Thursday Update

Today a colleague came to me and asked me if I wanted to visit the pub at lunchtime. The prospect of spending an hour sitting in the sunshine supping a pint of Old Speckled Hen was rather tempting, so I said yes.

Ten minutes later another colleague reminded me that I'd agreed to give a talk on Relational Databases at lunchtime as part of our "Lunch and Learn" series. Damn. So instead I spent the time clutching a whiteboard pen, explaining databases to a few of our software engineers. Still, there's always tommorow for the pub, and I get a few brownie points for doing the talk. I have to do another one in a couple of weeks on T-SQL. Yippee.

Apparantly the Chinese are engaged in an attempt at corporate espionage and are targeting "the company" with specific viruses designed to steal our technology. Sounds exciting, probably isn't. Of course we already have a joint-venture with the Chinese, and they have copies of a lot of source code anyway.

We sold the Rover on the weekend as well. The money will now be used to pay off the new video-camera, and to go on holiday. We've found a place that says we can book a nice place in Devon for a ridiculously cheap price. We tried to book it and it says they'll get back to us within 2 days. Fingers crossed, cos it is a fantastic deal. A week in a nice-looking lodge in a holiday park for £216. I really hope we get it.

I've started my first Java application as well. The difference between nice, easy course examples and a real-life app are fairly startling. Not least all the engineering guidelines and conventions we have to follow. Plenty of experienced people for me to ask stupid questions though, so I'll get there in the end I'm sure.

-Neil