I’ve sold my big Acer laptop and the cash has been put towards a new toy

I’ve ordered a HP Mini-Note 2133 from E-Buyer (their UK pricing was considerably better than even HP themselves!). In order to keep it all shiny and protected I’ve also ordered and sleeve-case from Waterfield Designs and I have to say it was one of the best examples of customer service I’ve come across in years!

I placed my order, it’s simple as all things on the web these days are… and a few hours later I got an e-mail from Gary (the founder) asking for some more info about my address (apparently "British Isles" doesn’t count as a proper country in the States ) after a quick explanation that UK or Great Britain would suffice, it was all good. 

I’ve had a couple more messages back and forth with them since then, confirmation of exactly what was ordered and a dispatch confirmation. All in all I have to say, I am extremely impressed! I’ll post more once it arrives - but I have no doubt that I’ll  have nothing but positive things to say.

It copies your old install to a directory, and upgrades stuff as required - the only thing I needed to do afterwards were to click the upgrade button to do the required “stuff” (1) to the MySQL Database and  to move my custom header image back into the appropriate directory in the live version…. all of 30 seconds work and none of the (slightly) painful download, unzip, upload, tweak, pray, tweak somemore, pray again process that was upgrading before I switched to Dreamhost.

I’m going to try and blog a bit more in the coming months…. honest! We’re going off travelling in a little over 2 months - so there should be photo’s and comments from around the world…. the tech focus might go for a while - but that’s hardly the end of the world when I average a post every 6 months at the moment We shall just have to see how dedicated I feel as  travel.

I’m selling my “big” laptop (an Acer Aspire 9301AWSMi - see the details here and give me a shout if you’re interested) and hoping to by an HP 2133 Mini-Note to take with us for the trip….. I’m happy to hear any thoughts people have on “better” options - but cheap, light and decent build quality are of paramount importance. I’d also like to be able to run XP and have a copy of my music / photo’s (and maybe a couple of movies) with me - so I’ll need ~50Gb of storage for that….. hence an SSD netbook is probably not suitable…..

(1) This is a highly technical term that means I have absolutely NO idea what goes on in the background

I’ve moved the blog to Dreamhost and so far so good….. it’s nice - a 1 click install of Wordpress and a quick Import / Export of the old posts, change the header picture and here we are…..

So far I’m very happy, it’s all good and I get Google Apps / Mail for domains into the bargain…..

The hosting costs are pretty much identical to Crystaltech give or take $1 per month (and I get a lot more space and bandwidth for my cash) - but it’s on a Linux host rather than Windows - so all sorts of things should work better including posting from my phone a Nokia N95 8Gb which is very nice so far….

Anyway…. off for a bit more testing of phone posts etc and some plugins to install……

UPDATE - Some images seem to be a bit broken… I’m working on it

Work is hectic, I’ve booked a round the world trip (more info to come soon on that…), and there’s just generally been a lot going on …..

I’ve been playing with U3 and the Portable Apps suite in the last couple of weeks - and Portable Apps has won the battle - my Sandisk Cruzer Micro 8Gb U3 drive has been formatted and Portable Apps installed - it’s mostly the same applications - but it’s less “intrusive”
My Home Server is a little more stable now - but I guess I’m going to have to save up and buy a “proper” one at some point (I like these), the mix and match approach doesn’t really seem to be conducive to a stable server and a happy backup database…. thankfully I’ve not had to try and restore any data recently!

Another bonus is that the “XBox360 as a Media Centre Extender” concept that I introduced to the house 6 months ago is finally gaining some traction, Becs is getting the hang of streaming DVD’s (converted to HD-WMV and stored on the Server) and I’m giving serious thought to getting an “Arcade” for the other TV in the Kitchen / Diner to allow us to stream to there as well…more for music admittedly, but with HDMI it’s as capable as my Elite for video I’m just waiting for a black version to appear now…..

