An agent called me the other day about a position as a developer on an insurance platform that I have tested on.

I mentioned that I was a tester and hadn’t been a developer for many years and the agent just didn’t get this concept. He said ‘well can’t you develop on this platform anyway?’. I answered that the developement language that they are using now is totally different to the mainframe development work I was doing a long time ago. Still don’t think he got it and he definitely didn’t like the pathetic excuses I gave him. He was very professional though but did sound a bit like a HR person (Hence the confusion, he he. Ed). No doubt he thought I was a complete waste of time.

Just installed Visual Studio 2010 Professional beta on an XP PC. I fired off setup, went for a bike ride for an hour and when I returned it was still running. Took a total of 2 hours to install. At the end it asked me if I wanted the documentation to ber installed. Too right I do with any app that takes that long to install. The documentaion install failed with some nasty error messages so I’ll be flying blind with that for awhile.

I got Smart PDF Converter Pro the other day to see how well PDF documents can be converted into doc files. I started with a single page house sale flyer, which had photos and house plans on it and it converted that pretty well. All of the pictures, plans and headings that were on the pdf file were displayed on the doc version. I then tried converting a 20 page credit report and that seemed to convert well too. Neat.

I installed the StatPress statistics plugin for WordPress and it’s quite useful, up to a point, seeing the viewing statistics for this blog. The stats it shows me for visits was less than I expected so I checked the hosting companies log files and of course there was not a lot of similarity. I checked 30 minutes worth of log files for visits, spiders and RSS feed entries and noted those totals then I checked to see what StatPress, which doesn’t use the log files, for it’s view of visits, spiders and RSS entries for the same period and StatPress was missing about 50% of them. Not as bad as Sitemeter though, as that seems to miss most visits. I checked Sitemeters figures for another page I have, a page that gets very few hits per day, say 10, and it said that over a 3 month period I had 280 visits with an average per day of zero and an average visit length of 0.00 minutes. That page is a bit boring but it’s not that boring.