Down but not out Oct 10, 2009 2 Comments
I think it would be safe to say this rule works for many things, blogging for one.
I have been meaning to get back into keeping my online persona and blog alive for some time now, but for one reason or another other things have taken precedent.
A lot has happened to me of late and as is always the case, it is hard to know where to start.
Last time I wrote anything here I had recently moved out of the house in Brighton. I was back home living with my parents with a bit more summer still ahead of me, hunting for and applying for jobs and looking forward to a nice Holiday in France.
That holiday has since been and gone (and if the temperature in the mornings is anything to go by, fairly long gone). The job hunting has also come to an end as I am now gainfully employed by a small company called RPM.
Living arrangements have changed too. No-longer am I filling a small room at my parents house, nor do I take up far too much room in a house in Brighton. I am now living in deepest darkest west country Devon with Demelza in a nice little first floor flat.
Suffice the say in my online downtime things have been very busy. To begin with I was busy house hunting (although, as luck would have it that didn't last long). Then I was busy with planning and taking all I could down to Cornwall to Demelza's parents house. After that came a nice holiday and a short time to relax (although even this was filled with writing lists of things we needed to do/get). Then finally a quick trip to London and then down to Cornwall to begin my job.
During the first week of my new job we got the keys to our flat, I spent my days working and my evenings moving stuff in. Then on my first full weekend down here we moved in for good. Well, I say moved in, we did, everything else was just a big pile of stuff on the floor.
What followed was a series of trips to Ikea, Sainsbury's, Tesco's, Argos and anywhere else you might find all the things you need when you move into a new place. The big things were, well, big, but at least we knew what we wanted. The small things took the real time, the wooden spoons, the cheese graters, the hand towels. You only ever realise you don't have them when you need them.
All the while with this backdrop of sorting the flat came work (for both of us), sorting out of bills, more calls to the rental agency than I care to even think about. I could have written 100 blog entries on the trials and tribulations of moving in, but as is always the trouble with the interesting things in life, you are always too busy to talk about them.
Suffice to say, it isn't all done, we have already had two visitors and still the weekends have long lists of things that need doing. We are however slowly getting through them. More importantly I feel like we are getting through them.
In other news, my computer is on its last legs, I have a new phone and the world still spins...
Just works (TM) Jul 20, 2009 No Comments
There is a certain irony to how I feel about computers at the moment.
Today started with the sync partnership between my phone and Outlook on my computer getting lost broken or stolen from me one way or another. The net effect of this was all my contacts, tasks, notes and calendar entries vanished from the phone. While this was not a catastrophic loss as all the data is in Outlook too, a phone with no contacts is like a car with no wheels.
So I set about restoring the flaky connection between the two devices and forced them to kiss and make-up. All in all this lost me about 3 hours of this morning with other distractions and tasks occurring in-between. You would have thought that now I would be generally annoyed at technology, but in actual fact the exact opposite is true. This successful patching of the morning spurred me on to sort out a couple of other things on my phone and general organizational system in the in-between times of the day.
Specifically I re-discovered MS OneNote.
In a way there is nothing that special about OneNote, it is a note taking application for the computer which is part of the Microsoft Office suite. All you do is keep notes in it, that is all. Yet it is how elegantly that this all works that makes me feel I can appreciate computers for that they are again, tools to get the job done.
I dragged bits from websites including text and images and they just appeared in the note along with date time and where they came from as a block ready to be moved about. I can just pick up any element and move it round like publisher. I can also just start writing wherever I want and use all the nice powerful formatting tools from Word. I have workbooks, tabs, pages, folders. I can tag items, draw things in, highlight text, search for anything (including text inside images). In short, it is an application that makes collating and storing little notes and bits of information for projects and alike really really simple.
The best part of all of this... I knew I could set this up to work with my phone. I found the option to install to my phone. Up on my phones screen popped the installation, I clicked through and 30 seconds later I had all my notes on my phone so I have them with me.
I like it when things just work!
What is clutter? Jun 11, 2009 2 Comments
So I'm moving out of the house in Brighton this weekend. I have lived down here for the last two years and in that time, although my living has been fairly spartan there is still a fair bit of stuff in my room.
