Why you should drink coffee black

This gem was provided to me by a fellow coffee aficianado in the hosting team at my current place of work:

http://ping.fm/Ol0vk

LOL

Help me lazy-web, you are my only hope...

So I've been thinking about my career, and my future; dangerous waters for sure... The thing is that I love programming, but more and more I am finding myself to be restricted by the kind of work I can get, in short I tend to find that there is too much 'fix it, fix it now!' and not enough thoughtful, well designed and planned and innovative development going on to really hold my interest and allow me to get the creative / intellectual buzz out of my work. Frankly, in the long term, if I am going to stay in programming, I think that I am going to have to evolve my skillset away from purely web-based technologies, if only to give me the opportunity to pick the most interesting work I can get instead of the most interesting web-based work I can get.

I am really enjoying the freedom and flexibility of contracting - don't believe the hype about the money; it was great in the 90's, but unless you are prepared to fly a lot closer to the grey areas of the tax rules than I am comfortable with it is not all that much better than appropriately compensated permanent work these days. Still the freedom and flexibility is well worth the extra hassle and uncertainty, so I'd like to carry on being a freelancer / contractor whatever I end up doing.

It has also occured to me that I like and am interested in server / systems admin, particularly on the UNIX / Linux side of things, and that I already have __some__ skills in that area.

So here's the rub... I have some periods on my CV that I can legitimately claim as times in which my job has genuinely required me to act for a portion of my working time as a UNIX sysadmin. I have some skills in that area and would certainly not be over-selling myself to describe myself as a "power user" in UNIX-like environments, i.e. I LIKE the command line, I use grep, sed, vi, perl, regular expressions and many other tools that characterise the sysadmin, box-pilot, code-monkey trope. I also love servers - I know this is a little weird, but if I had the money I would have a small rack of server appliances in my home, just to play with; I love the kit, I love what they can do for me if used correctly and the soft hum of server fans and the blinking of (preferably blue) LEDs is very attractive to me. I am a geek; there I said it, I feel better. Bearing all of this in mind, I think that I might like to move into doing contract-based sysadmin work, specifically providing short-term relief for key server support staff on long-term sick, or maternity leave or who simply leave a company 'in the lurch' by changin jobs unexpectedly and leaving a resource gap. The problem is that I am not sure of three factors:

1. How to shore-up (or is that sure-up?) my skills... Should I look into certification? Should I look for lower paying 'doing my time' work? Are there steps that I absolutely should take?

2. Where to look for short-term / freelance / contract sysadmin work.

3. Is all of the work in this field going to come with an on-call burden, or is there the potential to escape that?

Your thoughts, friends, would as ever be very helpful to me...

TTFN

.
EOT

Official Announcement - 365 Portraits, LIVE!

OK, there has not been a lot of communication from me on this subject for a while and I realise that we are now getting into the realms of short-notice, but I can now announce with final and complete certainty (well almost, more on that later) that the exhibition of my project "365 Portraits" will run from 12/09/2008 to 18/09/2008 in The Turbine House Exhibition Gallery at The Blake's Lock Museum in Reading.

If you can see this, then you are warmly invited to attend the 'Private View' on Friday 12th of September, starting at 1900h.

There have been some roadblocks along the way, including the prohibitive cost of having the collection printed, but this is by no means designed to be a sob-story, and the important fact is that the mountain has been almost completely conquered and the show will go on.

There are two remaining details to deal with between now and the 10th (when I get the keys):

1. I am still in need of a volunteer or two who are prepared to be anything from bored out of their minds to engaged in deep discussions with interested members of the public, for either / both of Tuesday and Thursday the 16th and 18th. Basically to get the space, it must be 'open' from at least 1030h to 1830h during the entirety of the exhibition and I have to go to work... I will be keeping the exhibition open under my own steam on the evenings, and the weekend, but I need some people who need to ring-fence some quality reading time, but who are comfortable dealing with the public if necessary. Any offers greatly received, please email me at - maleghast at gmail dot com.

2. I need to provide my own Pulic Liability Insurance for the duration of the exhibition or Reading Borough Council will not let me have the space. It may be that I just have a butchers on the internet and buy what I can get / afford and be done with it, but if anyone out there has experience with arranging / sourcing / buying short-term event insurance of this type, or even of any type and particularly if they can recommend a good, cheap broker, then I would be in your debt.

