Well, I’m bored. I’m bored of my situation. I’m bored of not being with Fran (after 1 week). I’m bored of not being able to ring her whenever I want and just talk about nothing in particular. I’m bored of now having to worry about if it was too soon after I rung her last time in case I’m putting too much pressure on her, which would make her want to stop me ringing to put pressure on her. I’m bored of continuely wondering what I can do to fix this. I’m bored of sitting in this house being bored. I’m bored of doing my allpay.net project. I’m bored of working. I’m bored of this. I’m bored of this dream (somebody wake me up). Or is it a nightmare. I’m bored of Fran telling me more reasons why she thinks it better this way. I’m bored of thinking that I have to try and get back together with her (because I do). I’m bored of thinking I need to give her time. I’m bored of the fact that I will virtually never see her again (she’s away for most of Christmas, she has a house in Oxford and will thus not be home at Easter, she wants to get a environmental job next summer, then another degree). I’m bored of being alone. I’m bored of not wanting to see another girl. I’m just fucking bored.

Well, you know how when it rains, it pours? Well my shitty Friday has now turned into shitty weekend/week/month/year/life. You may wish to note the last entry, where I said I would take solice in my Fran. Well guess what? I no longer have a Fran. She broke up with me, apparently because she thinks of me as a friend these days rather than her boyfriend. Mainly because we don’t see each other enough. I mean we’ve gone 3 years 7 months of this. Times when we are together for long periods of time are good. When we’re not together, it’s not so good. Unlike usual, we didn’t get to enjoy our time together this summer because we went away. Is this a good reason to give up? I don’t think so.

What could be slightly more worrying is Fran’s inability to deny there was someone else involved, that she was doing this to meet someone else. Maybe I’m just paranoid. But all in all, I hate this situation.

I was told to test some software today, so I installed it on a PC I was using (not mine, because I don’t get a desk until Monday, after being there for 2 weeks). Strangely, this interfered with the secure logon we use, making it impossible to log onto the machine. This after I had already broken it once this week. How bad do I feel? Ah well, I’ll take solice in my Fran this evening…

No sooner do I post up that entry about Jarvis and they’re laughable charges and incompetance, do they manage to cause another accident on the railways. Luckily, their profits did increase this year, so it’s not all bad. For them anyway.

It gets dafter though – they then admitted it was their fault. On the radio they were reckoning they did this to try and improve their reputation. I’ve got a better idea for them – try doing the work properly, efficiently and provide good value. Duh.

This entry is more of a reminder to myself about a few ideas I’ve been having for investigation. One could be very lucrative, but I’m fairly certain it’s going to involve some mind bending maths to do it. The others are all a bit work related.

Now for something a little more interesting. I get paid next week – my first paycheque since entering the scary world of work. I can’t wait to be able to spend some money on what I’d like for once. Admittedly I can’t go too made as I have to start saving up for all kinds of other scary things like paying off my student loan, my overdraft, etc. But not too quickly – the best thing to do is to take advantage of as much interest free money as possible and stick it in a high interest account, which basically means free money! So I’ll actually be extending my overdraft as far as she’ll go soon and opening a new savings account. Cunning eh?

Work has been quite dull for the last few days – working my way through 87 pages of data that was entered wrong into the system. However, I should be getting my desk by the end of the week, and then hopefully I can get started on doing some proper work. I do want to have a chat with the head of the department about my job title though. More on that soon…

Well, I’ve now been working at my new job for 3 days now as a Junior Software Engineer – the pay pretty much sucks at the moment, so I can’t see myself staying too long at this sort of rate (especially as it seems I’m going to be the only one working on something that could potentially be very lucrative). However, my dilemma is that there is no point really moving out of home until I’ve got somewhere to move into with Fran, and she’s going to be at Uni for at least another year, possibly two.

What I don’t really get is that my job title is “Junior Software Engineer”, which I assumed meant there was a software engineer above me, but having seen the current IT structure (with me right at the bottom) there is no software engineer above me. Why am I starting at junior level? Graduates tend to go straight into management courses and get paid ?20k+. Somehow I dream of that much. While I don’t really need that sort of money living at home, it’s more about be paid what you are worth, and I don’t think that I am being paid that amount at the moment. Still, I think I shall stick with it for now and cast my eye about for alternatives. You never know, I might get promoted to “Software Engineer” at my first appraisel and get a salary more like what I think I deserve.

My sister is off to University in Reading later this month, and she’s been getting the details through of her accomodation from “The Student Village“, a company run by Jarvis those people who do such a super job of maintaining our railways. Anyway, the thing that has got me really, really irritated with them is the amount they are charging for Internet connections, per Student. ?175 inc VAT. That’s right, one hundred and seventy five pounds. Can we all hear the cash registers ringing up here? How the hell (ooh, I think that’s the first time I’ve actually used that on this site) are students supposed to gain any sort of financial independence when they are expected to pay these sort of prices up front? That is 3 times what Nottingham charged when I was there, and that included phone, and many universities provide it free! It’s rediculous! I’ve got half a mind to write to them demanding to know how an earth they reached such a figure and why they think it’s fair that students should have to pay this?

In our house last year in Uni, it cost the four of us, in total ?300 to have always on high speed Internet. That’s ?75 each across the year, yet Jarvis seem to think they should be charging ?100 more. Money grabbing, theiving, fleecing, bastards. It’s not even like they give you a choice to go with anyone else, you are stuck with them. No money, no Internet. I’m sure that’s wrong. Trading Standards anyone?

Well, I had a chat with a potential employer today to have a chat about my progress on my project and job opportunities. The cool thing is that I should be getting a formal job offer off them sometime this week to do development work for them. It sounds like they want me to be doing C++ stuff, which is a little scary as I’ve only got one modules worth of experience in that but I’m sure with a bit of studying and practice then I should be ok in it. I’ve never really had huge problems with learning a new programming language and I was at last starting to get my head around pointers at the end of the module.

Regarding my project things aren’t look so good – while I have made progress over the last week on adding in the functionality that is required by the specification, getting it to the point where I get paid for it seems to be quite a long way off. I suppose I should have more strictly defined what needed to be done to get paid with them before I started as now I’ve got to get the software through the mill of corporate acceptance testing, which could be a right arse. As far as I was concerned I needed to hand over to them a piece of software that worked as far as I knew, rather than spending weeks testing and documenting it and writing test suites. Something for discussion perhaps…