Welcome to the 21st Century!

My in-laws have accessed the Internet via a dial-up modem for as long as I’ve known them (which is about seven years.)

For the whole of that time I’ve been gently suggesting that they really should think about broadband but they always said that they were happy with what they had, even if it did take twenty minutes to open my wife’s Flickr page and even when I have to login to their webmail account when someone sends them a couple of pictures…4mb attachments aren’t a big deal most people!

They finally made the jump this week and I popped round yesterday to get everything setup

I get a kick out of people’s reactions to technology and seeing their jaws hit the floor as pages were opening hundreds of times faster than they were used to was great. It got even better when I showed them a live video stream on the BBC news website

One of their arguments against going to broadband was always

“we don’t use it that much. we check our e-mail, do online banking and that’s it”

I always countered that they would find a ton of other reasons to use the Internet once they moved to broadband and as if by magic just as I was getting ready to leave one of them said

“What’s Skype?”

My sister in-law is spending a year in Australia so I imagine she’s mentioned it to them

Technology the enabler!

Upping Sticks

I mentioned recently I’d been planning some changes around here

I wanted to do this on the two year blog-anniversary as it seemed a cool thing to do but it hasn’t worked out that way so I’m doing it today (it’s just a coincidence it’s Halloween)

I’m moving my blog and hosting it myself

When I first started the blog I had no idea where it would be going to, if I’d stick at it or even if anyone would read it!

WordPress.com was great for this is at meant I could get up and running and it wouldn’t cost me a penny. If I decided it wasn’t for me then I could just walk away and that would be that

However, two years on it’s more than just something I dabble in. Even when I’m on one of my quiet periods I still think a lot about my blog.

Obviously the free WordPress services comes with some limitations. You are limited in the plugin’s and themes you can work with, your own advertising is a no-no (not that I’m planning on having any!). In a nutshell the creative control of how your site works is taken away from you.

The upside however is that I don’t have to worry about the admin side of things. Backups, security patching, server performance, uptime, etc, etc

I’ve had the andyparkes.co.uk domain name for ages now (redirected to the wordpress site) so that wasn’t an issue. I already pay for hosting due to other sites I have so the only decision I had to make was over which software to use

Making a move is something I’ve been agonising over for a while and I heavily tested blogengine.net which I was pretty impressed with. It’s written in ASP .NET, is open source and is very easy to work with. My only issue was when I had a problem importing my old posts across. If it hadn’t been for that I’d have jumped at it I think

But I’ve been so used to using WordPress for so long I couldn’t turn away from it!

Another reason for not doing this sooner was that I was worried about broken links and the fact that since the site has been around so long that certain posts were turning up toward the top of Google searches (do a search for netmeeting and vista on the UK site) which also gave me nice ego boosting stat graphs

But in the end I thought – screw it.

The new home for this blog can be found at

www.andyparkes.co.uk/blog

Please update any feeds you may have and if you visit the site itself excuse the dust while I try to figure out which themes, plugins, etc I’m happy with

I’ll cross post for a little while until I’m happy all is well and then parkey.wordpress.com will remain as an archive. I need to keep that WordPress account open anyway so I can use askimet and the stats plugin’s so I don’t plan on deleting the site

If you’ve read my blog over the last two years I’d like to say thanks. I’ve had an awful lot of things happen that would have just bypassed me if I hadn’t started rambling here two years ago. If you have any feedback (or you think I’m an arse!) please drop me an email or a comment

Now we just need to get someone else on a proper blogging platform

Happy Blog Day To Me

Where has the last year gone?

Today marks two years of writing my blog (and David Schrag – happy blog day to you as well!)

It’s been an interesting 12 months for a ton of reasons. I’m not really into those “last years highlights” posts as you’ll all grown ups…you can go through my archives yourselves

There is a lot of interesting stuff on the horizon though.

As I’m sure everyone is aware SBS 2008 is on us (and if you’re not playing with it now…why not?!)

We’ll also be getting some Windows 7 details over the coming weeks and apparently there is a some economic crisis going on….I haven’t heard much about that though <sarcasm off>

In addition we’re recently entered our fourth year as a business and also I’ll be knee deep in nappies again in the new year

All good stuff

I was planning on marking my second year of blogging by making some changes on the blog but that hasn’t quite gone to plan but it’ll get sorted in the next week

Quiet Before The Storm?

It’s been a couple of months since I blogged about how I’d not posted all that much recently.

It’s happened again.

After a brief flurry I realised today I haven’t posted anything for two weeks

I’ve no idea where the last two weeks have gone to be honest and I didn’t realise it had been that long

This morning I think I realised that I’ve had a change in my blogging behaviour. In the past if I had an idea for a blog post I’d start writing it straight away or at the very least the next time I was at a computer. Working in this way meant that any ideas I had stayed fresh and I would forget any details

At the moment when I have an idea writing the blog post goes into the “to do” list in my head where I then plan to write when I’ve finished whatever I’m currently doing. As you’ve probably guessed something else always comes up and the blogging has suffered.

Fortunately it’s not a lack of ideas it’s just a behavioural thing so I’ll try and break the bad habit I’ve gotten into over the last few months

Also the fact that I always seem to have something else to do indicates how busy things are for at the moment which is obviously a good thing!