Now I’ve been very keen on Windows Home Server - it’s been the thing that’s made me “happy” most in computing terms - I got my RTM copy some time ago, and I’ve been more than happy up until about 3 minutes ago - I would have recommended it to anyone, and did to several friends. Now, however, I’m NOT HAPPY AT ALL.

We’ll start at the beginning, I have a couple of PC’s / laptops floating around the house, and they’re all running Vista. So far so good…. I got WHS and set it up to backup everything each night and had some other stuff synced to the shared folders using Foldershare all in all I was very happy. I had some issues with the 500Gb Disks I was using in external USB caddies for additional storage and had set them back for replacement a couple of times due to mechanical failures (read: load clunking noise and no data) but I thought I was past that. (I’ll do a rant about the disks another day when I’m not quite so upset)

I was getting an occasional error with one disk “disappearing” but a reboot of the caddy and the server seemed to resolve it each time. I wasn’t too concerned…..

Then the hard disk in my Primary PC started playing up - the odd funny noise, and the infrequent hang became more frequent…. so I ordered a replacement disk and loaded up my restore CD - all fine so far, I booted and it found everything and so I kicked off my restore. It failed part way through as the disappearing disk went walkies….. no problems - I had sufficient spare disk space to remove the disk from the storage pool and then do the restore.

Now at this point I think it’s prudent to mention that this PC was the one with the PST files for both my Outlook and my Wife’s primary mail account…. (approximately 4.5 years of mail for her and more like 6-7 for me) everything else was backed up elsewhere… just not these files as WHS had them covered….. can you see where this is heading yet?

SO I start the removal process and I’m informed that all I will lose is the duplication of a couple of folders - all my Data and Backups will be safe. Lovely, so get on with removing the disk please…..

24 hours later when the removal process finishes, I unplug the offending disk and reboot the server to ensure that all is as it should be. When I reboot, I check the server storage screen in the WHS console and this is what I saw:

Hopefully you can see that there’s a lack of BACKUPS in the pie chart….

I did some digging through the event logs and found this really helpful message:

Great….. so my data is gone and my wife is likely to send my balls the same way when she finds out…. Thanks for fuck-all Microsoft!

If there’s anyone from the WHS team that is reading this and has any ideas - I’m open to suggestions - please leave a comment….. or better still get in touch - slimboyfat (at) gmail (dot) com I’d love to hear from you! In the meantime, I’m going to leave my server switched off to ensure that nothing “bad” happens to the data still on there, and look at other backup solutions…..

Technorati Tags: WHS, Windows Home Server, disappointment, backups, lost data, lost faith, disaster, failure

Bye-bye weekend…..

Excited barely covers it to be perfectly honest

On the plus side, the wonderful guys at SVP have got stock of their 500Gb PATA drives again (£52.30 + VAT) - so one was duly ordered first thing this morning and is en-route now. I suspect that it should arrive along with its’ SATA siblings tomorrow if all goes according to plan :-)  This will give me all the storage I need to rebuild my server… Just a USB2 PCI card to come. I’ll have 1 500Gb PATA drive internally, 2 500Gb SATA drives in external caddies attached via USB2.0 (hopefully), and still have 2 USB2.0 & 4 USB1.1 ports free for expansion - loadsa room!!

I’ve managed to source a PCI USB2.0 card in the UK, but it’s also out of stock until ~18th September - so it looks like the big rebuild is gonna have to wait a while There’s also the small matter of no guarantee that it’s supported by WHS - it’s got Windows 2003 Server drivers - so I’m hoping that it’ll be OK… otherwise I may be in the market for a new chassis to house all the kit…. more expense I could do without….

In the meantime, I have my CCNA exam a week on Monday - so the study has commenced and so far, so good….. subnetting actually seems to be making sense this time around - I’ve “understood” it before - well enough for MCSE at least - but I suspect that a better understanding is required for CCNA

Enough waffle for one day - I’ll post my impressions of the new hardware once it arrives - especially the drive caddies…. I’m hoping they’re better than some of the previous ones I’ve had.

