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August 20 Holme Pierrepont Slalom Course changes 2008-2009Last weekend I had the opportunity to head up to Nottingham to paddle at Holme Pierrepont Slalom Course (HPP). It's been a couple of years since I last paddled at HPP; that's what happens when you have a couple of (great) children! It was like visiting a long lost friend, basically the same with some minor changes. Paul, cK and I all enjoyed our time on the course and are looking forward to heading there again. I recently learned that HPP is to get some major changes, for the low down head over to the Nottingham HPP whitewater course users group http://hppconcern.wordpress.com/ I do hope that part of the changes will see a refurbishment of the building slalom control, this building holds the toilets and showers for course users and it's not got better with age. Looking at the latest information Holme Pierrepont plans finally revealed, I'm not sure that I'm happy with what is being proposed. From a playboaters perspective there are only a couple of spots on the current course worth travelling for. One of these is the fun play hole The Muncher. Looking at these plans this play feature will be gone for ever and I'm not convinced that the Omniflot (plastic bollards) system is going to provide a great replacement. If the BCU push on with their plans, the course is going to be changed forever come December, I may have to plan a trip end of November to say goodbye :-( August 11 The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor movie reviewThis film is total rubbish, don't go. Jen and I got a rare chance to go to the cinema, due to the time we got to the cinema we only had a couple of options. Jen is a fan of the first two Mummy films, so we went for the third iteration. A big mistake, The Mummy suffers from a boring script that seems to pull on the latest Indy film, with a strong play on a parent-child relationship. As with the Indy film, this relationship is very one dimensional, mainly used for some poor jokes and pulls away from the central theme of the film series. Jet Li is uninspired in the Mummy's role and looses a fight to Brendan Fraser that undermines the fighting strength and style of Jet Li and his character. In short, don't bother watching this, even if you can see it for free. August 01 Steve Fisher - Black BookIn follow up to What happened to Freestyle by James Farquharson, I've just been watching the promo video for Steve Fisher's new film, Black Book. Steve Fisher is an amazing boater that has invented some of the more impressive freestyles moves and watching this small promo video, I've spotted a couple more to try when Hurley and Shepperton come back on this winter. Watch the promo video over at: http://www.slproductions.tv/blackbook_trailer/blackbook_highres.mov Happy boating. July 30 What happened to Freestyle by James FarquharsonJames has written an interesting and as usual with James a pointed poke at the world of Freestyle Kayaking. One thing James fails to mention was his own involvement in the sport and the relentless pursuit of perfection. Part 1 - http://jamesfarquharson.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/what-happened-to-freestyle-part-1/ Part 2 - http://jamesfarquharson.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/what-happened-to-freestyle-part-ii-dadageddon/ I love kayaking and freestyle in particular however, I do find myself agreeing with his commentary with a few personality exceptions. I do miss the excitement of needing to buy new equipment every 6 months, especially kayaks in order to learn the latest moves. A really great, fun time that I would love to see again. July 25 Reporter 5.5 - review by Sam WinstanleySam has done a great review of SPSS Reporter 5.5 on his blog, if you're interested in this stuff, head over to http://www.surveyxtreme.com/?p=47 to check it out. May 27 Vista Remote Desktop restartI recently upgraded my workstation at home to Windows Vista Ultimate, 64 bit edition. As most of the time I'm working from my laptop I often connect using remote desktop. I needed to restart Vista and I was surprised to find the shutdown and restart options missing from the start menu. After a quick Internet search I found the Windows shutdown command. shutdown /r /t 5 /m \\<computer name> In addition to enabling you to specify the normal log off / restart / shutdown commands from the local workstation, the restart command allows you to perform these action for a remote computer. If you use the /i option, this brings up a dialog box where you can specify a list of machines, allowing you to shutdown / restart a set of machines at the same time. May 22 Associate Enterprise Architect ~ Architectus OryzusSo on the 1 May 2008, I was eventually given a promotion that has been on the cards for the last year. I now have the dizzy title of Associate Enterprise Architect. Well done I hear you say, except this wasn't the title I was expecting... I wasn't expecting the Associate part at the beginning of the title. Chambers Reference Online, has a definition for Associate, in essence I interpreted the roles as, not an Enterprise Architect, just associate with them... No matter, I am well aware that I have a lot to learn and that the last three years have been mixed for my technical and business development. Though, the last three years have been the best so far, starting with my marriage to Jen, followed by the birth of Holly and Liam. Things are going great with the family and it is now time to start developing my career once more. I therefore decided to find out what an Enterprise Architect is, by looking at job adverts and pier commentary. I found myself once again looking at the ThoughtWorks website (a very interesting software consultancy) and ThoughWorks Chief Scientist, Martin Fowler's web site. Martin Fowler has written an interesting article called Who Needs an Architect. Does my employer and co-workers have the right view of the role?, does Martin Fowler?, do I? I'm not certain however, I do know that it is too easy to get caught up in the pride of a meaningless term (for the IT world). I look forward to the coming challenge, development and discovery. November 24 iTunes and VistaSo I recently bought myself a Dell XPS 720 with Windows Vista. There are some really good things about the new machine and there are some things that really annoy me like, buying 4 GB of RAM with a 64bit processor but only getting 3GB because Dell installed the 32 bit version of Vista! Because of the arrival of Liam, I've not had a chance to ask why Dell has done this...
