Red's Place

So, here we are again yes?

Some people, well only some, will remember I tried this and managed to enter posts for just about a year, and then hit a few problems with the content system I was using, and abandoned it (without backup you'll be pleased to know), as the XML storage was completely unintelligable.

Anyway, now I'm back, with a much better system, this one is called Movable Type, and an alternative URL! This one actually uses a SQL database, so we'll see how far that goes :-)

Still working on links and stuff, I wonder what this template lets me do.... back later.

So, I've finally got a template I prefer, much lighter colours than before, reminding me of summer, which we need here :-)

I've also managed to get some links into the right hand bar, which is good, took me a while to find it, but now I know its just hand edit the HTML in the template. Sorted!

I was going to cover the wedding last weekend, but Chris has covered the saliant points, and Phut and Pete have input too.

However I do have some photos you should see.

Spam is killing email! My hosting provider who are very good are working really hard and have a new set of email software due to go live on their servers. However with the load going up by 50% every month, how can any IT organisation cope?

I read this week that MessageLabs (the european virus/spam filtering outsource supplier) and a US based supplier (Pironi ?) are both saying that over 85% of email they process is spam.

We obviously need to redesign the Internet, seems that this bloke from Intel may have an idea !

Ok, so it was only one week ago that Craig and Von got married, it still seems a long time. The weather has changed, now it feels much more like September, but its still bright today.

I had to mention Phut's tarnishing of ER. I still like the show and think the writing is pretty good, however, yes, I will accept they have thought up some really crummy plot lines recently.

What's that I hear you yell? I need an "about me" page? I suppose I should create one, give me time.

Off to the pub :-)

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Samual Adams Boston Beer, the two good beers I drink in the USA.

Just found in Sainburys at Camberley! Fantastic! I almost emptied the shop... :-)

Yes, I've moved domain, same service provider. The reason is complex, but means I don't need to worry about bandwidth as I did on the other domain.

I've set up a forwarder for any stragglers, but if you have any bookmarks, please update!

The good news is that the Movable Type system is quite easy to move from one place to another, and keep all the data. Also MySQL databases are pretty funky!

So its time for me to get on, and do the usual Sunday stuff, which unfortunately means cleaning. I'll catch you later.

Outside my house that is! Got home tonight early for me (6:45pm) but later than most people work, to find the entire parking area was filled with the building staff from the nursing home. Not amused at all. Had to park about half a mile away. Grr. They still haven't gone yet!

Looks like Phut has been helping fix peoples computers. Something I apparently know about due to the company I work for. Maybe I should get him one of these to ease the agony.

Perhaps I should return to the "gottle of geer" as Ribby put it the other day, specifically this geer. Ahh, Good bless Sainsburys :-)

Its probably just the Monday blues with a crap week ahead, but I'm just not with it today. All started with the usual grind getting to work, should be a 50minute run to Portsmouth, and yet today it took 1hr50mins! September, one of the worst months to be a commuter around here, goes with the few weeks after Chrimbo. Arrghh! What with School Buses, roadworks and the drivers who only appear when its raining, and despite having lived all their life in the same place, still don't know the road layout. ?!"£"!?"!

On another topic entirely, those of you who know me will know that I went SpeedDating, thanks to my friends Craig & Von (aka Mr Grumpy), and I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Obviously I was my usual idiot self, as absolutely nobody has contacted me, and nobody has replied to my attempts to contact. Arse. Guess I need to win the lottery now as I suspect a Silver may be required!

At least I have a holiday coming up... Onward !!

Yet again, malicious software and spyware have caused my friends chaos and hassle.

The Mozilla Firefox browser has just reached its 1.0 preview release, which I think means that is going to be 1.0 any day now! Some nice new features, such as a yellow address bar for secure sites, and the padlock symbol is now in the bottom right and it now shows the site name that is secured. I guess this is to show any mismatch between the certificate and the actual site connected to, which is something Internet Explorer has never cared about!

Firefox also has this groovy feature called Live Bookmarks which is interesting, and works on this blog, and the BBC News site.

