Contracting in Warrington

I have spent the last few months working in Warrington, and it looks like my contract is going to be extended for quite a bit more. I have had a difficult decision, to carry on working so far from home with one hell of a drive each Monday and Friday, or to hunt for something much more local. The advantage of working where I am is that it is a big customer, guaranteed to pay their bills on time. The only disadvantage is location. That said, quite a number of my colleagues are long distance commuters. One does the journey from London daily. Now the darker, colder (I almost said wetter, but the summer wasn’t great either) weather is here, then getting up on that Monday morning for a four-five hour drive is less and less attractive.

Back to Gym and swimming

Good eating at the B&B has led to a gradual increase in my belt length, and I am starting to see the yo-yo weight loss/gain cycle swing back. So, refusing to give in, I have joined a local gym (in Warrington) and for the last few weeks have managed to get there 4 times per week. A couple of gym sessions and a couple of long swims each week should stave off the creeping waistline. In fact, I have already noticed a small decline.

Cycling at the weekends is on the backburner too, I’m afraid, as Alison has been unable to ride due to her running injury. So, the new cycle roof rack has hardly been used. Oh well, not long till spring.

Drupal odds and sods

I am still enjoying the Drupal CMS, and keep toying with moving this blog back. I have been experimenting with a site with more static pages and less timeline orientated, but still retaining some blog-like features and think that Drupal will give the best of both. I have also managed to do some freelancing on Drupal, so not diluting my skills with yet another system seems a good idea.

iPod Classic

I am saddened to keep hearing rumours that Apple may be dropping the iPod classic as the flash based storage devices have a lot of advantages. I see this, but the 160Gb Classic has enabled me to ditch an external brick I was using for camcorder footage and backups while away from home, so please, please don’t ditch it Apple, until you have at least a couple of hundred gigs of flash on a device.

I am very concious that I haven’t been writing here lately. My career in contracting has dragged me half way up the country to Warrington to work. This involves a five hour drive on Monday morning and again on Friday evening, and staying in a B&B without internet connectivity in between.

This has seriously impacted my non-work personal activities. Monday and Tuesday evening are wiped up by tiredness from the early Monday start and Friday evening by travelling. Wednesday and Thursday are restricted in by lack of connectivity, Saturday and Sunday feel better spent doing things with my family that I haven’t seen all week!

I have a long list of things I want to blog about, and also I have been finding it hard keeping up the physical exercise. I have been managing my 2000 meter swims twice per week, but thats been it.

Hopefully, the routine will settle in soon and I’ll be able to get things back to normal.

My life as a contractor continues. It is taking a while to get used to. Instead of getting a steady stream of interruptions and ever shifting priorities, there is concern if anything is wasting your time. One day my email stopped working on the computer, and it took more than 4 hours to fix – the escalation was impressive after that and I had a new computer the next morning.

We had our first set-back today, where we have uncovered a bug in the .NET framework effecting our design so a few hours have been burnt proving the problem and devising workarounds. Hopefully, we are full steam ahead again.

Something that I naively didn’t realise is that there would be such a long time between issuing my invoice, getting paid into my company account and THEN (the important bit) getting a figure from the accountant for the amount I can pay myself. It’ll be worth it in the end, I’m sure.

I can see it’ll take a few contracts to settle into the routine where the vagaries of when money comes in becomes unimportant, where issues such as contract renewal and having another contract to go on to are minor niggles – talking to my fellow contractors, they just take it in their stride – so I have to learn to do the same.

Ok, how’s it going? Well, the contract is quite straight-forward – I have to design and lead the team developing a web service broker collecting information from external systems. There is the usual stuff of concurrency, request queuing, XSLT transformations, etc. This isn’t dissimilar to some of the integration and communications work that I’ve been involved with recently, so I’m quite buoyant about being able to do a good job.

Living in a house has been a bit strange, since I have to do the washing up!!!

Eating within my calorie budget hasn’t been a challenge, so the diet is still on track – it helps that the cupboards are almost empty so I only have what I bought with me to eat.

Exercise has been more awkward – I have managed one run, one weight lifting session and one swim in four days, tomorrow I will manage another swim making it a better hit rate, but it is still under what I have been doing lately.

I must order broadband for this house, quickly checking email and a couple of websites that I like to keep an eye on via dial-up in a right pain (and it isn’t a quick check by the time the pages crawl in – gmail is amazingly unusable on dial-up)

I have been travelling to Dublin a lot recently, with many trips through both Stansted and Dublin Airports.

Stansted is renowned for it’s long walks, but I think that Dublin Airport has now taken the crown for trying to make air travellers walk closer to their destination.

