Rob’s Blog

Back in February I wrote that the promising service Homepages Friends (formally MySearchFunds) had stopped paying out, (wel, they seemed to have stopped paying me anyway).

Any members will have seen the emails they sent recently. The first one seemed to give you the option of paying your earnings to a charity instead and the second one gave tyhe option of using the earnings to offset your carbon emissions. Neither was very clear about what exactly was happening.

Today I received an email clarifying it. They are going to stop paying users for their searches (as of 1 August), and instead will be donating it to your chosen “cause”.

They do say that any searches made before then will be paid (regardless of whether the threshold is reached), but I’m not sure whether to trust that, given how long I’ve waited for my payout (they owe over £50 now).

They are still due to pay for referrals, but only a flat ratre so it could take a long time to make anything!

I decided to look for an alternative, and came across Scour. They don’t pay as much per search, but you can increase your earnings by reviewing or voting for results. It also aggregates Google, MSN (or Bing) and Yahoo results, and it all looks much slicker than HomepagesFriends (in fact it looks like a nice search engine even without the payment!). Worth a try. Of course it would be great if you used my referral link.

I’d love to hear your comments.

Sorry, this one’s going to get a little geeky.

We rented a Blu-Ray last night in an attempt to have a nice Friday night in. Unfortunately the film (Be Kind Rewind) crashed the ATI video drivers on this computer. After a couple of attempts I decided to try upgrading the ATI drivers. I was a little concerned about doing this as when I last upgraded (just after buying the computer), the intallation failed meaning I couldn’t use Catalyst Control Center (CCC) (a control panel required to use the computer with our HD TV), and I got lots of error messages. I did fix it in the end, but it was a real pain.

Anyway, I ran the upgrade, and suprise surprise it failed mid installation. CCC doesn’t work, but that’s the least of the problems. Boot up takes absoltely ages, during which it pauseds on a black screen for many minutes (I actually thought it had crashed, and tried the various windows repairs, which also took ages). The drive doesn’t recognise Bl-Rays or DVDs, and crashes if I try to. Media Player doesn’t work, and MediaPortal only works for the first time each boot.

Luckily Spotify and the various on-demand TV sites work, so we’re still able to watch TV, but the computer is a real mess.

I’m going to have to try fixing the driver (it took quite some time last time), which I might try later.

If anyone is interested, we’re running Windows Vista 32-bit, and have an ATI Radeon 3870 HD graphics card. The drivers I tried to install were version 9.6. Install at your own risk!

It’s 3:40 am and  I’m up again today rocking Izzy to sleep. It’s not too bad as he gave us over 4 hours before waking for a feed and a change. I think she got wind, but that seems to have cleared (with a few of her surprisingly loud burps) and she’s starting to settle. I did think she was getting her daily dose of gripe (she didn’t need any Gripe Water, which is progress), but it’s cleared on its own.

I picked up our new (well, second hand) car yesterday. We upgraded our 12 year old Renault Scenic and got a 2004 Grand Scenic. The old car had done very well for us. It had just under 100,000 miles on the clock, but we hadn’t exactly looked after it. It still ran very well, and had never failed to start, but we were told at the last service that it was on its way out (annoying as we’d just spent over £300 to get it through the MOT!) The most immediate problem (given the hot weather) was that the interior ventilation fan had stopped working.

The new car is the top of the range spec, which is very nice because it has all sorts of fun toys like keyless entry and panoramic sunroof. Unfortunately it was made before cruise control and climate control was standard on the top spec. It does of course have AirCon, which was on our must have list.

It also has 7 seats, 2 of which fold down into the larger boot. We didn’t go looking for the extra capacity, but decided that the extra boot space could be very useful, even if we never use the extra seats (I think there are very few adults who could fit in them). Maybe we should just have 4 more children?

Slightly worryingly, I got our newer, more reliable car home, went to demonstrate it to Abby when she got back from Bumps & Babies, and it wouldn’t start (something that had never happened to the old car)! I rang the guy we bought it off (Selby Trade Autos is his trading name). He was great - despite the car being “sold as seen” (as most used cars are), he dropped everything and drove straight out to see me. Luckily it turned out to be a minor problem which had been caused by some work that had been done on the car just before we bought it. I do need to take it to my local garage and get a fuel line replaced to stop it happening again (not as bad as it sounds), but he will re-imberse me for that.

Overall I’m very happy with my new toy. I’ll leave you with a couple of the  photos from the ad for the car, I think I’m going to see if my darling daughter will settle in bed now.

