Hi everyone, Brad here coming to you for the first time! I thought given that Fiona is currently up at Mt. Everest base camp supporting Paul, I should get on here and give you an update. This is the first time I’ve ever actually posted to a blog, something that Fiona has heaps of experience at so hopefully it goes OK. Tracy (my wife) and I took the kids and both mother-in-laws on a holiday a couple of weeks ago. It was chaos with two little kids to run after and to fit our activities around their sleeping patterns. Anyway I’m glad to be back at work because I think I need a holiday from the kids!

I had the final pitch to the judges for the MUEC Entrepreneurship Competition on Monday night. There were 12 judges this time (up from 6 last time) and it was pretty full on! I had 10 minutes to not only run the 6 new judges through the entire business plan, but also to cover off some issues the original 6 judges had raised last time. The pitch went very well and I made it through question time in one piece.

Tracy and I attended the MUEC Awards dinner on Wednesday night at were fortunate enough to take out 3 of the 4 categories up for grabs. All the hard work over the past 6 months had paid off. It was a nice black tie function and the key note speaker was Evan Thornley from Looksmart fame, who was very impressive.

Over the past week or so I feel like I’ve made great head way on development of the WOMOW site. Fiona had kindly finished most of the layout (in CSS) before she went so now I just have to code it up. I guess learning a new programming language is similar to learning a spoken language other than English. A few weeks ago I didn’t know the first thing about PHP (I’ve always been a Microsoft ASP developer) but once you learn the foundations the rest comes pretty quickly. I’m actually really enjoying learning PHP and working with Open Source software (Red-hat Linux, MySQL) for the first time. I’ve managed to get the home page and a number of other key pages like the Search page 90% finished. I don’t think it’s going to take as long to get this site up and running and some of the developers on Rentacoder where quoting. They were all saying they needed 3 months with up to 5 developers!

Anyway that’s enough from me for now, I look forward to Fiona returning in a few weeks so we can get site up and running.