It doesn’t matter. I’ll still kick it around the house before eating it.

Recently I’ve been looking for a new [product] to replace the free, open source and somewhat buggy [product] that my [client] is currently using. I tested out some commercial replacement [products] and found one that I really liked.

I wanted to find out approximately how much it would cost so I could do some calculations and work out the best way to present a technical and business case for moving away from [product]. But could I get a price out of these people?

After two phone calls and two emails they were pushing for meetings, timescales, for me reveal the details of my client and the stakeholders, full information about who would sign the contracts and how long they would want to purchase the licence for.

Maybe this is how it works in the business and sales world, but I’m a technical person. I can poke my head in, relate to people, and live up there for a while, but I don’t like bullshit and I’ll go somewhere else if you piss me off.

When you say that you want to:

optimize [my] software investment with pricing that is customized for [my] situation, based on how the product will be used and deployed

I know that you’re really saying:

we want to work out how much money we can get out of you and squeeze you for as much of it as possible

I liked your [product] technically, but if you can’t meet me half way, I’ll find someone else who I can work with.

Like I said in my first email, I was looking for a general idea of how much [your product] was likely to cost so that I could work out the best way to put forward some kind of business case for moving away from [existing product]. I’d tested out a number of [products] and was impressed with the performance of [your product].

It’s obviously a complicated process to work out the cost of a licence, so for now I’m going to use the price of [your competitor] as a base line and forward the [competitor] and [your] details to the appropriate people in my client’s Procurement and Operations departments.

I don’t know what processes they use or what the timescales are likely to be, but I’m going to leave all discussions from now on up to them.

Thank you for your time, and my apologies for not being able to progress this further.

Anyway, back to my beloved code.

After being over here for nearly a year, I exchanged my driving licence for a UK one.

Amazingly, I’m allowed to drive the following types of vehicle:

• Car
• Car with trailer
• Up to 7.5T Box Lorry (!!!)

So for the move we rented a 7.5T Mercedes Atego 816 for a day. We picked it up from Bridgwater and I then drove it home, loaded it up, drove it to Nailsea, unloaded it, and then drove it back to Bridgwater.

This isn’t it, but this is basically what I drove:

Driving to our cottage from Bridgwater, I couldn’t believe I was allowed to drive such a massive machine without any kind of lesson or training. Except for a slight scratch of the indicator against a wall while I was reversing away from the cottage, it all went well. I’m not in any hurry to drive one again though.

Last weekend, Galen, Sherry and I moved house.

We loved our cottage, but I was struggling with the commute to Bristol 4 times per week.

Sherry found a lovely 4 bedroom semi-detached house in Nailsea (20 minutes drive from Bristol), and five weeks after suggesting that we should consider moving, we’d found the house, signed the contract, picked up the keys and moved all our possessions.

The new place is great. It has plenty of extra space, a garden that Galen can more easily play in, and I save 4 hours every day commuting to and from work.

We’re moving house soon. Last week, Sherry called BT to get the phone line sorted at our new place. Everything was arranged, we had an order, a phone number, but they’d given us a stupid connection date.

For some reason, they were unable to connect the new line at the date we wanted (any day around the time we were actually moving). They were also going to disconnect our current line on the same date. The only time they could apparently do this was 13 days before we moved.

13 days here without a phone line, leading up to a big house move, wasn’t something we could live with, so we cancelled the order and today I went to place a new one under my name.

But in the last week, it looks like BT have disconnected the phone line to our new house. When I called BT this morning there was apparently no connection, which means an engineer has to go to the exchange to connect us.

They want to charge us £122.50 to reconnect a line they disconnected in the last 5 days.

Thanks a lot BT.