About

Many years ago when I was a student, for the 3rd year of my degree I was sent to a place called “the real world”. Here I became a COBOL programmer and learnt some of the hard facts about data processing, namely it was a bit dull and on a VT3270 only came in two colours, black and green.

It was partly this experience that made me decide that I wanted to work in a place where there were at least 256 colours and that they moved, hence why my final year degree course looked at Digital Video. From here there was then a natural progression to CDROM development and over decade later I’m still in one way or another making web applications. 

Whilst I was on my placement I worked as part of a team, one of the more important tem members was a business analyst called Jon. Now in those days I left everyday pretty much on time,  I wasn’t paid to work late andwasn’t really expected to. So when I started to put my placement report together at the offices in the evening, I was supprised to see Jon there most evenings working away. One evening I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was checking some of the work which had been done, I asked him why he didn’t just go home and do it in the morning? He explained it would still be there todo tomorrow along with a million other things.

It became apparent that this guy really was busy, so another night I asked himwhy he was so busy and he took a peice of paper and wrote all the different job roles in the department – Developer, Senior Developer, Change control, deployement etc, etc. He then drew circles around each of the job titles, “you see, this circle represents the responsibilites of  the developer” he said. “This circle is the responsibilities of the senior  developer” and he continued to draw circles around all the job titles “..and this is the responsibilites of the senior business analyst, thats me. But! all the gaps between all the circles are also my responsibility, the ones that nobody else wants, these grey areas“.

So this blog isn’t about HTML coding, Sysadmin, PHP frameworks, Photoshop techniques or Papervision – it’s about the “grey areas“, the bit people forget, but the stuff that holds the rest of it together.

Basically I spend my time “organising” and I’ll show some tools here, this isn’t necessarily the same as my day job, but still worth my while putting a little back after years of using the free sotware from the GPL – oh and I dare say there may be a couple of gig reports here too.