tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53519472489862827012023-11-15T10:15:41.521-08:00The Itinerant WorkerThe rantings of a SAS contractor who would like to be working within a few miles of home, but never quite makes it....Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-30552622379555065562013-05-29T13:56:00.001-07:002013-05-29T13:56:21.759-07:00Resting.....AgainNow I have finished another 13 month contract - this time at Cooperative Financial Services in Manchester. This rest gives another opportunity to complete some much delayed decorating, as well as start some projects in the garden, of which more later.<br />
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CFS has been much in the news since I finished. First of all, they dropped their bid to buy the 632 branches that Lloyds Banking Group were being forced by Brussels to offload. Then almost immediately, they have had to disclose that their Brittania brand had been hiding some very sorry property loans. This led to their bonds being classed as junk by one of the three major rating agencies, and the almost instant departure of their chief executive.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-2465334426235126252011-08-29T23:55:00.001-07:002011-08-29T23:55:52.258-07:00Upgrading to SAS 9.3<div><p><a href="http://www.notecolon.info/2011/08/note-upgrading-to-sas-93.html?m=1">NOTE: The blog of RTSL.eu - Development with SAS®: NOTE: Upgrading to SAS 9.3</a><br>
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</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-41879836224395866042011-02-07T15:22:00.001-08:002011-02-07T15:22:05.269-08:00Three Day Weeks<div><p>Today I start doing three day weeks. I am not complaining though. I only have to go to th.office three days per week. The other two days I work from home. The reason for this is that we now have ten people in the team and we only have six desks.</p>
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-29757220361380570352011-01-07T07:59:00.000-08:002011-01-07T07:59:53.688-08:00Warehousing with LloydsI am now working at Lloyds Banking Group, helping to build a Risk Warehouse for the combined group. This project is intended to replace a number of different (fragmented) solutions within the enlarged LBG group. The contract started at the beginning of August and will run through until the end of March 2011.<br />
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My involvement will be to design and build a couple of modules that will help the group to manage the risk in their loan book.<br />
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The project is using SAS 9.2 and utilises DI Studio, Enterprise Guide and other tools. It will run on a GRID environment, a number of servers will be available to route the processing request and split the processing intelligently among the servers available.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-77781348103116835202009-11-10T09:00:00.000-08:002009-11-15T15:25:30.652-08:00Mortgaging the futureStarted at Bradford & Bingley today. They have hired me to help deliver Treasury reporting into the data warehouse. This involves specifying and developing reports from the existing warehouse structure together with the addition of a treasury application into the warehouse.<br />
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And because this is clearly not going to keep me busy all of the time, I am also to help to identify reporting requirements for archived databases. More about both these projects later.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-16261362980866041392009-09-25T11:15:00.000-07:002009-09-28T11:17:27.337-07:00Possible New Contract - At LastWent to see Royal Bank of Scotland today - they want a SAS analyst who can also do Excel. Seems a good alternative to going back to HBOS who do not seem to be able to get the project they have started.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-64147229447292238232009-07-31T12:55:00.000-07:002009-08-28T15:28:26.046-07:00The meter's running outIt is nearing the end of my time at British Gas. I have been productive, but the piece of work I was brought in to do is almost complete. I hear that HBOS (now called Lloyds Banking Group) want me back to do some migration work. I am waiting to hear.....<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-19402480779605866012009-05-22T12:49:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.211-07:00New Project - It's a gas!<p>At last, a new contract. This time in Manchester, of all places. At least I can put the suitcase away in the loft. I am now able to perform a daily commute. Centrica needed someone to help them reconcile their pre-pay meter records with their SAP financial ledger.</p> <p>This one goes through until the beginning of August 2009. So far they like what they have got.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-39888518606259776102009-04-22T12:54:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00End of an Era<p>An era has ended. I have finished at HBOS after 21 months. First of all to help kick start the Competition Commission investigation into the sale of PPI which was supposed to last 3 weeks! Within a week, it got extended to six months.</p> <p>At the end of 2007, HBOS asked me to stay on to help resuscitate a warehouse development project that got suspended by the PPI investigation. This warehouse was intended to enable reporting to be performed on the 3rd party insurance. This kept me busy when there did not appear to be much work around in the North West, and also meant I was available to help with further work on the PPI project.</p> <p>During most of 2008, I was involved in a new warehouse project to create a warehouse for the 1st party insurance system. Whereas 3rd party had not been properly designed, the 1st party application was implemented by more structured methods.</p> <p>This phase was delivered eventually during December 2008, allowing the warehouse team to think how they were to migrate to the new server platform running on a Netezza server, and then how they were to build the reporting systems on this warehouse.</p> <p>The early part of 2009 was spent refining the existing 3rd party warehouse, cleaning up the base layer to allow the reporting functionality to be built on a robust base layer.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-26425855676582279672008-11-16T12:51:00.000-08:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00HBOS General Insurance - another extension<p>It is now November 2008, and we have almost completed the Irish warehouse, apart from some glitches where the backfilled tables suddenly disappear - apparently, the person who did this was not aware that these were about to become production tables.</p> <p>Then, eventually, the team running the first warehouse were now in a position to start updating it to ensure its accuracy. I have another four months work to do if I want. Because the credit crunch is now reducing the amount of work elsewhere, I accept the extension.</p> <p>This project will allow the cleaning up of the warehouse to reflect the design benefits of the Irish warehouse. That will make this one work better (and more accurately).