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:
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.
So when people ask me what I do I give one of several answers depending on who I´m talking to:
It´s my whole new strategy for getting out of doing people favours. Once people find out that you know about websites, the interweb and computers then they will ring you or email you all the time asking all sorts of questions. This is ok if you don´t mind helping your mates etc, but when it gets to people you don´t know that well or friends of friends then it starts to get annoying.
The other thing is that they assume you know EVERYTHING about websites, the internet and computers and if you don´t you have to go and find out for them. SO annoying. Oh, and downloading stuff. I´ve got 4meg broadband and a bunch of PCs so the actual downloading doesn´t bother me but I´m not made of blank CDrs people!
So, new plan. I´m going to start telling people I´m a professional killer.
This way people just assume you´re joking and laugh. You then just quietly squint at them for a uncomfortable few seconds and hopefully they will never mention work again! Sorted!
I´d already got a large mp3 collection so buying an iPod Shuffle was mainly about having an mp3 player that did everything I wanted. Plus the iTunes software is pretty good as well as far as organising your music and copying it to the iPod goes.
I was at the gym yesterday though and a song was on MTV that I like so I thought I´d go to the iTunes Store and download it. We´ve got wireless broadband at home so I got the laptop out and sat on the sofa watching TV. Within a few minutes you can enter all your details and set up an account. You then just browse the store looking for what you want. All you do then is click on the "buy" link and confirm and it downloads the track and imports it into your library. A couple of seconds later its copied to your iPod and you´re good to go. Easy.
Ignore the fact that it could be a bit cheaper and I think that this is a good service. There´s also the DRM issue. Fair enough, they´re trying to protect themselves but I store all my mp3s on my laptop and have a second copy on a secured share on a server at work. This means I can listen to them on any of the half dozen PCs or servers I might be using at one time. Even though there is nothing illegal about this I can´t do it cos of DRM. So I´m gonna burn any tracks to CDRW and then rip them again to mp3 to get rid off the DRM restrictions then keep the original in a safe place.
I get the feeling that a lot of technical people will be doing this. If the music industry doesn´t like it, come round and stop me you arses!