I had noticed some new buildings, that I originally took to be portacabins, or temporary site offices. Along with the various bits of construction equipment I assumed they were for the site workers while they built some new exciting extension.

Instead, those buildings were the new walkway to another set of gates. They have removed a couple of the older gates at the end of one of the “piers”, and attached this echoing, cheap and nasty tunnel that zig-zags for about half a mile to a new hut filled with cheap and nasty metal chairs and the most basic gates you will have ever seen. No screens with flight details, no-tannoys, a tacky queuing system and a door straight onto the airfield with a rickety wooden ramp down to the ground that has wire grate tacked onto it as an anti-slip measure.

So, Ryanair has become an even nastier experience that it was before, hurrah. A couple of weeks ago I had to use Easyjet for a change, and I was surprised how much better things are. The planes are more comfortable, with wider aisles, and the staff are more friendly and accomodating. Ryanair seem to be hunting for the last possible euro of profitability and are nowing dipping below the level of acceptance – I wonder how much more that travellers will take before they start voting with their feet.

I’ve got into a bit of a bind finding the “ideal” software for managing my “Getting Things Done” action lists. I really like Next Action, but some of its issues have turned into major show stoppers. It has two problems that have ruled it out from being my software of choice:

1. It doesn’t have a built in Save function, or an autosave function. This makes it a right pain whenever you change anything.


2. If the browser goes to another page, for example if you click on a link in an email, then you lose the changes since you last saved. ARGHHHH.

I couldn’t stand having to press CTRL-S, enter, enter, enter every time I changed something in case I accidently navigated away from the application.

So, the hunt recommenced. I found My life organized. Quite nice commercial software, but over featured with extra key presses to do the simple things I needed. It felt a little clunky which put me off putting simple things into it, and the looming end of the trial period with the associated $60 bill further discouraged me from getting too into it.

So, back to the free/cheaper options. Eventually, I stumbled across Tracks, which is a web based solution. Cons – you need a web server and you need to be prepared to jump through hoops installing a shed load of bit of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MySQL integration stuff, etc. It certainly is not a typical end-user installation process. The program isn’t as neat as Next Action, and can be a little clunky – nowhere near as bad as MLO – but the basic need, a trusted system, it fulfills, unlike Next Action.

Despite having a version number of 1.03, implying a degree of maturity, it is still very much in development and it shows in places.

As a computer geek, though, these negatives don’t phase me and the normal workflow is a good fit for my needs (at the moment).

I am going to stick with this as I can’t really afford to keep hunting around – if Next Action sort out the basic problems then I may go back to it, but Tracks is a reasonably rounded (and free) alternative which has the massive advantage of security of data.

I got back to work on Friday after my day off recovering from a stomach bug to find my laptop sitting there with a shiney new and very empty hard drive. Thanks Dell.

I spent a couple of hours loading back on Windows XP. You can tell that Windows is due for a new major release, because is is now a right pain in the arse.

• Install from the XP service pack 1 disk from Dell.
• Mess around joining the domain, since neither of the laptops network cards are visible at XP install time, because both need extra drivers
• Install Service Pack 2 from a CD – at least we have one, heh
• Download about a dozen drivers from Dell, since they have ALL been superceeded in the last 18 months and every one on the supplied CDs is out-of-date
• Reinstall Easy CD Creator and WinDVD (Dell supplied apps), neither of which work with SP2 and need patches downloading and installing from Dell
• Run Windows update, I have to update Windows Update.
• Run Windows update, click Express update, I only get a revised copy of Windows Installer
• Run Windows update, click Express update, I have to go through a Windows Genuine Advantage confirmation stage
• Run Windows update, click Express update, and eventually get and install 31 updates, most of which are marked as security updates

It only took three express updates!

Then I restored a backup containing a registry backup – bad move. I then wasted several hours trying to fix various annoying things that weren’t working right, such as VPNs. I gave up sometime Friday evening. Next time, just before restoring the backup I did a System Restore checkpoint. Immediately after the backup I checked and found the System Restore had lost everything! ARGHHH. This time Windows was REALLY mega stuffed by the registry restore.

Yesterday, did the whole thing a third and final time. Managed to restore the backup without restoring the registry. Everything went really well, and only took a few hours – sigh.

I wish I’d acted on this reminder to backup yesterday. Mid-evening yesterday, I was working on some slides for our next customer seminar, when my work laptop started slowing down very badly. I rebooted it, and it didn’t come back. I spent an hour or two trying various things as it sometimes would boot to the system menu, sometimes get as far as the progress bar during loading. Eventually, I gave up and went to bed – to no avail, since I was going over in my head all the things I had lost in the month since my last backup. Some time in the early hours I fell asleep, only to be woken up by Tiffany at 4:30am when she got up due to being ill.