</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-47441691721144878342008-07-01T10:59:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00HBOS General Insurance - another extensionIt is now July 2008 and HBOS want me to continue with the present contract until the end of November. Considering that there seems to be no work at all in the North West of England, I accept. HBOS very generously allow me to do all my work for five days in four days each week. This allows me an extra day each weekend to do other things, like look after my accounting practice clients.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-25043712784271958482007-12-15T12:47:00.000-08:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00HBOS General InsuranceChristmas 2007<br /><br />HBOS now want me to stay on until the end of July 2008. This time, they want another warehouse built. This one is for the Irish based operation. It is to be built using the first warehouse as a model, but wherever necessary improved. I accept. Too good an opportunity to design a warehouse from scratch.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-50124699679113102372007-07-03T09:57:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00HBOS General InsuranceIn early July 2007, having spent a few weeks (gardening, as well as chasing the ever disappearing contracts) at home, I got a call from Chris Parker at Pathway - he had a contract for HBOS in Leeds (oh, not Leeds again). They had three weeks work to do. So I said yes. The money would help to pay the never ending bills.<br /><br />Within a week, HBOS decided that they really needed me for another six months, having discovered that the work for the Competition Commission investigation into PPI was not as simple as had first been envisaged. I looked at the market in the North West and decided that Leeds was better than nothing at all.<br /><br />The work on the Competition Commission investigation went on until the end of October, and HBOS decided that they needed to keep me busy on another project that had been put on ice while the PPI work was going on. This was a proper warehouse build project. So I accepted another six month extension, learning that I was needed to do another warehouse project based (loosely) on the first one, this time for the Irish operation.<br /><br />This project was to be a much better one than the first one. I had a chance to do the design work and the build using the techniques that I had learned were the best over many years of building management information systems.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-33105667646371998092007-06-30T09:47:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00Resolution LifeFollowing a successful three months in Edinburgh, I had almost a month off, gardening and chasing agencies for work in the North West of England. Eventually, at the end of July, I landed one, in Liverpool, for a company called Resolution Life. This involved starting to develop a new data warehouse for the company's actuarial department. They wanted to be able to generate actuarial reporting using a standard source of data for all of the multiple customer facing systems they had somehow acquired.<br /><br />This work involved documenting their source systems so that we could decide what data we should be capturing for the new warehouse.<br /><br />During the autumn, though, they decided that the Liverpool office would close and that the work I was doing should be transferred down to their Midlands base just south of Birmingham. I re-located down there during November 2006. This involved a weekly commute from Chester fighting the Birmingham crawl on the southbound M6 every Monday morning - It took almost as long to get to Wythall Green from J12 of the M6 as it took to get from Chester to J12, even though the distance was only about a third.<br /><br />I then spent the next seven months helping the documentation of the warehouse systems, without getting my hands dirty on the new SAS tools (grhhh). I actually helped Phil (who I met at Standard Life) get a similar role at Resolution. He stayed on after I finished (in June 2007) eventually finishing up in June 2008.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-53927176995922794712006-08-27T03:32:00.000-07:002009-01-19T13:24:25.044-08:00First PostThis is the first weblog <a href="http://www.google.co.uk">I have created</a>. At the moment, <a href="http://google.com/">I do not know</a> what else to write, but no doubt will find something laterAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-73064779926934897652006-06-30T09:34:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.212-07:00Edinburgh - April to June 2006I had a telephone call from an agent in London, about a contract in Edinburgh. The contract was at Standard Life Assurance to help with the demutualisation of the company. The job involved re-designing their actuarial reporting to fit the new de-mutualised organisation.<br /><br />Here I met another SAS contractor called Phil, who had learnt his SAS in the RAF. What he knows about mainframes beats what I know about accounting.<br /><br />Also while I was in Edinburgh, a lovely city, I met up with a guy I had worked with at Lombard North Central between 1987 and 1994. Andy was the same old cynical individual, always denigrating himself, but still able to make spreadsheets do some pretty interesting things.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-13361989601572475922006-03-31T01:52:00.000-08:002009-08-10T13:46:54.213-07:00Yorkshire Bank - summaryFinally, after nine months, YB have at last worked out how to resolve the problem of relocating the server. Leave it in Leeds, because they cannot afford to buy a new server to copy everything to and make the old (new) one redundant. They will send someone down from Glasgow to Leeds once a month (or so) to make sure that the server is doing everything it should.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-81997902811519962112005-06-18T01:39:00.000-07:002009-08-10T13:46:54.213-07:00First ContractHaving spent almost three months, calling agencies on a daily basis, my first contract for over two years fell into my lap. The downside was that it was in West Yorkshire, in Leeds actually, nearly 90 miles away.<br /><br />The good part was that I would be working again, doing something that I could at last enjoy doing, and not be frustrated by office politics, dictating what I could do, how I did it, and when I had to do it.<br /><br />The new role was to stand in for an employee of Yorkshire Bank who had been made redundant, while the job was relocated to the Glasgow office. The work involved a server that was then in Leeds being upgraded and relocated to Glasgow.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5351947248986282701.post-41656659043311523512005-03-28T01:35:00.000-08:002009-08-10T13:46:54.213-07:00Moving to ChesterMarch 2003-March 2005:<br /><br />Spent most of this time, working too many hours a day, only seeing our new house in the dark. At the end of March 2005, I was offered early retirement, which I took, almost gleefully. The downside, as the following posts will clearly demonstrate, is that I spend most of my working days living away from home, usually in bed and breakfast accomodation, only seeing my home at the weekend.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05499429265672072010noreply@blogger.com0