Now that it’s available in the UK for a reasonable price…. I’ve ordered my copy
Novatech are selling it for £86.95 inc. VAT - considerably less that some other resellers in the UK, which is nice……
In addition to this, I’ve ordered up some big (500Gb) SATA disks and USB caddies for them. The disks are lovely and cheap from SVP and they are supplying the caddies as well - USB 2.0 ones that support SATA / IDE / eSATA so I’m future proofed for a while at least….The plan is to rebuild the server “properly” - this will involve wiping all the data and starting again - so there’s some BIG backups to run once it’s complete…. the only downside at the moment is that I only have USB 1.1 on my old server chassis :-(  so I’m looking for a supported PCI card with USB2.0 ports now.

I suspect it’ll be a week or so before I have all the bits and I’m ready to start - but I’ll post my first impressions of the finished product once I have it built. I’ll also be posting some stuff on the fun and games I’ve had trying to get a reliable wireless connection for my XBox 360 so I can use it as a Media Centre Extender - 802.11a might be more “reliable” but it’s not easy to find hardware (at least not here in the UK) - that’s all I’ll say for now…..

Technorati Tags: WHS, Windows Home Server, RTM

,

Technorati Tags: XBox 360, Media Centre, Extender, 802.11a, wireless

One fun thing I’ve found that ties in is that you can get your 360 to blog - it’s all automated, and you can see my consoles’ blog here …. I’ll be intrigued to see how this develops as I game more and play around with the Video Marketplace etc.

So far I have to say that my favourite games are Bioshock and Forza Motorsport 2 - both very different, but excellent in their own ways.

More to come as I delve further into the games etc. If you fancy a game then please feel free to ad me - gamertag is jackeales

Technorati Tags: XBox, XBox360, XBox 360, Elite, Blog, 30, Birthday, Gamertag

Aside from that, all is good - I’ve finally passed the second part of the upgrade process to MCSE 2003, and I’m trying to get organised to sit my CCNA - but getting motivated to study is tricky…. with the weather being nice and the house being finished - I just want to chill out and relax in the garden….

There’s also the small matter of my impending 30th birthday…. the panic’s starting to kick in now…..

It’s improving…. OSPF, EIGRP, RIP - and least we’re covering something “meaningful” at last - I think I might have actually learnt something finally!!

It’s still slow - lots of talk and not a lot of do - but it might be worthwhile by the end of it…. I know that doing it as two course would have been the end of me - let’s put it that way!!

We’ll see how tomorrow goes - and then make a final call on Friday…. the jury’s out for now….

It’s not a lot better…. 25 minutes to “explain” Ping - for fuck’s sake! I’m not really in a suitable frame of mind to discuss the rest of the day - I guess it could have been worse - but it could of been an awful lot better…..

More to follow tomorrow……

Colour me unimpressed so far……. a 9:30 start… and by first break at 11 we’d just about got through introductions and associated bullshit…. this included the bombshell that was “we should be finished by 7pm each day…..” the course details talked of 9-5:30, and I figured that 6 wasn’t unreasonable… but 7?!?!?!

Fair enough… I never expected an easy ride - it’s a boot camp for God’s sake…. 9 days compressed into 5 - but I’m on a flight at 7 on Friday… so I’m going to miss the end of the course :-(  if I’d known, I’d have stayed until Saturday!

As it stands…. we got to 15:10 before anything as complex as “enable mode” was mentioned… so the pace so far… well, isn’t exactly racing along…. by the time we got to naming conventions for ports / slots etc. it was 17:15… and that took 20+ minutes - how fucking much do you want to explain something that simple!?

I don’t think anyone is finding it hard going - if they are, then they probably shouldn’t be on the course if I’m honest

More to follow…. hopefully tomorrow picks up the pace a bit….

