On Monday I started at my new job, it is for a growing telecoms company called PanTelecom. I got the job within a few days of giving my details to a programme called STEP (Shell Technology Enterprise Programme) which advertises itself as “a UK-wide programme offering undergraduates project-based work within small to medium sized businesses”.

My project is to make a new version of an existing one of their products with a web based front-end. I’m doing this using Microsoft SQL Server and IIS. I haven’t used either of these products before most of my knowledge being Linux based and as such I’m more used to Apache and MySQL. However the concepts are not vastly different and I feel it is going well already. I think tomorrow I will be starting writing some of the front-end in ASP, which I have used only briefly many years ago.

This morning I took some photos of poppies in my garden. Two struck me as being worth putting online. One where a bee is just buzzing into a shot of a poppy with the stamens fallen off and collected in a cup made by the red and dark purple petals. The other of another poppy has a bee collecting pollen climbing amongst the splayed out and ragged petals next to a larger more mature seedhead.