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Mortgage Application
22 September 2006
Read moreThis whole house buying lark is progressing quite well, or at least it feels like it right now. Since I last posted we’ve been to the bank and made the final mortgage application, passed the final credit checks and had the thing approved. Next they send us the final …
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Offer Accepted
14 September 2006
Read moreWell, we had an offer accepted on a house yesterday which is very exciting! This morning we instructed a solicitor, he will do all the legal stuff for us. I’ve also spoken with the mortgage provider and we’re off to see them on Saturday morning. We have to …
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Arranging a Mortgage
13 September 2006
Read moreWell, we’ve taken the first step and been to see a few banks about getting a mortgage. I have to admit that we did stick to the big names – Halifax, HSBC and Yorkshire Building Society. My partner is a contractor with short-term contracts, which on paper makes him look …
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Crochet Love-Knot Wrap
04 September 2006
Read moreYou might think that I’ve been a bit quiet on the crochet front recently … and you’d be right. What’s actually happening is that I have been working on a surprise project for my sister’s birthday and didn’t want to post about it until I had …
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Diet Oracle - working with Oracle eXpress Edition
03 September 2006
Read moreI’m a big oracle fan, which might seem a bit strange in a world dominated with the LAMP stack and its exclusive use of MySQL or, at a push, Postgresql. That’s not the entire world obviously, that’s my world and it is definitely MySQL-orientated. In the world …
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My Brush With RSI
02 September 2006
Read moreRSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) is the bogeyman of software developers’ worst nightmares. I think everyone knows someone, or of someone, who was once a great programmer and is now a primary teacher, porter or some such, and all because of this RSI thing. So here’s my experience, because it …
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A Tale of Two Jobs
01 September 2006
Read moreWell, not an actual tale, exactly, but some general anecdotes.
Since moving “oop north” (to Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK), my partner and I have job-hunted once each. Once for me when I relocated up here, and once for him just at the moment as the fixed-term contract that brought him …
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Recursive Queries in Oracle
29 August 2006
Read moreI’ve come across a very neat trick in Oracle that I thought I’d share. Its useful for situations where you can have circular references in the data diagram, for example when the table includes a column which is a reference for another entry in the same table. Usually …
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The Alt-Tab-while-you're-waiting Trap
29 August 2006
Read moreToday I’m working on a complicated database driven web page. I edit the source using vim on the main file server. In order to get the file onto the webserver, I then quit out of the file and a script checks my syntax and ftps the file into the …
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Compulsive Multitasker
22 August 2006
Read moreDo you know someone who seems innately unable to focus on one thing? They can only complete a task when there are twenty others vying for attention and even then they’re flitting between them like a lizard.
You know the person I mean, you call them to ask if …
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Regular Expressions in Oracle
22 August 2006
Read moreI need to operate on a big table with lots of records, but only on rows where the primary key starts with a number. Because obviously its a good idea to differentiate types of records in this way …. only joking! Its just one of those little tasks that crops up …
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Good Advice for Life at the Office
09 August 2006
Read moreI came across this when reading an article on Mike’s site yesterday:
_“The best advice I ever received from a manager is that it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.”
The article is at Top 3 Ways to Fight Bureaucratic Inertia in IT and it makes for …