Props to John Montgomery for this absolute blinder of a mock-up!!

“I’ve been busy” is a kinda lame excuse - but it’s valid this time… I’ve moved teams and house in the last 5 months - not to mention become a 2003 MCSA (I failed the second exam to become an MCSE last Monday… but I have the retake booked..)

Since Becs and I moved in together in our previous house (and especially since we got married,) we’ve been looking for a place to buy together - being a tennant has it’s advantages - but the time was right…. we started looking just after christmas, and found the ideal house in late March - it ticked everything on the “want” list and all of the “would like” list (downstairs loo - check, bigger kitchen - check, garden that faces “the right way” - check, utility room - check, garage / off-road parking - triple-check - 2 car dive & single garage!!)  I’ll post some photo’s once I get back and actually take some of the outside from the front! In the meantime, here’s one of the back of the house about 2 months before it got finished.

It’s a 4 bedroomed detached house - and we’re very happy - thanks for asking!!

As for work and the team move - it’s been on the cards for a little while, and I finally joined the Core IP Transit team about 4 months ago - so I’m now a part of a team responsibile for all of our IP traffic from POP’s in London to CPE / ADSL routers in businesses / homes. We also take responsibility for our MPLS NGN core network in the coming months - so you can imagine what it’s been like for me - I’m a “windows boy” I understand GUI - not Cisco CLI ….. the learning curve has been brutal to say the least. I have an excellent team to work with and ther’s no shortage of dedication and willingness to spread the knowledge - so I’m working long hours and learning a lot - a good combination - but the long hours don’t make Becs all that happy (until pay-day!)

The reason for this post? Well, I’m in London for a CCNA boot-camp to try and ge me up to speed with what I’m meant to be doing day-to-day…. so I’m planning to post something each night about the experience - we shall see…….

Technorati tags: CCNA, MPLS, MCSE, new house, ADSL, excuses

My new friend dekrazee1 (no link as “commitment” to a blog is a bit too much for her at the moment!) and an old aquaintence Mick have been “good” enough to get me an invite into Tangler and I can feel that it could begin to suck my life away - taking every waking moment - but in a good way

It’s a chat site - but a bit different to IM or IRC - you can subscribe to conversations and topics - create you own, and generally involve a load of people you’ve never met - an interesting way to get feedback on a website / project / new geek toy / anything else you want opinions on….

I have the ability to invite some friends - I don’t know how many - but leave a comment as to why you should be invited to this very interesting beta and an e-mail address and I’ll get in touch!!

I’ve chucked my MacBookPro up on E-Bay  - it’s a lovely bit of kit, don’t get me wrong - but I can’t justify it… it’s more than I wanted to spend on a gadget (at the moment anyway) and I really want an XBox 360…

Having WHS also gives me another excuse for an XBox - I can stream everything to it… hide the noisy PC in a cupboard somewhere and enjoy all of my music in the lounge….

Of course this means I won’t be doing my post on OS/X - but suffice to say - it’s going to have to get a lot better Mr Jobs if you’re going to convert me…. I’ve got my copy of Vista Ultimate and an new hard drive to put it on is on its’ way…. I think I’ll be staying Windows for the forseeable

Anyway - stop reading this and get bidding!!

As my regular reader will know, I was invited to the WHS Beta last week.

To say I was excited would be a bit of an understatemnt, I’ve been want ing to play with this technology ever since Charlie’s team announced it at CES! I immediately downloaded the software and documentation, requested my license key and burnt my discs.

The install process has been documented extensively by others who were invited to the party earlier, so I’ll skim over it - suffice to say it was a breeze on an old desktop machine that’s been gathering dust for 18 months - a P4? 1.7Ghz Compaq with ~700Mb RAM and a 120Gb Hard Drive - real bleeding edge stuff 5 years ago!! The only addition was a cheap “e-bay special” Firewire / USB card - no driver issues at all The firewire ports are required to connect my additional drives in their external enclosure….. When WHS goes gold I might step up to the 8 bay version :-))

The process of adding disks was very smooth, I managed to clear a lot of data from one of my disks (removing old backups etc.) and moved the remaining data to other drives temporarily - probably the slowest part of the entire process… then I plugges the array into the server and the “issues” began……….