Turning into a neat freak has certainly had a hand in helping me stay fairly organised, but it doesn't seem able to stop the clutter... well, maybe it has, I don't think I'm really sure what I regard as clutter.
For example, I am always fixing computers and picking up spare parts. Every time I am about to throw some random bit of hardware that doesn't work I take all the screws off it and add them to the (sorted) box I have. I hate having a screw that just fits when I could have one that really fits. The same applies to bigger bits of hardware such as MODEM's and graphics cards. To that end I currently have 5 spare graphics cards and 3 spare MODEM's in my room. OK, now it doesn't take a genius to know that is too many, but exactly how many is the right number? Fine, one lets me help one person with that problem, but I don't get new graphics cards every day. It would be really annoying for everyone involved if I ended up needing two.
This sort of problem, however small, seems to apply to a lot of my stuff. I like to keep things around that would be handy to have in the future, but at the same time I don't want to be surrounded by stuff that never gets used.
I do something similar with clothes. When something is old and worn out it just moves into another pile so it's kept for events (mainly Scouting based it has to be said) when I want something I don't care much about.
How about magazines. I pick up PCPro fairly religiously each month if only for the DVD of software it comes with. I regularly find myself going back a year or so in magazines to find some article or bit of software they talked about. OK, so I could throw out everything older than a year but I guarantee the day after I do that I will want something from 13 months ago....
I want less stuff in my room, I want less clutter, but what will it cost me in convenience to do that?
Made of fail Apr 5, 2009 1 Comment
Today has just been one of those days.
I have been broken the last week with what feels like one of the more vile forms of the flu and Demelza left for Italy today to go for a holiday with some friends. Both of these things suck, but not nearly as much as I have today.
This morning I have barely been able to construct a coherent discussion or argument with Nik. I have struggled all day to build sentences that, for lack of a better word, make sense.
This is liveable with if it wasn't for the strangle mistakes and bad luck that seem to have followed me round all day.
I think this is summed up today by the trip I made to Sainsbury. Our Sainsbury's has a set of escalators that deal with the single story people need to go up to get to it. To allow trolleys to be taken on them, instead of the usual steps, ours is more of a set of long ramps.
As I arrived at the shops the "up ramp" was stationary so I had to walk up it. The "down ramp" was working just fine. OK, a little annoying. 10mins later and I am coming out of the shop only to be greeted by a closed "down ramp" and yup, you guessed it, a fully functional "up ramp".
I don't know why I bother.
Killer joke Apr 2, 2009 No Comments
Ever get the feeling your girlfriend is just keeping you around in the hope she can later kill you and steal your money?
Either that or she was a serial killer in another life. Love you too dear :P
Get what you pay for? Mar 18, 2009 No Comments
I have for many years had trouble free computing.
OK, maybe that isn't quite true. Let's try again. For many years I have never had a computer break down in any way whatsoever. I have never lost a file, I have never broken a piece of hardware. Actually, not quite true, I broke a single external harddisk which I took everywhere and to be quite honest, expected to fail. Disks were never meant to be moved around like that, they are too fragile.
I have spent a long time fixing other peoples computers and something strikes me. It is always the cheap bit of kit that fails. It is the cheap power supply which dies and takes the motherboard with it, the cheap disk which last a year and dies, the cheap case where the fans clog and die etc etc.
Let's give a couple of examples.
My case cost about £70. It is fairly expensive as cases go for the size. It is of high build quality, it is big, heavy and solid. I have never had any issues with it. On every air intake for fans there is a filter. I am always having to remove dust off the front of these. Every time I remove the side off the case there is almost no dust in there. As such my fans still run just fine, they can still run quiet and the rest of the machine is in good order.
My power supply is made by Antec. These people have been the gold standard for any IT enthusiast since as long as I remember. There is good reason for this. I have a large high powered computer, it has 5 disks, a 4 core CPU and 2 graphics card. I am still running it on my 5 or something year old 550Watt power supply. It has to be fairly fully loaded and yet it still runs just fine. I have seen much larger power supplies give up and die at the mere sight of this hardware. Also, everyone I know who has ever killed an Antec power supply notes it never took anything else with it. This is a common problems with cheaper kit. As with before, Antec is not cheap.
