I've been slack in my updating of the blog again of late, it seems, so an update on everything interesting (not that much then...).

Firstly, work - as usual, this is pretty high up on my agenda. In the past week I've been put on notice that I'm going to be losing a pretty big ongoing contract that I've enjoyed for nearly a year. In one way it was a bit of a shock, but in others there'd been signs that it was on its way out. This isn't something that's down to me, but the department that pays me has lost a significant amount of funding - there's going to be significant job losses across the board, and it looks very much like I'm going to be out. That said, the fact that the contract has lasted this long is frankly quite shocking. It's good that it's lasted this long. On relaying this information to Sioned, she said that I shouldn't worry too much as I'll no doubt manage to fill the gap quite easily. Still, I didn't think that it'd be as quick as having an e-mail some 7 hours after hearing the above news asking if I'd like to consider working on another contract with another public sector organisation around here. A further phone call today sees me scheduling the meeting for the middle of next week. Monday I've got another meeting to finally hand over a working version of a piece of software I've been developing for the last few weeks to a local SMC. It's been an interesting project as - whilst it's just-another-piece-of-software, it's been developed for use in a sector I've got absolutely no experience of. This is one of the nice things about working in the way that I do - I get to experience a lot of new things and constantly add to my knowledge. Next Wednesday sees me heading down to Swansea for a few days for a training course. The University are sending me down there, and I'm staying in the new SA1 development. I gather there's a lot of nice places to go out and intend to have a good mooch around the area whilst I'm there. If anyone can recommend good eateries that cater for vegetarians and any other places I should look at whilst I'm there, then let me know! I'm there for 5 days all in, so I've got a bit of time.

In geekery news, I've been giving the new Macbook Pro a hell of a hammering. It's been used to edit about 60 hours of video so far, done some audio recording (doing editing on the fly) under Logic, as well as doing a fair bit of work under Parallels. Frankly, it's been utterly flawless. I'm really rather pleased with it, although as expected, the video editing eats disk like it's going out of fashion.

Our car is up for sale. The Saab is going to be gone soon, and we're replacing it with a Mercedes C220 or C270. The Saab - whilst bags of fun to drive, is costing me an absolute fortune to run being as I'm doing so many miles at the moment. It returns a not-unreasonable 30mpg from a 2.0 litre petrol with a turbo behind it. That said, it's still a bit too low so we're opting for a boring-but-more-economic diesel next.

House stuff. We've pretty much decided we're going to stay where we are for now. Whilst our house is still worth a pretty respectable amount, we're now at the stage where we're close to being pretty happy with it. During the last week we've managed to finish off the new kitchen which has been a project going on for about 6 weeks. We've now got some rather nice new worksurfaces (black, of course) with funky new cupboards everywhere. We've also changed the format of the kitchen ever so slightly (moving the cooker a bit). Today has seen us taking the back garden apart - ripping the whole lot up in preparation for another change there. We've now got a skip full of crap just outside.

I somehow managed to end up being one of the few that were chosen to be offered tickets for Live Earth at Wembley this weekend, although we didn't really much fancy the line up, nor the trip down to London and ending up back here at some stupid hour, and besides - it wasn't exactly a cheap gig either (£125 for a pair of tickets?! Screw that) so didn't bother going. It's been a pretty reasonable decision, I think, as I've had far too much stuff to do this weekend (finishing touches to the software et al).

I think that's about it for now.