It's a been a while but despite being in front of a computer far too often, I've not had a chance to put my thoughts down on here.

Firstly my gran is gravely ill in hospital and I was up near Boro over the weekend to go visit her. I'm glad I did because she was conscious enough then to recognise me - something she's not able to do now. I think I'll be up again this weekend.

I headed back to Bristol on the sunday (rather than the bank holiday monday) because an old school mate was going to be down that day and I'd agreed to let him stay at mine. I got a call just north of Nottingham on my way back to say that the previous night someone had broken into his house in Warwick, nicked a load of stuff and then set four fires throughout the house in an attempt to torch the place. Looks like they've lost pretty much everything! Made me check I had household insurance when I got back! :)

Also, I've started this contract near Bristol and it's already gone very wrong (through no fault of my own). I'm supposed to be writing something that receives messages regarded as spam and produces reports for users on the amount of spam they receive, plus giving them the option to 'unlist' something that is considered spam (new German legislation apparently). Unfortunately the client has not configured their spam agent properly so it just dumps the offending message into a single text block and that's it - making it nigh on impossible to programmatically determine who the message was from, who it was to or what the subject was. The upshot is that the client isn't back in the country until mid next week so I may have a long weekend before starting again on Wednesday!

Still, might give me the chance to finish painting the hallway! :)