On eating proper food: Thinking back myself to the point around 6-12 months ago where I stopped getting ill and dropped down a jean size was also the point at which I started cooking proper food myself.

Last night myself and housemates D and M forsaked the usual Friday night takeout for a chicken curry that was surprisingly easy to make. And heaps cheaper, of course. Also this week I’ve had pasta in a tomato sauce with chicken and bacon, chicken stir-fry with a lime, corriander and soy sauce and pork with mashed potato and a creamy leek and musard sauce. Sometimes when you don’t feel like cooking it’s nice to have housemates that will either motivate you to do so or even to do it for you.

My two sources of inspriation at the moment are the BBC Food site and the Sainsbury Local by South Ealing tube. I usually decide what meat (including none) I want and build a meal up around that. Add some carbs, a few vegetables and the rest is all down to experimentation. I’m still learning which flavours go well with each other and which herbs and spices to use under different circumstances.

Stir fries are always good if you’re not sure quite what you want to eat – the shops always seem to have the right ingredients even at 9pm after a long day at work. And the corner shop always has fresh ginger.

I try not to buy packets or jars. It’s easy to cook up that jar of pasta sauce in five minutes if it’s sitting there in the back of the cupboard but if it’s not there then I’ll use the can of tomatoes, the tomato puree and the vegatables instead. It might take a bit longer but it’s worth it for the feeling of accomplishment alone.

I think cooking is like blogging – it’s all about keeping up the disclipline. Get out the habit for a while and youn lose it. But keep on at it and gradually over time you start to suck less ;-).

Matt – working in a small company is new to me too. or at least it was two months ago. Now it’s just that daily routine of getting as much stuff done in a day as you can that I have to deal with.

This week the big event was undoubtedly yesterday’s web seminar with MySQL. I spent a lot of time working on the web infrastructure for this, and the effort I’ve put in will hopefully mean we’ll be able to deploy similar resources more readily in the future. Now that we have a proper place for white papers and for newletter sign-ups, it’s just a simple matter of linking this into the existing content we already have on the site.

I’d also like to welcome Chenoa and Villmond Luxembourg SARL as officially-listed partners on our site, which sees the total list rise to 19 partner organisations. It’s not me who’s put in the hard work in bringing these guys on board, but it’s nice to be part of the process that gets this news out to the world.

When I think back to the second I first read about Alfresco some five months ago (and on the other side of the globe, to boot) I was convinced that this company was going places. This week has done more than any other to cement this in my mind. And yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done to realise this, but I guess at least it’s better than being bored :-).

Catching up on blogs seems to be all I’ve had time to do lately with the hecticness of work being as it is at the moment, but now I’ve discovered a way of absorbing the latest open source goings on while I get on with other things!

Mirroring what we’re working to get off the ground at Alfresco at the moment, Novell recently launched Novell Open Audio to the world. I gave it a listen to last night mainly to see what kind of stuff they were doing in their podcasts, and ended up listening intently to the guys talking about iFolder and the collaboration features that they’ve built on top of the stack with the latest 3.0 release. Very interesting stuff indeed, and quite a lot of potential cross-over with the colloboration stuff that we have in Alfresco.

Also interesting is how they’ve now split off a community version of iFolder (complete with the compulsory shiny-MediaWiki-for-a-website thing just like F-Spot, Banshee and Mono – clearly a great way of getting content up on your site) from the enterprise offering and how they’ve split their people between those two areas.

I didn’t get round to listening to the second half of the 50 minute show about NLD, but I’ll make sure I do when I get a chance. Truly engaging stuff – we’ve got a lot to live up to!