Welcome to ned Productions

Wednesday 3rd February 2010: 5.42pm. So much for my birthday entry being anywhere near my birthday! Still, being two weeks late is not that bad considering the three month gap before the last entry I guess ... and I have been oh so busy since the last entry. Firstly we had that great freeze in Ireland (and indeed Europe) which effectively extended everyone's Christmas holidays by quite a bit, and because everyone was marooned in their houses not a lot happened for anyone at all really. Our water got cut off because the mains water pipe froze, but we weren't as badly off as a lot of people who had been cut off due to pipes bursting - for a long time now Ireland has had some of the leakiest water pipes in Europe with more than half our water going into the soil. No one's that bothered - we're blessed with lots of fresh water, indeed often too much fresh water due to us cutting down all the trees surrounding the upstreams of our rivers such that our rivers and towns get frequently flooded much as happened very severely before Christmas when most of Cork city and western Ireland got submerged. Anyway, by the time we got to my birthday everyone had just about got back to work and stuff started moving. My main preoccupation at that time was putting together my company's first annual return, and thanks to the assholes at Microsoft we first had to find a replacement for Microsoft Accounting 2009 which they had suddenly retired without warning. That meant evaluating a series of ERP and accounting packages which sucked up a week or so. I eventually plumped for the almost unknown but very highly respected VT Transaction+ which has garnered rave reviews from small business in the UK for years now, but it was not an easy choice at all.

Most UK and Irish small business uses Sage which royally sucks as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to use it will tell you. Sage is extremely expensive for what it does, it has an appallingly bad user interface, it is extremely unintuitive, it causes anyone using it to mostly spend their time ripping out their hair and cursing it - and best of all, its more recent SME editions have dropped multi-currency support which is jaw dropping in the European context. There are others such as MYOB, but Sage bought them not too long ago so I don't have high hopes for its future. The other big contender is QuickBooks, but they suffer from an idiotic business plan where they lure you in with time-bombed features in cheaper editions which suddenly expire and then it demands a paid upgrade to start working again. Before you know it, you're handing over two thousand euro a year for a package which does what you need and moreover, they basically did a Mafia extortion on you.

Those are the two big boys, and both are rubbish options. Both vendors deserve to go out of business for their ethics and the shoddy quality of their products. If you do any internet research at all, you will quickly wonder how the hell they ever get any new customers - but then again I guess most new business owners never bother researching the internet before they buy because you can do one hell of a lot better than either Sage or QuickBooks AND for a lot less money.

This leaves a SME ERP solution - ERP systems are basically an operating system for a company, so they tell each worker what to do and when to do it and the ERP system (is supposed to) manages everything else such as the accounts and stock levels. I evaluated two options for an ERP solution: (i) Adempiere, probably the most featured open source ERP currently available and (ii) Interprise Suite, because they offer a free one user licence. These two were chosen for evaluation because they both supported European VAT and multi-currency - both are absolute necessities for an Irish company as we tend to do a lot of importing and exporting - which almost every other solution I could find on the internet doesn't do. Boy do I miss Microsoft Accounting! They had such a great product for its price .

Both of these solutions were very good - both had all the right features and both were well implemented. Interprise had a much better user interface as it runs as a native application on Windows whereas Adempiere has a nasty Java/Web interface. Adempiere, like so many open source applications of its kind, required an awful lot of setting up and lengthy configuration - so much so it got discounted because of it. Interprise had pre-written templates which did almost all of the config for you, thereafter it was just lots of tweaking. What put me off Interprise was that the demo/single user edition they supplied was last updated in 2007 - hardly boding well given the extensive changes to VAT rules since 1st Jan 2010 (and precisely why everyone had to drop Microsoft Accounting so quickly), and I got the feeling that they'd hardly be bending over to support a single-user licence like myself. And besides, I had a natural aversion to getting into bed with another company who wasn't 110% committed to the product - I didn't want to have to do another Microsoft Accounting style migration as trust me, migrating between accounting systems is painful.

So in the end I went with VT Transaction+ which is not an ERP solution, it's just a simple accounting program. However it costs just £200 a year as compared to £1700 or so for Sage/QuickBooks or £1000 or so a year for Interprise, plus it has full support for VAT, multi-currency and it has really good Excel export so it spits out a very nice properly formatted set of accounts in Excel ready for submission. Having purchased the software, I then fully migrated the accounts, hacked at the templates to fudge the UK accounting format into the Irish standards (thankfully the regulatory standards are similar, it's just that all the laws have different names for obvious reasons) and finally submitted my annual return today!

