Well, after nearly four months of not working (including one month travelling around New Zealand) I start a new job tomorrow. I can’t believe how fast it’s all gone. At first I was pacing around the house counting down the hours in the day but I soon got into the swing of things – I installed broadband, wrote some software, attended some interviews, did a small amount of DIY (not enough for my girlfriend’s liking), played a lot of football, didn’t watch much TV, didn’t play on my Playstation 2 much and did a thousand other bits and pieces. It came to the stage where I don’t know how I’m going to fit a job into my day! (Okay, it won’t be that hard).

So I got lucky in the end. I was offered a job in my number one choice location – Leeds (a short train journey away). The role seemed the most relevant to my skills of all the interviews I had and the people I met seemed very genuine and switched on. Oh, and it seemed fun, which is the most important aspect of all. After the interview I’d decided that if they offered me it I’d take it straight away, despite some interesting second interviews on the horizon. I just had a good feeling about them.

It’s true what they say though, practice makes perfect. The more interviews I attended the better I got at being interviewed. I didn’t really do a good job of selling myself early on but as I had more interviews I relaxed and was better able to just be myself without trying to second guess what they were after. At this stage I was actually enjoying being interviewed and meeting new people. Despite getting a few rejections I didn’t let it get me down as my philosophy is that you’re getting to meet the real me at an interview and if you don’t want to give me a job then that’s fine – I probably wouldn’t have fitted in anyway.

Anyway, much more importantly I found the excuse I needed to buy a particularly cool piece of kit. As I’ll be taking the train to work and back I need some form of personal music device to make the time fly by. Naturally I’m talking about the beautiful iPod from Apple. I was initially going to wait for the iPod mini 4GB to make it to these fair shores but as soon as I looked at my MP3 collection on my hard drive I realised that it already exceeded 3GB and I had hardly made a dent in my actual music collection! So I opted for the 20GB iPod and I’ve spent the last few days ripping my CDs onto my hard drive in preparation of the beast turning up.

First of all, the software iTunes is extremely impressive. It’s pretty much along the same lines as Windows Media Player 9 but allows you to save as MP3 instead of the proprietary WMA format. It’s a very nice piece of software and surprisingly for a Microsoft fan like myself, I didn’t have any qualms about using it in place of Media Player. Then the iPod itself turned up… The first thing that struck me as I carefully opened the intricate packaging is how small the player is. I’d read people being amazed at its size and I still was. It’s tiny!

After an hour or so fighting with it and then realising that it just didn’t like my USB 2 card despite the claims that the optional cable I got would work, I bought a cheap firewire card (which made me laugh as I spent a lot of time learning all about Firewire at my previous job for a project but that’s another story) and as soon as I plugged that in it was happy and copying my music in a flash. I won’t go into a long review about the iPod itself as there are around a million out there on the net already, but my initial impressions are that it’s a beautiful piece of kit and will allow me to play the right music to match my mood in the morning or evening on the train (pretty much anything from the 80’s ought to do it).

I’ll let you know how I get on. Oh, and about the job too!