cake bordered by mint Matchmakers!

The commute to work is getting pretty close to the car’s range on a cold day. Even after giving it a quick boost at the petrol station I still came down to single figures by the time I reached home.

Looks like a trade up is on the cards.

Exciting news – I’m going to get to watch a bunch of German pensioners hunched over some keyboards for a couple of hours!

My favourite synth band Kraftwerk have just announced a date in Wellington — which happens to be on my birthday — so I had to jump online and book a ticket before it sells out.

Two weeks into a new job and so far so good. Switching from contracting back to permy wasn’t on the roadmap but a combination of slow contracting market plus a particularly juicy role lured me back to a previous employer.

I’ve seen the writing on the wall for my old role in infrastructure support – it’s slowly morphing into a DevOps coding role, which I don’t find that interesting. I can cobble some PowerShell together when required but generally programming is not something I enjoy, and I don’t personally think DevOps works well in a Windows environment, especially smaller infrastructures of a few hundred servers where they’re all quite different.

So I’ve moved into an area of support I’ve long found to be the most interesting – security. It’s definitely a growing area and will continue to be a focus as hackers get smarter and keep finding ways to break into businesses and steal their data (or encrypt it and hold you to ransom).

My new Cybersecurity Engineer role will require at least a year of fairly intensive skilling up and a fairly daunting certificate to study for (CISSP) but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

The good thing is that it’s given me a new focus and energy to push myself again; in my old role I’d lost most of my enthusiasm and was coasting to retirement. Now I’ve had a minor career pivot it’s given me some fire in the belly and a thirst for study again. Bring it on!