Meanwhile, throughout all these fun and games I also finished the contract with ARA which took another twenty-three hours this past month, though I only had the NTE for twenty hours but I like to finish a job properly. And lastly, mainly because I've had a VPS sitting in Los Angeles doing nothing since November, I finally rented a VPS in Atlanta and implemented a geo-directing DNS server such that nedproductions.biz and other hosted sites now use their local server rather than having to go to Europe all the time which is really very neat. Who knows, soon I might even be in a position to start selling Plone webspace at long last (I need to finish configuring the shopping cart first)!!!

So, I am now thirty-two years old, and as always in the birthday post it's time to look back on another year of life. This is what I have done this past year:

• Escaped the BIS Masters in UCC
  Looking back on it now I can't believe how much I hated that course or indeed that entire academic year. I disliked academia enough in St. Andrews, but at least they generally weren't as pig ignorant of their own field and moreover my time in St. Andrews was made worth it by all the non-academic stuff going on which, much like in Hull, was the real education. That real education was non-existent during my time in UCC, and so it was nothing but bad all the way through, not helped by the chip on the shoulder which most Cork people have anyway towards anyone with talent.
  
  I am extremely glad to not be doing that anymore. It didn't help that I was mentally and physically absolutely exhausted after St. Andrews and simply no longer in the mood for any of that bullshit. I have been deliberately taking ten to twelve hour sleeps each night since last summer and my overall health and wellbeing has massively improved. When I look into the mirror I no longer see anything like the lines on my face or dark bags under my eyes and I no longer wonder to myself if I might have cancer. When I compare me now to photos from the end of St. Andrews, I literally look five years younger. I feel about ten years younger though, and it's great!
  
  Now all that said I did meet some good people during my time in UCC, and the prize money from the Enterprise Ireland competition kept both myself and Megan alive for nearly four months. For the prize money alone I think the BIS Masters was probably worth it overall, and I suppose it's an extra arrow to my bow for the foreseeable future. Winning the prize certainly sounds good - in the interviews I've done since you can see them being noticeably impressed. It's funny how people value such things. So overall, I think that I will remember the 2008/2009 academic year as being rather like my year at Trinity College Dublin: not a lot of fun at all, but an edifying experience which stands to you in the long run even though it shouldn't if there were any justice in the world.
  
  
• Set up my own company
  I have dreamed of setting up my own company and working for myself ever since my experiences working in EuroFighter where I saw that the contractors were the guys on top of the pile, and while I was working sixty hour plus weeks, I was being paid for thirty-five and therefore getting an equivalent of €7/hour after tax. Meanwhile they were being paid €50/hour upwards with time and quarter overtime when management fucked up and made you work late. Had I been an IT contractor at that time I would have been earning €80/hour given it was pre-IT bubble burst. I suppose it helps a lot that the lads I grew up with all started their own businesses, plus my mother's family were entrepreneurial, but I really have to admit that I particularly value the ability to work on what I want when I want, and if one day I wake up and I don't feel like working then I don't have to.
  
  Moreover, let's face it: I have a personality which many people find disagreeable, and I also find working with many people stressful because they don't give a toss about doing their best. Not having to work with such people, or when I do they are paying me for their screwups, well I find that very pleasant indeed. I don't mind at all someone wasting my time if €100 is going into my hand .
  
  I guess what I mean to say is that I have a value inside my head of what my time is worth to me, and I strongly object to working any job where my time is not similarly valued by my employer. Because I value my liberty so much, I have a fairly high valuation of my time - sufficiently high that most ordinary jobs won't pay such a figure to someone as young as myself. Therefore, for someone of my age, the only route to such high marginal earnings has to be self-employment.
  
  Anyway, I last tried to form my own company after returning from Spain back when I was trying to commercialise Tn with venture capital funding. Without the backing I decided not to proceed, but had I not gone to St. Andrews then I definitely would have formed my own company. Well now I have, and while I haven't made much money yet I am hoping to report large profits this time next year!
  
  
• We survived!
  For much of this past year I fretted about how I was going to feed myself and Megan - indeed, for much of the last eighteen months we had between two and four months worth of money to go before we were destitute. It is truly a horrible feeling because you never truly relax - and no, social welfare has still not paid out though I am glad to report that my dole application has left the Dublin processing queue and has entered the Cork processing queue, so the welfare office currently think it'll probably be a full year from application to payout. Hopefully they will backpay me in full because I am now about €4000 in debt!
  
  We have been immensely lucky in hindsight. Firstly things like the car haven't spectacularly broken down or anything bad and unexpected happen like an accident or sickness. Even in the positive sense things have gone well when they might have not, such as us both passing our driving tests okay which was great as hitherto we were driving illegally, and it was a great relief to be finally actually covered by our €1000/year insurance. Secondly on every occasion when the bank balance started to enter the "fumes remaining only" level something unexpected has magically appeared in the nick of time e.g. the Enterprise Ireland prize money, the ARA contract or indeed Megan's work permit to name but a few.
  