The server saw all the disks - that’s fine, but it re-labels them - so I couldn’t tell which disk was the “blank one” :-(   So, I disconnected the drives again, and pulled the caddies that had “data storing” disks. Then, after a quick re-connect, I could add my blank drive to the shared pool. This done, I reseated the “full” disks one at a time, and moved data  around accordingly.

• It’s probably worth pointing out at this stage a few little “features” of WHS and adding storage to the pool.

  1.   Disks must be formatted before they can be added to the pool.

  2.   Once a disk is added to the pool - drive letters in the conventional sense do not exist - they all form part of a big pot

• 3.  In the console, the individual disks are “visible” (see the screen-shot below) but only for a status readout.

 This leads me to the biggest “issue” I’ve found so far (and at time of writing) the 2nd most highly rated piece of feedback on the Connect site (raised by yours truly!!) - the face that I cannot re-label my disks within WHS.  e.g. I’d like to be able to number my disks from 1-4 for the external disks - top to bottom in the external array. That way, if a disk goes “bad” - and it’s bound to happen - then I can identify it easily without having to pull the drive one at a time to see when the error goes away.

I see this as a VITAL faeture for the finished product - especially if Microsoft want this to become popular with non-techies - at the moment it’s in danger of falling through the cracks between enthusiasts (by not being feature-rich enough) and the “normal” home-user (because it’s too tricky to do the “easy” stuff). Don’t get me wrong - I LOVE this product, and it’s not going to be disconnected from my home LAN any time in the forseeable future - but it’s a way off being recommended to my parents for them to backup their digital photos etc!!

 There’s a very good write-up here from computerworld, and the reviewer seems to be of the same mindset as me when he sums it up with “For my part, now that Home Server is installed on my network, it’s not going to be unplugged”

Well, it’s excellent - in a word…..

I have to say it’s a very impressive bit of software - the most stable and functional piece of Beta 2 software I think I’ve ever used. I got my invite 36 hours ago - an overnight download, and an install the following night have got me to this post….

The install was painfully simple - pop the DVD in, boot and about 5 (possible more like 3) clicks later - it’s done…. so simple even my dear old Mum could probably manage it!

The initial user experience is good - it’s a very simple desktop - think stripped down Windows 2003. The console connection is clear and easy to use, and overall it’s a doddle.

My only complaint so far is the keyboard “support” there’s no option to choose what keyboard you have - so it defaults to US…. not a huge issue I hear you say - but it’s a PITA when you use @ or ” in your initial password - they’re reversed on UK / US keyboards - so logging in from a UK laptop later means you think you’ve gone mad for a couple of minutes
There’s also no obvious way to change the administrator password once you’ve set it - so if it’s compromised - you’re SOL as far as I can see at the moment - I’ll do some more testing on this one tonight and post more if I find it.

PC Backups are very cool - you install the connector software, it automagically finds the server, gives you a link to the shares and the console software and you can then setup the backups from the console in a matter of minutes - pick what you want to exclude - rather than what you want to backup - novel idea - and quite nice I think…. means you’re less likely to miss something important (and it automagically removes stuff like your pagefile and temp directories - very clever) The backup then kicks off - and it looks pretty fast - I don’t have an exact time as I got booted off the PC - WAF still counts for something
I’ll post more in the coming days as I try to work out how to migrate my data across (4 drives in a Firewire enclosure) - should be fun

I saw this and thought of my own rant

Well, I’ve been added to the popular gang - I’ve been invited to join the Windows Home Server beta!

