|Absolute Value|

After about 3 months of putting all the paperwork together, leaving the country to allow my application to be submitted, I am now the proud owner of a 5 year work permit for the UK. You can’t understand how happy and relieved I am that this is all sorted out. I love working and living in London and can’t imagine leaving and having to come back and live in South Africa. Maybe one day but not this day.

I will be back in London once I receive the documentation to allow me back into the country which should arrive on Thursday. Once I have this I can organize my flights and get back. Can’t wait!

I am sitting in Johannesburg International today and using their wireless Internet to pass the time and do some work before my connecting flight at 16:00. I have a conference call at 13:00 this afternoon so to save some money I asked the people to use my SkypeIn number instead of my South African mobile number. The SkypeIn number is a local London 0207 number that forwards the call to any computer that is logged into my Skype account.

I am absolutely blown away with the quality of the calls. We just did a test run to see if the dodgy wireless here can handle it and I am astounded by the perfect quality and zero delay. Better than anything I could imagine.

Skype (or should I call you E-Bay), I applaud you. Thank you for making communication so simple.

Our company hit a small milestone today. A few months ago we implemented Bugzilla as our bug tracking software. Today I filed bug 100 (No, I won’t be supplying a URL ) and its really starting to take off.

If you are a small company, filing bugs can sometimes feel like you are talking to yourself. However, it becomes a great tool to track all your bugs, feature requests or anything that needs doing in projects. I cannot remember everything I come across while developing projects and Bugzilla makes it really simple to keep track of your tasks.

I work for a small company so when it was first installed, I was pretty much the only person using it. But now we are starting to see a nice increase in bug activity. Even though the bug lists are getting bigger, it still means work is being done!

I am off to South Africa again albeit for a longer period of time. I will most likely be back in the UK around the 8th of October. This trip isn’t for a holiday thought and will be work filled.

I will hopefully be finding a good permanent Internet connection while I am away although this isn’t a definite. Otherwise I am stuck on 64K ISDN for the 3 weeks.

I hope the weather is better than last time!

I just came back from a day at the London Oyster Festival. It was a great day out - lots of Guinness, lots of Pimms and a very large amount of really good seafood. Lost out on the lobsters though as they sold out as I got to the front of the queue.

Otherwise I took the camera and got some great shots. Click the photo above for the gallery. Mmmmm.