mattwhite.me

jake over at codestore.net is about 18 hours into his blogathon. an excellent
effort and all in the cause of charidee… mate

i finally got motivated enough by my lack of desk space to change my office
round this morning. so since 07:30 i have been tidying and moving junk so that
i could fit a spangly new desk in. it means i have room to type and write! it
also means i have moved the office cam which now points at me (when i am here)
rather than just aimlessly into the middle of the room.

i have only been here a year now and yet it took me over 30 minutes just to
untangle all the cabling for my (admittedly complicated) pc setup. i also seem
to have gained about 7 usb cables which weren’t plugged into anything… and i
don’t remember why they were there!

this is just too freaky

a big thankyou to everyone for all the cards and presents, all in all i did
rather well!

i still had to go to work but apart from that the day was really good fun.

things are just ticking over really at the moment. doing some quite interesting
investigation work into citrix and continuing with my java certification. apart
from that just roll on the weekend and hope for some good weather.

well i got as far as shenfield this morning before the train turned around to
bring me home. power lines down was the excuse today.

i give up!

the other bit of news was that i got the hoilday voucher i mentioned in may. so
now i have gpb2,000 to spend on a trip. the current thinking is to get a
round-the-world airline ticket to go to oz, new zealand etc.  watch this space

i haven’t written anything for a few days as i have been very busy. so here is
an update of the last week or so of activity…

i met my brother in the city last week. he was down for the day to do some work
so we met up for lunch. always good to see him and things seem to be going
pretty well at the moment. roll on mid-august eh?

work has been insanely busy, but that’s boring so no more mention of it!

over the weekend i did loads of things all helped by the fact that the weather
was great. i now have my customary sunburn from the slightest sighting of the
sun. went to see minority report at the cinema. it was pretty good all
told.

i am in the process of selling the flat i have been letting out for the last
year so i spent about 3 hours on saturday filling in the endless forms which my
solicitory sent me. a lot of it just seemed pointless but what do i know?
hopefully the flat should sell pretty quickly which will give me a nice cushion
should i end up jobless.

also in the pipeline at the moment is revision for an exam. i am studying to
take the sun certified java programmer exam. although no single
part of it is particularly hard (so far), there is loads to learn. and they
have a nasty habit of asking trick questions. it will look good on the cv
though.

that’ll do for now i think.

i have had a digital camera for a few years now, i find it really good. the
only problem is that being quite old it only has a serial connection to the pc.
this means that it can take ages to download a lot of pictures. i found a neat
gadget today which makes life a lote easier. it’s a usb smartmedia card reader. very neat

this won’t be of interest to most people but if you run a limited company (in
the uk) like me then there is finally some good news from the government. there
is an optional flat rate vat scheme which means that i only have to pay
14.5% instead of 17.5%.

now if the government stopped ir35 and gave work to someone other than eds, things
would be really good.

there has been a train collision on the line i use to get to london so i
am stuck at home today. it would be great if it was nice weather, i could sit
outside and work thanks to my wireless network but unfortunately summer seems
to have disappeared at the moment.