  Between all of these we have finally become financially okay for these last three months, and I no longer fret about everything suddenly crashing down. In fact if things continue well we may even take a small holiday this summer, nothing fancy but nevertheless a major step up.

I think that those three things are the most significant accomplishments of my past year from my present perspective. I do wish that I had got my PhD rolling, but it was not for a lack of applications made or effort invested. I haven't done much on rolling my own PhD in the past few weeks given my busyness, but now that the ARA contract is cleared, the accounting systems migrated, the Annual Return filed and the geo-targeting DNS server implemented, I am hoping to dedicate two days per week into it and writing my Economics study book. For the other four days per week I need to get a shopping cart implemented, then I can start selling my content filtering boxes of which I have three already built and in stock below as well as selling general Plone web hosting and services.

So, so far so good! Let us once again hope that 2010 is our best year yet! Be happy!

Sunday 3rd January 2010: 4.28pm. Wow, some three months have passed and it's suddenly 2010! Has this been the longest break in virtual diary entries in twelve years? I think so. And yet again when I consider what I have done since the last entry, I know that I did loads of stuff but I can't quite think of any of it. What I have done recently is fix the "All Things Niall" Feed which had broken itself because Yahoo Pipes simply isn't working properly anymore and apparently they aren't going to fix it, so I wrote up some PHP which munges together all the feeds and outputs a combined feed which works nicely: this "blog" (I prefer "virtual diary") as it appears on Facebook and LinkedIn and many other sites, is now working again.

I went to the US for Thanksgiving in late November with Megan's family, then went travelling around Europe visiting people I'm still in contact with (and my apologies to those of you who weren't close enough to my line of travel this time round) which lasted until just before Christmas. My travels were hardly boring: I managed to fall severely out with Johanna over a matter of ideology, and we are no longer in regular contact at my insistence. Most sad. I am very upset about it.

The Christmas break seemed longer than usual this year in the sense that I haven't done any useful work since returning home until yesterday - partially the fault of how the weekends fell this year, but also a determined attempt to have a proper holiday break this year considering that the prior two Christmases were spent writing essays or other coursework which did not aid the holiday spirits! I suppose also that I am hoping for 2010 to be the start of a whole raft of new endeavours now that the company is established and trading with a hopefully viable business model, Megan has permission to stay and work in Ireland indefinitely and now we just need to kick off the next round. I finally went ahead and purchased an exercise bike - the outdoors proved too cold and inconvenient to incorporate into my daily schedule, and the PhD I was invited to apply for at UCC researching Federated Autonomic Trust Management did not come through for me which was a surprise given my superb background experience in that area - I had been anticipating walking in each day from a remote car park and that way gaining the needed exercise. Either way I recognise that my cardiovascular system isn't maintaining itself with zero effort any more - as I age it appears to need increasing maintenance much as with my gums where flossing has become very necessary as otherwise they recede (i.e. gum disease!).

Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I finally got around to erecting a proper company website for ned Productions Limited which is now listed on the navigation bar on the left and I also did some purchasing of stock and setting up of a shopping cart system such that internet users can buy stuff - probably Untangle boxes rather like this guy who beat me to it but thankfully he's US and dollar centric. During the latter end of October and the start of November I wrote a series of economic policy articles for the Irish progressive think-tank TASC copies of which I have placed on the neo-capitalism website as the last one was too radical for them to publish so they silently dropped me. I do remember doing some more work on nedmalloc for ARA and indeed I still have some loose ends to tie up there during the next few weeks, and hopefully before the end of January I'll release a beta of nedmalloc as it has so many new features. Social welfare still hasn't paid out which at six months now is breathtaking, but at least they owe me at least five grand now which is good since once again I will run out of money at the end of January. I also have the end of year tax and accounts filing for the company which must be lodged very shortly in a tax efficient manner i.e. cue me trudging through the Irish tax code.

Lastly, this year I will either get a PhD started or get that summaries of Economics papers book written. One or the other: failure to accomplish either is unacceptable now that the company is generating money though it will take some time before I can leave welfare support given the current economic climate. For the PhD, it all depends on obtaining research funding for which I firstly need a willing PhD supervisor - and that alone I have thus far failed to accomplish, but I am slowly getting closer.

Next entry will be in just a few weeks time: my annual "summary of the past year" post which I do around my birthday when I will turn thirty-two! Until then, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Sunday 27th September 2009: 12pm. Heh, what can I write about this entry which is any different from the last entry? A good question to be sure! I've accomplished a few small things: the first is that I have finally, finally, finally finished converting my CV into XML and it is available online here. I have wanted to get that done for oh about five years now because maintaining the Word edition was becoming increasingly annoying over time: any time you applied for a job you'd have to manually cut & paste the bits relevant to the job, and the Gantt chart had to be separately maintained from the main listings. What I really needed was a programmatically controllable CV and that really means a custom XML format with a parametrised XSL transformation to make it present itself as you need for some given purpose. The output also has hResume microformatting so technically speaking the search engines should be able to pick it up.

