A Long Day

This morning began very early, about half past seven in the morning, yes, in the morning. Now, by now you should know that I don't do mornings and so having to wake up this early makes the rest of the day look pretty bleak. The reason behind this strange behaviour was because I had arranged to meet the man who ultimately has the decision to accept or reject my website proposal. Over the summer I started on this project, sort of as a job and sort of as an educational exercise. I had just learned a bit of PHP and had re-learned HTML during the previous semester and was itching to put it to some good use. I've designed websites before but most of the time I've been a WYSIWYG whore and haven't really bothered to look at the code. When I found out last semester that I was going to be writing the code without using any sort of design package I was terrified. I couldn't even have written the outline for a basic page let along get some W3C compliant output. Thankfully the people at W3 schools had made a brilliant and very coherent tutorial which I highly recommend for anyone wanting to dabble in this world. What did surprise me during this project was actually how simple most of it is and only starting out with a little bit of knowledge, that tutorial and some Googling meant that I had come up with a very presentable and functional solution to a problem that I had been aware of (but lacked the expertise to solve) for a couple of years. I won't go into the specifics yet because I still don't know how this will turn out. My system is being compared to several off the shelf solutions and I wouldn't want to jeopardise my chances.

So anyway, I went to this man's house and demoed the product to him and he seemed to like it. Not sure he was so convinced about the pricing I had given him for it but that side of things I have entrusted to my step-father who seems to be pretty good at this sort of thing. He mentioned one or two features that needed adding or changing but I was surprised how much I had managed to get right with very little information about the problem in the first place.

Sadly after this, I had to start packing for my return to Sheffield, it had been nice coming home for a few days but I had lectures this afternoon and so had to get a move on. The journey up was relatively easy going save for a bit of queueing before joining the M1 and an unusually large amount of lorries on the roads. It seemed a lot anyway but I don't normally travel at that time of day so I guess that could be perfectly normal.

Back in Sheffield and I just about had time to catch up on Twitter, blogs and emails before heading off to lectures. Struggling to stay awake and feeling thoroughly drained only to find that when they were over I was walking home in the dark with the heavens having opened especially for me.

I waited for the rain to stop and then had to go and get milk for the morning before all of the shops shut, first port of call was Nisa and to my horror they had run out of blue milk! So as a consolation prize I left with half price Baked Alaska Ben & Jerry's and a bag of 50p Bassets Liquorice Allsorts. I managed to find an open shop and got my milk so at least I wouldn't have to go traipsing round in the morning to find some, tummy rumbling away complaining from the lack of food.