Keiron’s daily take on life, the internet and the world around us!

via books.google.co.uk

For those that don’t know about the incidents of our wedding day and the floods - this will probably make interesting reading.. Link to full story: Here

Quite surprised by Google Books having all the content of a book that’s only two years old (well not even that - our 2nd anniversary is in two weeks time!)

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing - let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

Clearly work think everyone is a five year old again!

This is also a test of emailing to Posterous!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing - let me know what you think!

Posted via email from keiron’s posterous<

via dilbert.com

Testing again for Posterous!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing - let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

That’s a hunch, not a hump!

I’ve just signed up with Hunch.com after reading Lifehackers review I figure anything that can help me answer some questions might be useful!

The signup process seemed to take forever after I’d provided my details - though the site had just been mentioned in LifeHacker and had 283 views on there (that’s probably not including those on their Feed Reader that picked it up the same way I did!).

Eventually it crashed with a 500 error, but I seemed to be logged in and able to navigate around my profile, it was only when I clicked “home” it ground to a halt again.

So I navigated to You -> Tell Hunch about You, let the interrogation begin….

Q1. Where is your home located?
Q2. Alien abductions, are they real?
Q3. Are you Male or Female?
Q4. Do you like Bumper cars?

After each question it told me the number of other respondents that had agreed with me. Most of them didn’t believe in Alien abductions I can tell you!

I abandoned it at this point as I was just getting too many delays and errors, I have a hunch that it’s because of their LifeHacker mention - maybe I’ll come back when they’re less busy!

No - I don’t ride, but getting back on the horse is still a tough thing to do when you’ve taken a knock, whatever the circumstances….

I’ve had a fairly tough year this year to date (some of which you’ll have heard about back in February), but I’m picking myself up again slowly, I’ve been back at work for a while now (with the assistance of my doctors and a few tablets on the way!). My panic seems to be keeping tabs on itself, and the stress levels are OK-ish so long as nobody rocks the boat (believe me, generally somebody rocks the boat at least once per day!!).

I have no energy for some things, and a massive renewed energy for others. I’m not sure where that sits with posting on this blog (I’ve managed to Twitter a lot and not blog much recently) I will try to blog more here, I’m just not one of those people who can produce a blog post everyday. But I do see a lot of stuff on Twitter and in my Google Reader I’d like to investigate/write about.

I’m doing lots of automation work on the business to make my life easier (and to support my customers better) so that really does take priority. I’ve also spent more and more time away from computers, in the garden (which is nearly complete thank goodness) and getting out with my camera.

What are your priorities at the moment, and have they changed now summer has come around?

I’m not sure where this blog post was going when I started it, and I’m not sure about how it ended - but I’ll post it anyway!

Ok the backup saga has rumbled on for close to a year now, but I finally decided on my solution last week and it looks fantastic!

I was heavily influenced by the register’s review, and an email from their sales team.

I’ve purchased a MyXerver 1TB along with a 1TB USB drive to run to it, and after the ParcelForce saga I now have them installed, I couldn’t have chose better as they look exactly the same when unpacked (just one in black and one in white!).

After unpacking I plugged in the MyXerver and started to write this post, given that the instructions said it could take anywhere between 1 and 3 minutes to boot I was impressed that by the time I’d finished typing the previous line it was booted and ready for use!

As the adminstrator I had to run the setup utility disc. I decided (unlike my usual self!) it might be wise to follow the instructions at this point..

The wizard looks fairly self explanatory, so let’s get started.

It appears to have recognized MyXerver correctly.

I’ve opted for a fixed IP, just in case I need to enable port forwarding on my router to this box (it will make life far easier if I do this from the onset I suspect!).

Next came the timezone and naming, I resisted the temptation to call it something humorous and left it as MyXerver, I was surprised to find it wanted to know my Workgroup name - not sure why at this stage!

Mission accomplished - I opted not to setup Flash Map as I wanted to keep this proprietary software as far away from this solution as possible (having had to install a CD for every machine with Netgear’s SC101).

Interestingly, the instructions told me to visit http://myxerver to configure the box further, in Firefox this resulted in a 404 after trying to visit http://www.myxerver.com and in IE it was simply a 404 - Page not found. Putting the IP address into the URL seems to have the desired effect though.

I managed to login and configure the device - I’m sure you don’t need to see all of that info!

Learning

I’ve discovered why it wants to know my workgroup, it has the ability to use Network Neighbourhood for mapping network drives with the users regular username and password - now that I like!

So that means each user has a private area, great - what about the global public areas that I want to dump photo’s and the link into?

This is found in the “Shares” section, and before too long I’d got a shared drive setup and 40GB of Photo’s transferring from my old NAS to this one, a process that took around 2 hours.

NAS > Backup Solution

I know what you’re thinking, I said this was my backup solution, and all I have at the minute is a new 1TB NAS. Here’s the best bit, I plugged in the 1TB USB drive to the back and configured and incremental backup from the NAS to the USB that will copy all changed files every morning at 6am…

Job Done!!

Be warned, rant mode is on….

We’ve live in our new home for over a year now, having moved in 15 months ago. The house wasn’t new when we bought it, it was about a year old.

I ordered myself some IT equipment on Friday (yes the backup saga will probably be solved by this kit!) and stayed at home on Wednesday to accept delivery of it (amongst several other deliveries).

When it hadn’t turned up by early afternoon I went hunting for my tracking number kindly provided to me by the online shop I’d purchased from.

This is what I got from the ParcelForce tracking number:

Date	Time	Location	Tracking Event
27-05-2009	14:18	Bristol North Depot	Delivery rescheduled
27-05-2009	11:17	Bristol North Depot	Cannot locate address
26-05-2009	13:50	Bristol North Depot	Undeliverable - insufficient / incorrect address
25-05-2009	22:54	Bristol North Depot	Out for delivery
23-05-2009	01:11	Bristol North Depot	Arrived at delivery depot
22-05-2009	21:14	National Hub	Sorted in hub

The 14:18 update came after my phone call to the depot (after I’d hunted for 10 minutes for the number!). So it went out for delivery and nobody could find our house (two days in a row possibly!). I was repeatedly ask by the Parcel Force rep whether it was a new build - no it’s not and you’ve delivered here plenty of times before!!!

She even resorted to looking it up on Google (I told her not to bother as that categorically still puts us in the middle of a field!), why is it people only trust Google - I’m stood in this very house right now!

In the end I resorted to having it delivered to a local post office, but this is far from ideal as it will have to happen every time I want a ParcelForce delivery (i.e. get one failure then get it delivered to the post office!).