Today is apparently the most
depressing day of the year according to the TV, radio and internet. Some
boffins in coats came up with an equation that worked out that everyone will be
depressed today due to a number of factors smashing into each other.
For me it has pretty much lived up to its name. The day was fine apart from the
awful weather but after getting home I got a message from one of my house mates
saying the landlord has been round today to show some potential tenants round
for when we move out. To my knowledge at the moment none of us in the house had
been given the mandatory 24 hours notice. They also unlocked and went in my
room without permission only then to proceed to leave it unlocked with the
light on.
This leaves me with a room with no insurance due to it being insecure and
voiding my policy. I phoned Unicom tonight and got them to send someone over to
lock it but it is besides the point I shouldn't have to worry about the
security of my stuff that is left in a locked room because some idiot is
unable to leave things how they found them. I well worded phone conversation
will be required tomorrow to ensure it doesn't happen again.
My second rant for today is down to BT and their poor excuse for a
router!
The BT Home Hub the pride and job of BT Internet. If you type in them 3 words
into Google you will get a few weeks worth of reading on how pathetic this
device is. The BT Home Hub is a piece of hardware made by Speedtouch (Despite
what I was told when I asked the sales representative) and then programmed by
some under trained monkeys at BT.
They can't even seem to be able to allow an iPhone onto their openzone/fon
wireless community because it's too much of a challenge to write a simple bit
of code that redirects a DNS request from an external source to a login page
which creates a cookie. The iPhone works with pretty much every website I have
been on apart from some pathetic JAVA application based websites such as universities
e-learning systems... I'm still yet to find what the JAVA application is
required for I could have written the whole thing in PHP and even used a bit of
JavaScript to make it wiz and bang a bit.
Basically if you’re going to get a router get one off a company that actually
knows what their doing like Linksys (Cisco) or Netgear.
Tomorrow is another working day with a website to copy from the development
server to the live server and another website visual to code into a working
HTML/CSS template. I may even be lucky enough to have another day of solving
problems caused by IT companies and email spam filters that block everything
that isn't spam.
I got an email yesterday asking if I was available to go back to Nottingham next week to work in house for nzime as Darren has been given the one thing most people/employers dead... Jury duty. I am going to be back for about a week. This means a week without the iMac and on my laptop which is close to torture. Luckily I have the internet when I am back this time if the BTHomeHub isn't broken like the last one I had to send back.
Yesterday I spent from 5pm lying on my bed with macrumorslive open reading the live feed from the macworldexpo with the release of the MacBook Air, Time capsule, iTunes movie rentals and most concerning me 1.1.3 firmware for the iPhone. After the conference I spent the next hour with my iPhone docked checking for updates until it finally went live and installed my firmware update.
My iPhone is now running 1.1.3 and I am a very happy customer. Mass texts works brilliant, locate me even though a little inaccurate works great and bookmarks to the home screen is a really useful feature. Well Facebook is now bookmarked onto my screen I am sure I will find a few other things to drop onto the home screen.
I'm now going to watch the macworldexpo conference now it's online to watch.
I have finally finished all of my assignments for semester A leaving me with only 4 more assignments left till I finish my degree. I was awake till half 4 last night tapping away as the keys but at that time of night the material I was producing was just dribble. I decided to get a few hours sleep and set my alarm for 8am. In the morning I finished off the last few words I had left on my 3rd assignment and set the printer going. My final projects prototyping and preparation documentation weighted in at around 100 pages. To show you what 100 pages looks like I took the liberty to take a photo:
Does anyone have a stapler?
The wonderful device that saved my life was the new Canon MP180
Not bad for £30. Also the iPhone doesn't take too bad a photo
So I finally have a little bit of time on my hands apart form having a full e-commerce store to write, a dissertation to research and write also to top that off a few other web jobs. Oh wait theres more University doesn't think a dissertation and showcase project is enough for your 3rd year they get you do do another 4 pointless units. Luckily I'm a pretty fast worker when it comes to web development and will be able to keep on top of everything with a bit of dedication.
You may have started to notice a few small changes within the site recently. I have started adding more content, blogging more. Also over the past few days I have setup a dynamic site map for google now that I have permanent urls for my blog. I might as well help boost my search ranking everyone else is trying to do it. The bonus of having this dynamic site map also means I can now parse it into a usable sitemap for the website. The links can be found in the footer of every page.
I plan to get the portfolio up to date within the next few weeks and also change the format it displays my portfolio work giving each item it's own page with more detail and the possibility of more images. I'm off to York tomorrow for a weekend of beer fueled relaxation before I am back to university and a working routine.