It’s just gone 3:00 in the morning, and I’m writing my first post in a long time, and I’m writing it one handed.

It’s been nearly 2 months, a long way from the relative excitement of my post a day “experiment”. Anyone who reads this regularly (I’m still not sure there is anyone), or anyone who follows me on Twitter (which I have been updating), will of course realised it’s because my wife Abby gave birth to our daughter.

Isabel Anne Ferrer was born at 11:03 on April 20 2009!

[More Photos Here]

Of course the reason I’m up so late/early, and typing one-handed is that I’m trying (and as of 03:11am, succeeding) to rock Izzy (her name was shortened almost immediately) to sleep.

I’m not sure what words to use to describe adjusting to parenthood. It has of course been amazing. We’ve had a few sleepless nights, but on the whole I think we’ve been pretty lucky. Izzy has been a pretty good sleeper, and we’ve rarely resorted to naps during the day, and haven’t been walking round like zombies.

We’ve also been pretty lucky with feeding (I say we, Abby’s been doing all the hard work). Izzy latched on almost straight away after birth, and there’s hardly been a problem with breastfeeding since birth. A lot of our friends from our NCT antenatal class have been very jealous!

A week or so ago we started to have a bit of problem with Izzy becoming fussy and grouchy every evening. This turned out to be gripe, and we’ve found giving her Gripe Water at this time calms her pretty quickly (normally after some impressive burps/farts!). Again we’ve been lucky and I’ve heard of much worse cases of gripe/colic.

Everyone of course asks how the nappy changing is! To be honest, it’s not a huge chore, and it doesn’t even seem too disgusting any more. We are using cloth nappies, which I would highly recommend and isn’t loads of work. The only problem is she’s using up to 15 nappies a day, which given we’ve only got 20 means daily washes. I may write a more comprehensive account of cloth nappies at a later date.

It’s now nearly 03:30, and Izzy’s still fast asleep (thanks to lullabies on Spotify - you should see our recent Last.fm stats!), so I’m going to risk going to bed now! I’ll try and post sooner than 2 months, I promise!

Goodnight!

I’m up early (well early for me - especially for a weekend). I was wide awake (which is again unusual for me in the morning), so I thought I’d get up!

I thought now was a good enough time to sum up my Post a Day experiment.

In ten days I wrote eight posts. Nothing particularly exciting. The most viewed post got just 25 views, but that’s not too bad.

I quite enjoyed the challenge of trying to write something every day. I expected to write more about what I’d been doing in the previous 24 hours, but instead found writing more about what was on my mind. This probably made for slightly more interesting posts (emphasis on the slightly!).

I’m not quite sure why I stopped. I think it was partly I was pretty busy, and when I had paying customers wanting work done, and Abby getting bored on maternity leave, I couldn’t justify (to myself) taking half an hour every day to force myself to write. I probably also ran out of things to write about!

I will continue to post more often than I did previously - it’s been good getting my thoughts down “on paper”, but I’m not going to try and stick rigidly to one a day. In fact I have something else I will probably write about later today.

If you want to get started with a blog, or want to kick start one you already have, forcing yourself to write once a day can be a good way to get motivated, but I don’t think it’s for me in the long term.

I’ve just recieved an email from our colocaltion suppliers encouraging us to take part in WWF’s Earth Hour.

Basically the idea is to turn off the lights for an hour tomorrow evening in an attmpt to halt climate change. Nice idea, but is one hour in 8760 going to make any difference?

I know the idea is to raise awareness, rather than actually save energy, but the way our suppliers put it is:

“[we] agree to turn out all nonessential lights from 8:30-9:30 pm on March 28, 2009″

Surely if the lights are non-essential they should be turned off anyway, especially on a Saturday evening? I understand some of the lights they are asking people to turn off are advertising signs and external floodlights, but does an internet hosting company really need those anyway.

People want to save energy and halt global warning, but as soon as a council suggests turning streetlights off in the early hours of the morning, all the NIMBYs start complaining that without their world permenantly lit they are likely to break their legs! I have no figures, but continuously lighting all our towns and cities (and most of the motorways) must be a massive waste of enery, compared with turning off a 14W energy saving bulb for one hour a year!

My point: if any lighting is non-essential, turn it off anyway, not just for one hour!

I’m sure I’m not alone in creating administration pages for websites that under development, and relying on the fact the URL is unknown to keep them private (until the site is launched of course).