I’ve grabbed the software and got my key - I just need to juggle some disks around to get myself some hardware - I’m just short a big disk… so it might be an EBay job - I’ll just have to see if I have enough free space to move data and pull one from my array - if not a 500Giger from EBay sounds tempting
 Lots more details and info to follow I’m sure as I start testing and playing around with it.

I was chatting yesterday with my former boss - a nice fellow - he’s now doing ¨consultancy¨ for small businesses and SBS install etc - we were chatting about this and that and I mentioned WHS…. Cue blank look from Rob….. tut tut - working for in the SoHo realm and not knowing about this? Shame on you…… more shame on you for not blogging since August - and I thought I was slack!!

Still the point of this post it to try and get Rob up to speed - so here’s the links to the most important thing Microsoft have done in a long time (I’m biased as my Vista laptop has just died and I’m back on XP - and I think I prefer it to be perfectly honest!)

Beta 2 of WHS is out now - Sign Up here

Forums are here

Team Blog here

Requirements for WHS Beta 2 (and a blog you should read)

• Music Player - been done.
• Touch Screen - see it before.
• E-Mail - yep, got that. Web Browser - yawn…..
• Ooooh, hang on - oh…. no it’s EDGE (not  a lot of use in the UK) - not 3G / HSDPA - so not worth having for data really in this day and age…..

Where’s the “Breakthrough Internet Device”? All I see is a bunch of things my Ipaq 3970 could do with my bluetooth enabled phone 3-4 years ago - OK so it’s all in one piece of hardware now - but it’s not exactly NEW….. My E61 will do all of the above - and it’s 3G……

As for the AppleTV announcement - can I be any more underwhelmed? It’s not 1080i - just 720i so it’s not Hi-Def enough for my liking…. and it’s all DRM’d up - the usual Apple “Fairplay” bullshit - so I can share the content with 3 TV’s in my house - big fuckin’ deal - I still need to cable them together somehow as far as I can see…. what use is that?

Steve - I’m sorry to say this - but I just don’t give a shit…. I’d LOVE a MacBook Pro - running Vista of course….. but OSX would be nice to play with now and again…. but the whole “I-<insert random name here>” thing fails to get my juices flowing…. I like to rip my CD’s to MP3 without DRM and be able to move them around and put them on whateve device I like - I HATE the idea of being tied into a bullshit ecosystem that means that I can’t change to the device that I like….

</rant>

Charlie, I’d more than like to test this - I’d LOVE to…… I think I’d be a perfect example of what you need to test it - data syncing using a combination of Foldershare and SyncToy and a bunch of batch files / ftp’s etc. 

Music / Photo’s / Documents etc. on 3 Laptops and 4 PC’s, Firewire attached disks with loads of storage and multiple copies of all my data - I’ve probably got in the region of half a terabyte of backups dotted around my house (and with my parents for offsite storage) - all being updated (at least) once a day (if not in real-time) and weekly / monthly archives I’ve got for a final worst-case rollback…

Please, please, please can I it? I’ll test any hardware you like - it doesn’t need to be the HP kit - although it’s rather nice and might just have the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) that I’ve been looking for - the heat / noise / power use combo that my current strategy has is something of a problem on the WAF front - it’s not very popular - but probably not a Divorcable Offense like losing all of it!!

The Xbox360 is coming soon to complete the setup - and one of these to go with it would be perfect - it might just justify the 360 - anything that makes it easy to show off the wedding photo’s whilst streaming the music to go with them would be considered a “Good Thing” TM

The ideas that Rick has are excellent and to have voiced them a year ago is visionary, I have to agree with him that they could have done more - but for version 1.0 it’s looking pretty good!

So, if there’s anyone out there from the Windows Home Server team that wants to send me some test kit - I’d be more than happy to give it a trial run?

