I’m listening to the long-awaited album right now. I heard the first half last night. It’s actually pretty good. Some of the songs make me laugh though (see the intro to Scraped).

Oh well. It’s good stuff. 🙂

I left work at 5:30 and I got to the train station 10 minutes later. 15 minutes before the train is scheduled to leave. Lame!

I’lve spent the last day and a bit coughing and shivering. Not sure what’s wrong, but I’ve just been getting on with it. Can’t really call in sick at my new job already. Can’t go missing my HNC either. Oh well.

I should be able to finish my FormMail/Captcha project at work today. 🙂 I think the process of making an installable is a bit over-complicated, but it works, so that’s good.

I think I’m getting used to the system quite quickly though, it’s just a pain not having much access because I’m new. 🙁

VAT is currently at 17.5% in the UK. That’s quite high compared to California which was something like 8.5% when I was there, I think. That’s probably something to do with the fact that we have the NHS.

Starting from Monday the VAT rate will be 15% to try to combat some of the effects of the global economic downturn. Credit crunch. Financial crisis. Money-related-buzzword.

Unfortunately that means that bunches of stuff on the company website needs to be changed a bit because it charges VAT at the regular 17.5% rate at the moment. I suppose this is kind of how all those computer people felt back in 1999 in the run up to the Y2K disaster-that-never-happened.

Luckily the people who wrote the code in the first place seem to have forseen this and have a variable in a module somewhere that they can just change to account for differences in the VAT rate. 🙂

There are still loads of customers who will have shops set up on their servers that will need to make the changes themselves. It’s going to cause a lot of problems for people who are less organised.

What shall I do with my extra 2.5%?

Last night I caught the bus back to Mansfield, even though I’d accidentally bought a return train ticket because I was going to college. As I was about to get on the bus I got a call from Dave telling me that I should get the train because there was an accident on the A60.

I ignored that advice thinking, somewhat foolishly, that the scene would be cleared before I got there anyway.

When we finally approached the scene of the accident the whole bus was diverted onto the A614 instead, bypassing a couple of stops. Luckily nobody seemed to need those stops anyway.

I got to college an hour late. 🙁

I’m so glad I have my new phone. I spent most of the bus journey chatting on IRC, playing around with street view on Google Maps, pretending to be in Nice or Monaco.

I’m not having much luck with public transport this week.

The train was cancelled… 🙁

I put my headphones on a couple of minutes ago on my free coach journey. I put Last.fm on with the ‘awesome’ tag. Somehow NERD made it onto the playlist. One of the lyrics went “Life is short and black and white, just like little penguins”

Well, what can you say about that?

Today I have actually been working on some support tickets. I’m timetabled in to be doing very specific easy tickets with the help of my colleagues, but I’m doing more complicated ones, and I’m doing them on my own.

Admittedly I haven’t done very many (about 3 or 4) but that’s because I don’t know the systems well enough. I don’t want to grab a ticket that I’m not sure I can fix, so I spend a few seconds researching it and by then someone else has usually grabbed it. 🙁

Oh well. Still enjoying it. 🙂

I’ve finished my first day under the employ of my new company. It’s been a good day. I’m spending the first week working with the tech support team so I can have a better understanding of the company as a whole, which is quite nice.

The computer that I’m using for now is really really nice, apart from it’s got Windows Vista on it, but that’s ok for now. I’m not doing anything complicated with it.

I’ve met loads of people whose names I have mostly forgotten already. 🙂

I really think I’m going to enjoy getting used to working there.

I am le drunk!

I’ll be leaving college for the last time as an employee in about an hour.

It’s so strange to be leaving another job. I’m just pleased that I get to leave with everything being good. It’s not happened like that in other jobs for whatever reason. So yeah, I’m not pleased to be leaving, but I’m over the moon about having my new job. A bit of a contradiction…