Yesterday was a very strange experience at work.

Having been a contractor for the best part of ten years, it’s the first time that I’ve been in the position of calling a couple of the agencies I’ve worked for, looking for a contractor, rather than for a new contract. It’s certainly been a learning experience, being on the other side of the coin.

The fact is, there’s more work at the new place than I can do on my own. We’ve already got one other person on board who works part-time, but we’ve got a couple of big projects that need completing ASAP. Given some time I could do them – but not both of them simultaneously. (Well, I could – but it’d involve some serious working hours to get both in place at the same time) I suspect I’ll still end up doing a lot of the work on both, but well, the company has agreed to looking for a contractor, so it’s worth a go. (And we’ll gloss over my current nagging suspicion that it’ll still be me ending up doing the work because they won’t want to pay the contract rates. We’ll see though.

But anyway, it’s still been interesting. We’ll see how it all develops, but it’s let me see the agencies in a bit of a different light too, which is never a bad thing.

As part of the run-up to my birthday – and yet another of the “Five Year Plan” rundowns, as at that point I’ll be 3/5ths of the way through – I’ve been starting to think about some site organisations and rationalising a few bits of what I’m doing.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m anywhere even close to having sensible levels of life/work, but I’m trying to do something about some of it, at least. In some ways, weirdly, it means I’m going to have more to manage, but that’s OK too.

One of the projects I’d had on the cards this year was to merge my ‘creative’ sites together, so that the Photography and Writing stuff would all sit under one roof. I did it back in April/May time, and what it’s actually meant is that I’ve not added much to either site – which of course wasn’t the expected action at all. So I’m spending a bit of time separating the sites again, and going back to (almost) how they were a year ago. Retrograde steps or what?

In hindsight, while it was logical to think about putting the two ‘creative’ sides into one place, the two bits don’t actually go together all that well. Putting the two in one place led to more separation and confusion than the seperate sites did/will, and while in some aspects it’s now a wasted effort, at least I know for sure that the idea didn’t work, and (to some degree) why it didn’t.  Sure, it’s annoying. But like the man said, “It’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t”.

There’s other bits of rationalisation and thought in the offing, but that’s the starting point.  I’m sure I’ll write more of the other stuff over the next two weeks. For in two weeks time, I shall be 38. And that’s pretty scary in itself.

Checking out some information about the location I’m going to be based in over the next month or so (from a week on Monday) I had a look at the dreaded Tesco website to see what stores are close to the places I’ll be working/staying.  (And in this case, the answer is pretty much “fuck all”) I’ve also looked at the locations for other supermarket-type places, and will obviously wander around the area a bit too, see what’s around that isn’t easily web-findable.

Anyway, while looking at the map on the Tesco site, I noticed this…

I think they haven't checked the work on placenames

Yep, there’s notation for “Waterloo Strain Station”…

NOTE : You can find the same thing by typing “SE1″ into the store locator.

A silly reason that I like databases, and SQL…

Herself asked me “How many days between 1st January and August 10th?” – for reasons beyond comprehension.

Normally, something like this would involve figuring out how many weeks, or counting weeks/days in a diary or whatever.

In SQL, it’s a simple “SELECT DATEDIFF(‘2009-01-01′,’2009-08-10′)” and lo, you have the answer. (221 days, if anyone cared)

Today, I’m working in the office of a new client down in London.  Thankfully, once this day’s done, I’ll be able to primarily work from home, which means I won’t have to do the drive down to London on a daily basis or anything.

It should be a good day, though – there’s a lot to be done for this project all told, but I’m glad it won’t involve shedloads of commuting.

Mind you, next Tuesday I’ve also got to drive down to Brighton for a meeting with another potential new client. Madness – although it should be fun, even if I’ll be coming back looking like a stunned primate.

Currently, I’m working on a small e-learning project which is absolutely killing me mentally.

The work itself is OK, and the ideas behind it are quite cool. However, the people in charge of the project have put together the entire set of e-learning tests in PowerPoint (AKA The Software of the Devil), with one screenshot per PowerPoint Slide.  All told there’s nearly 200 of these – and they’re not necessarily in order.

Now the order doesn’t matter too much – all this stuff is going into a database, and that’ll handle the question order just fine whether or not it’s out of order. However, having them correctly grouped does make it easier during the transfer to process them out of SatanWare into anything remotely usable.

As it is – and this could be because I’m not au fait with Powerpoint, so there may be some esoteric export function or somesuch that would’ve made life easier – I’ve had to go through the following process…

Phase One

1. Select PowerPoint slide.
2. Copy Image to clipboard
3. Go to Image Software of Choice (in this case Fireworks, but Photoshop would’ve worked too)
4. Create new blank image
5. Paste clipboard-copy of image into new image
6. Save new image as filename.jpg.
7. Close new image.
8. Repeat 200 times.

Phase Two

1. Open each new image one by one in Photoshop/Fireworks (I could do it in batches, but again, one-by-one allows for consistency/sanity)
2. Add four new layers for answer options (A,B,C,D) and add a pretty arrow pointing to a possible answer for each one.
3. Make sure that the letter for the correct answer goes to the correct answer
4. Save new image
5. Close new image
6. Repeat 200 times.

In short, it’s utterly soul-destroying.  I’ll just be glad to get it over and done with.