A little place of calm

Just a quick post to say, hello, and celebrate the fact that i'm on my netbook at my parents' home! :)

Predictably, they didn't know the password for the wireless internet. I thought it would be written down on a piece of paper somewhere, but no, it's worse than that … only my uncle in Yorkshire knows the password! Happily i managed to poach a network cable and use that. It's nice to have my own machine, with my email and calendar, and internet preferences and keyboard and everything just the way i like it! :)

This has been a tough week at work, and i was feeling rather overwhelmed yesterday, but several things all came together nicely today. It was a good day. I'm also very happy and relieved to say that my brother, who has been very ill for some time, is significantly better now.

I'm going to bed in a minute … i've been given some Nytol sleeping tablets which will hopefully help me to sleep better. I've had a lot of nightmares and sleepwalking lately. I can feel the tablets kick in as i type this (or maybe that's just psychological?!) … i think this is going to be a nice relaxing weekend.

I am waiting for some inspiration to occur to me about what to do for the rest of the afternoon. I know i have some chores to do (don't i always?!) but not too many today. I might watch The Bill which my sweetie kindly recorded for me in the week. I might work on the MyChores API a little bit … or i might just continue lying in bed. Blogging from my bed is the best thing, haha!

I went to church again this morning. It was perfectly fine. I met a few more people, including many of the musicians. I keep dropping hints that i'd like to join their band, but i haven't yet spoken to the people i would need to in order to join! I felt very content this week, and happy to be at the church. I love it that there are so many South Africans at the church. They are friendly and kind … and i love their accents! I'm probably going to pick up a bit of Afrikaans if i keep on going!

Work was good this week. I did a good job and i knew it. There's no doubt that the work i'm doing now is the hardest i've ever had to do. I'm not used to finding my job difficult. But hey, it's so rewarding to overcome a challenge and know i did it really well. I feel proud of myself. It's tiring, though. I had a lovely relaxing day yesterday, but i still feel like i need a bit more time to relax before going into another busy week of hard work.

Yesterday afternoon was spent with nyecamden who came to Winchester to meet me. We had a good time together. Visited the library to have a go on their wifi with our netbooks! :) Went to my favourite cafe, The Sanctuary for a delicious hot chocolate. We walked down to the cathedral green to idly pass the time. On the way we found several messages written in chalk on the pavement of The Square. I don't know who started it, but they were interesting to read. Many of them began with "This is …" and contained recollections of Winchester and happy memories.

I added to the messages, with "This is my favourite place to live". It's true, i love Winchester. Such a beautiful city, steeped in history and culture. I am very happy to live here.

Thank you Nye for the picture! :)

I'm happy it is Friday. Lately Fridays seem to have been coming around about every 3 days, but this week felt a lot longer.

It was my turn as 'sweeper' at work, meaning i pick up the extra little things that need doing, to avoid disturbing the rest of the team. It means that i had a much more varied week, with little odd things here and there. I had quite a varied week out of work too, so i guess all these things made the week feel longer.

I have re-designed and re-launched a website for a friend of mine who owns a business in Winchester: The Medical Aesthetic Clinic. Cathy is going for customer service award, so we're updating the site with more information, pictures and testimonials in anticipation. It's quite exciting.

Last night i went to a WinACC meeting as a follow-on the Low Carbon Champions initiative. Tomorrow i'll be meeting a new-found friend to discuss what we shall do together as Low Carbon Champions in spreading the message to our friends, families, neighbours and associates. It's quite exciting.

But for tonight i'm going to put it all on hold and take time to relax. I have a pasta bake in the oven, and the plan for tonight is Eastenders, Little Britain USA and Ugly Betty! :)

Happy Weekend, everybody!

Married life suits me well. In some ways everything feels pretty much exactly the same. We've lived together for 4 years, after all. But in my heart i just *know* something is different, and i like it a lot. We're not just friends who live together anymore; there is something more to it. Something that everyone can know and recognise and celebrate!

But at the moment my beloved it at a geography conference, and i'm at home for another boring night with meaningless Twittering and blog posting! I do apologise!

