I've been neglecting my journalling, as usual. So...

Job - I've been with OpenBet for 5 months now. It's going well. There's a great atmosphere and the two teams I work on are nice. I'm still on the learning curve and it's still a bit stressful but much better than the last job for my mental health. They're very big on staff contentment with lots ( Read more... )

No updates since August. Bad Jonathan ( Read more... )

Just noticed I haven't posted here since the beginning of July ( Read more... )

For a number of years I read three magazines a month: SFX, GamesTM and Edge. But with money being tight I dropped Edge a couple of months back. I figured I didn't need to get two games mags. Well now I'm dropping SFX. I have lots of stuff to read and no commute to read them in. So I may as well save £4 a month. I'm going to stick with GamesTM for ( Read more... )

So I've just got a letter from the benefits office telling me that my Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) will be cut from £58.45 a week to £25.11 per week. A drop of £33.34.

This is because I now earn £83.02 per week from my 2 days per week job. So removing that JSA drop means I am effectively £48.68 better off working. But my transport costs me £11 per ( Read more... )

So sinec we decided that the existing Linux rdesktop software would be acceptable for use by SoThin's existing clients we now come to a new stage. We need to be able to install Linux (currently Ubuntu) from a USB drive to client machines. That's already doable but what I need to do is to be able to put in a USB stick, install Linux and then run a ( Read more... )

So my Work Placement at SoThin has been extended. I'm doing 2 days a week until next year (I can do up to 16 hours according to DWP rules) and they pay my travel expenses. They've said that in the new year they may be able to take me on minimum wage if company finances permit. This is good, but a 40 hour week at £5.93 per hour still leaves me about ( Read more... )

So technically my placement at SoThin ended on Friday with the end of the Employer Engagement New Deal course.  But the boss wasn't in most of the week due to the snow issues. So I wrote a handover document about the project, what I learned, what I'd do differently. We chatted on email and I'm going back on Friday for a chat about maybe extending ( Read more... )

As part of the Employer Engagment course I have to write an 'elevator pitch'. This is a short (less than 30 seconds, shorter even) statement about who I am and what I do to spout at people I don't have long to impress (like at networking meetings).

So far I have

"Hi, I'm Jonathan Baddeley. I'm an experienced software developer who's worked in a wide ( Read more... )

So I just got back from the IT 360 expo at Earls Court that I wangled a free ticket to (read: I lied). It turns out it was nearly all infrastructure stuff (networks, hosting, storage, security etc). But there were a couple of intersting things. Firstly I went to a talk about a new Open University course which trains techies up in the business side ( Read more... )