I have a new job, which I will be starting in a month’s time. It is not after all in (the I.T. side of) finance, but it is in central London, not far from Old Street station. The commute from Northampton will be an immense pain to begin with, but we’ll probably move somewhere a bit nearer in a few months’ time.

One particularly nice thing about the new role is that I will be working with F/OSS technologies on a Linux (sorry, Gnu/Linux) platform. I’ve had to bite my tongue repeatedly over the past couple of months when recruiters have told me enthusiastically that such-and-such a company is “a Microsoft Gold partner”, like I should give a toss…

I will give a quick plug here for ECM Selection, who put me up for the job. They take very good people, match them with very good companies, and don’t try to hustle you into things you don’t want to do. They’re also imaginative enough to consider misfits like me, who don’t have “numerate” degrees but have somehow got it into their heads that they want to do clever things with computers (and have done, I should add, some of the necessary intellectual spadework…). I think lack of imagination, about people and processes as well as platforms and technologies, is the besetting vice of the software industry at present, so it’s very cheering to find that there are people out there who do value imagination and exercise it.