Seriously though - whilst I do this “blogging thing” for a bit of a laugh - you can tell how seriously I take it by the frequency of my posts!! - it’s be nice to cover some of my hosting costs (currently a few $ per month with CrystalTech) so I’ve opened an Adsense account with Google - I’ll see how it goes - any comments good or ad gratefully received!!  Enough feedback and I may even turn them off - I’m jus intrigued to see what sort of adds they provide and if I get any hits!

Anyway… more posts to come - there things at CES that I REALLY like the sound of…….  

As I hinted at here, I’ve been working on a mail related project…. Well it’s finally over and I’ve got some time to blog again… and it feels nice!

It’s been a busy few months, and December has been double-long (60+ extra hours in the first fortnight!!) but it’s been worth it. The new mail platform for Manx.net is done. I have to pass much thanks on to the team at Mirapoint here in the UK - they have been consummate professionals throughout the project and the positive feedback we’re getting now is proof that it’s been worth the effort.

I was given the project early in the year (within a month of starting) and it was no small project either - webmail and POP3 / IMAP access for ~27000 people all of whom live within 1 hours drive of me! The existing platform was becoming increasingly flaky and customer complaints were growing by the day.

There was no margin for error - the migration had to work and it had to work first time. As I mentioned living as I do, on the Isle of Man - no-one is more than an hour away by car - so the potential for ”feedback” coming and biting me was very real and slightly terrifying.

As it turned out, it all went very well, we had a few issues and I’m sure there’s a couple of our customers who might disagree with me, but all in all it was a very smooth changeover. I’d make a couple of suggestions to anyone who is considering a major platform change like this in future…..

• Ensure you make sure your password policies are the same - so if your old platform is not case sensitive - make sure your new one isn’t! This caused a bit of pain…..
• Make sure the rest of your infrastructure is ready to handle the increased load. A change like this makes a lot of people “test” the new system out - so make sure your call centre staff have been trained on the basics and that support services such as DNS are fully specced to handle the load.

Over-all it was hard work but extremely rewarding - and not a fortnight I’d like to go through again any time soon
I’d just like to name a few people who deserve extra thanks for making it all go so well…. Tony, Kev, Steve, Dickie, Sarah - you all deserve medals - and the rest of you (you know who you are) - I couldn’t have done it without you!

Finally - there’s one person who deserves thanks more than anyone - my wonderful wife Becs - without your patience and understanding I think I’d have gone mad!

Right - back to normal service now - I’m promising myself that I’m going to blog more in 2007 - it won’t be hard to do more than 2006 - but I’m going to work on it…… ;-)

So far, I have to say that the experience has been good - the interface is nice and easy to use, it’s detected my blog settings (I hope) and it seems to allow me to create drafts easily - so I might actually post bits of interest more often - I’ll have to see how things go over the next couple of days…. if the integration with the Live toolbar works like I think it should, I should be able to flag stuff for posting later - save the drafts and write something meaningful about the link when I ahve time!

Anyway I going to try out a couple of the other features - such as images etc and see how it performs….

edit - images don’t work to wordpress - I think I need to do some more digging on that one…. bugger!

I’ve got some music reviews to do in the coming days - I’ve found a couple of great bands / artists that I want to get the word out about - so I’ll be testing the changes more in the coming days - in the meantime check out Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly! and YoYo Hearts - the YoYo’s are supporting GCWGF on the Island next month - can’t wait to see them both live…. There’s other stuff I want to review - but I need to find the links that lead me to them - so I can give “props” to the people who have pointed me in the right direction!

Cheers

Jack_eales@manxemail.net

or

slimboyfat@manxemail.net

Possibly like this http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/gmail_slimboyfat/75655

 of maybe I need to do so HTML coding and do this:

Dunno….

but I want a pro account! So I’ll see what I can do and let you know how I get on….

http://zapr.typepad.com/michael/2006/07/important_custo.html

It’s genius and Michael and the rest of the team at Zapr should be congratulated for his originality.

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!

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…..

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!!

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…

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