All cool :-)

One of the topics on the many radio stations I flip between on my drive to Portsmouth (I hate the BBC, and the journey puts me in three different commercial coverage zones, very annoying), this morning.

One women phoned in saying she hated, and could not use, toilets with the cistern "up high" with the long pipe and the long chain. I knew exactly what she meant, but yes, a good definition of irrational. :-)

Anyone recommend a plumber? My heating has a pressure relief valve that has developed a fault. Its supposed to let out the pressure if its over a dangerous threshold, but no, it lets out all the water instead. Thus the boiler shuts itself off. Yep, and its starting to get chilly in the evenings. One more thing to sort out.

Got my booking confirmation today for my 2 day trip to Belfast next week, probably my final trip for this project, get some of the i's dotted and t's crossed. Backups and disaster recovery are the topics for this trip. Heh.

Ahh, the sweet smell of independance. Yes, I may not have all the pre-built frills of blogger.com, and I am no graphic artist. However I also don't have the little oddities going on that Phut and Pete have found.... :-)

I've taken today and Friday off as leave to get two things sorted - (a) a plumber is turning up tomorrow at a rate of £47.50 per half hour, with parts and VAT extra. (ouch!).

(b) My "advisory level professions case". This is a set of documentation I have to prepare for work, or I will be given a bad grade at annual review time, plus no chance of promotion or salary increase.

What really annoys me is that I've not been deliberately ignoring this requirement, just unable to find the right "peg" to put myself down as. I really don't know what is required as the information available is not detailed enough. I have a vague idea thanks to some colleagues who've told me what they've written, but the whole system seems horribly screwed up. I've had to take time off (yes, as vacation) to do this, which I consider unfair.

So I've been staring at the screen, got quite a lot of text written about this current project, but nothing about my previous, however I cannot tell if its what they want.

Reminds me of going into my A-level Geography exam to find that out of the 10 questions the class had only been taught the topics covering the first 5!

In other news, in case it wasn't clear, I was talking about that blogshares site last night. Google's Blogger is linked to it, but as I'm not using blogger this blog doesn't show.

Right, back to the grindstone, and some food is required....

After a serious bender, there was a slight realignment of the continents.

SatireWire

Phut - like school? Naa, its worse! Payrises? Yes, they do happen. :-)

Still waiting for my plumber, who phoned at 11 (due between 9 and 1) saying he'd be late as dealing with a gas leak!

I also got sent this, which some may find amusing:

Check this out.

Count the number of people, wait for the animation, and count again.

thanks to Ben for that.

Macaulay Culkin has been arrested on drugs charges.

I guess staring in a crap film as a kid and making millions screws you up for life. :-)

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahah.

So the plumber has been, spent 15mins here, told me the valve was fine, and that my pump and pressure vessel were worn out and needed replacing. Has booked to come back on the 7th October. I reckon this is crap as the pump is fine. Expect he wants to sell me expensive stuff.

Right, better get into work now....

So I've cancelled the poxy plumber, hopefully I won't get a bill for the 20mins he was here yesterday, as he was on the phone about 50% of the time!

Discovered today that the intel i810 chipset (early P3) cannot cope with PC133 memory. The i815 chipset can, but the i810 in this eMachines P3-866 gets horribly confused and randomly crashes. Had tried to upgrade the box from 64mb to 256mb, so the OS could go from winME to winXP. No go.

Hopefully I've found somewhere that will swap my pc133 memory for pc100, and I can try again, or the machine is totally useless. At least the wireless LAN card worked fine, so it can pick up the broadband that should be enabled this week.

I notice the Phut talking about the Commodore 64. Ahh, those were the days. I remember those who wanted to play games were worried about graphics and sound, such as the c64, and those of us who were actually interested in computers had Sinclair Spectrums and were trying to program. :-)

A few years later, the game players had Commodore Amigas, whilst us techno-heads were very much learning DOS on ancient PCs or DOS-compatible machines. (TRS-80, Apricot, or similar). :-)

Interesting flight today, we got diverted via Bristol as the service from there had packed up. I guess they couldn't find the jump leads!