Hard disks have moved on a bit in recent years. When you start seeing 5 year warranties on disks you know it is going well. Although, bear in mind that the disk my OS is on is again 5 or so years old and still going. I would say this is at least in part due to not picking the cheapest disks out there.
I will admit some of the bits in my machine have changed, but all the computer hardware I have ever bought is still in active use. My old motherboard, RAM, CPU and graphics card are in my brothers machine and running just fine everyday.
I will be the first to admit that my computing life has been far from trouble free, however, hardware wise I don't really have any issues to my name. Compare this to the countless machines I have fixed, clearly there is more than just luck going on here. Perhaps the next time your thinking of buying a new machine that extra £50 might save you something.
Advanced Facebook Mar 6, 2009 No Comments
Looks like Facebook knows what I am going to say before I do
(this was last night on the mobile Facebook. I had just written that comment)
I'm a neat freak! Feb 25, 2009 No Comments
OK, well this I didn't expect...
Living away from home has taught me many things. It has taught me to cook (not just muffins and cakes but real food). It has taught me to (at least try to) manage my time in a sane way. It has taught me In part to be more independent and more self sustained (although I had a fair bit of that before I moved out). However, the point I have most changed on because of living away from home is in household chores. When you live at home the place is for the most part pretty tidy and you don't really have to do much about that, it just happens. I'm sure my mother could go into the detail of exactly how "it happened" but lets face it, it was never my forté .When it comes to your own room you care less. Fine, it is a bit messy, but it is not where you live, you just sleep there. When you move into somewhere shared and rented etc you have just the one room you can say is yours as such. Then all of a sudden having to clamber over 3 piles of papers isn't just an inconvenience, it is downright annoying all the time. It simply isn't sustainable.
In a little under one and half years I have gone from someone who didn't mind that much about mess to someone who craves order and perfection. My room is always tidy, I am always sorting papers and checking things are in their correct place. I don't just hoover my room, I work my way down through pretty much the whole house. If there is stuff on the drying rack by the sink I always put it away making sure it is all clean. Even my room at home is now tidy and assuming my parents don't fill it with stuff then it remains that way.
There is a part of me that feels this change is more than a little creepy. After all, whoever heard of a tidy boy? Maybe it is just another part of growing up for me, maybe I was always a tidy person, just stuck in a more lazy body than I knew...
Maybe it is just Demelza's influence that has brought it out... well in part at least.
On a plus side, at least I can find stuff!
Anyone know where we’re going? Feb 8, 2009 No Comments
Why can't people just say what they mean?
So I left Cornwall yesterday afternoon knowing full well this was almost certainly going to be a bad day for travelling. I mean, have you seen the weather of late? Actually, I ask because I haven't. Cornwall has been fairly well shielded from most of it. Devon on the other hand had up to 55cm the other night. Suffice to say I assumed my travel problems would be there.
How wrong could I have been? Sailed through Devon without a hitch, In fact, sailed all the way to Paddington station without a hitch. Slowed a little in places, but for the most part it was a fairly boring journey I spent watching the rest of the firefly TV series on my laptop.
The trouble all started just as we were coming into London. The announcer on the train told us that we had made good time and were in on time and that to add to our good fortune all the underground lines were running just fine too. Well that's handy, maybe I can get an earlier train than the hour later one suggested to me.
Yeah, as if things could go that well! As I go out the main station and into the underground I can't help but notice a lot of lost looking people, even for a big tourist place like Paddington. Turns out the circle line was shut down, the whole thing! Well, that's handy. Thinking cap on, I know, District line down to Earl's Court, then District along to Victoria. OK, sorted. At Earl's court I am met with about 3 times the number of people that station can handle and a train that claims Victoria isn't on the District line. Quick look at my map and I'm still right thankfully. Find a train that claims to be going to Victoria, get on that, they announce all stations. It is pretty packed, not much room to move. We rattle through the stations one by one until we get to Sloane Square (the one before Victoria) and then they decide our next stop will be St James's Park. Oh come on guys, no, not again. You see, several years ago I was on a train to Victoria when they decided it was closed (twice) and we sailed through it. This time I had already given up and just stood there waiting to sail through. Thankfully, little luck on my side and we actually stopped there this time.
