I find myself apologising once again for the lack of posts in recent time. Unfortunately I do not have access to t’internet at my flat (but it might be coming soon) and I am usually too busy at work to actually post something (until now that is ).

Well as you all probably know by now, I am currently in Germany and working at Intergral on a new analytics product. You can read a little about the intitial rough release here if you want to know more about it. I was originally only meant to be here until September, but there is the possibility of going to France for 9 months or staying here for a further few months to work on a new software as a service product. Only time will tell which one I actually end up working on.

I must admit, after living back in Stoke for a while after having lived in Cambridge and then coming here to Stuttgart I do not particularly want to go back, so I might start looking for some opportunities that would allow me to move away again. I can’t see myself staying in Germany for ever, but I definitely do not see myself living back in Stoke either. Plus I need to get back to work with Johnny eventually, once we both have the money to continue.

I am now officially a certified Flex developer having took my exam last week at a prometric test centre and passed. It’s something that could come in useful in this media rich web world as I see more and more jobs that require knowledge in Flex/ActionScript. The company covered all expenses and obviously, trained me in the first place so I can’t complain .

They have also been very good by getting me a new laptop for personal/work use. My boss ended up buying my macbook pro from me and they did a deal for the rest. So I managed to get a new Dell XPS M1730 which was very very good of them to do. It is pretty much fully spec’d and cost around £1800 so you can imagine that I am very happy about that. I have not taken delivery of it yet, but Dell shipped it last Friday and it should be here come Wednesday.

I have spoken to John and things are going very well with his Stellant contract. He is going to America for a training course sometime soon and now has his blog listed on the Oracle blog list, which I can imagine is no easy task. Although reading his blog is now a hard task, having to filter through all the Stellant advice to get to the personal stuff .

I hope to keep posting as and when I get the chance. Hopefully this could be sooner rather than later if t’internet is installed in my building within the next few weeks. Until then, keep safe.

Its about time that I post an update as it has been a while. Well I have been in Germany for a month now and things are coming along nicely. I have managed to learn some new technologies such as flex, LiveCycle (BlazeDS) and ActionScript, and have already finished a lot of what I have to do which is always nice. It’s good that I have learned something about flex as we were going to use that for some of digaset.com. Knowing more about it makes me wonder whether we should or shouldn’t use it, but I can talk to Johnny about that another day. Well I have another 4 months to go until I get back to sunny Britain so I have a chance to build up a little bit of money. I should also have some consulting work when I get back to the UK which should help in keeping the coffers filled up. The worst thing in the world is working on your own thing and then finding that your money is running out – quickly, and not really knowing what to do next.

Well I finally had SmellBeautiful.co.uk all ready to launch about 3 days before I got this gig, so have had to postpone once again until I get back. I was hoping to get someone to send the parcels for me, but considering that I did not have time to get a feeling for it myself, it wouldnt have been fair to ask someone else to run it for me. I think it will be best if I release when I get back. Plus I will have a little bit more seed money for some more stock. If the shop makes even a little bit of money it will be nice and combined with the money from the projects I should be getting, I should have enough to keep me ticking over nicely. Also I have a couple of friends who started up in business after uni and they told me about some grants that are available to startups in the west midlands ranging from 5 – 15k. So far he has received two of these totalling about 20k, and the best thing is that they do not need to be be paid back. There are many reasons why they are giving away these grants but I do not think that there would be enough space on this page

Anyway, to sum up. Things are going well. Looking forward to getting more stuff done when I get back. Would be nice to get some free money rather than spending my own.

I have managed to secure a contract with ze Germans and will going to Stuttgart (south Germany) for the next 5 months. So if any of you fancy a good beer on a freaking good weekend then I would love you to pop over (Carl, John, Helmy, Mike, James, Svend, Ian and everyone else). I will be leaving in the next week or so and will be coming back at the end of September so you have plenty of time to sort something out. There will be a sofa and some floor space available (enough for at least 3 people to share) so get your weekends booked and lets have some good times. I will be emailing you all at some point so that we can organise something.