Doesn't time fly? It seems to have been rather a while since the last entry. I've actually been rather busy, with my attempts to earn a living. I've even begun to earn a little money.
I've invested in a new virtual host located in Auckland. The one I was using turned out to be located in California, and sometimes its performance was, to put it mildly, dog. I now have 3GB of disk space to play with and have root access and can thus do pretty much anything I want, although the kernel seems to have been tweaked with one or two features removed.
Diane managed to have a small incident in the Odyssey - not bad only 3 days since we bought it. It wasn't her fault - it was parked and a van driver managed to smack the door of his van into the bumper.
Another networking meeting resulted in a couple of referrals. One of these was for someone wanting a shopping cart. I've not done one before, but plucked a copy of ZenCart from the Internet and set about figuring out how to configure it and get it up and running. I was a little nervous about the credit card aspect, but it's actually dead simple, because all it does is run off to the bank's payment page and returns a succeeded message back to the software. I also found a very handy payment provider in Paymate, who specialise in the Australian/New Zealand market. No setup fee, no monthly fees and reasonable rates. They seem better than the ubiquitous Paypal, since you don't get screwed over for having the audacity to use a currency other than the US dollar, and hammered if you withdraw funds. Paymate deposit into your bank account within 25 hours.
Di had lots of fun at work with the "IT" person. He seems to have a right stinky attitude - everything is too much trouble. He also seems barely competent at his job, since he failed miserably to get more than 6 of the dozen or so computers connected to the wireless access point. I told Diane to ask him some searching questions about DHCP address pool size just to make him a little bit more paranoid.
Freya's netball skills continue to improve. She really has got the idea of moving around the court and is becoming more cunning in the way she plays the came. The last match they played involved a number of excellent sequences of play resulting in the team's first win - and quite a comprehensive one.
Having swatted up on ZenCart, and put together quite a decent demo, (including debugging the Paymate payment module which didn't seem to work with the latest ZenCart version) I arranged a demo for Tuesday.
Diane did an open home on Sunday - one person very keen but sadly has their own house to sell, which effectively means no sale. This seems to be very much the order of the day.
Tuesday came around and I did the cart demo. It went really quite well - nothing broke and the price I came up with seemed not to frighten the guy off. He asked me for a quote which I duly sent him. It wasn't all success on Tuesday though, I managed to hoover up Rhiannon's headphones which promptly spat both the ends off. Fortunately we managed to track down an identical set with which to replace them and were thus spared the full fury of a hissing spitting teenager. Diane also spotted a bloke across the road from her office, carving jade jewellery outside his home. Although she was only vaguely interested, she made a fuss and latched straight on to his lack of a web site. To cut a long story short, he was after a shopping cart too, so my card was pressed into his hand and he was duly directed to give me a call. Good girl! Later that evening I got an email (he'd been sniffing round my website) and it seems he's more than interested. I hastily modified the demo I'd put together and wandered round on Wednesday. He and his wife were impressed, and I wasted no time in issuing a quote. The following day I got my first order! His money turned up the following day and I got to work registering the domain name and putting the site together.
Saturday Di and Vicky went to a massive Zumba party. It was supposed to be the largest party in Australasia, but missed out by 16 people. Wayne and I watched NZ hammer the Welsh into oblivion, and England beat Australia at rugby. Huzzah! Much beer was consumed (mainly by me it seems) and when Di and Vicky returned I was a little worse for wear. Di was rally pissed off, having been pulled over by the police allegedly on suspicion of drunk driving and then fitted up for not staying in her lane while navigating a round about. The filth that pulled her was clearly one of those to whom the job meant everything. The piggy little moustache and the immaculate and tightly fastened shirt and tie said it all. He was apparently not at all amused at finding a sober driver, not just sober but stone cold sober, especially an English one and was really highly sarcastic, asking questions like "Don't you have lanes in England?". He took about 20 minutes wibbling on and generally getting off on his own sense of self importance and then issued an instant $150 fine. Bar Steward. Subsequent enquiries revealed that Di was dead unlucky, as most coppers will send you on your way with a little advice. Vicky's verbals probably didn't help much, but he was clearly just an arsehole.
Sunday we hade the pleasure of Charlie and Lola for a couple of hours while V&W had a couple of hours to get some painting and tidying done. In the end they just went for a walk in the mount, but they certainly appreciated the time off.
