Busy busy

Work and Play

I’m currently doing an dicey balancing act between the day job, the other job, planning a three week backpacking trip (for less than two weeks time) and trying to find time for other people. I’ve almost completely forgotten that I’m going to University in September!

My non day job has gone nuts, but I’m not saying anything until we actually pull some of it off because I’ve been here before and it’s not come to anything. Well, it’s never quite got this far, I’ve never had this many business meetings for a start. I just hope I can keep some of it up as part time work at uni when I go, without hampering my academic performance. I must stop thinking thoughts like “why am I bothering to go to Uni again…?”

I’ve submitted a paper to the IEE Write Around the World Competition for younger members and have also applied for a scholarship with them. I don’t hold out much hope for either, but it’s all good experience.

The day job is also quite interesting, despite the boring marketing meetings and the seemingly endless printer problems which hamper the more interesting aspects of the job. When I leave they were talking about my replacement being a web developer. I had to point out to them that they’re going to have to pay someone a hell of a lot more money if they want to call them that. I really wanted to say “look, I really don’t develop these web sites for you and admin a Linux web server for the £9000 a year you pay me, I do it for love.” I think the govenors would have been very suprised at what I’m paid. But for now I’m happy for the appreciation for a job well done and to speculate to accumulate, there are more long term rewards up for grabs if I play my cards right.

Soul food

There’s not much time left over after all this work, but I’m trying to find more time for my music. At the weekend I was playing the guitar with lauperr‘s brother which was cool. I really would like to find the time to get back into some music software, particularly the Wired project and some free software tools.

Hoary

I’ve installed Ubuntu Hoary finally and it’s brilliant, except that I somehow managed to remove warty and windows XP from the bootloader. I think the fact that it took me a week and a half to notice this says something about my computing habits.

LUGRadio Live

I went to LUGRadio Live in Wolverhampton (although I ended up going on my own) and it was awesome! I had a chat with Mark Shuttleworth about software patents and asked him if he was a nudist at heart. Bill Thomson shared his dried fruit treats with me as he wrote his presentation at the last minute and I was recruited by Creative Commons, I must get back to Rufus. I briefly chatted to the nice people from Open Advantage, talked to lots of other people, listened to lots of talks and bought a Debian t-shirt. I met slef at the event who very kindly gave me a lift back to Stamford (the trains in the morning had been interesting to say the least) and we had some interesting discussions on the way back.

In other news

I’m going back to OpenAdvantage in Birmingham on Friday following my two two day courses, to discuss a single sign on for a bunch of LAMP apps using an OpenLDAP server and hopefully not some dirty hacks. Then I’ll nip over to the University and try and convince them to give me an ISIC card.

Mum, Grandad and Reuben went up in a hot air balloon and we followed them in the car and saw them land which was very cool, although the early morning was a killer.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned lauperr and I spent a lot of time looking around Birmingham and loved it (thank goodness!). We rode on their temporary London Eye lookalike and watched the sun set over the city, walked along the canal and walked from Five Ways station to Birmingham New Street station past all the lovely water features and big buildings. I’m still not convinced city life is really me, but I do like the city more now I’ve had a proper look around.

Right, I suppose I’d better get off to bed, then in the morning I’ll think about chasing up djkoa the hopeless and buying a £220 train ticket, travel and health insurance and a last minute flight to somewhere in Greece or Turkey for the 17th or 18th.