21st January 2019 – 27th January 2019

As Katie was working full time hours at her job this week covering for the manager, I was doing both school runs and more childcare than usual. This lead to a feeling of being at least ten minute behind on everything I did for the week as I tried to cram a useful amount of work in to the available hours (many more than there could have been due to grandparents helping.) Tom being ill Thursday night and off school on Friday meant I am now working on Sunday trying to catch up lost client hours.

Client work

I finished the tail end of the server move for a client, that being finally working out what was stopping a Lets Encrypt SSL certificate installing on their admin area (a config option had not taken although in a control panel it looked like it had), some final testing and deleting the old virtual server. Also, a bunch of changes to two sites and writing specifications for Laura so she could write the code for other more in-depth changes. For another client, compiling information on what we’re doing on the many domain names they have registered in different accounts by different people, what that’s costing them, and whether they are worth keeping.

On top of that, I got my personal tax return done. I’m not sure if I should have entered the tax I’ve paid on account for the 2017-2018 year somewhere in the return, so I may yet need to pay money I’ll get a refund for. Although the online filing for self assessment tax returns is an enormous amount better than the old paper forms, and has improved from its earlier digital versions, sometimes it is still confusing.

My projects

Very little progress on these due to losing so many work hours.

On the positive side, I did manage to get my data our of my broken Vagrant system and next week should be able to get it all back up and running, and integrate in the work I did while the data was locked away.

I am determined to get more done on these next week.

Watching an episode of the TV series Salvage Hunters: Classic Cars reminded me that I had been working out what parts of building my ideas I could outsource/subcontract. Experience subcontracting client work has taught me that a decent specification does wonders for getting something built with the fewest problems possible. Unfortunately, this also takes a chunk of time to write and due to modern frameworks within programming, it can be borderline if it is quicker to write the code than it is to write out the spec clearly.

This is something I still need to think about more and experiment with, as I am not making enough progress on my own.

The Farm

We had around 17 people at the Farm this week, a bit low due to a cold snap and the ongoing “Dry January”. It was great to catch up with Haze, who’s been away in America. My notes were:

• New Orleans
• Fitting in learning new skills and tech
• Machine learning
• “He was in to roundabouts”
• Illness
• OS Commerce (the bad old days)
• Working from an ex-prison
• The Skiff coworking space
• Farm website
• Mutual project catch up
• Presenting past experiences which are not entirely relevant to what you want to do now
• Finding work quickly

I need to get the Farm site moved to new hosting, and give Haze access to it so he can add in a search to the site. Another thing on my infinite to do list.

Reading: Continuing with Jeeves in the Offing, perhaps the most flowery Jeeves-type prose of the 5-6 I’ve read.

Writing with: Mainly a Papermate Inkjoy Liquid 0.5 needle point. Works well like the now discontinued Bic Z4+ needle points, shame it doesn’t have their chunky and soft grip section.