At this point I gave up with sleep, got up and tried again – totally dead PC, booted for about 3 seconds before automatically rebooting. BIOS diagnostics said “no hope, your hdd is a gonner”. I just left it looping and gave up, not even motivated to switch it off. Then, about 30 minutes later I looked to see it at the login screen! I plugged in the external HDD, and 30 minutes later had backup up all the important stuff. It was the last flicker of life, and I had saved my work – hurrah.

Dell were great, I rang up the Gold support line and within 5 minutes they had accepted the fact I had a genuine HDD failure and had arranged for a courier to deliver a new one for tomorrow. Great.

I might set the alarm tonight, after the lack of sleep last night I don’t want to be lying there worrying about over sleeping!

Over the last week I have done a major tidy up of my home office and my desk at work. Getting Things Done was the spur to sorting these things out. I first heard of it reading a Guardian article, and have since noticed references in several other places that I regularly read.

At home, getting started took a solid weekend, involving several visits to Staples to get all the necessary supplies. A4 filing cabinet folders, a labelling machine, tape for the machine, pads, manilla folders, card, etc.. The shredding machine was exercised nearly to the point of expiry. Several sacks of shredded paper built up by the garage. Essentially, I took every bit of paper I could find and went through it all as if it were all in the intray. For every bit of paper we decided whether it was actionable or not. If not, did it get trashed or filed? If actionable did it go in the tickler file, pending tray or just get done?

Eventually, it was all done. There isn’t a single bit of paper anywhere other than the filing cabinet, several things surfaced that needed dealing with (such as address changes on my pensions), and the action lists are working. I’m getting done little things I’ve meant to do for ages, like selling old books on Amazon, taking a photo of the family to work, etc..

Then, I decided to go whole hog, and implement the same thing at work – this is slightly more of an interesting proposition since I have no filing cabinet, just one filing drawer and we didn’t have any foolscap folders for it, etc. So, another stationery expedition later, several hours of paper shuffling, and lots of bemused looks and comments and I have a clear desk, and the ability to lay my hands on any document in a moment.

Work email is a slightly different issue, and I am trying out the GTD outlook add-in. So far, I’m not really impressed. My biggest issue with it is the fact that when you have finished a task it leaves the associated email in the @action folder. When you purge your completed tasks it then deletes the email at the same time. I never delete any email – hard disks are big enough. I hate the way someone decided that I would want to trash emails once I had dealt with them. You can work around it, but it is several steps of awkwardness, instead of one swift button click. I guess that I am going to manually handle email, perhaps using the excellent Next Action web application. Programs like this are revolutionising web applications, and I will probably write up the technology on my other blog.

In the three weeks since we’ve been back from our nice, long, relaxing and wonderful holiday in Spain, life has been absolutely hectic.

Work: I’ve been to Dublin for a couple of days to kickstart the work for a new contract, and have a review on the ongoing work on an exisiting one due for delivery at the end of September. Also, non stop talking to recruitment agencies and doing interviews for more developers to help us with the increase in work we’ve had coming in.

Home computing: After waiting for what seems like forever for Gallery 2 to be released, I noticed that Release Candidate 1 was available. I took the plunge and migrated the photo galleries from Coppermine. This was a major exercise including writing scripts to pull data from Coppermine, making import files for Gallery 1 and then running upgrades into Gallery 2. Further scripts changed all the pictures currently in blogs and changed them into links into Gallery 2. After this, there was much tidying up and retraining for Alison and mum. While all this was happening, release candidate 2 was made available, so another upgrade had to be made!

On route, I found a couple of bugs in WPG2 which embed Gallery 2 inside the Wordpress blogs I run. Ozgreg was very helpful in bottoming out the issues, and everything now seems quite smooth and seemless.

More home computing: I wrote an article about my experiences of trying to set up a Drupal site after being such an avid Wordpress fan. As a consequence, I was goaded into porting a very useful Wordpress plugin called Bad Behavior, which helps control comment, trackback and pingback spam, to Drupal.

Home: Over the last two weekends I have driven 600 miles visiting friends and relatives. Both cars have had MOTs, mine has been serviced. We have joined a karate club which has the beginner classes on Saturday mornings and I have been keeping James’ swimming lessons up taking him down the teaching pool on Sunday mornings. I did manage to squeeze in a Spanish lesson yesterday.

Things are now settling down a bit, so may be I’ll be able to write a little more in here again.