Author Archives: lornajane

20 Aug
2007

First Edition Painting

In case anyone thinks its been a bit quiet on the house front, I’d like to reassure you we’re still pottering away here. We’ve got a loo roll holder and a towel ring in the bathroom, Kevin’s fixed the bedroom door’s rattling and we’ve also painted our first wall!

Wall is possibly an exaggeration since I only painted the top 18 inches of it but we have to start somewhere. I disliked the terracotta paint in the front room as soon as I saw it, here it is:

I put up with it for a while but then I bought red curtains and it had to go!! Here’s the new look front room.

 

I can’t show you the dresser against the new paint to compare it because we moved it get to the wall. The top part lifts off – and its too heavy for me to help Kevin lift it back on, so its on the floor until some strong person visits us!

19 Aug
2007

New Niece

My niece or nephew is here – and she’s a niece called Natalie. She was born late last night and we got to meet her today! Here she is:

Yawning :)

With her Dad:

Some very proud first-time grandparents!

And Kevin and I being very brave and holding the baby ourselves. We’re not used to kids but this one is adorable.

 

17 Aug
2007

Small Company vs Big Company

When choosing a career move, whether its your first job out of university or the next step on the ladder, the type of organisation you work in will make quite a difference. Different sectors are all different and each has their own culture, but the size of the organisation is a big factor as well. So far I’ve worked for companies of 6 people, about 120 people, around 2000 people, and now there’s about 18 of us at my current workplace. I have also spoken with friends with different experiences.

Big Companies.

The advantages Larger companies tend to be better at paying overtime or booking holiday because they have systems to organise this. They are also more set up for supporting employees because there is an HR department and some policies and procedures for getting things sorted out if the need arises. They can also usually cope with people on maternity or long-term sickness leave without too much impact on the business and the other employees.

The disadvantages Large companies, certainly here in the UK, have a bit of a one-size-fits-all attitude to employees. The results tend to be silly things such as if one person is thought to be covering their poor timekeeping by changing their shift pattern a lot, the whole company will be stopped from changing their shift pattern more often than every three months, for example Each role in a large company tends to be quite well-defined and you will not find yourself outside of your job description very often.

Small Companies

The advantages If you like variety and hate bureacracy then a small company is for you. In small companies I have variously rewired phones, assembled furniture, cleaned kitchens, crawled on the floor, sold products and even ordered stationery. I’m a software developer by trade so that’s quite an impressive list. Whether this suits you or not is very personal; I thrive on it but its not for everyone. The other big advantage of a small company is that they tend to be quite flexible, in terms of changing job roles or working patterns. This is something to do with being quite reasonable and judging each case on its merits rather than feeling like they have to be uniformly inflexible in case anyone feels hard done by. And you can all go to the pub together on a Friday.

The disadvantages They’re the same as the advantages! There will be days where you wonder what your job specification actually is. There will be days when your flexible employer will expect you to be flexible too and you’ll be in the office 12 hours after you arrived. If you don’t get on well with a colleague then there is no getting away from them, because the organisation is so small. If you like to have an organised, well-defined job which will not bother you when you leave at the end of the day, then probably a small company may not be the right place for you.

15 Aug
2007

Netball New Year

In my own personal netballing calendar, the season starts today! Its the first training session of the season this evening and I am quite looking forward to it. I’ve updated the Shipley Netball Website with functionality to record results as well as fixtures.

It will be great to see the friends I haven’t seen all summer – and to be reunited with my award which is still in the loving care of Janet.

I’ll be playing this season with most of the same people as last year and for the first time in 5 years I’ll be playing with the same team two seasons in a row, which will be something great in itself. There are some team changes and some league changes all to look forward to and I’m sure plenty of blood, sweat and tears as well. Happy New Year :)

12 Aug
2007

How does your garden grow?

I’m so organised that I forgot to take a before photo, but for those that this means something to, here’s my new-look front garden:

Previously it was a bit of a mess, with gravel just dumped on top of bits of plastic sheeting and weeds coming up everywhere. We went to the garden centre and bought a few bags of slate chippings, some edging stones and some weed-suppressing membrane.

