Excuses time…..

I guess I need to give a reason for the lack of activity on the blog recently….. but I do have a valid excuse – I got married!!

Yes, as of April 8th 2006 I ceased to be a single man (not that I’ve been truly single for 2.5 years now…..) Since then I’ve been off enjoying the delights of Athens, Santorini, and Rome for a fortnight – more to follow in a later post that will include some photo’s (and some bitching about a certain Greek airline and their slightly broken ideas on customer service hint: they fly around the Aegean….)

The big day went extremely well, the weather was a bit dodgy early on – 20 minutes before the bride arrived I was stood outside the church in torrential hail (I’m not sure what the right work to describe that much hail is – but torrential gives you an idea…) Thankfully it cleared just as Becca went to get in the car, and by the time we left the church, we were bathed in bright sunshine and surrounded by blue skies!

I’ll do a proper post about it all in a few days – at the moment I’m struggling to get back into the swing of work and home – the house is a bomb-site of cards and presents -  not to mention washing and nik-naks for people we picked up on our travels.

But at least I’ve made some sort of excuse about the lack of posts recently!

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Google discrimination?

Now, I’ve always found the concept of “US English” & “British English” rather amusing – English is English – and so by definition, it comes from England (or Britain if you like…) So americans spell some stuff wrong…. that’s their perogative I guess….

But Google, the “Do NO Evil” company… how could you discriminate so? I was reading fellow ManxMan Dan Karran’s Blog, and I came across this rather interesting little factiod.

It seems that if you change you regional settings away from US English then the much publicised changes to GoogleTalk are not available to you…. no chat window in your inbox – I just presumed that I was unlucky not to have it yet…. but no, I was daft enough to ammend my local settings to UK English – heaven forbid! I live in the UK (give or take a technicality – it’s strictly a Crown Dependency and part of the British Isles rather than the UK – but who’s splitting hairs?)

More importantly – I was missing the MUCH Hyped Delete button – what’s going on Google? Does delete mean something different in US English? Has your localisation team been too busy to translate?

I’m disappointed to say the least…..

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New stuff….

If there’s one thing in life that makes me happy (other than Becs!) it’s getting new stuff. That feeling of anticipation when you find the little green card on the doormat (the one from the postman that says “I tried to deliver something that’s too big for your letterbox.”)

I got home yesterday to find a card indicating that there were 3 (yes 3!!) parcels waiting for me at the post office…. two of them are slightly boring (and entirely un-tech related) things for my impending wedding, and one was a huge box from the USA – I’ve been waiting for this box for what feels like forever….

I found the contents of the box through Tom Coates over at plasticbag.org and this post in particular (Tom – they ARE toasty!). The box contained two Slankets, one for me and one as a belated birthday present for my father*

What can I say – other than they are SUPERB!! I am hugely impressed with the customer service which included a personal e-mail (not a system generated robotic notification) when they shipped, and most incredibly, a HAND-WRITTEN note in the box….  Gary, can I just say “the UK loves the Slanket right back!!”

The whole experience is one that should be an example to small businesses everywhere about how to sell on the web, and earn the respect (and referrals) of your customers – this post is just the start, the boys have got themselves an evangelist right here in the UK – I’ll tell everyone I can about these wonderful blankets. So, stop reading this – get out there and buy one!!

* Dad suffered a stroke last July and I thought it was the perfect thing for him – for those days when he needs a quick snooze mid-afternoon (which is most days at the moment) – Love ya Dad!!

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Hardware disasters – aka why I take backups….

Hardware glitches….. well, shall we start with the dying hard disk? One drive in my external firewire box decided to die last week – of course it’s the one with all my photo’s on, and where all the music is ripped to (490 Albums at last count) so you can imagine my horror when it wouldn’t come back online – it’s been giving me problems for a couple of weeks – just dropping off and requiring a reboot of the PC and the Array to get it back….

Luckily I have some good backup software and I keep two copies of all that sort of data – wasteful in some ways – but disk space is cheap!! I found out how cheap disk space is with a bit of digging around for a replacement drive – I have a spare that was dropped in – but now I need a new spare!! I’ve not decided if I should start a round of upgrades to 250Gb drives from 120’s or just be cheap for the time being and get another 120 as a like for like replacement. I’ll keep you posted of what I find / decide on…

Whilst I was searching I found a Fujitsu 80Gb Laptop drive on E-Bay (brand spanking new, for £88 delivered to my door the following morning) this will allow me to do a load of juggling of disks amonst the laptops here and improve the data redundancy somewhat. At present I have a pair of 30Gb drives in my Laptop (a Compaq Evo N600c) but I have to use the MultiBay slot – so I have no optical drive most of the time…. just a little frustrating :-)  I intend to upgrade this to have the 80Gb drive in it and drop the pair of 30’s into Becca’s Armada M700 (along with a RAM upgrade also found on E-Bay) to turn that into a useful machine at long last (there’s minimal chance that she’ll need an optical drive - I hope!!)

