Ok, time for a rant. Recently there’s been a few things in the news that have been bothering me. All of them related to the damn assed morons that run this place, the government. The first is the new Road Pricing policy they are talking about. The idea is that duty on petrol will be reduced, tax discs will be abolished and we will be charged tax on a per mile basis.

The reason they’ve come up with this idea is partly to reduce congestion and partly to help the environment. I’m all for reducing congestion, but the environmentals just need a good kicking. It’s march and we’re scrapping frost off our cars so this global warming thing can’t be that bad. If you want to reduce carbon in the atmosphere why not plant more trees in city areas? Enough about this anyway, it just pisses me off.

Congestion. The thing the morons government don’t seem to realise is that the reason we’re all on the road at the same time is because we’re going to work, not just driving around to annoy people. This won’t ever change and trying to price us off the road won’t help. It might be time for a different idea pillocks.

And before you start, saying we should all use public transport is not the solution in it’s current form. I used to get the bus to work and a fifeteen mile journey through the country and then straight through the city center takes thirty minutes by car. By bus this takes an hour and a half each way and costs £8. As much as I love working fourteen hour days to spend half my wages on a big, slow box that stinks of piss, I think I’ll stick with the car thanks.

Anyway, enough on the roads. The other thing that’s been bothering me is taxes. Beer and fags have just gone up again, inflation has gone up 2.5% but prices tend to go up by a lot more and we have to pay £120 a month to have our bins emptied (except the council won’t let me have a bin outside my flat…. good one) and what have we got for all this extra cash we’re dishing over? Well… they probably used some of it to fuck up the NHS… oh, and I think there’s a big ferris wheel in London. Great.

I hate this country and as soon as the Isle of Man let me in, I’m off!

Just a few things before you leave a comment:

• I don’t give a shit about the environment, so don’t bother.
• Don’t say “You don’t know what you’re on about…”. I know. But I don’t think I’m capable of running the country.

Right, back to work!

Yeah right. We had one in the office that we were using for milk and lunch stuff but it was mine and I needed it at home so it disappeared. While up at Asda getting our morning MacDonalds we decided to get another but we had walked up so we had to carry it back. It´s only three quaters of a mile but it was bloody hard. Anyway, back to the point.

While we were up there we had the usual morning meeting and today´s raised a few interesting things for me to do next year. The meeting was about how we were going to grow the business next year and therefore had a strong marketing and sales focus. Since it was me (IT and Web), the MD (Marketing focused) and our new Market Researcher, there wasn´t too much for me to input from a marketing point of view. When this happens I tend to switch off slightly but keep one ear open in case there´s anything that crops up that might be a technological problem or something where I can provide some technology to make the job easier. Today´s meeting raised two interesting challenges for next year.

The first was that as a company we should always present ourselves in a professional, capable way, not purely focused on "gettin the sale". As such we decided to improve our support for the websites. This will involve replacing the "Contact us" page on most of the larger sites with a "help and support" section. This will be basically be a set of FAQs with contact forms that will be routed to the relavent person if the answer isn´t there. Also I plan on implementing an AJAX "chat" system similar to an instant messaging program so they can ask us for help as and when we are online.

The other challenge will be to shift onto a dedicated server for one of our main projects. It´s currently not launched but still receives a fair bit of traffic. The only problem is that it´s already pushing the database on our shared hosting package. Looks like a lot of messing about with root access and then a few sleepless nights with DNS getting all the domains shifted across with the minimal of downtime.

Interesting couple of months after the holidays then.

Hmmmm…. If you press F6 then it highlights the search box on the Google toolbar.

I went up to Edinburgh this weekend and since it’s a 4 hour train journey I thought I’d take my laptop and get some work done. Unfortunately I spent pretty much the entire trip in both directions standing up.

On the way there it was because of the Scotland - Australia match and on the way back there was flooding on the line which meant three trains worth of people were stuck on one.

Better luck next time maybe?

Yup, that´s right, something else for me to do! This time its…. cartoonist!

We´ve been very successful of late with targeted emails bringing in a large amount of sales. The problem is that christmas is usually a slow period for us so we came up with the idea of doing more humurous emails to try and get a few more sales in while everyone is winding down for the holidays.

For this we decided to do a bunch of cartoons and send those out and my boss decided we´d get a freelance cartoonist to help us out. Luckily I did A-level art and am quite good at cartoons so I said that I´d do them in my spare time.

It´ll make a change from complex coding at least.

We´ve got a new morning ritual at work and I love it. I normally get in about 7:45, check the emails, make sure all systems are go, do a few bits and bobs and so on.
 
Then the best bit. About 9:30 me and the MD head around the corner for a MacDonalds breakfast and talk about what needs to get done that day. It´s brilliant! Give it a try.

Since I started getting the bus about four months ago I went and bought myself an iPod Shuffle to make the three hour bus journey every day a little less… BORING!!!

This was after I had vowed not to go down the iPod route as it seemed like it was giving in and trying to be like part of the cool crowd. But after checking out the specs (the built in battery and charge by USB are better than 1 x AA mp3 players and the fact it just shows up as a removable flash drive if you don´t have iTunes installed), the price and the fact that they do look shit hot, I decided that I would get a Shuffle.

I then started using iTunes as my default music player. This was after using Winamp 2.77 for nearly five years. If you shove your mp3 collection through Windows Media Player first then iTunes does a good job of sorting and consolidating massive collections. It also has a nice UI and although your stuck with iTunes Music Store only, it interfaces well and makes buying and importing songs into your collection easy.

Then it started to get even worse… I saw the advert for the iPod Nano. Technically and size wise, it´s kind of a combination between the Shuffle and Mini (which it´s actually replacing). I´ve been on the site and checked it out and then went to find out the prices on Dabs (pff, 2 weeks wait my arse) I checked my bank balance and tomorrow I´m off to Dixons to grab one. I´ll let you know what it´s like after I´ve had a play.

Although I´m supposed to be a web developer, I always get all the IT problems of the entire county heading my way as well. Just to prove how awkward I can be I thought I´d put up my four favourite IT sayings instead of fixing PCs for people:

• "A little knowledge can be dangerous"


• "RTFM" (Read The Fucking Manual)


• "Stop leaving passwords on postit notes you pleb!"


• "Sod off. I´m napping"

I´m testing the "add post" script - thats all

We´re starting a new project at work to acompany our set of directory sites but as opposed to it being an online venture which is what we mainly do, this one is a magazine for local areas, e.g. The Spondon Rabbit for Spondon in Derby.

 
I like this project because there is very little to do on my part. I might have to upload a few adverts every month but thats easy, and the sites are pretty basic so creating new ones when we do more areas is easy too. For the first sites I was even lazier and got Sam, our GCSE work experience lad to do them for me.
 
Plus I get to be a journalist now as well. Since its locally based the stuff in there is mostly going to be about stuff going on in the community and so on, but we´re also going to some of the human interest stuff and I´m going to be writing a few articles along the lines of "How to keep your PC running smoothly" and "Avoid Internet Phishing scams". Should be interesting.