Summer Over 2005
Summer is done for another year, the mornings have got that crisp air to them with dew soaking the lawns and watering not needed once more. The physical part of my day has kind of morphed over the summer from being the lead maintenance person at the marina to landscaper. The change is mainly due to a new employee that’s a real keener on fixing things and is quite talented at it too. Good with electronics and, (at first anyways, like anyone, we all tend to avoid the kitchen’s grease-out), doesn’t mind getting a little work done.
For most of the summer, outside work was a mix of fixing and doing the lawn mowing thing, but in the last while the English Gardener hasn’t been around and doing more of that sort of work myself. With winter coming on, there’s plenty to do with the cottages to get them ready, no one else likes to go on the roofs much and heights have never bothered me. Hot on the restaurant roof this summer though, as a couple years of ivy got trimmed off by moi as part of the landscaping improvements.
More work coming in on the web development front as well, have been answering some ads on the local Craig’s List and things are starting to percolate. With summer over, everyone is getting back in to the work frame of mind as well so expect the back ground work I did this summer to pan out into a few things. It’s becoming more common knowledge know I think amongst the business community as a whole, that xhtml and css layouts are the way to go for those that have a heavy bandwidth bill.
There are a heck of a lot of web sites and CMS systems that need to be converted out there. I don’t think for myself I will worry too much anymore in the near future about which CMS to use for clients requesting them, the selection available now is a good mix from dead simple to massively complex and all of them are going to be blown out of the water as soon as PHP 5 starts being available from most hosts.
MG Web Services is still in the holding pattern with PHP5 for now, waiting for just a bit more of a gold release for production servers before upgrading everyone. On the development servers the change over is a breeze code-wise, and unlike the change-over from php3 to 4, there doesn’t seem like a need this time around to have that number at the end of the extension so people don’t mess up - imho they did a very good job of redoing PHP in C with good OOP support this time around. Not an expert, but their methodology makes sense to those that aren’t experts, and that can’t be anything but a good thing.