Anyway, got here safe, busy as normal... catch you lot later :-)

So, I'm back from Belfast, another flying visit. Flight was quite smooth, but completely packed again. They're a very friendly and professional bunch at our subcontract operation. Spotted a few small gotchas on the network link today, so will have to try and think of a fix tomorrow.

Also I've not mentioned here yet, but I'm off on Holiday (Yes, finally!!!) for two weeks! California for some proper sun for 7 nights, and then back home to sort plumbing. Keeping well away from work, and depending on net access I may post here, or I may not. :)

Phut, whattayoumean the C64 kicked ass? Yeah, of course it did, but it was about 200% more expensive too !

Home, sorting out packing etc....

No food, and No beer.

D'Oh!....

Reading Bob Thompson's blog (from 13:58 onwards) today, I'm interested in his definition of a "moral compass".

Bob says that most people reading his blog who have a honest outlook would agree its wrong to steal an audio CD or computer software from a store, but that they wouldn't feel wrong copying the CD or copying the software, because the owner of the original hasn't lost anything. Especially if no money changes hands.

He also argues that people don't feel dishonest when driving, so often don't obey speed limits. I think he's very right on this one, in my experience on "safe" roads, motorways and dual carriageways, where its typically 70mph, most people will exceed that. However in towns where its typically 30mph and near schools, people will drive closer to the limit.

Unfortunately when the 30mph zone is in the middle of a major commuting run, this is where people tend to speed up due to the regular monotony. This is yet another reason why we need more roads, or upgrading/bypassing of existing roads here in the UK.

Anyway, I finally got to get some food, went to Sainburys, and they still had some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in stock. I got 6 bottles, which I think left them about 4. I wonder if they'll get more in? Perhaps I'm the only person to buy it. I did notice they had no more Sam Adams :-(

The label is very very similar to the one on the bottle I brought back from the US two years ago, brewed in Chico, CA, but it says "Imported by Vertical Drinks Ltd" and says 350ml instead of fl oz. Nice!!

Yes, I've been busy this evening. Copying off to DVD some episode of Brainiac for my mates, also discussing the fact that some of my friends seem unable to view websites using JavaScript, and that Mozilla/Firefox are no good.

Still can't solve one persons problem with JS and IE on XP, but still working on that.

Even in the IT industry there is an assumption that AntiVirus software will keep you safe. Unfortunately that is just not true.

If a popular program (lets use IE as you know how popular that is) has a bug in (at work we call them defects) where the program doesn't work as it should, then this may be just annoying, or it may be security relevant.

Using IE as the example, if the bug/defect allows a website or malicious person to control your machine, then its pretty serious! However some manufacturers (hello Mr Gates) don't seem to be that concerned, perferring to think that people won't use (or exploit) this hole.

Some of these holes are like driving a car at 75mph on the M25 in busy traffic when the wheels suddenly fall off. I really would not want to be a passenger!

I prefer to use products where the creator and development staff use their best effort to fix problems. Also when third parties find problems and notify the creator, the creator acts on these notifications.

That's why I use the Mozilla Firefox browser and open source software. Unfortunately some companies (hello Odeon Cinemas) really can't be bothered to write a proper website. This is totally inexcusable.

Evening to you all!.

Its 8:50am here, and a balmy 96degF (about 35 C). Fantastic blue skies, and a nice hotel.

Flight, as always, was a chore. Virgin Atlantic were good, lots of food and drinks provided, free icecream and snacks too. Legroom wasn't quite as good as on my previous United and American flights, but the in-flight entertainment system should have been better. Huge screen, but when we saw it reboot, it was based on Linux! Great, except that the designer must have never tested his creation in an aircraft seat. Looks like its a downgraded version of a "movies-on-demand" system, and the downgrading wasn't done too well. Who knows.

This is coming via internet over the TV... clever but Netscape 4.6 is very old, and its not DHTML compatible so most sites look wrong.

With that I'm off out...