After many years of dabbling in all things internet, today I took the first steps to truly becoming an internet entrepreneur. Myself and three partners have setup a company and plan to sell a web based service. I know the dot com days are well and truly over but I still believe that a business with a strong business plan and a superb niche market can make money on the web. 
Stay tuned for more updates as things progress!
For the last couple of week I have been so busy I didn’t even have time to blog.
Work is really busy and I’m spending a lot of time using SQL server and Transact SQL. Some of it is very interesting, especially the object oriented database concepts.
At home I have been working with Joomla, for those of you that are familiar with Mambo. This is mambo but the Open Source developers had a disagreement about the direction that Miro are taking the project. So off they went to start Joomla and I have to admit I’m very happy with it. I spent most of the weekend creating a template and getting to know the API, I like it.
Try it if you need a content management system.
Well i’m back from Frankfurt since friday and haven’t had a chance to post since. Work is finally picking up, which is nice. This does however leave me with less time to blog 
I have a couple of photos I took in Frankfurt that I will put up in the Gallery. Didn’t really get out of the hotel much during the training. But in typical Irish fashion a group of us made a break for it at midnight for a “few” beers on the town. We had only finished work at midnight(started at 8am) but we wanted to make the most of it. So we stumbled back to the hotel at 6am and got an hours sleep before the training began the next day again.
It was fun giving a presentation to 120 people after only an hours sleep, but everyone seemed to think it went great saying it was my “irish charm” that got us through.
Here are a couple of pictures from the trip
This one was the view from my hotel room window.
Work are sending me to Frankfurt tomorrow evening for a three day training course. Should be good fun.
I will be staying at the Intercontinental, Frankfurt pictured below.
I’m not sure if the room will have high-speed internet access. The “superior” rooms do, but i’m not sure if work splashed for that. I will try to get on and post to my three loyal readers (including myself in that figure).
I must take lots of photos and bring them back.
Information is no longer a scarce resource - attention is
I was reading the always excellent “Joel on Software” and came across this reference to Life hacking scroll down to “Multitasking in the Workplace”. Joel is an advocate of private offices for all employees, simply by removing distractions you increase productivity.
[an employee] would take an average of 25 minutes to return to what they were doing [after being interupted].
Joels article points to this excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine[free subscription required] the article by Clive Thompson is about how we have so much information coming at us in a regular day that we are constantly interrupted, wether by Instant Message, E-Mail, Collegue, telephone, etc. So we spend our days looking at these distractions and very little time doing any work.
Fascinating stuff thoroughly worth a read.
The 43 folders website is all about Life hacking and has some amazing tips on how to clear your time for the things that matter.
Traditional methods to help you concentrate (still very valid and helpful) I particularly like the “be here now” approach. I’m going to try it over the next few days and see how that comes out.
Internal training courses for work are sometimes a bit of a bore! You have to take the rough with the smooth I suppose. But this particular (online) course I have completed today was taking boredom to a whole new level! It was a six hour course that was nothing but pages and pages of text(100’s). It was split into 7 modules, each one with a test at the end, then after you completed all the modules there was a big test, that you had to get a minimum of 70% in. Well I tell you that course may have caused me brain damage (or maybe that was all the beer at the weekend, hmmm). I need to go browse the internet now to regain some sanity.
Having been away from the Head Office on a different site for a few weeks, I came back to hear that one of our two lifts has had a sex change!! We formally had two female’s but now one has gone all butch. I have to admit it’s a little strange, maybe the other lift will get a testosterone shot soon too? Watch this space!
Finally they have me doing some real work. Thats why I have not being posting so much recently. I will make a dedicated effort to post more I promise :p .
So anyway this is what I’m doing:
Unit testing and Regression testing a very large website. It’s interesting to see how much effort goes into a large enterprise web portal with a huge backend!
I’m doing all this using HTTPUnit and JUnit. Which are based on Java, which I don’t know too well. I’m having to learn very quickly.
So after a month of doing nothing I am finally back working. I have been moved to Lansdowne Rd. I’m currently on a test team for a fairly major website but should be moving to the development team in the near future. I can see the stadium out the window. I will take some photos tomorrow.
Well I discussed the situation with the other half last night, she seemed more excited about it then I do. I sometimes feel like a bit of a homebird, prefering to sit in the house, watch my favourite TV shows and mess about on the internet. But I know that it would be a good experience to get out and do this, even if I do have to leave my cushy house.
Laziness more then anything is keeping me from wanting to do it.
I guess it’s time to get up off my lazy ass and give it a try.