This Tuesday I started work on a rather interesting project - making the Quickbooks accounting software talk to a Linux/Apache web cart. Various people had apparently told my contact that it couldn't be done, but I fail to see why this is the case. The Quickbooks web connector uses XML/SOAP to talk to its data sources (i.e. the web server) and as these are all implemented in PHP, it should be possible. Time will tell. The first thing however was to get quick books installed, which took rather a long time on my poor little laptop. All that .NET rubbish. Noooo!
I spent quite a lot of time this week trying to get the holiday rental code I'd written to run inside a Joomla CMS. In the end, I came to the conclusion that it would be far easier to ditch it in favour of using Opus instead. This worked quite well in the end, but the path was rather painful, not least because of an inadvertent CSS name conflict which had me confused for a while. It's now hanging together and there's a danger I might actually get paid again.
The rest of the week was spent flitting between Quickbooks, Zen Cart and the holiday rental stuff. Busy busy busy. We've now had the shortest day, and even then it only seems to get dark at 5PM, not like the UK where it starts to get dark at 3PM. Still not massively cold although we have had one or two overnight frosts. The heatpump is earning its keep, not doubt about that. I've also ordered some roof insulation, since we get 60% off with a community services card. The bad news is that we might not get it installed for 4-5 weeks by which time the winter may be on its way out. However, as we may not have the card next year, it seems like a good time.
Friday, 25 June 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
God Save The Queen
It's been a while since the last entry - I don't seem to have got round to doing it. Part of this is being stuck to the laptop for most of the day and half the evening curtail the enthusiasm for more typing. What follows represents two weeks of nefarious activity. Well, I'd like to think of it as nefarious, but it's probably just plain boring. Read on and find out.
I went round to Wayne's on Monday to watch the world twenty20 final between England and Australia. Sadly I managed to missed the start (6AM), but thanks to the magic of Sky was able to skip through the action and watch England WIN. Huzzah. Shame it was a Monday morning otherwise we'd have cracked a few beers open. Always nice when England win, especially if the Aussies LOOSE.
Tuesday I met up with another web design company based in Greerton. They lack any programming ability but are very good on the graphics side. We hope to be able to do some business in the future. The meeting was a result of a referral from another graphic designer who did my business cards. It really is who you know in the country.
Thursday I attended the 7AM (why am I having all these early mornings??) networking meeting but picked up a referral from one of the members who wanted a web site. Sounds promising.
Saturday morning was spent at the Mad Butcher and PakNSave shopping for our house warming party. We had invited pretty much everybody we knew and the place was full of Pomms and estate agents. Hmm. It started at about 3PM and we threw the last people out at around midnight. Everything went well apart from one five year old who lost his front tooth courtesy of the trampoline. Tramp: 2 Kids: 0.
Sunday we cleared up but paid a visit to a friend who as a nurse, had promised to remove Imogen's stitches FOC, saving us a few bucks on a trip to the doctor. We had a lot of stuff left over from the party so we descended on V&W and insisted they spark up their barbecue. It wasn't the warmest of days, but their outdoor wood burner just about kept the shivers away.
Monday I went to chat a bout a possible web site which seemed very positive, and the rest of the day was spent shopping for cars. We visited perhaps half a dozen dealers who all seemed to stock the ubiquitous Honda Odyssey MPV. We particularly liked the one we found at Car Connexxions. Unfortunately we'd forgotten that Freya was competing in an inter-schools cross country event. She finished 11th in her age group - a thoroughly creditable performance.
Tuesday we went back an bought the car, and then tried to find some insurance. Insurance over here is not compulsory, but highly advised since you're liable to pay for the other party's car if you drive like a twit. The AA were initially miles cheaper, since they decided that Diane (it's her car, not mine - the Mirth Mobile liveth on) as a real estate agent did not need commercial insurance. We rang around a few others including a guy from the networking group who was the only one who could explain the reason for commercial insurance being more expensive: namely that it costs more to administer a claim on a commercial policy because the government takes an interest in write offs. This is because as a GST registered person, you're able to claim GST and depreciation on the car, and it's not unknown for the car to be mysteriously written off and thus act as a tax fiddle. In the end the third person we spoke to at the AA suddenly decided Di did need commercial insurance, which meant the network guy got the business.
