In the run-up to the Festering Season, I had one hell of a lot of work coming in with some documentation that needed doing in order to get us what’s known as PCI-DSS accreditation. PCI-DSS stands for “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard”, and it’s a total fucking nightmare.

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.

Back at the start of 2009, I started a plan to get at least one piece of writing out the way and completed in 2009.

That plan failed spectacularly.  In fact pretty much everything around my writing ideas failed spectacularly in 2009.

So I’m going to do the same for 2010.

All I actually want is to get one piece written from start to finish, get it done and ready for whatever comes next. If I can get more stuff done then even better. But just one piece, that’s all that’s being targetted right now.

Well it’s New Year’s Eve, so it’s time for me to have a few thoughts and ideas for 2010.

As always, there’s a number of ideas and plans coming together at the moment, but whether they’ll all come into fruition or not is something only time will tell. But for now this is the list of what’s in my head, and we’ll see what happens. I’m trying to keep it down to four or five categories, just to simplify things a bit.

• Photography : I really want to make some progress on the photography side of things, work towards selling some bits if possible. I’ve got some contracted work to do for the charity I worked with a while back, and from there see what progresses.
• Writing : Again, I want to get to the point of having some stuff actually done and finished. I planned to do this in ‘09, but that hasn’t worked out. There’s a few bits that have been started, but I need to finish at least a couple of them and work that way.
• Work : I’ve made the commitment to stay in the current job throughout 2010 – allbeit with the “unless everything turns to shit as a result” proviso – which will keep the bills being paid and me in general work. But I still want to get some of the outstanding projects and ideas into some version of reality.
• Social Life : Over the last couple of years (really since moving to Norfolk) I’ve been utterly shit on the social side of things. So I plan to spend some time getting back in touch with friends around the place, and seeing them etc.
• Money : For me, 2009 wasn’t a good year financially, and want to spend 2010 getting back into a place that I’m happy with. Currently I’m not happy with the situation for debt, and I want to get a significant dollop of all that paid off if at all possible.

And that’s it. There’ll be more detail over time, I’m sure – and there’s also stuff on the domestic side – but that’s the rough plan. It’ll do for now.

Things might slow down here on D4D for a while – I’ve got a couple of writing ideas that I want to make a start on, and I’ve only got a finite amount of time for writing.

So there’ll still be regular updates here, just that for the next [time period] it might not be a daily thing. We’ll see.

Of course, if the ideas don’t pan out, I’ll be back to writing this stuff instead. Swings and roundabouts, and all that rot.

Over the weekend, I’ve made a decision and a bit of a commitment, which came as quite a shock to me once I’d decided on it.

Up ’til now (a whole month!) I’ve been looking at the current job as a six-month contract that’s likely to extend, rather than as a permanent role. My aversion to permanent roles is well-documented (and recently re-witnessed by Herself when this job came up) for a range of reasons, so seeing it as a contract role was more of a sanity thing than anything else.

Anyway, I’ve made the decision – allbeit with the proviso “Assuming that it doesn’t go as horribly fucking wrong as the last one” – that I’m going to be here for the next twelve months, through to the start of 2011. After that, all bets are off – but I’m going to do my best to stick out this role for the whole of 2010.

As you can imagine, it’s all been a bit of a shock to the system , but I do have my reasons for making this decision/commitment.

First of all, I’d quite like to have a year that’s considerably calmer than the last two years have been. In this case, while I’m still going to be doing work for myself (and for the clients of my own company) I’d rather reduce the stress levels a bit by not having to keep on chasing new contracts. Making this choice will basically put contracting “on hold” for 13 months or so. With the way contrating and work has gone this year, I can certainly live with that.

Additionally, it means that (hopefully) Herself will be less stressed out about my work situation. She’s never been a great fan of how contracting works, and this year has done nothing to help her opinion of it. That’s completely fair – my own impression of it has taken a pretty big knock this year, and that’s as someone who prefers it. So it’s no surprise at all to know that Herself will be happier if I’m locked in to this for a year.

Another reason is that – as others have said this year – I need to give “proper jobs” a fair crack of the whip. My experience of them ’til now has been unremittingly negative, but I need to give it another go.

The final reason is kind of related to the first. I want to have the time/energy to get other plans done. I also don’t want the pressure of “my livelihood, paying for the house, paying the bills etc. etc. are all dependent on these plans working”, so it makes more sense to keep my head down for a year, do the things I want to outside of that 40ish hours a week, and know that everything’s paid for, that holiday time is paid for etc., and I don’t need to stress (as much) about it.

So yes, that’s the decision made. Unless all else goes wrong, I’m now in the same place ’til Jan 2011. I’m still torn about whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. We’ll see.

Over the weekend, Belle De Jour, one of the last remaining published ‘anonymous’ bloggers (which should really be pseudonymous bloggers, but let’s not be picky) has come out and revealed her ‘true’ name. There was also a piece in TechCrunch by Paul Carr about this, which made for interesting reading.

While I (for obvious reasons) don’t have an issue with pseudonymous bloggers, I do think that Carr’s point is equally valid – if you’re going to write something under a pseudonym, don’t go out and get a book deal. The concepts of pseudonyms and fame are pretty much mutually exclusive – yes, there are some people who’ve managed both, but not really during the current media-driven Age of Celebrity.

For me, some (OK, a fair number) people know my ‘real-life’ name. I write as Lyle to keep things separate from the real world – I don’t want a Google search on my real name to bring up D4D™, and I don’t want searches on D4D™ to easily bring up my name. I believe it is possible to make a connection or two these days, but I still try to keep the two apart as much as I can.

But I don’t want fame or a book deal. If I were looking for that, I would’ve done things very differently with D4D. (I mean for one thing, I’d have had a theme for it, rather than just random sweary rubbish) And for the writing I do where I would like/love/dream of getting it into production, of seeing the writing become properly known, I write in my own name, and on a totally different site.

I don’t have a problem with people writing pseudonymously, nor with them deciding to remove that pseudonymity in order to re-join the two parts of their lives. That’s fair enough.  I do object to the media forcing people to lose their pseudonymous lives (as happened with Girl With A One-Track Mind when her book came out) but that is – apparently, at least – not what’s happened with Belle de Jour.

As usual, I don’t really know where I’m going with this – it’s just a random spattering of thoughts. I suppose I just end up being bemused a bit when people get the book deal and still think/hope they can stay behind the pen-name.