If you asked me to sum up the last week I could probably do that (it's been pretty boring actually) but to try and write about the last however many months I'm either going to gloss over a lot of stuff or bore you all (and myself ) to tears. I'll stick with the former.

So dgym and I left our jobs, sold our house and went off cycling. We had loads of fun and there's quite a lot to say about it all, you can read about it here. We were originally considering emigrating but were never really convinced enough about anywhere to make the move so for now are living in the UK. France would still be nice if it were easier to run a business there but is off the menu for now.

The whole cycling thing left me with a bit of a problem in that I'm somewhat addicted to the whole thing and am rather opposed to returning to a full time job because there's just not enough holiday. So I haven't. I've since been cycling in Ireland and Scotland, and last autumn I cycled all the way from home to Corsica. Which was awesome and blessed by many a pain au chocolat.

While travelling, we started work on Game Pixies, a site for german boardgames and japanese puzzles, aiming for both fun and advertising revenue. We've achieved the first at least and have a small core of dedicated users, unfortunately it's not taken off amazingly well and we recently had to take down a couple of games, also the ad revenue is terrible so we ended up focusing on other stuff.

I was also working through Rentacoder for a while. The idea seemed great at first - working whenever you want on fixed-price coding projects for people all over the world. It was vaguely feasible while we were considering life in a different country with a lower cost of living... but once we returned to the UK, the rates just weren't worth bothering with, and the lack of physical presence aspect started to really work against us. Too many people able to offer lower rates from other countries, too much effort filtering through the crap to find a project that might be worthwhile, too much competition and not enough value placed on good programmers... bah. I did however pick up one UK based client on there willing to pay decent rates, who I still do occasional work for.

At the start of this year, Blue Room Hosting was born, selling Linux virtual private servers. It's growing slowly but the customers we do have seem very happy so far (we love and value each and every one of them) and we're hoping things will eventually start to sell themselves once we grow a bit more and start getting recommendations, reviews, etc. We're now at the stage where things are running pretty smoothly and require very little attention unless something happens (which is quite rare) so I'm thinking about getting some proper contract work, maybe that'll help pay for the next cycling adventure :).

We're living in Dorset now which is where I grew up, we are renting a lovely farm cottage with fantastic views, we overlook many miles of open farmland and can often see cows from the window. Moo! We've been here for over a year now. It's a bit of a social dead zone though, the people I knew when I was younger have mostly gone to the city for things like jobs and fun. They don't know what they're missing out on, it's the local cheese festival in a couple of weeks time!

I've taken up geocaching this summer, which makes cycling around the local area a bit more interesting... Any other geocachers around here?