Sorry, Where Was I?

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.