Ronald van der Wijden

Just a quick write-up on the current affairs: after five months of idle time I’m on a new assignment for a large dutch travel organisation. Since I’ve spent my entire professional IT career in banking and on mainframe platforms, a different business (travel) and platform (Unix) make for a nice, refreshing change of scenery and a great opportunity to acquire some new skills.

I’m through the first month: learing, getting used to new tools and new habits; I’m curious about where this will take me!

It had been quite a while since I last posted something here; most times I even bother to log in it’s for deleting spam comments filtered out by Akismet. Spammers seem to be the only visitors not te be deterred in any way, shape or form by the complete and utter lack of activity in here.

Since the last post I have been pretty much tied up by work to do anything more than eat, sleep and, well, work. Not much going on besides that, and not much of interest to write about.
My previous assignment however ended at the end of august and I’ve been on the availability list ever since. Requests from clients do happen and some of them fit my profile well but none of them heve been honoured sofar, so I spend my days studying, checking the request database, keeping an eye on my mailbox, and brushing up on some of the things I haven’t been paying much attention to for quite a while (whenever did HTML5 become part of the W3C?! Sheesh…).

So: about time the dust off this space and write a bit about what’s going on nowadays.
Coincidentally, I was talking to a friend of mine over the phone last evening during which he asked me if I could do some minor revisions to the site of the shop he works at. I’ve done some work to it years ago, sprucing up the look a bit and rearranging some of the content and maintenance pages. Since this was sort of a hand-rolled CMS in PHP and MySQL it was an interesting excercise doing work on an actual working site instead messing about with tryouts.
Because it has been quite a while since I last worked on the site it’ll take me some time to get acquainted with its internal structure and database layout again, but it should be good fun.
Sort of makes me wonder all over again if I should consider another line of work…

Phew! I finally got around to a much needed upgrade of my WordPress installation; since my hosting provider upgraded to PHP5 a while ago things looked a bit off in this neighbourhood.
Primarily, post order turned from descending to ascending, placing the oldest post on top.
Baroo?

So, it was due time for an upgrade. The previous version of my installation was 2.0.2, and the current one is 2.5.1 (2.6 in still in beta). In the past, upgrading usually was a walk in the park so I wasn’t too worried; nice job for a sunday afternoon, right? Well…
Mostly due to my own clumsiness things didn’t go quite as smooth this time around: on extending the config file with some new statements I accidentally removed the database prefix one, causing WordPress to miss my existing database altogether and install a new, empty one, so no posts and the default theme. Yikes!

Luckily, after re-starting my heart I realised my mistake, added the prefix statement back in and all was good again: my theme was back and so were the posts, this time in the desired order. Success!

Hopefully this will be a good starting point to reactivate this very much dormant blog, with more attention to my slowly–very slowly–growing model railroad interest.

Up ’til now, the complete lack of posts must have been obvious; the main reason for this is my shift in interests and the general lack of time to focus my attention on anything but work and staying alive (you know, breathing, eating…).

Among the victims has been the world of web design; I almost completely stopped keeping up with that and what little free time I have to spare nowadays is taken up by model railroading.

I decided not to kill off this web space just yet, but unless I find a good alternative use for it I may still do so: after all, it’s not like it’s free or anything!

For those die-hards that haven’t already given up on visiting here altogether: if it survives at all, this site will likely see a major shift in focus, probably towards model railroading–if I ever find the time to actually do something with that…

Yesterday, to my joy I found the latest addition to my book collection in the mail: “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” by Jason Beaird, published by Sitepoint. Since I’m not a designer, and likely never will be, it’s books like these that at least give me some basic knowledge on how to do simple design work; also, the more I know about this subject, the more I can appreciate the wonderful work proper, trained, skilled designers create.

I’ve been rather busy lately, but if I can squeeze some time out of my busy schedule I look forward to curling up on the couch with this one.