It’s time to do something other than moan about how boring my job is.

So, I’ve started to learn again.

At the moment I’m doing some stuff with PHP but I’m trying to chuck in CSS as I go too.

We were just about to leave the house this AM when my other half remembered we still had to print something. The laptop was already logged into Ubuntu and I thought “Hell, everything else has been so easy, I’ll give it a go”. I added a printer and printed the document in about two minutes. I was as simple, if not more simple than windows. Excellent.

Just spotted something awesome while watching the extras on my Iron Man 2 Blu-Ray.  During the “Practical Meets Digital” featurette you’ll see an ILM guy applying a dust map to the Mark II suit and he appears to be using a GNOME desktop, Firefox and Thunderbird.  Cool.

I had an email today from an employee of Tribal Group PLC – for those that don’t know they get a massive number of ICT contracts from the British government.

Anyway, this employee, no doubt under a multi-million pound contract, requested I complete a form and return said form via email.  However, rather than send me the form they directed me to where I could download it.  They didn’t provide a direct link.

Having found the form I discover it is in PDF format, with no editable fields.  So I email my contact and say as much.  They respond with the following:

“it is in the format of a pdf document so that it cannot be altered.”

That doesn’t seem the best format for something you are asking people to alter to me.

The employee goes on to suggest I print, complete, scan and email the form.

I don’t think I’ll bother.  After all, I’m not getting paid to admin the multi-million pound contract.

March 9th 2010

I’m a convert. FireFox has been my browser of choice for the last 7 years and I loved it. I never intended to switch to Chrome, as with all the best products I just found I needed it.

July 21st 2010

I’ve converted back.  Again, not a decision based on preference but necessity.  Chrome has some great features for web development and I will use them again but for general browsing it just eats memory.  And it’s slow.