Archive for the 'Internet' Category

I know I’ve written this post hundreds of times before, but time I’ve actually put my plans into action. About 5 minutes ago, I started working on a new version of my website which promises to be cleaner and better suited to my needs.

Given the new amounts of free time I’ve acquired as a result of starting at uni, I actually believe I stand a chance of finishing it this time. The downside is that I do need to design a new skin, and write a shit load of code, but I’m prepared to do all of that.

The whole thing is an exercise in abstraction and good, clean code writing. If you have any suggestions as to what I should include on the site, please let me know.

Watch this space!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, as ever. Still, this time I have some genuinely interesting things to say about my life (no guarantee there), rather than just a rant about how much I hate living here. The title of this post, self-actualisation, is a term that describes what I feel I have achieved over the past month. For those of you who are so heinously uneducated enough not to know, self-actualisation is the a state that sits atop Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (a model spoken about lots by marketing types). Upon reaching self-actualisation, a person feels that their physiological, security, affiliation and affection, self-respect, and recognition needs have been satisfied.

So, with the exception of financial security, I feel as though I have ‘arrived’ as it were. It’s taken me 6 months of being here, but I’m finally content with the way things are. I’ve realised that I am happy in my job as a developer, and I’m thoroughly enjoying my work so much that I’ve started throwing myself at as many tasks as I can possibly manage in the time I have, and I’m feeling more and more rewarded by it. The beauty of working for a small company such as BWS who have a large market footprint is that you can see the things you do well making a difference to people. The software that I write, improve and debug, the design work that I do, and dealing with support calls - all of it goes towards driving the company forwards, all giving me positive feedback. A good example of this is that the new website that me and Liz have been working hard on has more than doubled the number of incoming leads to the sales department since its launch a couple of months ago.

On top of enjoying my job, I feel that I’m really starting to fit into the company. I know the people there well, and we have a good time working together. And, what’s more, I feel respected for what I’m doing.

It’s a good feeling.

I have on the drawing board (my pad of paper at work) a database structure and a couple of doodles for a new version of Jimmed.net.

The main improvements over the old Jimmed.net will be my ability to upload entire photo galleries (perhaps with snazzy AJAXy slideshow features) and videos to my blog without having to piss about using WordPress to insert them into blogs. I’ll keep my ‘About Me’ page (probably), all my blog posts, and my RSS deliciousness. I may also have some kind of reading stats so I can keep track of how popular stuff is easily.

The only thing it lacks is MySQL 5.0 on here. Annoyingly, one.com (my webhost who are pretty shoddy) don’t have any planned timescale for this upgrade, which I need for stored procedures. While I could do it without, inline queries in web apps are just so DIRTY.