I was impressed by the tobogganing policemen, for having a sense of humour, and getting involved with the local community. As a UK tax payer I whole heartedly endorse this use of my money.
I as not impressed by them being told off.
Have fun (or not, as the case is much more likely to be).
Ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/14/sledging_coppers/
Christmas shopping today, in between watching episodes of the season 2 of Bones 🙂
If you want to get interesting fair-trade presents in London, check out “fair share”, at the end of bewick street, next to the red light district of picadilly circus (hope I’ve got the spelling right). Very cool little things, made in interesting and deprived places. Worth giving it a look, if you’re looking for something a little quirky as a gift 🙂
Addictive flash/iPhone game: canabalt
Elwoodicious just wrote an interesting price on elastic load balancing with amazon’s virtual servers: http://elwoodicious.com
RPS a uk pc gaming site/blog got mentioned on a BBC news article about the laws of war, and how they’re broken in computer games
That’s all for today!
Hard day today. Can’t go into details, but emergency work always trumps scheduled work,unfortunately.
Not much fun stuff today. I’ve been re-reading crimsondark.com, a really good web-comic. Updates on Mondays, needs help funding hosting at the moment 🙂
Got to be quick. Today is the closest ie come to failing the challenge (using my brothers post earlier to give me a break, hope that doesn’t break the rules!
Today, used the east-coast train. Sat opposite to an older Irish lady, who looked like she had a lot of money, and seemed a little rude, the little I spoke to her. Don’t know if she was or not, it was very early in the morning. Then spent the rest of the day preparing a server, to move a site onto it in a rush this weekend. Kinda out-grown shared hosting all of a sudden, being a Christmas targetted website! Mine because I phoned the customer with the “we need to turn you off” call 😉 fun fun. Anyway must post. Cutting it fine!
Today, I pushed through some paperwork for a server migration I’ll be doing this weekend. Tweaked dns, tweaked cong files, etc etc.
Monitored Stephen Fry’s cluster closely whilst he was live-streaming a talk about social networking. Pretty much it.
Today, I, tweaked a domain name, helped talk a customer into upgrading, changed a few passwords, advised a user on a script I helped write, to add apache vhost, user, email, mysql db & user to a server and closed a few support tickets. Oh, and talked to a customer who is leaving. Fun fun.
Note to self, when cutting up chillies, loose the seeds.
Fun tweets today (sorry if you follow me on twitter!)
I’ve been looking for a really good set of headphones to use while doing extreme sports (Bocking) which has got to be the best test of how well the headphones stay in your ear!
I’ve tested a few different sets headphones designed specifically for sports (jogging) and ones that are not (in ear/noise isolating silicon ones.
Here’s a short review with ratings 1-5 (where 5 is best) in various categories. Scroll to the bottom to find out the overall winner!
Sennheiser Mx55 ((£15 from HMV)
Comfort 4 (can get a bit unconfortable after a few hours in)
Sound 5 (excellent sound quality)
Volume 4 (Not as loud as i’d expected, but also doesn’t leave my ears ringing after listening with my player on full volume)
Quality 4 (the snap on interchangeable covers designed to let you bling it up a bit are pointless and come off too easily. I’ve superglued one already, but at this price, who’s complaining?!)
Hold/fit 5 (they stayed in for hours while i bounced around, amazing!)
EDIT: Superglue the rubber bits on too, they fall off in pocket!
Skullcandy in ear
Comfort 4 (pretty comfortable until i took them out then found my ear holes were quite sore)
Sound 3 (good, but lacking something, and no matter of EQ tweaking could give me that…too crisp)
Volume 5 (ear blisteringly loud :()
Quality 2 (poor, the metal mesh on one of them fell off after about a week, and then the speaker on that side got kind of bent in and the volume halved)
Hold/fit 2 (fall out often, not suitable for jogging/sports)
Sony Active MDR-AS20J Ear Clip Sports Headphones ~£12
now it’s been a little while since i used these headphones so forgive me if i’m a little less specific. These have got to be my second favourite since the Sennheiser MX55.
