Yes! I have a job! It’s amazing, I know, but it is true nonetheless.
I’ll hold off announcing the company name until I receive the official letter, I’ve told people in email but I don’t want to post it on the web just yet.
But yeah… um… more details to come! 🙂
Well, it’s obvious. The reason that I haven’t got a job currently, is that I haven’t created any viruses or had any high-profile hacking attacks.
Why I couldn’t see this before, I don’t know…
An unlikely combination! But the only link between them is that I happen to be mentioning them in the same blog post. Firstly, the 80s and 90s night went really well! Thanks everybody for coming, it was a great night!
And… Linux. Zeth seems to think that Linux will catch on in Europe… I’m not sure. If you want to be worried, read this.
Incidentally, the interview today went well — I should be going back tomorrow… I’ll let you know as and when I get news!
Well, I was going to post something up on here a few days ago, but for some reason Blogger seemed to be unaccessible. Ah well.
I came down to Colchester on Friday. On Friday night, me and Philippa went round to Claremont Road to have a curry which Alex had very kindly offered to cook for us. Saturday, we went into town to buy a few things for the Bond night which the Anglican Chaplaincy were putting on. I managed to buy myself a new suit from the Salvation Army for £8.99! It’s not a bad suit – although I don’t know much about suits and their quality, I can’t see any frayed edges or anything, it looks in pretty good condition. Not bad!
The Bond evening itself went very well, hopefully I’ll have some pictures to put up here of it soon. Thanks very much to Matthew for arranging it, and all the games and things he came up with! It was very enjoyable 🙂
This evening, there’s an 80s and 90s night in Cafe Mondo on campus, which the CU are putting on and I’m DJing at. It’s going to be a good evening, so if you’re around — come down! 9:00 until 12:30 this evening.
Lastly, I thought I’d already posted about this but evidently not. Anyway, I have a job interview tomorrow! At least, all things being well (for reasons which are too complicated to go into here) I hope I’ll have an interview, it might have to be rescheduled. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed and my hands together (in prayer) for this one!
Right, I think that’s just about it. Phill out…
I forgot, when mentioning all my open source software below, was the excellent jEdit. If you do any kind of text-based coding (i.e. HTML, ASP, Java, C++ etc) then jEdit is your application. It’s written in Java so will run on any operating system with a java interpreter (keeps your Windows and Linux crowd happy…), and it has quite a lot of plugins for it which do useful stuff e.g. a Java compile plugin makes it easy to compile Java stuff 🙂
Open source software rules.
As some of the regular readers of this blog may know, a couple of months ago I had to wipe my hard disk, because I was just fed up with the spyware that my computer had been infected with. My plan was then, after reinstalling, to use as much open-source software as I could.
My first efforts weren’t exactly successful… I downloaded and tried to install Linux Mandrake, but it didn’t want to work… I still don’t know why. At some point in the future I will try and get it working again, perhaps when I get a new PC…
But the next thing was getting a decent office environment. In previous years, I’ve used Microsoft Office… this time I gave installing MS Office a miss (except for Outlook, which I shall come to in a moment) and installed Open Office. I have to say, I’ve found its features to be comparable to those of the Microsoft (pay-for) version, and it works pretty well. I don’t do much mucking around with office documents these days, but still… it’s decent!
Anyway. Then I needed a web browser… this was easy. I’d been using Mozilla Firefox for a while, so I just downloaded that again! At least Firefox seems to be immune from much of the spyware rubbish that Internet Explorer is prone to.
Now, email clients… I’m still using Microsoft Outlook. The reason being, I had all my data files as Outlook files, and I wasn’t sure whether I could import them directly into another email client. Now that I’ve got Outlook up and running, I think I’m going to give Mozilla Thunderbird a try.
Compression utilities (zip files etc) are always useful. I found a neat little freeware program called Filzip which works very well!
Which brings me to the most recent — graphics software. I do the odd website and mess around with images a bit, so I need something which can do graphics but not have to pay too much for it! In previous years I’ve used Jasc Paint Shop Pro, but this time I decided to opt for an open-source alternative: the GIMP (I think it might stand for Graphical Image Manipulation Program but I’m not sure). Although installation actually meant downloading two different files and installations, I was pleasantly surprised by the features. It’s definitely comparable to Paint Shop Pro in terms of its functionality, and certainly holds its own in the graphics department!
Overall, I’m very happy with the software I have at the moment! Now I’ve just got to find a Linux distribution that works on my computer…
Well, I’m sorry Joe, but it appears you may be wrong. It looks like Bush is going to win (read: has already won) the election.
I’m not convinced about the rights and wrongs of George W Bush or Kerry, but I do think the Iraq war was a mistake (at best, coule have been handled a lot better)… not to mention little things like not subscribing to the Kyoto treaty. Perhaps the UN should invade the USA for breaking its treaties?
Having said that, apparently Kerry wins by a landslide…
Anyway. Um, not much for me to say, so … I won’t!
Just thought I’d post up to let you know what my weekend was like. I went up to Colchester on Saturday afternoon, and had dinner with Philippa. Afterwards we went to Waffles for a cocktail, and spent our evening there (well, we did go for a wander round town, but decided against stopping in anywhere because it was all so packed). On sunday morning, as the CU were holding their autumn house party at St John’s we went to the morning service there. It was good!
And then in the afternoon we… uh… didn’t do much… and then went to Claremont Road and had pizza and watched ‘Mulan’. Afterwards Alex made a comment something like, “Well that wasn’t the best film I’ve ever seen.” Ok, so that probably wasn’t funny unless you were there, still…
Um, in other news, my CV is being forwarded on to another company! So that’s good news. Hopefully I’ll get a proper job soon, but in the meantime it’s back to the ol’ cleaning soon. At least it’s only today and tomorrow…
… I don’t actually know what other “things” I really mean, but still. I’ve done a bit of temp work the past couple of days. And really, not much more than a bit! I’ve been doing some cleaning work in some offices. Not very exciting work, but still — it’s better than doing what I did before (I can’t be bothered to explain here.)
And I’m off to Colchester this weekend (no surprise there). It’s the Christian Union house party, which they’re holding at St John’s, so I might pop along there at some point.
And, um, I don’t really think there’s much else to say! So, I’ll update sometime, uh, whenever…
Well, I’ve just found a site with some good e-cards on there! They’ve given me a good laugh browsing through. Go and have a look… after all, what other e-card site has a card which says “Your eyes are hypnotising…… knowing that, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t make me cluck like a chicken in public.”