So there’s been quite a lot going on that’s meant I’ve not had time to post here in a while. Well not until this week anyway.

The main thing has been that I’ve been working very hard on a new project…to get a new job! I’m pleased to say it has now been completed and I’m now into my third month with Mobeon, a Swedish company that produce voice and video mail systems for the telecommunications industry.

There are several benefits for me in this change:

1. I’m working with software.
2. I’m working with messaging software, i.e. e-mail servers and the like.
3. I get to work from home.
4. I get to travel around the world.
5. I get paid a bit more!

It’s not all roses though, the travel is quite extensive and can be at very short notice. So far, I’ve been to Sundsvall in Sweden (twice) and Jakarta, Indonesia. This can cause some problems with child care for Euan on the mornings when Louise works, but we’ve managed to work it out so far.

Working from home is cool, but I do have to be careful about not spending all my time working. It will be much better when I get a dedicated home office in which to work. At the moment I’m having to sit at the dining room table, so end up spending almost my entire day there!

Another reason why I’ve not had too much time for blogging is that I’ve been working quite a bit on the websites that I manage for various organisations. In particular, I’ve been working on one for the band I now play in, Northwood Volunteer Band. I’m particularly pleased with this one as it’s my first foray into content management systems, and it seems to work quite well with Joomla. However, now that I’ve been asked to do Euan’s school website I’ve discovered there some reasonably fundamental issues with both Joomla and Drupal. Joomla doesn’t have great frontend support for editors and both Drupal (at least the beta version of 5.0) and Joomla don’t have great permission/role frameworks, at least not natively. I’ll have to try the non-beta version of drupal plus extensions.