Found the blog again

Just revamping the web site after a long period of inactivity.
I'm still failing to retire and coming to the end of an interesting but frustrating contract.

One of the more demanding aspects of the work has been that the requirements and external systems change at short notice - a couple of days before a release which means implementing methods for making the system flexible. It has meant implementing an imported that can handle changes in file structures and methods of reformatting files.

I've utilised command line, VBScript, PowerShell, SSIS transformation tasks in abundance and will write some articles about the methods.

I've also been involved in studying with the Open University which is sadly now struggling to keep up with the imposed funding changes and also some poorly directed and implemented policies. Not sure it's good value for money now and probably wouldn't recommend it to new learners but for those who want to dabble it is still useful. I'm coming to the end of a couple of bachelor degrees (Astrophysics and associated). I tried some computing undergraduate and postgraduate.

My first introduction to relational databases was an OU postgraduate module and was excellent. Unfortunately, since then they have rewritten the module and it is no longer  much use. I also tried the undergraduate version and it was very poor. Some of the material was confused and quite often incorrect. The tutors didn't seem to understand the subject and the tmas (tutor marked assignments) had questions that showed basic misunderstanding of theory.

I'm currently devising a method of updating the text files for my web site to include google adsense scripts - which turns out not to be as easy as I would expect. I'm going for a method of including code in each file then running a script to replace that with the adsense script.