All in all, I love the underground. That is not to say it is without faults. I have been on much cleaner; better, easier to understand systems in other parts of the world, but none of them have quite that character. Maybe it is the little mistakes from time to time that make me like it so much, even if it does cause me to almost miss my trains from time to time...
Legal tango Jan 16, 2009 No Comments
OK, the last few days events have been, well interesting.
On Tuesday I received an e-mail sent from my website via my contact form. The e-mail claimed to be from someone at the law firm Hewitsons asking for a response regarding a letter and e-mail sent to me on the 10th of December regarding me infringing copyright on something called the "Belbin SPI".
First reaction: "What the hell?".
So, I typed back an e-mail saying I had received no such e-mail and could they please re-send.
Wednesday morning I got a reply containing a PDF of the original that was apparently sent. Unsurprisingly it had been sent to the wrong place. I have always made sure you can't trace my address, phone number etc from my site. In fact, you can't really even get my e-mail. That said, I do have a contact form which by the very fact I replied to him, I do monitor.
The letter detailed a URL to a copy of the Belbin test I had on my blog. That link in fact comes from this blog entry made back in 2005. I wrote this having just done the Belbin test in college, and thinking it was quite interesting I took the document we were given at college and put it online for others to try out. The document I posted had no copyright notice on the bottom. Call me a little naive but I didn't see an issue with this.
In the letter they firstly accused me of "passing off" my document as my own work and not their clients. The first thing I did was go back and re-read my entry. Although that entry is now different, the first 4 lines are the same. I explain in the entry who it was by and what the name of the book it was first published in. In my mind I don't think that really counts as passing off.
Then they gave me a list of things they wanted done:
We are instructed to demand that we receive by close of business on Wednesday, 24 December 2008 the following:
1. a written undertaking that you will not hereafter whether by yourself, your servants, agents or any of them or otherwise howsoever
(a) supply or offer to supply services, not being services of our client, under, by reference to, or including the name BELBIN (or colourable imitations thereof)
(b) infringe our client's copyright in the Belbin SPI
(c) cause, enable or assist others to do any of the aforesaid acts
2. the delivery up to this firm of all material (including without limitation, promotional or other business literature and hand-outs) in your power, possession, custody or control, the supply of services using which, would be a breach of undertakings in numbered paragraph 1 above
3. the names and addresses of all persons, firms and companies to whom the you have supplied services relating to BELBIN Team Roles using the Infringing SPI and/or the Belbin SPI
4. an accurate written statement setting out in reasonable detail the dates and numbers of SPIs provided by you or downloaded from your blog together with details of any remuneration received by you for providing these
After I spent some time pouring over that wonderful legal babble trying to decipher it into English I came up with the following: Remove the document.
You see, I can't do much more than that of their list. This is the internet, I don't know anything about the people who may have downloaded it. As an individual I am not required by law to keep access logs of my server and I can't possibly have names and addresses. In fact, the only real thing I can do is work out how many times it has been downloaded and even that proved hard, I don't have logs past 2006 and a lot of the early logs are incomplete or for the wrong site etc... (the web is a complicated place and I have moved the document around as I have changed sites).
The other reason I couldn't do much more was because I had never supplied the document to anyone bar putting it online, nor had I ever had any money for this.
So, I removed the document (plus the other couple like it that they never mentioned, better safe than sorry). I then replied saying I had done all I could and would like confirmation that the issue was closed. I waited until yesterday lunchtime for a reply. I then phoned only to get through to voicemail. I called a couple more times before e-mailing again. This time I got an auto response saying he was out off the office that day.
This morning I finally received an e-mail saying that they were going to drop the issue and not pursue it further. They thanked me for helping and removing the document.
It has to be said, I am glad that is over, I never would have thought something posted almost 4 years ago would cause me so much trouble.
As a side note, I was rather unimpressed with the bullish wrong attitude taken by the Belbin company and their law firm. Had they simply used the contact form on the bottom of every page of my site instead of trying their hand at investigating my e-mail address and postal address they would have got in contact with me first time. I am also not impressed at such impossible demands made and the accusation that I was passing off the test as my own. They could well have been sending their message to someone without the technical knowledge to call them on the impossibility of most of what they asked. They would have been complete fools to go after me for this, things like this have been tested in court over and over and they simply wouldn't have got anywhere. That said, they did give me a scare.