Category: General

Quick Update

So, I thought I’d ease into what will (hopefully) be another flurry of posting activity with a quick update on what’s been going on here recently.  If you’ve read through earlier posts on this blog then you may well know that I started working at bit10 in September 2007.  I’ve had a fantastic time working at bit10; I’ve learned a great deal and met many people with whom I’m hoping to keep in contact.  However, as with all things, I think that it’s become time to move on. Continue reading Quick Update

Overactive Akismet

I’ve always really ignored the comment moderation queue, generally trusting Akismet to filter out the spam and only let real comments through.  I’ve actually been very pleased with it as it has stopped comment spam coming through, which was initially quite a nuisance.  This evening though (as I currently can’t get to sleep) I decided to have a look through the comments that Akismet has marked as spam. Continue reading Overactive Akismet

Matt Gets Certified

Being my first “official” certification, I figured I’d give it a mention.  A couple of weeks ago I got sent down to London to do some developer training for a CMS that we’re going to be using quite a bit at the company I work at.  At some point, there’s also going to be some interesting work porting existing customer sites to the Sitecore platform.
Continue reading Matt Gets Certified

Kung Fu Panda

Went to see “Kung Fu Panda” at the cinema last night.  Even though it’s a kid’s film, I really enjoyed it; the film was absolutely hilarious and half the time I couldn’t help but laugh out loud (but the rest of the audience did too, so that’s okay).  We were going to see “Wanted” but since I haven’t heard good things about it, I might wait until it comes out on DVD.

Aside from the start, which had a mild overdose of the word “Awesome” (intentionally, we later found out; I would highly recommend this film to anyone regardless of age.

bit10 does Alton Towers

I know I mentioned this in an earlier article, but I really thought that it merited its own post.

bit10 arranged to have a “Team Building” day at Alton Towers. Fortunately for me, I started early enough to get a ticket. The plan was to have everybody meet at the front gates by 9.30am, so I managed to arrange to get a lift with fellow developers Craig and Gareth at around 8am. Unfortunately, events conspired against us, and we didn’t make it to the park until about 10.30 (among the conspiratorial events was the failure of Craig’s satnav thingie, so we had to rely upon my directions until we started seeing road signs).
Continue reading bit10 does Alton Towers

Dell build quality

I’ve always been a bit of a Dell proponent, but recently I’ve been given several reasons to be dubious of the build quality of Dell systems. During my time at LFRS, I received a great deal of kit from Dell; all of which had to be tested before being recorded in the inventory system. I must have tested at least one hundred PCs during my various stints there, and never once did I find a fault with a new PC. There was one incident where a user plugged in a 95W charger (instead of the usual 65W one), and damaged the laptop, we had a technician arrive at the IT office the very next day to repair it.
Continue reading Dell build quality

Whoops!

I really am terrible with keeping track of my passwords. I decided that it was high time I get back to updating my little corner of the internet, and lo and behold, I couldn’t remember either my username or my password to get into the admin section of WordPress. Not to be beaten, I decided to go and manually alter the database record for my user (don’t worry, my dear registered users, the passwords are stored as MD5 hashes, so you don’t need to worry about me finding out your passwords… unless anyone would like to give me a nice eight Xeon behemoth?). Anyhow, I got to the login page for that and realised that I’d forgotten -those- as well. Feeling terribly embarrassed, I had to go to the DreamHost control panel (which I could remember my login details for, fortunately) and reset things from there.

The moral of the story: update my blog more frequently so this sort of thing doesn’t happen. :)

Snow!!!

I woke up today, around 07:30, and was greeted by the sight of lots of nice, white, pristine snow. Put me in a good mood right a way; quite a feat considering that I’m in no way, shape or form a morning person. However, all good things must come to an end, and my morning was marred by the prospect of slogging to lectures in this weather. So, I continued my morning routine, ignoring the conditions outside.

Fortunately, this morning I was getting a lift in from my boyfriend, Rob, so I didn’t have to hurry too much. The second we left the house, though, we noticed a slight problem: the roads had not been gritted overnight. Traffic was moving at 20mph at the very most, and conditions weren’t great with all the snow and slush. It took us about half an hour to make a 15 minute drive.

It’s odd that given the recent frosty weather, the roads have been nicely gritted every day this week, but the one day that it’s most required is the day that the gritters stay at home by the fire. Bah humbug.

Up and running again

As you may already know if you checked the site in the last few weeks, I recently changed web hosts. My old host (portugalnetworks.com) wasn’t too bad, it was incredibly cheap ($12 [~£6] for a whole year), but the server performance reflected the price, unfortunately – downtime was high, along with the various other problems. So, I changed. I moved to DreamHost, which is admittedly significantly more expensive, but provides much more in terms of features – see for yourself

I can’t resist my inbuilt student moneygrabbing tendencies, so I’ll just say: if you do find yourself thinking about signing up, put me as your referrer :D. I’ll leave it at that.

Anyways, I decided to go with WordPress this time, rather than b2Evo, because it offers much better anti-spam facilities, as that was becoming a nuisance toward the end of January. So, now that I’ve got something up, I may even find myself updating a bit more often than I did in my site’s previous incarnation.