Michael Snoswell's Journal: Marriage, coding and other things

Well it's 3.5 weeks to the wedding and I'm starting to get a little anxious. We've sorted out the major items: honeymoon booked - 2 weeks on a tropical island off Thailand - not hit by the tsunami!, caterers booked, marquee booked, bought the rings and my suit ($130 to rent so decided to buy - ended up costing just over $1000 but should last a good few years) and the weddings dress. Everything else is details (we have a spreadsheet with 200+ tasks). Budget is about 2k over but that's acceptable. This is a complicated enterprise, especially with so many friends and family coming from interstate - some staying at our place before and after and some farmed out to friends and some staying at hotels.

At the same time I've started maintaining the web site for the local professional counselling association which may well be more than I can reasonably handle - have to wait and see.

I've started in earnest coding that php project for a local multi-media company. We looked very hard at the closest commercial software but it was around $20k so I'll charge him half my usual rates and we'll own the final product 50/50 and sell it to similar companies for 1/3rd the price (considering it's version 1 and the opposition is at version 8). We figure it'll take about a year to refine it before it's ready for selling.

I'm still reading up on this noosphere stuff mentioned here on slashdot a few weeks back. I've read the papers and find it most curious. I confess to not being as closed minded as some slashdot posters to the original story who wrote it all off without reading about the project in detail. As a member of the local skeptics association I consider myself a fairly critical thinker, yet this stuff can't be written off lightly. As the people at princeton have concluded, this bears further investigation.

Work is plodding along the same as ever. I think this is year 5 of an 8 yr project (I've been on it for 3+). I'm glad I'm not managing programmers anymore but the current sysadmin stuff is getting a bit tedious and specialised. It'd be nice not to have to drive 65min to work (45kms) but I've been looking and am unlikely to get paid the same elsewhere - maybe in a few years when the shares are doing better I can afford a cut in pay but for now I'll just have to put up with it. [sigh]