Matthew Knott

Well, it's nearly a week since we had the keys to our new home, and the work is progressing well.

We finished the ceiling in our bedroom tonight, and I look down all of the wallpaper in the front room, and made a start on that ceiling too. I also cemented a hole in the kitchen where the fridge is going good work indeed.

Had a wierd bit of drama tonight thoguh. We were upstairs, when Lisa's father, Adrian, thought he saw a kid come in the back garden. Probably getting a ball I thought, but neither of the neighbours kids were out playing (it was raining), so just to be sure I went to check it out.

Going through the double doors from the dining room, rather than the back door, I stood out looking down the garden, with the light drizzle coming down, all looked well. As I turned to come back in, I dropped one in my pants when these two little kids huddled together under the shelter of the back door scared the crap out of me. They weren't very old, maybe 12 and 13.

I asked them if they were hiding from the police? "No, we're hiding from our mate, can we stay here please?" said the bigger of the boys. "Come on lads, you can't hide round here" I said.

They walked stiffly up the alley, got to the main road and legged it. There was a woman in the police car, so I went and knocked it at first thinking she was a police woman, but she turned out to be the mother of the smaller boy, who'd ran away after school. I gave the policeman a description of the two and off they wen't, but jeezus they made me just, like creepy little ghosts.

Welcome to Ammanford...

Tags: Work Police Ammanford Runaway Children Scared Jump Coving Ceiling Plaster_Board Plaster Renovation

It's been hard to find time to get much done this week outside of work, what with rugby and spending time with Michael and Lisa, but the ideas and output are still trickling through.

Digita Solutions

Every time I look at the v3 design for Digita Solutions, I come up against the same brick wall, what do we want to offer. I keep bouncing off the web design question, do we? don't we?

It's very frustrating not having the confidence in yourself to commit to an area of the business, my initial fears were over making it pay, but I think if the quality is there then you make it pay through competitive charging for the product, but not selling yourself short.

I really do believe that once we've finished the products we have in development then we'll have the capital to start looking at different services like web design.

This site

I'm planning something revolving around a photo gallery Silverlight application, and also setting this blog software up to post to multiple blogs simultaneously. With dual posting I can post items of consequence to other sites I maintain such as the digita solutions site. Would be great to do it form a single admin suite.

Life

After I was deeply disappointed with the shortages of Wii's when they first came out, a few years on we've finally bought one. Lisa want's a Wii fit, which frustratingly are in as short supply as the Wii's were. Very frustrating that Nintendo seem to want to create demand for the product even greater by not supplying in sufficient quantities, and then we end up with a situation like this, where hoarders buy up a large volume of the item and sell for £120 plus on eBay. Rediculous profiteering.

I've got dentist Friday, argh, no fillings please.

Work

It's been a slow week, but looks like things will really pick up tomorrow, may be a late night on the cards, I stayed on a little tonight, but the flexi will be useful for a long lunch in town next week I'm sure.

Tags: Rugby Work Blog Site Digita Solutions Lisa Webparts Wii Nintendo Business Plans Dentist Slow Moodle

Motivation comes easily to me. It goes just as easily as well. I can remember projects dating back to the age of 10 or 12 that I've started and given up on very quickly.

Even back then, these were programming projects, writing silly little games on my ZX Spectrum that I'd show off proudly to my mother. I had a book of code for the spectrum that I'd plug away at for a few pages then get bored because you couldn't just run it periodically to see what was going on.

Aside from programming I've started writing about 20 novels, good ideas too, fascinating expansive ideas that people have found interesting when I described the premise. I was excited that they got excited about it, and I was so enthused so I'd plan and plan my story, characters, plot, ending, do hours of scientific research, and I'd start writing like a madman... for about 5 pages then I'd get bored, move on to something else.

Almost naively, I thought that when the baby came, then things would be different, I'd have something to hold my motivation, to anchor me to a project that would generate some significant revenue and allow us to move not just to any house but to somewhere really nice. I mean, people say they want the best for their kids, and I'm no different. I want to be able to give Michael everything, but not necessarily give him everything, I want him to understand the value of money. I want Lisa to be able to stay home all day and not worry about money and be able to relax.

The worst part about all of this is that I have the ideas and the skills to turn those ideas into profitable solutions, and what I still don't have is the motivation within me to complete any of them.

It's funny though, because then I look at my father. All of my life he's been working hard trying all sorts of business ideas. I could list ten off the top of my head. He is a carpenter by trade but has tried everything from running a stationary business to selling postcards with religious verses on them. He seems to be the opposite, he has lots of motivation, but he is a bad businessman. He rushes into ideas too quickly, creates poor or ill-conceived products, and fails. I on the other hand forge well-conceived, heavily researched products, and never do anything with them.

