Nearly a month

... has it been since I've last blogged. There are a multitude of reasons why that is. (Just took a while there to email old school friend who's coming to visit next weekend, haven't really seen him in ages).

Listening to song that friend sent me. Afrikaans song about SA ppl working in London and living here, never really belonging and never really leaving, get use to the lifestyle.

But back to the topic at hand, a month has passed.
Work : Things have had a fair amount of ups and downs in the last 2 weeks. I received extention of contract that started two weeks ago. Going to be running for 13 weeks ( touch wood), and the first two has been.. painful I dare say.

Those who are in the know of contract work on projects. You tend to have to give a recollection of your time spent on which projects that was done ( normally all of them have budget codes inside of the company that you are contracting into, but not always) and it was with that problem that I was struggling the last two weeks.

There are two really big projects at the moment running in the CBS (central business systems) department, the one that I work in. The one is heavily involved with finance. Now, needless to say, when a company that does about £1bn a year turnaround and is one of the countries leading television broadcasters, has a CBS project that involves finance it tends to pull rank.. in a big way.. and so when the new system was to be rolled out, Paul (kind of lead developer), Wendy and Rob (my boss) were still working on the coding of it on the Friday before it went live... not really the best way forward, as these things go they had to go up to Manchester ( Paul and Rob that is) to install some hardware for the upgrade of system. They were to spend a day there and then return on the Tuesday... Ironically on the Monday that all this was happening my new contract was due to start, but I had run out of work, had taken a sicky on the Monday to give the guys some breathing space as well, so they wouldn't have a SA guy asking what he can do or if someone has work for him to do, which, thinking about it now they wouldn't have been able to answer because they wouldn't be in London.

Anyways...

So on the Tuesday I went in to work expecting to see Rob and Paul back at the office.. and when it struck around 9:30 and neither was in I realised things had not gone well on the Monday. They weren't coming in, they were still in Manchester, not good.

And thus my dillema started. I got to work, asked what there was to be done and got a budget-code-less (and that last four letters is what is suppose to make you cringe) timesheet project, which Kieran told me shouldn't keep me busy for longer than a day and then Rob and Paul will be back and there'd be something else for me to do..

And thus it didn't turn out that way. Poor Kieran had done very minimal programming in ASP, and weirdly enough in web development. Now, don't get me wrong, the man does what he's suppose to do very well, and he works very very hard. But I honestly got a half baked something. Wouldn't go so far as to say I got a site.

So I got the AJAX part of it to work, which had been his struggle at a time because he never really got a clear hour or two to work on the project ( and that showed for sure). Day passes and Wednesday comes along. Paul and Rob return.

Now things had gone particularly bad up north and things were still going bad. So I gave them their breathing space rather than to ask and bother ppl who are highly stressed. I took to working on the Timesheet project just to stay out under foot from the finance project. But the project I was working on had more and more faults as I went deeper into it. What I should have done, was just rebuild the whole thing from scratch when I first set eyes on it, but alas, that I did not do, and that is outrightly my fault. So it came that I've basically spent about a whole week worths of time ( which is a lot of money from ITV's point of view to pay) on a project that is no closer to working correctly than when I got it on my plate, and I feel guilty that I'm going to be charging my time against it. I have tried to do some creative admin in the lines of charging extra little bit here and there to other projects, but essentially I'm not sure what to do with it all. Maybe I should ask Rob the best way forward, he is after all my boss and should know these things.

All that being sidenote to why I actually am still up and writing this post.

I love being up really late, especially in the flat, I tend to look out over South London from here and think about all those people living their lives and for the greater part of them being asleep. I enjoy trying to think up really huge philosophical points of view, yet very seldomly being able to find either the topic to think about or keep one train of thought.

Funny actually, as I sit here I'm wondering what the time spent here in London over the last 7 odd months has taught me... I used to be very open with personal information, what I earn, if I can afford this or that, where I'd like to go in life, what I'd like to do, and I feel it sad that in having one bad run with a landlady I've closed up, my plans and ideas are privy only to myself and Grieks at the moment. Oh sure, almost everyone I know or that is close to me has a general idea of where Zodan is heading, maybe. Uhmm.. this feels like blabbering for blabbering's sake.

Maybe I should post this and go to sleep... it's been a longish day, and tomorrow I'll be doing a lot of freelance work stuff.. loads of it actually to be honest.

Best bet forward. Time to go hit the hay.

[10,4]
Z