DMOZListing :). I must apologise profusely to all who have been incontact regarding work on Aggreg8. I have been Uber busy, setting up shop here in the UK. I am now sorted though, finally got myself a job(rippleffect.com), and have my office sorted too. I have another project I am working on now though, which should finish in a couple of weeks but after that I am Aggreg8 bound (I've said that before I know but this time I mean it:)). Anyway I hope ya'll are looking forward to Aggreg8 v0.2 ( See screenshot)
As you can probably guess, this is an Aggreg8 posting and I reckon I will start cross posting them all here.

One of the reasons I don't like flash sites is I have no control over how a link behaves…. I open all links in new tabs.. In flash you can't do that. I also saw Maxthon, a project that turns IE into a tabbed heaven. I'll try install through Cross Over office and report my findings. Of course i could just install it on my WinXP box but where's the fun in that.

My Grandads funeral was on Friday last. A very sad day but, it's a part of life eh?. We went fishing on Saturday in my grandads favourite lake and netted 19 fine looking trout. mmmmmmmm!!!!. I might say that it was my grandad giving us good luck but if you've seen Peter Kay's joke about the quavers, you'll know why I can't say that.

I travelled over to Norway with my Dad and my brother. We were in Copenhagen for a few hours and those of you that know Copenhagen know that it is a huge airport so it will come as no surprise when I tell you that I lost the other two. How do you think I found them ???.. Email!!. My Dad had his Toshiba L5 with him and I had my trusty iBook. We were both logged on through wifi. A quick mail soon sorted everything out. 🙂

I'm in Oslo ariport at the moment hooked up on a 2 for 1 account (they don't know about it though as me and my dad are logged on with the same details). I've been playing with Fink and just installed the Dillo browser which I also have installed on my Suse box. I have never seen a quicked browser in all my life… truly blistering rendering speeds. I must also post about the Live Cds I have been playing around with. Knoppix is the ultimate Live CD with truly everything installed and running from a cd that you could imagine. Damn small linux is a nother great offering and at only 50MB it rules.

Finally after 3 re-installs I managed to get my dream machine up and running. My new machine arrived yesterday afternoon. It’s a Packard Bell iXtreme 6092 (minus monitor). It’s got an AMD 3000+ Processor with 512 MB RAM, 80GB hard drive and a DVD writer. And all for a very palpable GBP310, from ebay of course (tam-pcs). I have SUSE 9.1 Pro installed. I really like it, really smooth and fast and the apps I have installed could not be beaten; Firefox, Zend Studio, Open Office, Thunderbird, KOrganiser, KOpete, Amorok, Apache 2, PHP, MySQL, Mozilla, DigiKam, K3B, MrProject, KDevelop, XMMS, CrossOver Office -> thus (Adobe Photohop, Macromedia Flash MX, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and internet explorer 6 [for testing only 🙂 ]) and loads of other great ones too. It’s a work horse, eating up everything I throw at it. Well that’s enough for now. I’m off to Norway tomorrow morning to my grandads funeral. I’ll be back on Sunday , back to the grindstone. Sya folks

Well it took a while but in the midst of our family's misfortune. I managed to get a job. It's with Rippleffect.com and I am really looking forward to it.

Bestefar Olsen died early this morning. A great man, was and still is what I aspire to be like. He will be sadly missed. It has put things in perspective really, more important things than getting a dream job. Thanks for your support lately guys……

I haven't updated on my job search progress, so here goes. As you all know finding a good job is a tedious process.

When I arrived in Australia I started travelling, when in Brisbane I decided to look on Monster.com.au to see if there were any good jobs in Sydney (where we were heading). I found one and applied for it. A few days later I had a phone interview and a few days after that i had the job… simple as that.. eezy peezy.

Now for some reason I was under the impression that that is how easy it was going to be when I settled in England… No Sir.

I have been searching all manner of websites/printed press and job centers looking for appealing jobs. There aren't many I can tell you. Most of them want .NET and C# and ASP.NET, which I could learn in a few days no doubt, but I don't want to. It's not what I would like to be doing in the future. I applied for a few anyway but of course it was mainly recruitment agencies that had advertised and as such either the advert was bogus (they do this just to get people on their books) or the job just never seems to materialise — quoting restructuring in company resulted in not needing any more staff..   A whole load of BS if you ask me and recruitment companies are not worth a flying donut.-[ If they did eventually get their act together and offer me a job, I probably would take it.. I never was one to stick to my beliefs].

I have applied for a couple of Graduate schemes as I see them as hugely beneficial to graduates wanting to start off as they introduce you to all the facets of the software/application development world. I was successful up to the 3rd round (3 of 4) with a company called Atos Origin. Pretty good company but I was interviewed by a HR person, something I had not adequately prepared for. They were looking for the elite.. It seemed I fit that mold technically but my interpersonal skills were lacking :(.

"An excellent level of customer
focus and interpersonal skills are key competencies in our recruitment
process and, while you did interview quite well and show some evidence of
this, we have very high standards and we have a lot of very high calibre
candidates who apply to us.  Unfortunately in comparision to other
candidates, you did not quite meet the standard. "

That was a bit of a kick in the goolies but I have learned. I realised that you got to talk the talk when talking to HR and non technical folk. I bought a few recommended books and have started studying them in anticipation of more interview – I am awaiting response from BAE Systems.
The books I bought were " Programming Interviews Exposed" and " How would you move Mount Fuji?". They are really good reads and well worth it.

Yesterday though I had an interview with rippleffect.com which I knew little about but upon completing the interview I was extremely impressed and definitely want to work there. The pay is a little lower than that of a graduate scheme but I think working on something you enjoy and are challenged constantly by is worth the difference in salary ten fold. That previous conclusion was a difficult one to come to but I know in my self that I am happiest when I am doing something that I enjoy and especially when I am learning new things about something that I enjoy. I am waiting to hear from rippleffect so fingers crossed.

A good buddy of mine from Uni managed to get me some work on a project he is working on. It's a cool project using SVG and PHP. It'll tide me over hopefully untill I get something more permanent. Anyway in summation, I reckon doing something you enjoy is worth more than a bigger salary. Sya. When I bought the above books I also bought Jeffrey Zeldman's " Designing with web standards"

My Grandad (85) has just gone into hospital again with a massive heart attack. They are shocked that he is still with us. Must be the viking coming through in him I suppose. Anyway, this is probably his first mention online.