Finally, there's a growing part of me that says you have a beautiful wife, and a gorgeous son, a well paid job and a nice house, but in the end I just can't shake this overwhelming feeling that I'm meant to do more than this, I know I can do better I just can't find the incentive to do something about it, I just come here, tap away at something that helps me straighten out my thoughts, ready for tomorrow when they can get mixed up again.

I think a day will dawn when I get up, and I start typing and I don't stop until I'm finished, and once I've done that, I'll be able to do anything. (Maybe even go on a diet )

Tags: Work Projects Family Motivation Ideas Dreams Emotions Drive Incentive

I thought that a new job and a new baby together would be a clean break all-round. As it turns out it's about the hardest thing I've ever been through, and on top of it all I've got a cold.

But enough moaning, on to some updates.

Firstly, week two at work is over, and things are getting better! More structure, more idea where things are going, more settled and more vision for the future.

On the back of work, I'm learning asp.net, amongst other things. I always knew it would be a huge leap going from asp 3.0 to .net, and there is that ever-present, inherent fear of the unknown to contend with. Now I have no choice but to learn it, and thankfully it's not as hard as I thought. In fact I'm enjoying it, which definitely helps.

Outside of work it's been a tough week. The amount of work that goes into raising a baby is starting to sink in and take its toll, and I'm only doing a quarter of the work (if that). Lisa has been amazing taking care of him, but it's still draining. You just don't have time for anything, and sometimes knowing that just eats away at you, even if you don't have anything to do anyway. I can only update my blog at crazy times of day. It's a tough lifestyle change but I'm getting used to it. Single parents have more than my admiration, they have my vote for sainthood. 

The run of failing electrical items has progressed today as I ordered a replacement fridge freezer. The old one doesn't keep milk for more than a couple of days, bugger. That's now the Xbox, the Camcorder, The Tumble dryer, and the washing machine that have bitten the dust recently, as if things weren't strained enough.

Another positive is that I found a little motivation, and a little time to start working on a few project ideas. Unfortunately I have little of both and things haven't worked out very well so far, but progress is progress. I want to build something to help me save money, and will probably make it into a web service, all singing all dancing. I'm also working on a VLE of my own, probably open source. Hopefully it will be my first asp.net project release, although I plan a php version also.

Well the room is starting to rock back and forth which means one thing, need sleep.

Tags: Work Baby Lisa Michael Tired Sleep Progress ASP.NET Silverlight SharePoint Open-Source VLE Electrical Moaning

Anyone who leaves a job after 8 years and thinks they can make a clean break emotionally is either kidding themselves or they have a heart of stone.

I was the former type. I thought that leaving would be hard yes but the new job would be full of adventure and new, exciting challenges. One week on I've come down to earth with, not so much as a bang, more like a ten megaton nuclear detonation.

I've diagnosed myself with job sickness. Symptoms are:

 

• Constant moaning to loved ones about how hard the new job is
• Depression caused by an unfamiliar environment.
• Freaking out because you've gone from the top of your game to the bottom

It's been an up and down week emotionally, Mid-week I started to seriously freak-out, what had I done? I even made enquiries about the chances of going back to IBM, albeit half-hartedly. Since then my emotions have continued to shake about.

I think beyond missing my former colleagues like mad, I've gone from being a respected (Ego detected, warning warning) web developer, to being a new guy, forced into learning .net and sharepoint in a short space of time, and initially not being very good at it.

The only redeaming features I think I managed to exhibit this week was helping one of my new coleagues with some mysql questions, and helping someone else resolve an issue with CDO mail sending under Windows 2003.

I think I'm resolved to do a good job ultimately, and realise that I do need to train, and it will take some time before I get to a decent standard, I just need to think more about what I'm doing, and get some damn sleep :)

Tags: Work Leaving Job New .net mysql Problems Sick Fear Uncertainty Lonliness

Due to a failure in the heating system in work today, we were all sent home early. In fairness it was bloody freezing.

After a 3 hour power nap, I got up and finally completed the tagging system for the blog.

It works simply though an onBlur function on an input box, splitting the tags into an array and inserting them into the database. Each keyword is passed separately so that I can check if it already exists in the database, in increment the usage accordingly so that I can later create a tag list, sized around popularity.  

It's a start anyway, and it works well, which is all I want. Off on holiday tomorrow, and hoping to be off Wednesday to help Lisa.

Tags: Javascript PHP Cold Work Temperature Tags Blog Split