We raked all the gravel to one corner, put in the new flower bed and laid weed-supressing membrane on the exposed ground left over. Then we raked all the gravel onto the new membrane and laid membrane on the other bit of the garden. To plant the shrubs we just made cuts in the membrane and put the plants in with potting compost and slow-release fertiliser, then raked the gravel all around them.

 

Finally we scattered our few slate chippings on top of the gravel – its an instantly much nicer effect and without either paying for or carrying vast quantities of them as well! We can add a few more bags of chippings in the future, perhaps.

Thanks to mum for helping us get this sorted! All that’s left to do is to plant some bulbs and then try to keep it looking as nice as this :)

09 Aug
2007

Women Together

Most people know that I’m active in the phpwomen community, women in technology is something that I really believe in but won’t start ranting about right now (or I’ll not get round to what I was going to say!).

Today I’m getting to grips with irssi which is a command-line IRC client. I was struggling with some quite dry documentation when I came across this tutorial from Ubuntu Women which has really helped me to get sorted out.

Yay for the women :)

09 Aug
2007

Wiki Wonder

I love wikis for workplace documentation. For anyone who doesn’t know, a wiki is a web page with an “edit” button, so you can change the content of it if you have something to add or something is out of date or missing. Wikipedia is the obvious example.

So why is it, whenever I set up a wiki, I spend the next six months fielding requests from people for me to add things to it for them?

09 Aug
2007

Happy Cat Holidays

We have a guest staying with us … a cat named Orbit :)

He actually belongs to a friend of ours who has gone on holiday, so the cat gets a holiday as well, staying with us. Its quite a responsibility but so far he’s doing fine. He’s pining for his owner and keeps going back to the door she left by and the room she had when she stayed, but he’s popping down for food quite regularly so I think he’s OK.

07 Aug
2007

Textpattern To Serendipity

I’m planning on migrating this site to a new platform soon, I’ve been looking around for an alternative to textpattern. Textpattern has been great but I’ve kind of outgrown it. Its easy to use but a bit “fluffy” and it eats my code excerpts which is really annoying.

I’ve picked serendipity as my intended target, its very modular and uses smarty for templating which I like and am familiar with. And if its good enough for sara and davey then I expect I will get along with it just fine.

Meeting Serendipity

So I installed Serendipity, nice easy installer, and started to look in the admin panel. There was a button for “Import Data” … you say what kind of blog platform you are coming from, and enter your database credentials and it attempts to import your old data. So I kind of tapped in my details.

Literally five seconds later I was looking at a blog with my entire history in it. Its got comments, posts, categories and users. I’m blown away, its utterly fantastic.

Finishing touches

The import didn’t cover stuff like images, which will need a whole series of conversions and text replacement on the posts to get sorted, and it seems to have chewed on some HTML entities. Also textpattern uses a post body with an optional excerpt and serendipity uses post body with optional extended body which has done some weird things to the import. It doesn’t help that I did use excerpts for a while in textpattern and then stopped after complaints from people reading on feed readers.

I’m also procrastinating over a theme for the new site … obviously it will involve a very empty stylesheet and at least two shades of pink but I’m not quite there with it yet. Once I’ve converted my content then I’ll just stop fiddling and use what I’ve got I think. I’ll also post the conversion scripts once I’ve finished with them.

Finally I will have to put together a bunch of HTTP 301’s since serendipity won’t support having article titles as the only thing after the domain name on the URL. I’ll keep you posted :)

06 Aug
2007

Home Help

I finally took a picture of the garden, with its new benches and no tree stumps:

I just wanted to post the photo and also thank the many people who have already helped us in the house and garden, and the many more who have promised help (or whom I have on my list of helpers, with or without their agreement). Between you, you have carried, cleaned, assembled, dug the garden, hung the curtains and the shelves, shifted furniture and generally helped us keep the whole thing in perspective. It means a lot to us while we are starting out on this project/adventure, so thanks to you all.