Oh well, got made reduntant 4th of October, and due to the loving tech industry at the moment, there aint any jobs out there.
Got to the stage of using up all my payout to live, and now on government payments (*sucks*) and blanket mailing companies in order to find a position anywhere.
Bah. The boss and CEO are in a meeting with the financial directors of the parent company. Will we exist after lunch time? My bet is nope! :)
Payout might be good, will let me pay off some debts and look for a nice job :)
Its been a long time since I have even considered entering data into this system. Used to be working at mBox.com Ltd, but got fired (Decision of the Directors) so they could post a saving on their end of finacial year report (pffft). My boss quit the next week in disgust.
Searched around for ages (well 6 weeks, which is ages when you have no income) for a new job. Finally found one closer to home, same pay (sucks), and less work load. Basically paided to admin the unix side of the network and write code on Solaris machines that process datafeeds from stock exchanges. Exciting stuff.
My Family life is different now. No longer living with a housefull of children, doing the fight in the family courts thing with the mother of my son.
Doing much less coding at home recently, spending more time researching stuff.. But started recently back at programming a gaelic-english lexicon/dictionary (I am learning gaelic and its much quicker to do searchs on the computer then thumb through a book). Plus I got bored and decided to catalog all my images (800megs of stock images / nice photos). Nothing good on freshmeat to do what I wanted, so I am 90% of the way through writing it myself.
Slan leibh mi chairaidean
woohoo, my managing director handed me a piece of paper signed, as a waiver, protecting all my out of hours hacking and contracting from IP claims from the company.
And I have managed to explain to the powers that be that using some source code i found online would be a useful component to modify and use. I was adding some functionality to a commercial MTA, with a big and clunky interface that involved huge amount of testing etc.. etc.. But I decided to grab a simple smtp proxy, hack around with it, and added the same functionality as a small component.
Blerk!
About to go on a 7 day vacation/holiday. Not a great time for it at work. Two of our major clients are about to go live with our system and I wont be there to babysit them.
I think you can tell when you have become a corporate slave(I am just a humble corporate slave, working myself into a corporate grave), it's when you feel guilty taking time away from the office.
Mind you - I do enjoy where I work, and leaving for any time tends to mean i miss stuff when i need to see whats going on.
I had to cert whatever as a journeyer after reading their mature attitude toward free software as well as posts in general.
Kudos!
Finishing Cryptonomicon (by Neal Stephenson) a few days ago has finally cleared my synapses. All (well most) of the fuzz from my brain is gone. How do i know? I have decided to pick up and start reading a book on Chaos theory (which I have intended to read for a long time), instead of vegeing or TVing.
Once all the legal shit with the parents-in-law is out of the way my brain will really clear... (Anyone want to help fund our legal case? We are currently $5000 in the hole :/ With 6 kids to feed).
Although, I have much to thank Neal Stephenson for.
Just posted to the gnupg-devel mailing list about some features i'd like to see happening. Even if i have implement them myself.
i wonder how clean the code is.....
The first test of the cohosting/virtual domained webmail went without a hitch. The remote management scripts work fine, even via SSL.
Still need to finish the major contract i have going in my spare time. Once I have that finished, i can collect the money and relax.
Home
Only 250 pages to go until I finish Cryptonomicon. Its shaping up to be even more brilliant then I thought.
Need to get the house cleaned for a rent inspection. If I was not so exhausted I'd be able to do more cleaning :/
Also need to help untangle Tonia's threads (wonderful kids had a go at them), so she can sent 10meter skeins out to her 'thread swap partners'.
Beg
Anyone with a spare laptop. Even a cheap and rusty 486 or a lowend pentium, I'd appreciate to 'borrow' it. I need a way to keep emails and documents with me most of the time. Plus play around with writing 'OrdoEmacs' as in Cryptonomicon. *thanks*
Finally, premium services are a long distant memory. Now we have the task of working on a paying customer. And writing services for them. Cohosted and branded webmail, with our standard IVR backend.
Not to mention lots of funky hacks with DNS and remote adding of users from another website. Yes, its all shoelaces and sticky tape here.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