I wasted a fair few hours trying to get that CV to work right on Internet Explorer - unlike Safari or Chrome, IE actually does spit out "the right thing" but unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to make jQuery accept XHTML in a way which worked (on IE) which oddly enough was an identical problem with my MBS BIS final project. Anyway in the end I gave up - all browsers will happily translate the XML into XHTML, it's just only Opera and Firefox will let the user mess around with the conversion settings. And in the end it is currently only Firefox with the support for CSS3 rotated text, so Firefox alone works perfectly which is a bit sad though all too common.

The other major thing that I have been doing during the last month is a contract with Applied Research Associates for work on my memory allocator nedmalloc which now is pretty much complete and is worth a good few bob to my company which is great as it's seriously in debt - as indeed am I. The RoIP contract came through too which will no doubt occupy much of next week, and I have also been working on a critical pedagogy for numerate social science subjects which currently looks like this:

The theory goes that students completing the above would be much better placed to not repeat the mistakes made during the recent credit crunch and indeed before that, the Enron and other accounting/consulting related lapses in morality. My hope is that we might be able to collaboratively develop this into something serious though of course it would be highly unlikely to go anywhere without a serious bandwagon effect. Anyway, we'll see.

The plan still holds to make a start on that "synopses of Nobel prize winning papers" book after the RoIP contract is done using all my work on deepereconomics.org to good effect, and then after that to start my PhD thesis. Meanwhile Megan has begun her OU Masters in Education course, and she has her next driving test this coming Friday. I also must start getting more exercise - I have exceeded eleven stone and I am definitely becoming fat which needs to be fixed, not least that fluid keeps building in my lungs due to lack of breathing fresh air - however, after these two contracts and hopefully the imminent payout of welfare after oh, like four months now, we should be financially secure until 2010 so I can finally relax. Be happy!

Monday 31st August 2009: 10.25pm. Well the summer is almost over - Dad comes back from his holidays on Thursday which is the usual signifier of being back to work, and the weather is definitely becoming much cooler - I had to turn on the heating a few days ago because it was getting too nippy even under a blanket.

This month, much like last month and the month before it, has once again very little evidence to show for its passing. I have my ZEO cluster running as you can see if you like on deepereconomics.org or lowenddedi.net though in fact at the present time it actually consists of just one lonely and very puny Celeron D processor until the tax office return from their holidays and give me my VAT number. I have finally got the latter site up and running despite having languished for such a long time - I bought the domain itself maybe two months ago, but it needed some custom Zope datatype programming and teaching myself how to do that swallowed a week just on its own. Meanwhile, very, very, very slowly, deepereconomics.org is finally at a point where I can start adding some content as I have nailed one pernicious bug after another.

Once again I wonder where the hell all the time went - how can one invest ten to twelve hours a day every day and get almost nowhere after two months? I was even getting up early as Megan got herself a summer job teaching English to foreign kids so I was dropping her in early and collecting her fairly late. I haven't had the time to release TnFOX as I usually do each summer, and the Radio over IP work I did in July was done before even the last entry. Furthermore I didn't need to drive Megan to and from Mallow daily anymore as she failed her test so that yielded even more free time. I am also very sure that I have been pushing myself hard because my mouth ulcer opened itself up again, and that only happens when I'm getting very run down - moreover, I do feel knackered and I do know I keep forcing myself to work just that extra hour or two per day. I almost wonder if I should start keeping a time and motion study!

At this present time it seems unlikely that Megan has obtained a teaching job, and the TEFL one has ended so she has a lot of free time on her hands. She has a her visa application to make, and I suppose she needs to start thinking of non-teaching jobs and activities which make her the network of contacts requisite for getting a teaching job such as voluntary work and interacting with the teaching unions. She also needs a slew of further qualifications unfortunately, but it's a dog-eat-dog world out there and even a Masters is fairly worthless nowadays. You just gotta have that PhD.

Speaking of which, I will almost certainly write that crib book for Economics students first and after begin writing my PhD with an intent to submit it for PhD by Publication which a few of the UK universities nowadays offer. I am hoping to have it done by Summer 2010 though if I keep up this low level of accomplishment then it'll probably be Summer 2011 at this rate. Once I have the PhD, many opportunities open themselves not least the possibility of a US work visa.

So that's the plan. If we're ever going to make any sort of progress in life like getting married or having children then we gotta get some money from somewhere. Money sucks and the system stinks, but time is running out before oil and food starts to seriously rise in price - hence all those governments buying up agricultural land recently. And then the shit will really hit the fan. Be happy!