Well, no job yet, some contracts on the go but I’m due to go off for my fortnight’s hols on Friday so not a lot of point getting too wigged about things, really until September starts.

Bought a PC from http://savacentre.co.uk. Good spec, reasonably cheap, made a tit of myself because I thought the keyboard wasn’t working. It turns out I was trying to type in the bar code instead of the XP activation code and the XP installer helpfully disables all of the keys you don’t need to type it in. After 40 minutes on the phone (and a weekend in the middle) I finally got through to one of their tech support people who was mystified by the number I was trying to type in – oh, well, it’s working now.

Ideas

I’ve started work on a site of my own that might start to bring some cash in eventually but don’t want to discuss it here because it’s too public a forum. Been playing with Dreamweaver and so on to get the marketing message right. I’ve begun to realise that fireworks sucks for everything but creating silly buttons with text on them. I want to draw an image, maybe I’ll have another look at gimp (but it’s even more horrible).

I’m having an inner conflict about the dev platform, whether to J2EE or use PHP, PHP seems to be faster turnaround by all accounts but I’d have to learn it so maybe it wouldn’t be faster at all. Roger recommended I use postgres for my DB, but I can’t find an easy NT install without running cygwin (which is OK but looking fiddly). MySql just works on NT (OK XP Pro but you know what I mean).

Went for lunch with my former colleagues. It was nice to see them all, who knows when I’ll see them again. The best bunch I’ve worked with in a long time (well, the people at Oracle were mostly good too, but you’d only see them for the duration of a project and that’d be that). Nobody can understand who the hell is going to do the work now I’m gone. Including the time I was working for Oracle pre-head hunt, I’ve been there four years.

Annoyances

I can’t send mail because I’m running a local LAN and the external mail servers say that they won’t relay. Roger got this going using his sendmail server but I have to keep resetting the VPN because the GPL version of smoothwall doesn’t like IP’s changing.

Sadnesses

My poor cat is dying after 16 years. Her kidneys are packing in and her liver function isn’t far behind. We’ve decided collectively not to prolong her suffering. I need to work out how to do things the buddhist way and try to help her to a more favourable rebirth (mystic stuff, but I believe it).

Good stuff

I love having ADSL. It’s just like being at work without the journey (but what work, compadres?). Got JDeveloper and the 1.4 JDK downloaded no probs. Wireless network working fine but I need to make it secure.

Onward and upward.