Wednesday evening we attended a multi-country dinner at the primary school. Everyone was supposed to bring a dish from the country that the kids had been researching. Freya had chosen Sweden, and we took Swedish ginger cookies. I had also been roped into playing guitar - since it's Spanish. I was thrust onto the stage and tried to play while sat on a very small chair. The foot stool was out of the question which made things rather awkward. The lighting was not very good which didn't help with reading the music so my first piece was a bit rubbish. The second was much better and I was quite happy with it - playing from memory with your eyes shut does work it seems. I was applauded off the stage and no one threw any of the food.
Thursday - another network meeting. The quotes I'd given out seemed to have been well received. I just need to chase them up next week. I exchanged a few emails with the Greerton outfit - looking very positive here. I migrated my mobile phone over to the 2degrees network - Vodafone are really expensive and 2degrees are half the price and keep giving a way extra credit and free texts. The process was relatively painless and the number transfer took about 6 hours to complete. We took Phoebe and Freya to netball - Freya played really well but does need to work on her shooting skills. She ended up with the player-of-the-day award so it's not just our imagination. Freya's teacher was apparently very impressed with my guitar playing and wants me to give her lessons. She seems serious... blimey. Thursday evening I went to meet up with a few other webheads over in Tauranga. Rather boring, but free beer and pizza:-)
Friday I met up with another network person at his premises - he's a bathroom/kitchen warehouse. We spent a while discussing requirements and then at about 5PM he locked the doors and got the beer out. Consequently I was late home and wasn't able to cook tea. I managed a convincing excuse about customer entertainment which I think I got away with.
Saturday we finally received the invoice for the pool equipment - but it was wrong. There appear to be two of the same item. Hmm. Smell a rat here. We have had reservations about PoolCare, since they were supposed to have been maintaining the pool, yet the pressure gauge and filter basket were both knackered and in need of replacement. We've also heard a few rumours, and having met the proprietor, he seems like a wide boy who might just slip in an extra item on his invoice "by mistake". We sent a querying email.
Later we went to a party at a former neighbour's house - sadly we were the oldest ones there - everyone else was under 30, or so it seemed. We managed to talk to a few interesting people though.
Sunday was a miserable wet day. We attracted most of the local kids into the house somehow (must be the death trap AKA trampoline) and the noise level was immense. Vicky was bored and wandered round with the kids to add to this mix. Fun Fun Fun.
Monday was a bank holiday - the Queen's birthday apparently. We decided to have V&W round for nosebag, so headed into Tauranga to raid PakNSave. We also stopped in at Bond+Bond, and scored an Emachines netbook for Di. She apparently needs a machine while she's at work. Neither of us really wanted Windoze seven, and as the netbook was a mere $399 inc GST (which can be reclaimed) and it's XP powered and the right size to drop into the handbag, it seemed like a steal.
I cooked a massive pot of chill-con-carne, which V&W tore into like they hadn't eaten for a week. Both of them are now eating meat again, having given in to the cravings and got fed up with feeling anaemic. The latest graze is apparently a diet linked to blood group which means that Wayne can't drink beer - only red wine and cider. Such a shame we had several reds left over from the party.
I went round to Wayne's on Monday to watch the world twenty20 final between England and Australia. Sadly I managed to missed the start (6AM), but thanks to the magic of Sky was able to skip through the action and watch England WIN. Huzzah. Shame it was a Monday morning otherwise we'd have cracked a few beers open. Always nice when England win, especially if the Aussies LOOSE.
Tuesday I met up with another web design company based in Greerton. They lack any programming ability but are very good on the graphics side. We hope to be able to do some business in the future. The meeting was a result of a referral from another graphic designer who did my business cards. It really is who you know in the country.
Thursday I attended the 7AM (why am I having all these early mornings??) networking meeting but picked up a referral from one of the members who wanted a web site. Sounds promising.
Saturday morning was spent at the Mad Butcher and PakNSave shopping for our house warming party. We had invited pretty much everybody we knew and the place was full of Pomms and estate agents. Hmm. It started at about 3PM and we threw the last people out at around midnight. Everything went well apart from one five year old who lost his front tooth courtesy of the trampoline. Tramp: 2 Kids: 0.
Sunday we cleared up but paid a visit to a friend who as a nurse, had promised to remove Imogen's stitches FOC, saving us a few bucks on a trip to the doctor. We had a lot of stuff left over from the party so we descended on V&W and insisted they spark up their barbecue. It wasn't the warmest of days, but their outdoor wood burner just about kept the shivers away.
