Today I finished with Sutherland Consulting and Deutsche Bank. Five months in a contract with an option to extend a lot longer. I decided to leave because the work was not challenging and not at the technical level I should be at now.

It wasn’t easy to leave. I had to weigh my fear of the open market against my faith that there is more challenging work out there. As much as I like to talk about avoiding the comfort zone, I seem to land in it easy enough and it is always difficult to leave it.

The DB contract was not a bad gig, as things go. I got to work in a new investment bank and see how it contrasted with Barclays and BNP Paribas. I got to work with an old Barclays Capital colleague again. I got to do some nice things with .Net 2.0. But, ultimately, I couldn’t escape the reality that the job was not right for me.

How long till the next contract? Who knows? I got enough projects going on to keep me busy for the near future. I’ve got some WPF stuff I’m studying. I have Overpass service providers who need some work to do. I need more time for running. When I’m finished with all of this, I’ll put my CV back out there and start talking to agents again.

This is in keeping with the last blog post.

A very interesting video on CNN.com:

http://www.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/law/2007/02/16/arena.nc.swearing.on.the.koran.cnn

Although, as an American in Britain, I am wary of showing news stories that show Americans as kind of crazy, this video is pretty interesting.

I grew up believing in the first amendment in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion (and the press, etc), so this news segment is very surprising to me.

Have a look at the link if you can.

Last week, Robert Cottage of the BNP (British National Party) was in court for stockpiling chemicals and accused of “conspiracy to cause an explosion.”

See the BBC article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/6369953.stm

I can’t help thinking of the word missing from this article ? terrorist. The word terrorist has been used more freely on raids where no weapon materials were found. His arrest wasn’t even in the national news (yet, we watched a couple of Muslim brothers on trial in the press last year and nothing was found).

If Robert Cottage were Muslim, would the article call him a terrorist? Would he be tried under terror laws? Is there something wrong here?