Work Kills Blogging!

My longish absence from blogging can be directly attributed to my having started work. Since the beginning of April I have been helping out at Qualica, a company run by a group of friends of mine, people that I met when I last worked in South Africa for Internet Solutions. Qualica is involved in a variety of different projects; amongst other things they developed and support the IT systems behind the 1Time Airline, support data exchange under tough conditions in remote parts of Africa for Bayport Financial Services and provide networking solutions for South Africa's Old Mutual. The common link between all of these is Linux operating system; Qualica is a Linux specialist house.

Working again with people I know as friends and respect as professionals is an amazing experience. But I am not only working with them, I am in the same building as in the days at Internet Solutions, and working with some of the same systems, so sometimes the air at work feels like it's thick with ghosts from a past which was a personal golden age; and the fact that I have travelled so far and done so much since then and still come back to the same environment makes me restless. And that feeling is not a new one; its something I've had to deal with a lot in coming back to South Africa.

The fact that my stay here is temporary makes it easier to deal with. But I also think that you can't show how much you have changed until you go back into an old environment.