As for Vista, currently I've not found a reason to buy it over XP. However I haven't looked at with my programmer’s hat on. What I have found is some software doesn't like Vista, like iTunes.
Now I'm not surprise that iTunes doesn't work that well with Vista, I never really like iTunes. The UI isn't in keeping with Windows, it hogs CPU, memory and there are many other 'features' that are less than brilliant. However the built in support for Podcasts and the synchronisation with my iPod is brilliant.
On moving my iTunes library to the XPS, everything seemed fine until I started to get the great "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore". This seems to be iTunes default behaviour when it doesn't know why it can't properly communicate with the connected iPod. Well after restoring the iPod and losing my play count since last synchronising, etc, I was annoyed to see the "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore" message again. I turned to the internet and unusually got no where...
I decided that I would run iTunes in Administrator mode and low and behold, synchronisation is now working.
Don't you love software ;-) November 23 Liam Joshua Mills, born 20 November 2007I'm delighted to announce that Liam Joshua Mills was born at 13:31 on Tuesday 20 November 2007. Liam weighed in at a healthy 8lb, 5.5oz, 6oz heavier than his sister.
Both Liam and Jen are doing well and are back home getting to know the rest of the family.
September 20 Elegant Bridal Wear updatesSo the development of www.elegantbridalwear.com continues, we have loads of items in the pipeline that should improve the user experience for brides. More details will come as I start to get these features implemented. Today's updates, sees a branding update. We've taken the new logo design, from our wedding fair banner and applied it to the web site. To accommodate the new logo, we've tweaked a lot of the site colours which should make the site more pleasant on the eye. There are further updates in line with the branding change and these will be rolled out over the next week. The other key change, for this version of the site, is the introduction of paging to the Dresses (products) section of the site. The products page uses the ASP.NET 2.0 DataList control. This control is great however, it does not support paging and the underlying data source doesn't implement the paging option either... So a quick google search, found the http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/DataListPaging.asp article. In the end I didn't use the code from this article however, it layed out an easy way to solve the problem which provided the basis for the www.elegantbridalwear.com version. The products paging capability is going to see further enhancements over the next week, I'll keep you posted. Powered by ScribeFire. September 16 Elegant Bridal Wear, Bridal CatalogueWell it's taken a bit of time however, I'm really pleased to post that www.elgantbridalwear.com Bridal collection is now online. Powered by ScribeFire. August 28 Holly's first stepsWell it's been a while since I lasted posted, rubbish I know. Anyway, over the last week Holly has started to walk. Initially the odd hesitant step, over the weekend, she walked two feet from one couch to another, so she could pick her bottle up off the floor! I'm a very proud daddy :-D Powered by ScribeFire. June 19 Shadowrun: IGN Australia ReviewI never like to see a games that is trying to do something different get a slatting however, a well written slatting can be a fun thing to read. And if like me, you're bored away from home (currently working in Paris) and you like a good laugh, head over to: Shadowrun: IGN Australia Review. Powered by ScribeFire. June 12 Microsoft PhotosynthI've just watched the Photosynth presentation, a truly amazing demonstration of a piece of web enabled technology that will have a fantastic impact on the presentation and sharing of photos. The demonstration showed many things however, the feature that amazed me was the ability to map a famous landmark using all of the available pictures on flicker to create a multi-resolution image that allows you to view the landmark from multiple angles, from distance, to the smallest detail. All of these pictures are merged using collage technology (as seen in lots of image manipulation applications) however, this is done for you, as you pan around. In short, go view the presentation. Powered by ScribeFire. May 18 Halo 3 MP BetaSo after a fun trip to Prague (SPSS Directions, European User Conference), I was looking forward to playing the Halo 3 multi player beta. I like most of the Halo 3 MP Beta players, are getting