That Was The Weekend That Was
Posted: Mon 23 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Own Business, Photography, Work-related | 2 Comments »Posts over the weekend were non-existstent because we were running round like blue-arsed flies. There was a party going on over at Herself’s Sister’s place.
So Friday involved putting up tents/marquees and setting up the basics, Saturday involved putting up another tent, and finishing off the set-up, then the party in the evening.
And of course Sunday meant we were stripping everything back down – although the overnight wind had helped a bit on that score, by knackering two of the five tents. Still, at least they didn’t blow away – which had been a concern earlier in the weekend, and meant that all the tents/marquees were gaffer-taped together. OK, it didn’t help when it came to something giving way and bending, but for keeping everything down on the ground and all linked together, it was blinding stuff.
Hectically busy then, but well worth it, and a good party was had by all, thankfully – even with the weather doing its level best to screw things up.
Even better, I got to take a lot of photos of people, which I’ll be putting up on the portfolio site at some point this week. After all, I may have some spare time during the evenings in which to process and upload them…
Off for the week
Posted: Mon 23 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Travel, Work-related | 1 Comment »So yes, off I go to the new contract down in Basildon.
I’m sure I’ll update this at some point today, but it does depend on access in the office. If there’s none (and there really should be) then I’ll be online in the evening from the B&B.
Wish me luck!
700,000+
Posted: Sun 22 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Thoughts, Work-related | 1 Comment »It’s a bit late, but I noticed the other day that D4D ™ has just gone over the 700,000 word mark. That’s pretty scary really.
D4D™ has been going now just under five six years, so I’m averaging about 140,000 117,000 words a year, or 10,000 (roughly) per month. Not bad going at all.
However, more and more I wonder whether I’d be better pausing D4D™ for a while and to put that effort and routing into writing something a bit more formal. After all, it’s undeniable that I’ve established a fairly regular writing routine – so maybe I should try putting it to some “proper” use.
I don’t know yet, it’s still something I’m thinking about. But at the end of the day, churning out 10,000+ words a month of rubish isn’t a bad place to start…
[Edited] : Thanks BW for pointing out I’m an amnesiac twat, and it’s actually six years D4D™ has been going, not five. Figures have been recalculated as a result of my twuntdom.
New Work
Posted: Fri 20 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Getting Organised, Own Business, Work-related | 2 Comments »From Monday, I’ll be working away from home during the week again – this time down in Basildon, Essex. It might be that the company allow me to work from home for the majority of the time after the first couple of weeks, but in the mean time, I’m going to be down in Basildon from Monday morning to Friday afternoon.
Yes, in theory I could do the commute on a daily basis – but that would be 200 miles per day all told, and would mean I was away from home for about 13 hours a day. Not ideal. So I’ll stay down there, and maximise the working hours during the time I’m there.
In addition, I should (with luck) be able to carry on and do some other work in the evenings, and/or get some of that writing out of the way as well.
All told, it should work out OK. Yes, I’d rather be based from home (or at least be working locally) but at the end of the day, if I have to work away from home in order to pay the bills then that’s the way it is.
It does mean that this week has been taken up with a fair amount of organising, getting paperwork sorted, booking a place to stay, checking out what the area’s like, what facilities are around, all that guff. But again, that’s just part of the way things are for this kind of contract.
Firefox v3
Posted: Thu 19 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts, Work-related | 3 Comments »So yes, yesterday I downloaded and installed the new version of Firefox, Version 3. It’s being touted as the latest, greatest with supposedly some 5,000 improvements and fixes to it since v2.
And yes, it’s OK. At the moment it’s missing two of the add-on extensions that I swear by – Paste’n’Go (which allowed you to just paste a URL into the location bar, and immediately go to) and the Google Browser Sync extension (which allowed me to synchronise bookmarks etc. between my installs of Firefox on the laptop, home PC, and the PC at whatever workplace) – and it’s already been announced that Google won’t be doing the browser sync extension for v3, which is a massive pain. )Then again, it looks like Weave by Mozilla Labs may be an answer to that)
For the most part the changes between v2 and v3 aren’t all that visible. There’s some additions to the location bar which may or may not end up being irritating over time – I like having a location bar/history that just tells me the URLs I’ve typed in, not that does an automatic search of other urls I might be meaning instead. It may be that I get used to it, it may be that it irritates – if it’s the latter, I’ll find a way to kill it.
All told, it looks OK, and seems to be pretty usable. So far the only other significant annoyance is that it no longer highlights https secure connections by turning the entire location bar yellow. It does seem to change the favicon section to a padlock, but that’s simply not as immediately noticeable – and it’s a big change for people who’ve got used to seeing the location bar change colour to indicate a secure connection.
Still, it’s an advance, and we’ll just have to see how it goes. And there’s always Opera if I get annoyed by Firefox…
Short Notice – Results
Posted: Sat 14 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Work-related | 1 Comment »Well, following on from yesterday’s short-notice meeting/interview, it looks likely that I’m going to be working in Essex for the next few weeks.
Confirmation will come early next week, so I’ll know for certain then, but yeah, it looks likely.
So that’s my recent respectable ratio of interview:success happily maintained.
Short Notice
Posted: Fri 13 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Work-related | 1 Comment »Looks like this afternoon might be busy – I’ve just been asked to go off to an interview with a company for a contract, possibly even starting on Monday.
So that should make life interesting…