OK, so yesterday sucked. One of my guys’ computers went wrong, and he cycles to work and had left his laptop at home, so I had to drive him there, in the rain, to pick it up (much to the irritation of his wife, who had been hoping to use it — but it is company property so the outcome of that discussion was pretty obvious at the outset). Then I spent ages on the phone trying to locate a replacement, until the extremely helpful chap at the Apple Business Store (hi Rod!) sorted me out with next day delivery on a new one.

Then I spent the rest of the day doing customer support. We all do that at Coriolis Systems; it’s good that we software developers get involved with real customers and see what the real problems are with our products. All too often people are divorced from the actual customers because they have (sometimes layers) of customer support staff in between them and the real world. We don’t. The downside of that is that it can be a bit of a drag at times, dealing with yet another “I forgot my password”, “My e-mail address is wrong” query, punctuated with occasional customer angry that “we didn’t reply” (translation: they, their IT department, and/or their ISP are not competent to run a mail server, but are trying to anyway, and have cunningly configured it to ignore/junk/bounce e-mail from us).

Anyway, the remainder of yesterday was spent doing that. We always get a lot of mail to deal with on a Monday, because we don’t work weekends, but I really don’t like not making progress with whatever else I’m working on.

Today, on the other hand, was great. Made plenty of progress with what I’ve been working on. It still isn’t perfect (just checked it remotely, and it’s broken :-)), but it’s definitely getting there, which is good news indeed, as it means I’ll soon be back working on what I was doing before (both more interesting and more fun, quite frankly).

Also managed to do a load of housework when I got home, so that’s good too. Surprising how much work it is to keep on top of all the housework, but I really do love living in my new house :-) :-)