The Wall to be Removed

The builders are still here and the banging has started. They’ve been wandering around with a gas gun and a big DeWalt power saw which is always an exciting thing. Above you can see what part of the wall they are removing, immediately behind this wall is the large room that we are splitting in two. Below you can see a view from the room that is being partitioned. The red shaded area on the right is the wall that you can see above. The blue shaded area is where the new wall is going to be constructed.

New Wall to be Added

It’s not anything technical but I guess the builders paying us a visit today (and tomorrow) is worth a mention. We are having a new wall put into the middle of a large room (3.5mx6m) to form a bedroom. The other half of the large room is being opened up to our living area by having the 3m segment of wall between the two removed. There’s some other things happening too but these are just some power points being installed and a TV antenna outlet being moved.

Up until now the only work we’ve had to do in preparation for this work is to move furniture. This will change once the builders are finished though. The new bedroom will need painting and carpeting and the newly created extension to our living area will also need painting and some sort of flooring put in.

I’m a 40 something year old male with 4 young kids, a lovely partner, and experiencing a mid-life nerdy crisis. For the last 10 years I’ve run my own mISV (micro independent software vendor) business developing and selling mostly time tracking applications. These applications were all installable Windows programs until last year when I launched a web based time clock system which was developed mainly in PHP and Javascript (Prototype and JQuery) and is hosted on a LAMP stack. My other products are Time Clock MTS, Timesheets Lite, Timesheets MTS, and Time and Attendance Plus. These programs were developed in Visual Basic 6 and right now are being ported to C# using Winforms.

I also help my partner run a collectables and hobby supplies business, write for a popular collecting weblog and maintain several different websites. Sometimes I also dabble in a bit of contract web-development mostly focused on custom WordPress solutions. For example, I built the Numismatic Association of Australia website and I’m currently developing a nifty reference site for the Perth Numismatic Society (no, I didn’t develop the website in that link). And finally, I still do the odd bit of contract programming (mostly VBA and C#) but I’m trying to stop this sort of thing because I really don’t have the time for it.

Back in the early 1990’s I managed to get a degree in mechanical engineering but haven’t actually worked as an engineer since 2006. To be honest I wasn’t all that good at it anyway so the engineering world probably doesn’t miss me.

The What Mark Did blog is written by me, Mark, and it’s mostly about what I’ve done. Occasionally it’ll be about what I am about to do, and sometimes it’ll just be about what I am thinking. Most of it will be technical because my job is technical and a lot of my interests are technical. Some of it will be nerdy because I am a 40 year old going through something of a nerdy renaissance (thanks to the Big Bang Theory mostly). Right now I am expecting entries covering programming (C#, PHP, Javascript, VB6), web development, search engine optimization, gadgets, software, and whatever else happens to interest me.

As I write this entry I am not expecting a lot of my entries to be of much interest to anyone but myself so you’ll have to excuse any self indulgence. I don’t feel bad about this because I am self employed and spend a lot of hours staring at a computer and need to get what I am thinking written down. So I intend that this blog be something of a medium for my thoughts during my work day and I am certain that sometimes it will only make sense to me. Apologies in advance for this.

If you’re wondering about the title of the blog thanks must go to my lovely partner who suggested the name as a play on the children’s book title What Katy Did. So, if you’re interested in What Mark Did please read on.