Once all this is completed and I get sign-off from Becca, I’ll probably upgrade the PC to run SBS 2003 and have a domain in the house – central storage and offline files, combined with Foldershare for additional redundancy and music / photo syncronisation across multiple machines, we should be on to a winner! I then just need to find somewhere to “hide” the PC as it’s pretty noisy – and I’d like to get it out of the study and into a cupboard (understairs stylee) of some description – run it headless and use remote desktop as required to do admin….. but we shall see…

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New Job!

I’ve been meaning to post a bunch of stuff for a while, lots has been going on in the household, Wedding plans are entering the final stages, a new job starts tomorrow, and a couple of minor hardware glitches and upgrades have taken up the remainder of my time…. so expect a flurry of posts today!

The new job – I start work for Manx Telecom tomorrow (Monday 13th Feb 2006) in the Hosting team – so I’ll become responsible for a number of aspects of the online services that MT offer, including ManxNet Mail…. they seem very keen to provide training – so I hope to be MCSE & (hopeully) CCNA

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Latest upgrades….

Hopefully this post will work… my first attempt failed for no obvious reason – but I suspect it may have something to do with the abomination that is Internet Explorer 7… it’s like IE 4 – but more horrible (remember the active desktop?) the Beta 2 preview release is a crock, and will be coming off tonight…. I’ll have to wait a bit longer for a version that works properly with SpamKarma (the one saving grace of IE7 is that the previews of captured spam work as they should… like they do in Firefox….)

An update from IE6 is badly needed – but please give up with the RSS integration (FeedDemon works just fine thanks), and put the buttons back where they were…. and what’s with the Blue Boobs?

 Anyway enough of a rant… WordPress 2.0.1 is now available…so I guess I should upgrade that as well…. at least it’s not BETA!! Why oh why didn’t I wait a day or two more before upgrading??

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Upgrades – software and work…

Well, I’ve done it and finally upgraded to WordPress 2, and I have to say it was stupidly easy!! Apart from some hardware problems (my laptop freezing twice as I was uploading the new files) it was utterly painless.  I’ve also upgraded to Spam-Karma 2.1 – to ensure that the junk stays out of my comments….

The new interface is lovely – just a bit cleaner and “nicer” that the previous version, the editing tools are superb as well…. the preview is massively improved from previous versions (create a post and click ‘Save and Continue Editing’ then scroll down to see what I mean…) 

I know I promised to post more, and I will – a new role beckons working in telecoms (on the web hosting side of things) so it should start getting interesting…. I’ve got to have a medical and get my references checked… and a “security check” but it’s all OK!!

More updates to follow as things progress……

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MSN Live Messenger

Invites available – i’m looking for MEANINGINGFUL comments – not the usual pleading….. impress me – show me some GOOD new software – show me something funny – give me a reason to give you an invite…..

The oppourtunity is there – PLEASE take it!!

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I’m alive!!

It’s been too long since my last post – over a month….. but I’ve been busy – honestly!!

I was finally made redundant (after 2.5 years notice) at the end of November, so I have been fairly occupied with the hunt for a new job, not to mention having my first holiday since February! The final week at work was fairly chaotic as well – completing a number of projects and handing over those that would not be completed in time.

It’s nice to be out though – the last year or so has been a bit of a roller-coaster emotionally, my girlfriend agreed to marry me this time last year, then my father suffered a fairly massive stroke at the age of 57 in July – his recovery has amazed everyone from family and friends to the medical team who have treated him over the last 5 months. Finally finishing work was a huge relief – it’s meant I’ve had more time to spend doing the important stuff and not worrying about projects that are my problem – but out of my control!

The job hunt continues – but I’m hopeful that something will come up in the new year – but nothing is guaranteed in this life – so if you know of anyone who’s looking for technical project staff or infrastructure techies in the Isle of Man – please give me a shout – or leave a comment!!

I promise that come the New-Year I’ll start reading blogs again and posting any interesting snippets I find – but time has been short this last month.

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Win a t-shirt!

The nice people over at F-Secure are offiering some superb t-shirts to a few lucky people, why not have a look at their blog and see if you can get one.

I’d like to point out that anyone who gets one as a result of reading this should contact me – as I’ll be very upset if you win and I don’t!! 🙂

Want to win one of these?

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