Just a note in case anyone is wondering why I’ve not replied to email etc. - I’ve been on holiday. Yay! 
Am back now. Boo! 
I’ll try and deal with email over the next few days - please bear with me.
It’s too late to go into this now, but it’s been one hell of a day! It all started yesterday evening when the BritBlog server decided to die. It took a power-cycle to bring it back.
Then, early in the morning, a small server I rent from 1 and 1 internet was disabled. Turned out the credit card they had on record for me had expired, so instead of letting me know that they couldn’t renew they just went and disabled the server. Great. Took me ~ 11 hours to get that one back up. Not good. 1 and 1 are not in my good books at the moment.
To finish it all off, the server that handles my mail and some other web sites (including this one) decided to die too! Bah! I couldn’t believe it!
On the plus side it gave my web site monitoring a good testing, and I’m almost please to say that I got a text alert for every single failure. If only they hadn’t been in the middle of the night…
With luck tomorrow will be a bit more peacful 
I took this afternoon off work today and deposited BritBlog’s second web server up at Sovereign House in London’s Docklands. The journey in the car was a bit of a nightmare (with four hours of driving) but it’s good to finally get that done. It will take a bit of time to get the box ready for use, but it’ll make life a lot easier over there.
I don’t know what it is about the drivers in London, but driving up there feels like a constant battle. You have to drive right up the backside of the car in front or else someone will try and push into the gap. In fact, people will just try and push in anyway. And what really pi**ed me off was when an ambulance was trying to get through some traffic, and other drivers saw it as an excuse to gain a car’s length in the traffic — with absolutely no regard for the ambulance truing to get though. Unbelievable! Still maybe these drivers will one day die in a car accident while waiting for an ambulance stuck in traffic to get to them. OK, that’s a bit harsh, so maybe they should just come very close to death so that they realise what obstructing an ambulance can do
France are into the finals, so I know at least one person who will be pretty happy, and I’m totally zonked, so think I’ll go to bed!
Night night!
Got my LaCie 319 yesterday, so managed to get it plugged in last night when I got back from the Go Kart track and pub….
The good news is the screen works, and I couldn’t spot any dead pixels. The colour as it stands looks good too, and text on the screen is nice and sharp.
The bad news is the colorimeter that came with it (a LaCie blue eye pro) was broken in two pieces, so that has to get returned (once I proven to LaCie that it is indeed broken). This is a bit of a pain as I have a batch of photos to process from a friends wedding this weekend, and I was rather hoping to have my screen all setup and ready to go.
So not too chuffed.
The good thing is that I’ve given my desk a bit if a tidy (still a long way to go though), and getting rid of my old Dell 19″ CRT has freed up a lot of well-needed space.
Yay!
I was saddened to hear that the Youngs brewery is planning on stopping the sale of Pilgrim brewery beer in the Rising Sun pub in Epsom.
This is probably my favorite pub at the moment, given that the ale from the Pilgrim brewery is delicious and it is a no smoking pub.
I signed the petition a couple of weeks ago, but it seems this isn’t enough to stop Youngs:
“We spent £900,000 to buy this pub and we haven’t bought it to sell other peoples beer. If people don’t like it, they can drink somewhere else.
We have 210 pubs, and have never before come across a case where someone has refused to comply with our conditions.”
A Young’s spokesperson
I have nothing against Young and Co as a brewery — they make some very nice beer — but I do feel it is against the interest of real ale drinkers to make any changes to this great Surrey pub. So if you like real ale and think this little gem of a pub should be saved, join in the fight!
More information can be found here:
I seem to be encountering lots of web site screw-ups these days. Today it is AXA Insurance’s turn.
I just did a google search for camera insurance (I want to get my gear covered), and in the google ads on the side of the results page was a link to AXA Insurance. “OK” I thought, “let’s give it a whiz”.
I’m having a hard time making this sound interesting, so to cut the story short, I visited their site and got a wonderful template page, complete with Lorem ipsum text, holding images and so on.
So my question is this: if AXA Insurance can afford to just throw money away at pointless adverts, why can’t they reduce their premiums too? (Or improve their customer service…)
Related Link: Car Insurance free quotes
It’s inevitable. Rain = Wimbledon.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this observation today, but I felt I had to say it. Not a fan of tennis — the sooner it’s over the better in my opinion.
One nice thing about this weather is how it reminds me of holidays in the Lake District. I’m in desperate need of a holiday at the moment, so the brief journey through some of the hills and lanes of Surrey in the rain this morning was a nice distraction from the thought of another week at work… Talking of which, I’d better press on.
Everyone seems to be doing this at the moment, so I thought I would join in. It doesn’t really tell you anything useful about your site, but it’s quite nice to look at.
I have more, there is a huge public list, and you can even make your own.
RSS Feed for posts