access through Crackdown. As I'm sure you know, there were some problems that basically resulted in a days delay getting in on the action :-( however, Microsoft and Bungie have extended the duration of the beta by 3 days, so that's good :-D So what are my first impressions, well it's Halo 2 in high definition with some new toys to play with. Halo 3 MP Beta doesn't look anywhere near as good as Gears of War however, there are loads of nice details and effects, the pace is much faster and I'm sure there will be lots more of this in the finished game. Where Halo 2 and now Halo 3 destroy the competition is the multiplayer features including clan support, match making capabilities, stats available in game and on www.bungie.net too and now cool features like the map veto option and the save replay feature. There are only three maps in the MP Beta and I've enjoyed the two that I've played, Highground and Snowbound. Quite a lot of players are complaining about Snowbound and using the new veto option. For slayer I prefer Highground however, I had a very enjoyable, mad game of Crazy King of Snowbound and I recommend everyone to give it a go. So the Halo 3 MP Beta has confirmed further that I want Halo 3 and that I need to spend some more on-line play time improving my Halo skills. Powered by ScribeFire. SPSS Directions, European User ConferenceEarlier this week I got the opportunity to visit Prague and attend the SPSS Directions, European User Conference. Hearing the success stories of our customers and how our technologies have made a significant difference was great. As well as the customer success stories, there were presentations focusing on Predictive Enterprise, including Enterprise Feedback Management. The only difficult aspect of the event, was choosing which sessions to attend! The opportunity to network with our customers and fellow SPSS employees was great and I look forward to future events. Next time, I think I'll take a couple of extra days and take the family for a short holiday too. Powered by ScribeFire. May 02 ResearchTalk Podcast - Steve Wills: Making Better ResearchersFor just over a year I have been working for SPSS as a Solutions Architect within the Dimensions Solutions team. I had no previous experience of Market Research or Analytics, therefore the last year has been an interesting and challenging time! Another SPSS Solutions Architect, Sam Winstanley (http://www.surveyxtreme.com/) told me about the ResearchTalk Podcasts So I decided to subscribe through iTunes and I've been listening to the collection, starting from the first episode. The other day I listened to one of the early episodes: ResearchTalk Podcast - Steve Wills: Making Better Researchers If you're at all interested in the Market Research Industry and what to know where the industry is heading, listen to this podcast. Steve is a very powerful speaker and I completely agree with his views that in order for Market Research to deliver more value to the customer, we need to start delivery insight that is focused on business needs not just on the specification. Powered by ScribeFire. April 28 Elegant Bridal Wear goes liveI'm pleased to announce that Elegant Bridal Wear has now launched www.elegantbridalwear.com So what is Elegant Bridal Wear? Jen and I have set-up Elegant Bridal Wear with the goal to provide brides with quality bridal wear at an attractive price. We are able to do this through a number of ways. Without getting in to the whole business model, there are two key drivers. These are the use of the internet as a sales and marketing tool and to differentiate ourselves from every other internet vendor, we're offering by appointment the option to come to the house to view and try on our products. We have a lot of plans for Elegant Bridal Wear and we're working hard to ensure that the business allows us to generate additional income allowing Jen to work from home and look after Holly. The current web site is basically a place holder and there are lots of ideas for the web site within the business plan. The current development plans should build the web site in to an interesting place to be, watch this space. I look forward to posting about the delights of starting and running our own business. Powered by ScribeFire. April 02 Google MoonJust found Google Moon http://moon.google.com after talking to Jen about Google TiSP. I believe that Google Moon has been around for a while however, I thought I would pass the fun  Powered by ScribeFire. April 01 Google TiSPHave a look at Google TiSP, this has to be an April fools joke  , have fun over at: http://www.google.com/tisp/ |
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