I currently have a large project under development, which has a number of administration functions that are executed by visting a certain URL (in this case refreshing product information and wiping cache tables). I got a call from the customer telling me that the cache kept disapearing without him running the function, and I knew I hadn’t.

After checking my code, and looking at the data to check if the data really was missing, I decided to check the Apache access logs.

A quick grep told me that the admin URL had been accessed, not by me or the customer, but by Alexa! This had caused the cache to be wiped (correctly as it turns out, since that was what it was meant to do).

I have a firefox plugin on my main office PC that tells me the Alexa ratiung of any sites I visit. Clearly they also spider any URLs they don’t know about!

I quickly added password protection to the admin pages, and will make sure it’s the first thing I do in future. I don’t think (I hope) that they are publicising these private URLs, but visiting them is bad enough. I will of course be removing the Alexa plugin when I get back to the office.

This post isn’t so much about Jade Goody, or her recent passing, but about the over-coverage (in my opinion) of the story.

Don’t get me wrong, it is tragic that Jade has died, but in my opinion no more tragic than any other young mother dying of any terrible disease. In life she was annoying and obnoxious, and someone I just wasn’t interested in. Her claim to fame was pretty much being stupid. She wasn’t evil or malicious, just ignorant.

For months (after Celebrity Big Brother), she was vilified by the press and the public (in my opinion unfairly), and yet now she’s being held up as a saint. I have even heard of at least two people comparing her to Princess Diana (including Stephen Fry!). She’s still second story on Radio1 news, a full two days after the event.

The one good thing that has come of her death is that more young women are getting checked out for cervical cancer, so I suppose if the media coverage saves lives I can’t be bad!

I am aware that by writing a post about this, I am being hypocritical, but there you go!

I’ve spent most of the afternoon today listing items on eBay.

It’s a great idea getting a bit of cash for your unwanted junk (not that anything I sell is junk of course!), but it does take a surprisingly long time putting them up there (and then of course a long time packaging and posting them once they’re finished).

The part that can take the most effort is getting decent photos. There are so many items on eBay with crap photos, and I don’t want to do that. The main problems with other peoples pics that I want to avoid are:

Bad Lighting

There are so many listings on eBay that have really poor lighting, often to the extent you just can’t see what you are buying.

Out of Focus/blurry

A lot of this is also due to the bad lighting - exposure is so long that there is a lot of camera shake. It may also be that the camera doesn’t know what to focus on.

Glare from Flash

I have rarely seen a good photo on eBay that has been taken with Flash. A flash is great for lighting up a family snap, but it doesn’t show of a product well. Either there are strange shadows, or more often (because they’re normally close-ups) there is a lot of glare from the flash which ruins the photo.

Distracting Background

If I’m buying a product from you I don’t want to see a corner of your tatty sofa, or your messy kitchen table.

Hanging Clothing

It’s very hard to tell what an item of clothing is like when it’s on a hanger, or lying on a bed, especially in conjunction with all the above problems.

The method I used today worked quite well. Firstly I took advantage of the nice weather, and took the photos outside. This meant the items were lit nicely from lots of directions, and I didn’t need a flash.

Next I set up a dark blue fleece blanket on our decking, hung over a table lying on its side. I got rid of the creases and folds to give me a uniform backdrop. This of course was in a sunny place, with no odd shadows.

I set up my camera with a tripod. This probably wasn’t needed given the light levels, but in slightly lower light means you can get good photos without using the flash.

That was it really. Framing the well to show off the product well is important, but can also be helped by cropping.

For one item of clothing I get Abby to model (it was a maternity top so it was ideal), but a pair of trousers that don’t fit had to be hung from a hanger.

I’m no photography expert yet (as much as I’d like to be), but I think I got some pretty good results, which you can see when my listings start at 7:30 today (or I might post the pics here later). Certainly better than a badly lit, blurry, camera phone photo!

OK, so I messed yesterday, but this post is only a few hours late, and is about yesterday, so that counts.

It was a gorgeous day in York yesterday, so we wondered into town, did a very small amount of shopping (I bought a soft toy for our baby - going to be the first I give him/her), and generally enjoyed the weather.

After we had some Fish and Chips in Museum Gardens, I took some photos. The full album is here, and here are a few highlights:

On the downside, I’ve discovered that the spot I’m getting on my images isn’t on the lens, so must be somewhere in the camera - going to have to do some more playing!
(PS: I can’t get the styling of the photos right - never mind!)