I had a very good day at work. I got a few tricky things done in the morning, and lots of little easy things done in the afternoon. So it was a productive day, and i was complimented on a few things i've done lately, which always makes me feel very good indeed!

Tonight i have become a 'beta' reader for a Harry Potter fanfic. I've never done this before, but i loved the start of the story and it's nice to get a sneak preview of the next chapters! My job is particularly to translate the dialogue into British English where necessary! This is fun and easy for me to do, because Americanisms in Harry Potter fanfics always stand out for me like numbers on a colour-blind test.

The author send me a Microsoft Word document with 'Track Changes' enabled. I was delighted to find that OpenOffice knows all about tracking changes. What's more, when i sent it back, my author was able to open it in MS Word again and see what i had changed. I love it when technology works! I was half expecting Word to throw all the toys out of the pram because i'd dared to look at it in a rival word processing application!

By the way, what colours do you see in the bubbles above? I see a 57, which is normal. Some people see a 35 instead. I used to love these tests whenever i went to the opticians when i was little! I thought they were so clever! I always got them right so there was no point in testing, but i thought it was such a fun game! :)

PS here is a very sweet video montage from my favourite film, "Beautiful Thing". I can see Ste saying "I'm gonna stink of mint!" The Body Shop still make Peppermint Foot Lotion; i got some as a free sample the other day! :)

Here's a quote i love, brought to me today by newspirituality.org:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

A Return to Love
Marianne Williamson
Pages 190-191

Apparently it is part 1 of the quote. I don't remember how the next bit goes. Perhaps if it's good i might post the next bit tomorrow.

I am really very happy at the moment. I am so enjoying walking to work, i'm loving everything i'm learning. We're working on a new project just now, and it's so exciting to see it come together. I get on well with the people, and everything is simply wonderful. My personal life is shaping up particularly well at the moment too. More on that soon! :)

Wow, i have been sooooooo busy lately, haven't had time to write here even though i wanted to.

I know that almost every post i do write seems to be about my job, and this is no different. I am still loving it. I have realised that it is possible to write a successful web application with Ruby on Rails, not really understanding much Ruby at all! It's quite odd to find out how much i didn't know … i used to go to all sorts of extreme measures to make things work when i didn't know you could do it with a single ennumerable block statement. I knew nothing about Prototype and Script.aculo.us although i used them without understanding what they were actually doing. I am being forced to raise my game significantly, and it is giving me a huge buzz!

In my spare time i am still working hard on Shea Bliss. It is coming on really nicely, and we have some great plans to extend it beyond what we were given from FreeWebshop. At the moment i am focussing on HTML optimisations and ensuring valid XHTML compliance. It's quite a fun task because i enjoy running it through the validator, zapping the errors and watching the error count come down! :)

Yesterday we had a nice trip out to Chichester to do some shopping. It was a pretty place, and lovely weather so we had a very good time. Unfortunately i missed the Winchester Hat Fair, and by the looks of today's weather, i'm not going to be going today either!

Oh my gosh, Doctor Who last night … what can i say that adequately expresses my awe at the quality of that episode?! Russell T Davies is incredible. After last week's episode, i wondered how it could possibly get any better … but oh my, the finale totally eclipsed it. It was deep, profound, hilarious, exuberant and tragic, all in one mind-blowing episode. I cried floods of tears and was sniffling all evening! I have downloaded a Donna Noble wallpaper from the BBC website in commemoration.

I just got some flowers from a friend!

These are a thank you gift for helping to make Shea Bliss – Natural Shea Butter Body Care – the webshop is now open and ready for business! :) I personally use the products, and they do wonders for my skin … really good quality, and they make excellent gifts too!

My job continues to go very well indeed. Most of this week i have been working on Nudo Italia – a site for olive groves in Italy. You can adopt an olive tree and receive all its produce for a year. So all week i have been looking at stunning views of Italy! :) I ordered a pot of their olive oil … it came last night and tasted absolutely delicious in a salad dressing!

Today we are going to Portsmouth … a bit of shopping and a treasure hunt and barbecue this evening. I hope this lovely weather holds out! :)

Resumo: Mi trovas min tre okupata, sed ankoraŭ tre feliĉa. Mi estas multa lernanta kun mia laboro.