I hope that some / many / all of the people who can see this, plus their significant others (if for some reason I can't reach them) will come and see the show - a lot of the people who will see this blog-post are in the show. I hope some of you will be able to make it on the Friday evening, where there will indeed be 'pie and punch', or perhaps something a little more sophisticated. Anyone who can hook me up with cheap wine that is actually drinkable, and / or good nibbles may well get a copy of their picture presented to them (though not the show copy, as I hope to re-exhibit later this year / early next).

Those of you who can see this who blog in other scenes / environments / areas or just have different audiences to me who are prepared to do their bit passing on the details, you are forever in my debt and you are also shiny, special people. So that you can spread the word, here are some details:

Blakes Lock Museum

Dates: 12/09 -> 18/09 2008 | 1030h to 2130h

The Project on Flickr

There will also be a 'Page' on my Wordpress Blog with these details, but it's not ready yet - I will send another Ping around when that's live.

Thanks in advance to any and all that talk / blog about this for me :-)

Finally... I am going to say this up-front so that it's not a shock to anyone, and also to make it as clear as I can to the people most important to me that I have no expectations on this front;

This endeavour is costing me (conservatively) about £1k. Now, that is my choice and I'm not asking anyone to either praise my commitment, or mock my lunacy, I wanted to do this, this is the best way to make sure that it's my show, my vision, my achievement. Nonetheless there will be a donations box at the show, and rather like the money you may (or may not) spend on a piece of good shareware software, or the tip you leave after a good meal, if you enjoy the show, then please think about leaving a donation. I do not expect to even get close to recouping costs, but if I do, the balance of any further donations will go to charity, I have honestly not decided which one yet. Please feel free to give me some ideas...

There will also be the chance to buy either an 'official' / licenced digital copy of the picture or pictures that you like, or to order paper or canvas prints. Again, I do not expect this of people, but I want it to be possible, and I want to be transparent about the fact that there will be a mark-up on printing, so if you want to get the best deal, then I would think about the digital route and doing your own printing - there is simply no way for me to get it any cheaper than you can. For Reading locals I will be recommending a local tradesman, who appears as one of the portraits in the show. He is an excellent printer and framer and his prices are very good considering the qualilty of what he turns out. There will be more details on his services in the show literature (must get to Kinko's this weekend)...

Okay, that's it for now - I look forward to seeing as many of you as I am lucky enough to get on the 12th; thanks fo reading...

New Fun Things...

So, I have managed to get on the Beta for Ping.fm a really cool tool that does some clever things that I wanted to do last year and never found the time to actually write the code - oops...

Basically it allows you to post to multiple blog / social network locations from one source; in this case I am using MSN.

I am going to use it for a while and let you all know what I think, but I can see this being a really important tool in the weeks and months to come, and I can definitely see some business applications of it as a tool as well - not just a convenience for internet whores like myself...

Now the party's over, I'm so tired...

Well, I'm another year older, for a whole day now...

I had a great birthday, better than I have had for some time, truth be told. I'm not going to do a blow by blow - for those that were there it's all in their memories and for those that weren't it's not that exciting. Suffice it to say there are a few things that I remember:

Using the sprinkling water trick on a barbeque that has paraffin infused charcoal in it will make clouds and clouds of white smoke

Pimms is ALWAYS a good idea

DJ Nick Rock will be sorely missed from The Rising Sun for the next few months while he toils around the club and weddings circuit in Rhodes - oh the poor lamb!

Clutch are a great band - I had always thought that they were good, but I have been informed that they are in fact great.

Girls in corsets are ALWAYS a good idea.

Posh / splendid places are all very well, but I seem to be able to have more fun in the best, dingy, noisy Rock Bar in the whole of the South of England - I do not care what this says about me, it is mentioned in order to remind me that keeping it simple is good.

Too much Guinness makes it hard to walk home, but it don't half feel like fun ;-)

P.S. Big Love and Big Thanks to everyone who came, and everyone who woulda wanted to but couldn't for perfectly good reasons.

The worm has turned!

I LOVE THIS! At last there has been a backlash!

clipped from www.lolcats.org

Bank Holiday Photoshoot...

This May Day Bank Holiday I managed to schedule an hour with a friend of mine who is a semi-pro model, and a very satisfying hour it was too. Put your dirty minds away! I mean there were some good pictures that came out of it!!



There will be more to come as and when I get around to processing the rest...