(posted at 09:29PM BST) 
Oooh... lots to tell... lots to tell!
Firstly, I got back from London on the 16th and after getting all my server upgrades and maintenance completed plus spending nearly four whole days of quality time with 'she who will not be messed with' was a breath of fresh air from the typical working week at Spilsby Internet Solutions.
The trip down Oxford Street was fun, with such games as 'Hunt The Toilet' being prevalent as was 'Spot The Laptop With The Normal Temperature' in the Apple Store - those MacBook Pros' really know how to kick out the heat, don't they ?
Secondly, I am taking time out to actually learn an AJAX framework inside and out along with rehashing my knowledge of PHP's internals (esp. PHP 5's OO functionality); I am personally leaning towards XAJAX but if anyone reading this has used something better and would like to let me know about it, please contact me via the usual methods.
Thirdly, it would appear that the oh-so-competent folks over in the ICT Department at Linkage have completely broken my account which means that when I need to go on the Internet during my evening classes, I am having to boot my copy of Knoppix and load up good 'ol nxclient to access a GNOME desktop on one of my co-lo boxes.
The sight of a working web browser often draws gasps from various students and staff who cannot for the life of them figure out how I can get Internet access when they are unable to do so... and Group Policy settings enforced on IE are easily breakable!
I'm absolutely shocked as to how bad things have gotten since I left and the fact that their new primary mailserver is advertised in DNS with one hostname (babelfish.linkage.org.uk), advertises a different one in the SMTP banner (babelfish.internal.linkage.org.uk) and has a completely alien hostname configured in reverse DNS (lctweelsby.force9.co.uk) really demonstrates to me how fucking amateurish the ICT Department really has become in the few short months since I left.
Any sane mailserver which does an SMTP callback to verify the sending address will immediately reject the mail due to fear of DNS cache poisoning or a man-in-the-middle attack; of course, any competent admin would know this but hey, I guess I don't run a large production network in the same manner as my own home network but I guess this is something that they need to learn by themselves - they have also opened up a nice gaping security hole by doing what they have done but I'm certainly not going to tell them (or anyone else for that matter) what it is. | 
