Great day

Posted in: Drivel

Hmm, haven't really done a true diary style "Today, I did this, and this, and this, and this!" entry but today was been so much fun I think I will anyway.

After not being able to sleep, watched Dogville on DVD this morning on the suggestion it is apparently quite soporific. Quite the opposite, I was gripped and intrigued: arty, challenging, moral, and somewhat depressing-because-it's-hard-to-deny film. Worth seeing.

In the morning-proper, met up with Simon and will be working with him on an interesting XML/SOAP/Postgres/Bricolage/HTML::Mason implementation (in other words, programming :-). Knowledge from that will directly feed into the main project I'm working on, not to mention help me save.

Flushed with success of being "hired" (two month part-time contract), I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around town dragging loved ones from their offices, an activity that turned out to be a great way to spend a few hours. On nice days (which today certainly was) I will definitely do more of this. An amusing side-effect was collecting various visitor badges, the best of which was from Nik's place at Sony which informs others I have "VIP ACCESS" - hell yes I do!

Met with Giles at Proboscis HQ and we caught up. More amusement and admiration from seeing a press release about the soon-to-be-released RSS feeds for Urban Tapestries. This was a two-day hack I executed for them last week for peanuts and now the "project" has its own full-page press release! I guess this is why Giles is running a hugely successful research non-profit and I'm just turning out random bits of code. I wonder if I don't appreciate what I'm doing, matter of perception?

One solid score was completing the Microsoft Partner Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Empower Program enrolment through Proboscis. In essence this snags a small org access to a 12-month license to a pile of MS goodies for £260; an enormous savings (the dev environment is thousands of $ alone). Key for me is that it offers up access to a C#.NET compiler for PDA/phone devices. That in essence means I can write software for my phone.

I am bursting out of my skin with excitement about being able to write a phone app. I'm finding the whole emotional aspect I'm experiencing delightful. Not having wanted to program this much for so long is inspiring; I thought being paid to write web-apps was going to put the knife in for my programming career. Ah well, I hope it's as much fun as I'm anticipating.

Spent the evening "coming down" off the anticipation of a DVD full of MS development tools (Microsoft, for chrissakes! The company I swore I'd never work for) and reading about an offshoot of EFT which claims to be a therapy even more capable of deep change at warp speeds. (Its name is Be Set Free Fast [BSFF].) More on that later when I finish the e-book and if I find some residual emotional issue for me to test it with... (I'm running out of them, honest!)

Posted by Paul Makepeace at September 7, 2004 22:16 | TrackBack