Last year on November the 23rd I had a job interview with the company I'll be working with next year.

It was only my second time in London, so fearing the worst I got trains and the London Underground so that I'd have an hour to spare for delays and getting lost. Thankfully I got there quicker than the train should have, I found the underground really easily and got to the building I was meant to be at about one and a quarter hours early!

With my spare time I thought I'd be a bit touristy and check out some of the sights that were within walking distance of my interview. I took photos on my lame camera phone of things like Big Ben, Palmer Street and a few mangled shots of Westminster Abbey.

Then on Flickr earlier this month I got a message asking if some company could use my (frankly pretty poor) photo of Westminster Abbey for use in some tourist map thing I'd never heard of. Being the kind fellow I am I agreed.

Today I've been told that if you go Here you can see my little photo and a credit to me! Apparently it also works on the iPhone and some other phones too, so you can tour round London and find out all the history, information and maps.

Thought I'd let you all know about them as they were nice enough to include my photo, and to ask permission too

Long time no post!
Seems to fast be becoming my default intro to all my blog posts!

This is actually the first post in 2009, over 2 months since my last post. Since then much has happened to me and my plans and unfortunately not all for the best.

General project plans have been delayed by faffing about with placements, new university semester and year long project deadlines. Some projects, like the shoutboxes are currently on hold while other, like the new version of Palmnet, are still in the pipeline and have jumped the queue.
That isn't to say that shoutboxes will never be finished, just as it stands my future seems fairly busy and I'm not sure where to squeeze them in. But as it's a fairly popular project I dare say I'll squeeze it in soon enough and hopefully get the damned thing done and available for download soon so that the 3 of you, you know who you are, can get off my back and bask in the glory of fresh code.

I've also been tweaking some of the current Palmnet scripts lately, updating things like the raycaster (which still refuses to work) to show a debug view which is pretty handy and should make fixing it properly fairly easy when I have chance to sit down with a pencil and paper and sort it out.
The minipolls also got a bit of an update today with a few new features requested by none other than Rob Manuel, co-founder of the renowned B3ta.com, who then made 2 polls of massive proportions and almost killed my server with the load put on it. Interesting server statistics would be the 309.3% load it was reporting on the intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5130 @ 2.00GHz processor and the 9.4 requests/sec, which though it doesn't sound like much it caused enough lag on that server for database connections to time out and for me to receive 54 emails letting me know about it!

As for Palmnet v3 I'm still researching various options for the back end. The choice between coding it all myself and using a framework is pretty tough, trading enjoyment for time. But I did start some preliminary work on the database so it can cope with the stress and complexity of the many projects linked together. I'm also probably going to develop a sort of micro framework to lace it all up which should be fairly portable for use on top of other frameworks and systems so I can keep the handy functions together for use in future projects.
And the most important new planned feature is a project time line, so I can plan ahead properly and set goals to guilt trip me into working more often on what I should be and keep me away from time sinks like facebook and Google reader.

The job offer I mentioned back in my Christmas post was accepted by me and I shall start working for a company called Fivium down in London starting in July. If anyone has any advice on living in London it would be much appreciated as I'm a mere small country town boy and have only been to London twice before, one of those was for the interview.
The job should be awesome, pay sounds good, company seem great and the work seems to be interesting. However, it will probably mean less blogging than usual because of working 9:00-5:30 and I also had to sign official secrets act, so I can't even blog about some of the work I'll be doing which is a shame. But it's all for the good of the government and such, so it's for a good reason.

Also, congrats to Ben on passing his theory