Monday I went to chat a bout a possible web site which seemed very positive, and the rest of the day was spent shopping for cars. We visited perhaps half a dozen dealers who all seemed to stock the ubiquitous Honda Odyssey MPV. We particularly liked the one we found at Car Connexxions. Unfortunately we'd forgotten that Freya was competing in an inter-schools cross country event. She finished 11th in her age group - a thoroughly creditable performance.
Tuesday we went back an bought the car, and then tried to find some insurance. Insurance over here is not compulsory, but highly advised since you're liable to pay for the other party's car if you drive like a twit. The AA were initially miles cheaper, since they decided that Diane (it's her car, not mine - the Mirth Mobile liveth on) as a real estate agent did not need commercial insurance. We rang around a few others including a guy from the networking group who was the only one who could explain the reason for commercial insurance being more expensive: namely that it costs more to administer a claim on a commercial policy because the government takes an interest in write offs. This is because as a GST registered person, you're able to claim GST and depreciation on the car, and it's not unknown for the car to be mysteriously written off and thus act as a tax fiddle. In the end the third person we spoke to at the AA suddenly decided Di did need commercial insurance, which meant the network guy got the business.
Wednesday evening we attended a multi-country dinner at the primary school. Everyone was supposed to bring a dish from the country that the kids had been researching. Freya had chosen Sweden, and we took Swedish ginger cookies. I had also been roped into playing guitar - since it's Spanish. I was thrust onto the stage and tried to play while sat on a very small chair. The foot stool was out of the question which made things rather awkward. The lighting was not very good which didn't help with reading the music so my first piece was a bit rubbish. The second was much better and I was quite happy with it - playing from memory with your eyes shut does work it seems. I was applauded off the stage and no one threw any of the food.
Thursday - another network meeting. The quotes I'd given out seemed to have been well received. I just need to chase them up next week. I exchanged a few emails with the Greerton outfit - looking very positive here. I migrated my mobile phone over to the 2degrees network - Vodafone are really expensive and 2degrees are half the price and keep giving a way extra credit and free texts. The process was relatively painless and the number transfer took about 6 hours to complete. We took Phoebe and Freya to netball - Freya played really well but does need to work on her shooting skills. She ended up with the player-of-the-day award so it's not just our imagination. Freya's teacher was apparently very impressed with my guitar playing and wants me to give her lessons. She seems serious... blimey. Thursday evening I went to meet up with a few other webheads over in Tauranga. Rather boring, but free beer and pizza:-)
Friday I met up with another network person at his premises - he's a bathroom/kitchen warehouse. We spent a while discussing requirements and then at about 5PM he locked the doors and got the beer out. Consequently I was late home and wasn't able to cook tea. I managed a convincing excuse about customer entertainment which I think I got away with.
Saturday we finally received the invoice for the pool equipment - but it was wrong. There appear to be two of the same item. Hmm. Smell a rat here. We have had reservations about PoolCare, since they were supposed to have been maintaining the pool, yet the pressure gauge and filter basket were both knackered and in need of replacement. We've also heard a few rumours, and having met the proprietor, he seems like a wide boy who might just slip in an extra item on his invoice "by mistake". We sent a querying email.
Later we went to a party at a former neighbour's house - sadly we were the oldest ones there - everyone else was under 30, or so it seemed. We managed to talk to a few interesting people though.
Sunday was a miserable wet day. We attracted most of the local kids into the house somehow (must be the death trap AKA trampoline) and the noise level was immense. Vicky was bored and wandered round with the kids to add to this mix. Fun Fun Fun.
Monday was a bank holiday - the Queen's birthday apparently. We decided to have V&W round for nosebag, so headed into Tauranga to raid PakNSave. We also stopped in at Bond+Bond, and scored an Emachines netbook for Di. She apparently needs a machine while she's at work. Neither of us really wanted Windoze seven, and as the netbook was a mere $399 inc GST (which can be reclaimed) and it's XP powered and the right size to drop into the handbag, it seemed like a steal.
I cooked a massive pot of chill-con-carne, which V&W tore into like they hadn't eaten for a week. Both of them are now eating meat again, having given in to the cravings and got fed up with feeling anaemic. The latest graze is apparently a diet linked to blood group which means that Wayne can't drink beer - only red wine and cider. Such a shame we had several reds left over from the party.
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