It would be accurate to say that i have been pretty busy! My job has been totally excellent. I've been learning a whole bunch, but it's difficult to grasp and i have been slightly frustrated with myself at times for not picking it up as fast as i'd like to. I recommend peepcode.com for some really great video tutorials about Ruby, Rails, REST, Git, Rspec, Ajax, Prototype. It makes me realise that i was never a Rails programmer before. I was a Rails dabbler! Now i can see myself getting becoming super proficient at Rails, but it's going to take a while!

In my spare time i have also been busy with a PHP project for a friend: a web shop sheabliss.co.uk. My friend sells some top quality products made with shea butter. I use them every day, and thoroughly recommend them. It has been fun to work on the site, which is FreeWebshop with some heavy modifications. It's an opensource community project so i have shared my mods on the forum and some of them are being included with the next release version! :)

For the experience, and to help me get used to it, i have installed Git at home and i'm using it for revision control on the web shop. It's really amazing how you can switch branches and it instantly modifies the necessary files in your filesystem. It means i can work on separate things simultaneously without worrying about them interfering with each other. When the time comes and the changes have gone live and been verified, i can merge the changes back into the master branch.

This is a trivial example showing how i branched this evening to do the reCAPTCHA separately from icon changes and then merged them together later. At work we get far more elaborate branching, quickly resembling a map of the London Underground! It's fun! :D

Speaking of London, we are going there tomorrow! :) We'll be meeting a friend for lunch and then going to a midsummer party. Should be excellent, i imagine! :)

I feel i have settled in extremely well at my first week of my new job. I love the people, the environment, the work we do … it's fun and enjoyable, challenging, inspiring, makes me feel worthwhile. Most of the week i have been learning and paring with others, watching what they do, asking questions and making suggestions. Today we switched around and i was doing the typing, with help from one of the others.

They are very opinionated about how to do things – what works and what doesn't. We follow test-driven development rigidly: before we start any task we write a story about it. We run the story to see that it fails which means we need to write code. But before we do we write specs for the code. We run those to see them fail, then we write just enough code to make it pass. We keep iterating in small steps until we have it working, then we go back to the story which tells us what is to be done next. It sounds long-winded but it really works well. I am embarrassed at how haphazardly i wrote the code for MyChores … but i didn't know any better! MyChores is going to become so much more reliable, i can tell!

The other great thing is we are using Git and, now that i understand the power of branching, merging and rebasing, i realise what an awesome tool it is to use! It's so exciting when we're all working on the same project, Git allows us some very fast simultaneous development … and gitk makes it very exciting to be able to visualise what is going on! :)

Anyway, this is not interesting for the vast majority of my readers, so i will stop now!! Instead i will give you some pictures!

Here is a nice picture i took of the poppy fields near where i work. I love the accidental over-exposure of the sky!

This evening, inspired by the iMacs we use at work, i made a Leopard-style wallpaper!

Good, good. That's all for now. I'm going to go watch someone get evicted from Big Brother! :)

Resumo: Mi tre ĝuis mian unuan tagon de la nova laboro!

I had a really great time at my new job today! I woke up stupidly early this morning because i was so excited. Had a lovely walk to work, thinking, "I'm going to do this every day! This is actually my regular walk to work from now on!!" I got there by 09:30 and met the rest of the team. There was a new person started last week, so i bring the team up to 5, as big as we're planning to go for the moment.

I had an introduction to the company and the way they do things. I am impressed in so many ways. We went out for a lunch at the pub … a "welcome" lunch for me and the other new person! :)

In the afternoon i installed TextMate and Git, and watched video tutorials about Ruby on Rails. They are keen for me to learn Rails properly, even though i've done so much already. I'm very pleased by this because i've sort of picked it up as i've gone along and i'm sure there are big gaps in my knowledge.

With a gentle breeze coming through the open window, it was hard to believe this is actually my job! It felt more like a holiday! The people are lovely, the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed … i think i'm going to be extremely happy to work there. It's not a job … it's a passion! :)