Jellybob's Journal: Guess it's time to journal again.

No, I'm not dead just yet, just not been around the office much, which is where a lot of my journalling gets done from.

Work
Firstly - my job rocks, I got to spend today filming people doing mock interviews, which is easily the best bit of the courses we run... most of the candidates start of the course under-confident, and unenthusiastic because of long periods of being turned down for jobs.

By this point (last few days of week 4) they're all doing job interviews in front of an audience and video camera which would put most people to shame. Just seeing people confident about the skills they have, and able to see how they'd be an asset to the jobs is stunning.

So what if I've got a backlog of work at the office - it's worth it to see this happen.

Life
Is still a bit of a bitch. Tonight's cell was on the subject of trust, which is a big thing for me - as highlighted by the fact I deftly stayed quiet about almost everything I feel on the subject. I don't trust people, and that's just life for me. There are times I wish I could, but for some reason I can barely be open enough with people to tell them any more than "I'm tired".

On a positive side though, out of the blue I received an e-mail this afternoon from a friend I'd lost touch with, who had been reading my old journal entries - the e-mail was on the subject of my "losing touch with people" entry. If you're reading this, I am going to reply, I just havn't got round to it yet.

Web Stuff
Journaliser is slowly (very slowly) developing, however I've been asked if I'd help develop BlogIM instead, which is a blog type system which can be sent instant messages, which will then be posted as entries. Nifty stuff, which needs a web frontend for the things you can't do as easily through MSN.

I'm not sure what I'll do right now, since I've put a lot of time into Journaliser, however working with an existing code base should allow me to work on the more interesting bits, instead of dwelling on low-level stuff (although the form engine I've developed for Andromeda is looking good now - it loads XML based form definitions, with validation rules and other nice stuff).

To fill in some time this evening, I did a design for a new website for my church, which has been on my todo list for about 6 months now - here, partly as an excuse to try out Macromedia's Contribute, which seems to be some very nice stuff. It allows me to design page templates, which can then be used to create pages on the site by other people using a stripped down version of Dreamweaver, which is limited to only being able to edit marked blocks (so people can't mess up the navigation for example), and only being able to apply standard XHTML and CSS classes to text, so they can't insert the obligatory 76pt pink text everyone seems to need.

If you take a look at the mockup, the children's events page, and parts of the youth events page were created in Contribute as an experiment.

Well, enough from me, I'm going to bed.