This from the BBC website...

Looks like they answered their own question there, doesn't it?

Aimless rambling through blogs

Sometimes it's nice to ramble aimlessly through blogs. Find one you like, find an entertaining bit of commentary, follow the link. Start over.

It's kind of like a country walk for my head. A wander thourgh a crazy forest of other people's thoughts. But I guess everyone gets that.

So imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon this metaphorical fairy-circle-with-real-life-hermit-and-complete-henge in my blog wander.

Just had to share. I particularly like rule 19:"Do you minimize your Outlook Distractions?"

I like the Outlook envelope in my taskbar. I tried for a time managing email by setting aside a specific time for checking and dealing with email, using it to plan my work for the next couple of hours and suchlike. Didn't work, though. I think because email was so abused at my old office, I'd get an email, not read it for sometimes as long as a 30 whole minutes, and have someone run over to my desk to ask me why I hadn't done whatever they'd asked me about in the mail.

Maybe I was just managing the people wrong, rather than the email. Who knows. It's all in the past. Anyway, I thought it was a right cracking little nugget. Definitely one to share with colleagues.

Just wanted to share.

Well here it is...

I'm spent. It's been a long a stressful week this week, what with trying to find gainful employment, keep doing my regular job and such.

However, here's my CV (or Resume for those readers who don't speak Latin. Or live in the UK). Even leveraged some weird things into it. HTML CV? Nah. That's far too boring! I know (I thought one evening aftera little too much ale) I'll do an XML CV. Then transform ti with a spot of XSL, and then just for the kicker, I'll throw in a bit o' fine CSS magic to make it look sensible.

It doesn't look too pretty at the moment. Improvements will, inevitably be coming.

Just wanted to share...

Oh yeah, and if anyone can let me know how I can get the indentation to look right on the school and employment history in Firefox, then please do. It's been driving me insane all week.

Update: The link has been changed, so it should work fine in IE now. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Oh the whoriness of it...

So my employer let me know on Monday that I was being made redundant. I've got a few more weeks until I'm out of the door, but in the meantime I've been applying for lots of jobs.

And my word don't I feel cheap and dirty!

I've been scouring job sites and applying for everything under the sun that I think I can do. Now the thing about job sites is that all the agencies go through them. So, now my spam mailbox is loaded 24/7 with mail from a whole load of agencies. Loads of them. I've even got my mail folders organised by agency. I can tell you I've 'registered' (a rather spurious term, if ever I saw one) with some 24 different agencies.

That doesn't make me feel like a whore, though.

The thing that really makes me feel cheap and dirty, and makes me feel like I need a shower, is having to actually read every mail, and (even worse) reply to them. Normally spam is given short shrift in Benjimawoo towers. Almost no-one has my real email address, and the very few newsletters and things I subscribe to go to my spam account. Product registrations (an even more insidious route to getting spam) goes to a separate webmail account.

I digress, though. Answering unsolicited (or at best semi-solicited) mail really grates.

But hopefully it'll keep me in a job. Which will be nice. I've had a few calls from various companies, and I'm being put forward for a few positions, so hopefully, I'll have some more news shortly.

It's all good fun, though.

Finally discovered for the charlatan I am!

Well I knew the dream couldn't last forever, and I just discovered that the client I've been working for isn't going to be needing any further development on the applications I look after.

As a result, I've been made redundant.

Bugger.

So if anyone's looking for a VB.NET developer in the London UK area, drop me a comment. Hell, if you just want to jeer and boo, then drop me a comment. In the spirit of unfailing optimism I'll be posting a CV at some point. In the meantime I've got sites to scour and people to cajole into employing me.

Apologies for irrelevance, begginess, and miscellaneous other stuff. There will be some technical bits coming soon. Promise.

Oh so NOW I get it...

I've always been a bit mystified by the whole keyboard mappings thing. I know people really do get quite het up about keyboard mappings, and I know VS has a quite frankly bewildering keyboard mapping configuration properties thing.

I never really used it before, though.

However, I have just recently been feeling a little cheated because no software at all seems to support my very flash mouse. What I really wanted to be able to do was do some nice document navigation through my mouse. The buttons are nicely customisable, I can even assign key combinations to them (as opposed to standard operations or single keys). I was a bit miffed, though, because I can't assign keystroke chords to them (as used a lot in VS). However, through the gift of the keyboard mappings setup, I've got now got multiple keyboard combinations set up for my bookmark stuff (e.g. Next Bookmark is Ctrl+K, Ctrl+N as well as Ctrl+;). Once those are set up, I can assign the Ctrl+; combination to the 'next' button on my mouse (which I never really use anyway) and skip merrily through my code just using my mouse.

Pretty neat. I know it's nothing new at all, but it is to me. I'm impressed.

It's what camera phones were invented for...

The one visual gag that never EVER EVER dies!!!


Nice jugs Mrs Mawoo!!

Just wanted to share.

PS

Oh yes.

And I'm eternally indebted to the fine folks at Virgin for upgrading my broadband connection from 512Kbps to 1Mbps. Good work fella!

Ssshhhh!

I've been very quiet of late. I know this.

I've been doing something even more fun than simply writing code. Writing code for money!

Yes. I've been in my job for a couple of months, now, and it's really good fun. Okay, sometimes it's not, but then most of the time it is.

I sadi a while ago that it was really useful having a second person in the background telling you where your application sucks, or at the very ;east not where it sucks, but what would make it even cooler.

Well now I have a whole squad of them. The upshot of it is that although I'm not reading so much, I am teaching myself lots of quite cool things. There are a couple of reasons why I haven't been frantically blogging about them:

1. It's nothing particularly new
2. It's not neccessarily .NET focused (I've been doing a bit of JavaScript, bit of network type stuff and so on...)
3. It's not that interesting (I mean, who really wants to know about freezing table headings a la Excel?

So I've been quiet. There are stil a whole bunch of things I'm planning on doing in th enot too distant future, though:

1. Get a wireless Router
2. Get a New suit
3. Start writing my software Magnum Opus
4. lPut together a code library to help me write stuff after my software Magnum Opus
5. Get a proper host
Register my very own domain name
6. Some other crap, I'm sure.

But what I've noticed is that now I write code for a living, rather than wanting to do less for fun, I actually want to do more for fun.

So that's where I've been. I've got a whole host of not-quite-so-new ASP.NET stuff to write about, couple of false starts, and an entire code demo in the making, which'll be along shortly.

Anyway. Just wanted to share.

Yes yes yes

Yes quiet. Yes more soon. Yes yes yes.

I don't care, though. The Hoff is on telly tonight.

If I was going to turn, I'd turn for him.

Just wanted to share.