The COO gave a presentation on Tuesday about the company’s objectives over the coming year.
One of those objectives could offer the opportunity of us moving to either Singapore or to Sydney.
Of the two, Singapore is the more appealing. Experiencing a new culture for a few (or more) years would be a wonderful experience for the family, Zachary especially.
However Sydney would also be great, so both would be seriously considered. The plus for Sydney is that we’d already know people in the area.
That leaves the question, what would we do with the house? My instinct is to rent it out, get the mortgage paid and then we have somewhere to live on our return. The alternative of selling up and then buying again when we’re back isn’t so good an idea – I think leaving money invested in property is still a good bet these days.
The thought of moving abroad is very appealing. I’ve lived and worked my entire life in the UK. Doing something like this while Zachary is young is perfect; it will get a little more complicated if he’s at school.
It could be an interesting year.
I’ve been incredibly bad of the last few years in that I haven’t had smoke alarms fitted where I live.
In the Bromley flat I think it was pure laziness on my part (I’d purchased a pack of two at some point, they were sitting in a cupboard), I have no other excuse for putting my family’s life at risk.
On a recent visit to B&Q, I picked up a smoke alarm, it was cheap (cost about £3 or so), and it didn’t work.
So this morning I’ve been researching them a little, finding out about the different types and getting the required ones for the house we’re in now. I’ve gone for an ionisation and also an optical smoke alarm. This should cover both fast burning (think electrical appliance) fires and also the slow smoldering (think burning sofa) fires.
When we look at decorating the rest of the house, I think I’ll consider mains powered devices, possibly with link-up (so one going off will set the rest off) but these are certainly a start and I know Emma will be more at ease with them fitted in the house.
Daddy: Knock knock
Daddy: Zachary, say, “who’s there?”
Zachary: Mama!
In all fairness, Mama was sitting with us.
Following the successful launch of the previous project, a rewrite of the press release submission process to include the ability to submit pictures with press releases, my next project is due to start soon.
It should be fairly straight forward: the brief is to ‘enable people to pay for their press releases online, via a credit card.’
Up till now, payment has mostly been by invoice. A release would be submitted to the distribution system and before putting online and emailing out, a check would be made to see if the submitter is known. If so, then an invoice is raised at the beginning of the following month. If it is a new customer they are phoned and requested to make payment via credit card. Not a perfect system and it requires the customer to give their card details over the phone.
There are a few caveats with taking payments online which I’m looking into at the moment. The main concern is that an invoice will be required ‘there and then’. Currently the accounting system can do ad-hoc invoices – manually – however it’s mainly geared for a once a month run. If we do require immediate invoices (I have a document from HMRC to peruse to determine this) then this project could extend a fair bit beyond the original spec.
All in all, it’s looking to be an interesting undertaking. I’ve worked with the Datacash API before, but never directly with the bank’s own interfaces.
This is the blog of Jonathan Tullett: father, iconoclast, occasional geek.
A little about me: I’m currently in my (late) 20s, I live in Kent with my girlfriend, son and various pets. I work for an investment company full time while also running a consultancy and development business. I’ll admit that sometimes I become too work focused for my own good and that my family life starts to suffer, but I hope that is becoming less and less frequent.
I registered the jonathantullett.com domain so it could become the focal point of my online presence – personal and work.
My email address will remain jonathan (at) downagain (dot) com, but I felt it was time to retire my other websites which have become incongruent with who I have become.
I don’t expect anyone to have any interest what I write on this blog – I write solely for me, to archive my memories.