They disappeared a while back and I can’t seem to find them anymore 🙁 lol.
Comfort 4
Sound 4
Quality 5 (survived being chucked into my bag with various implements until they disappeared)
Volume 4 (not as good as the in ear ones obviously, but louder than the MX55’s)
Hold/Fit 4 (the stay on, but its a bit fiddly to get them on)
Sennheiser CXII300 In ear noise isolating ~£30
These were quite expensive for me, but sounded greate and lasted ages. The hold while Bocking wasn’t too bad (it helped taping the cable to my neck with a plaster to prevent tugging).
I killed them by accidentally snagging the cable on a street sign and turning round. The cable separated at the connector.
Comfort 3 (got a bit uncomfortable after an hour or so)
Sound 5
Quality 4 (good, rubbery cable didn’t seem to kink and was easily wrapped but the rubber cable ends on the buds slid down after a good few months of kicking around in the bag)
Volume 5
Fit/hold 4 (not best suited to sports, the cable always caught on my clothes and dragged them out of my ears. Better fit than the skull candy though.)
My recommendation? Get the Sennheiser MX55. Great hold and sound quality for an amazing price. I don’t miss the volume, my hearing seems to be improving now (i think a volume rating of 5 is excessive!!).
The in ear/noise isolating ones especially the sennheiser were pretty good, but i quite like being able to have some sound from the surroundings. Even though the hold was pretty impressive for something not secured to your ear, the cable always won and ended up yoinking them out of my ears.
Edit: added comment to Senheiser Mx 55 section.
So, got futher this year 🙂
Still another nothing happened day, nothing to post about. Now you know why I don’t post so much 🙂
Walked past the poster at the bottom of this post the other day. What a load of rubbishy ramblings. What is the point of pasting that up outside a train station? It won’t get your (daft) point across to anyone. Good way to vent I guess. Apart from that,and being slightly offensive 😉
We have a lot of customers. A few, whilst emailing us at tech-support can be rude. It’s interesting, visiting their sites, and seeing whether that is just because they’re stressed, under the effects of caffeine, or are just naturally rude.
Take one example… one person just kept ignoring what I said, treating it as if I didn’t know what I was writing about. Turns out, I did, and I fixed the immediate problem (if not the whole one, but that’s something different altogether). He still insists on treating me as if I’m not worth listening to.
Surprise surprise, if I am given the choice (and at the end of the day, when I’m just doing support tickets to stop them needing to be done tomorrow, I often am,) I will delay answering the tickets of those who have been rude. They’ll get done at some point, but I won’t prioritize them; what’s the point? I’d rather help someone who will be grateful! I will go all out in my own time on a problem that interests me, or a customer who is kind. I will go all out if you are rude, but you are stressed and have an excuse. I may force myself to go all out if you pay us a lot of money (but it won’t be on my own time 😉 )
I’ve stayed in the office till 10pm, on a ‘I’m not getting paid right now’ problem, because it interested me, and I liked the people running the website involved. I will gladly spend my free time trying to help them.
If you talk to tech support, be nice! Say thank you, treat us with respect, and you’ll find we’ll be inclined to help you a lot more. Ignore what we say, treat us rudely or as if we don’t know what we’re talking about, and we’ll get dispirited. The last thing you want is dispirited sysadmins. They tend to go home on the dot, and they won’t go out of their way to help you.
If you’re angry, worried, stressed, take a deep breath and a calming moment before speaking to us. We, like anyone else, don’t like people shouting at us for something we can’t help. If your website goes down, because the server it’s on has blown up, and you didn’t pay for a fail-over system, we can’t help you any faster by you shouting at us, and you shouting at us will not make us like you 😉
In the end, just remember, we’re human too! That person you call up because your email is broken has emotions, and they’re likely busy fixing problems, or helping others already. Don’t let the frustration of the problem blow into anger at the people who try to fix it for you 🙂