Personal posts; things most likely to be only of interest to friends and family.
Just a quick post to note that it’s been four years since my first post on this blog, on which my friend Jim commented:
HAHAHAHA, this won’t last long!
Like many blogs before it, it’s doomed to sit on a webserver somewhere and gather cyber dust!!
I may go for a fair while without posting sometimes, but it’s still alive, so hah! :)
I’ve been toying with the idea of redesigning my website/blog for quite some time. I recently retired my old website and redirected it here to my blog. I’ve been considering replacing WordPress with something else, but I think for the time being at least, I’ll stick with WordPress, as it’s powerful and works well for me.
I decided I couldn’t be bothered to attempt my own design for the blog, as I’m not particularly good at design (back-end code is my area of expertise), so I’ve just picked a template I think is quite pretty and functional. That’ll do :)
I decided that my old website was so hideously out of date (and hideously ugly) that it was time to retire the poor beast and move my blog from blog.preshweb.co.uk to www.preshweb.co.uk. So, my blog now lives here at www.preshweb.co.uk; all old links will be redirected automatically and eveything should Just Work ™, but if you spot any odd breakage, do let me know!
Just a quick plug for my future brother-in-law, who has gone self-employed doing domestic appliance repairs in/around Stevenage, repairing cookers, washing machine, tumble dryers etc.
I knocked up a basic site for him, and figured linking to it from here would help Google find & rank it :)
Edit: I’ve also registered stevenage-appliance-repair.co.uk and pointed it to his site, to see if that helps. Maybe it’s time to practice SEO crap.
Just a quick post to say a big Happy Christmas to everyone!
Continue reading Happy Christmas!
Okay, yesterday I posted whinging about how cold it is. Today was even worse – not only did I have to use a lighter to heat the disclock to defrost it before being able to remove it, I got to a petrol station and couldn’t open the fuel tank because the lock on the cap had frozen too!
Thankfully the staff at the Sainsburys petrol station in Stevenage (Poplars) were very helpful and came out with a can of their own de-icer to help me out, which was appreciated.
Unfortunately, Tom (or “Sumo”, as we affectionately called him, as he used to be a rather large fellow) had to be put down this evening.
I’m hating the coldness when I ride to + from work at the moment – it’s just too damn cold!
Back on the bike today after a few days of non-riding (weekend, and Monday + Tuesday off work) – the riding was mostly fun, but uncomfortably cold, even with thermal longjohns, jeans, textile bike trousers, two tshirts, two jumpers, textile jacket, WindSkin, neck tube, winter gloves (and boots of course). Bring on summer (or at least our poor excuse for a summer) already!
On the way home, the big matrix signs by the roadside were proclaiming “A1 closed – accident at Stirling Corner – use other route”. I figured it’d probably be wrong, so stayed on the A1 – sure enough it wasn’t closed (unless they’d just re-opened it) but was very heavy, mostly stationary traffic, so good filtering practice :)
When I got almost home, I noticed some muppet with no lights on – yes, no lights at all in the dark. I tried to draw their attention to it several times, as did others. They were behind me, so I pulled over and let them pass so I could get their registration, and reported them to the police for dangerous driving. The police took the details, and promised to send a report out to nearby units in case they’re spotted, and also to pass it on to the “dangerous driving unit” (if there’s such a thing). I doubt that much will come of it, but I hope it’ll at least be held on record, and will be seen if the police ever look up that registration for anything else.
Another day of freezing cold riding tomorrow, then I’ll probably take the train on Friday so I can have a couple of beers after work – what with it being Friday, and more importantly, the last working day of the year :)
Okay, I’ve moved my blog to a new server, and upgraded too – I’m now running WordPress checked out from WP’s Subversion trunk, so I’ll be staying up to date with the bleeding edge of WP. Hopefully there won’t be too much breakage each time I update :)
If you notice anything not working right, please let me know in the comments, or mail me direct (davidp AT preshweb DOT co DOT uk).
I’d thought about joining Facebook a few times when friends mentioned it, but never bothered signing up. To be honest, I think I expected it to be much like MySpace – full of ugly, garish, horribly-“designed” pages filled with immature drivel :)
I gave in the other day when a couple of friends from work recommended it, and I have to say I’m *very* impressed. It’s full of features to help everyone stay in contact. I’m particularly impressed with the photo upload tool and the ability to “tag” people in photos – very slick. It’s a clean, simple design, and there’s plenty of slick AJAXy magic in use, to make the site even nicer to use.
Here’s my profile on Facebook – if you use Facebook, add me as a friend!