Niall’s virtual diary archives – Friday 17th April 2009

Friday 17th April 2009: 6.05pm. It's sure been a busy few weeks - I have been making very good use of my free time now that lectures are done. I have added a "feed of feeds", the "All Things Niall Feed" which uses Yahoo Pipes to draw together all the feeds from all my websites into one giant feed. In fact, last entry the feed ripper for this website didn't work very well - it didn't pass Atom 1.0 validation but now it does. Indeed, in the process I even wrote an Atom format RSS output for Plone which was my first publicly published piece of Zope DTML programming. It's strange really ... after all the years of refusing to touch web programming because it's too toy, I must admit that it's finally powerful enough to merit my bother (though Tn still makes XML data services, ASPX .NET and even Zope look extremely toy)

The Freeing Growth plan continues apace - I won't bother repeating here my post about my plans on the Freeing Growth website - and my activity since I got back from Scotland has been mostly preparing for my PhD application and also my job application to the University of Limerick for a position as a Junior Lecturer. Scotland was busy but good, saw a fair chunk of people from St. Andrews just before their term ends, and my next journey outside of Ireland will be one of a visit to Johanna in Sweden, Nat in Belgium or Northern England (via Hull). To be honest, it depends entirely on how the next few months pan out, not least the current likely exhaustion of cash in September after which myself and Megan will starve. If welfare let me sign on during the summer months, all will be well so long as they pay most of the full amount. I'm hoping to set up a grind school company in addition to the publishing company aiming to begin trading in September - this should provide much needed cash flow which is going to be a very serious problem if welfare drag their heels or refuse to pay (this is quite possible as I have no social insurance stamps).

My head is pretty spongey so I shall conclude for now - I think it is a combination of not being used to concentrating for long periods thanks to falling out of practice due to the previous ten days of holiday, and also because those ten days were fairly exhausting and I haven't recovered yet fully. But soon I will - and then shall come the exams starting early May. Be happy!