I’ll write more about it as time goes on, but for now, well, that’s it, I’m away.

Enjoy.

Anyway, one of the big steps in attaining this PCI-DSS standard is to have somewhere around a metric shit-ton of paperwork. No kidding. There’s some 230-odd points in the PCI-DSS standard, and each one of the bloody things needs documenting. It’s a serious bit of work just getting all the paperwork done.

With the other stuff I also had to do in order to get everything in place, the documentation took a back-seat, and we ended up getting it done by me speaking into a dictaphone, and then getting an audio-typist to type it all up. It was supposed to save me a stuff-load of time. And it worked – I’d got all the dictation done in two and a half days, and the typist did everything in time for mid-January.

Or so we thought.

It turned out that the audio-typist was a tossbag, and didn’t actually do all that much in the day they were in – at the end of which they said they’d done it all.

Cunty fucking bugger.

It’s taken me the intervening three fucking weeks to get things back to where I thought I was in mid-January. Three weeks of doing this sodding documentation, three weeks of making sure it’s right, and that it all makes sense. Oh, and still doing all my normal insane workload as well.

This goes some way to explaining why I haven’t been writing much on D4D in that time – I’m utterly damn sick of typing, and didn’t have the time or headspace to do much here.

I’ve just now finished the documentation for PCI-DSS. We’ll review it tomorrow and next week, so I’m sure there’ll be some edits. But that’s just fiddly crap – the most important thing is that I’ve broken the back of it. I’m done.

I’m also utterly fucked. But that’s beside the point. I’m done with the documentation.  Happy, happy day.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.