There is no other point to this post other than to write it while I was thinking about it

I should have plenty to write about in the next couple of weeks as we’re getting closer to the SBS 2008 launch!

In case you didn’t know the WESS partner Readiness Tour has already started. Microsoft are bringing the launch to the user groups!

The AMITPRO event is November 12th but unfortunately I won’t be going

We’re having a short holiday while there is still just three of us and I can’t be in two places at the same time! A colleague of mine is still going to be attending so the company will be represented

I don’t really want to miss the tour though so I’m planning on going to the Bristol User Group next Thursday (23rd October – 17:30 start)

The Bristol user group is run by Andy Watkins who is very kindly letting me gatecrash

If your a member of the Bristol user group it’d be great to hear from you before then!

The National Computer Museum at Bletchley Park

I posted a little while back about the good news Bletchley Park received and said that I’d like to visit and take a look around the National Computer Museum

Well as a bit of a weird coincidence I’d completely forgotten that we’d arranged a visit to Milton Keynes on the Saturday immediately after the post

Said friends actually live in the Bletchley area which made things even easier so I dragged one of my friends along

First up we had a quick look around the mansion which was a fantastic looking building 

In here there were details of the history of some of the famous names such Alan Turing (wikiepedia entry here)

After that we had a quick look through the huts where all the code breaking took place

Listening station – she didn’t say much Alan Turing’s office

After that we jumped onto the end of one of the tours and heard all about “bombes” that were used to break the Enigma Machine

I won’t try to explain how the bombes worked!

Then it was onto the part I’d been waiting for and the National computer museum where we got to see the Colossus rebuild project 

 Colossus was the world’s first programmable computer.

It had no storage though and all output was directly to a typewriter

Calculations were performed using valves and the black valve on the left of this picture is an original valve used during the war! Apparently they have about 10 years worth of spare valves so if you have any old gadgets lying around that have valves they welcome donations

The rebuild project has been led for the last 14 years (!) by the legend that is Tony Sale. Most of the documentation was restored and whole project started from just 8 1945 photographs and some fragments of circuit diagrams some of the original engineers had been keeping illegally (good job geeks are hoarders!)

Me with Tony Sale

It was onto the museum proper after that and I was in my element!

Calculators and PDA’s! I had one of the Psion’s in this picture!

BBC Micro! I actually owned one of these CUB monitors as well. My dad hacked it up so when it was plugged into our spectrum we had sound and volume control. What a mod!

  Radar!

Punch cards!

The very first PC we owned had one of these in. Along with 8MB of RAM, a 50MB hard disk and a quad speed CD-ROM

Legend!

  An Apple Mac!

Had both of these. An Atari ST and a Amiga 500

The first two computers I have any memory of! Look at the rubber keys!

Why is the screen the wrong way round? Because it’s trying to look like a sheet of paper. This system was just a word processor. Look at the size of it!

  I want a desk like this in my office!

I’ll stop there….as you have probably guessed I took a ton of photo’s which I then spent the next week boring friends and family with

I had a great time with my only “criticism” (not really the right word) was I was expecting to see more hardware as there appears to be lots of gaps in the time periods (Other than a PET I didn’t see much commodore kit for example). But I do understand it’s still pretty new and things are being added all the time and they are running on a shoestring (donate!!) as the museum itself is free! It’s Bletchely Park you have to pay to get in

If you have any interest in computer history do something to support our computing heritage!

Other resources:

The National Museum of Computing (they have newsletters too)

Bletchley Park

Codes And Ciphers

The power of the Internet hype

While not giving you the power of the stats a self hosted blog would afford, the stats that WordPress.com provide are generally good enough for me

I get to know which posts are more popular than others and see how site visitors come across my page

The page views numbers also help give me an ego boost when I need it

The numbers are usually pretty predictable. I get fewer visits at a weekend with each weekday having similar figures so I get a nice curvy line

However, I was shocked when I saw this graph last week

WTF?! Best day ever!

At the top of that spike I got more visit’s on that single day than I usually get for an entire week!

What caused it? This post I made about Google Chrome towards the back end of last week. On that particular day that single post alone got about THREE times the amount of visits the entire blog does on an average day.

According to the stats it’s down to the fact that I linked to a post on the official Gmail site (who obviously get a hell of a lot more visitors than my humble blog does!)

At the bottom of their post was a “blogs that link here” section and I must have got a lot of click through’s!

Another side effect of this meant I was at the top of the WordPress “Top Growing blogs” and “Top Posts” lists for a short while which doesn’t mean a lot but made me happy for a hour

Just goes to show what a bit of hype can do!

Needless to say my “Andy is stupid and has infected his own computer with a virus though it’s a worm if you want to be picky and has let everyone on Facebook know including a whole host of fellow IT pros who will probably ridicule him at tonight’s users group meeting” post didn’t quite get the same amount of visits…it did get more comments though

Bletchley Park given a boost

Just saw this on this BBC news site

Bletchley gets £50,000 donation

The article is pretty comprehensive so I won’t reproduce too much of it here

I’m planning on making a trip to check out the National Museum of Computing soon so was pleased to hear this news today

The donations made by IBM and PGP are made with the idea it will help get some more funding to help keep the site up and running (another BBC article on the “neglect of Bletchley park” is here)

I was given this book Colossus- Bletchley Park’s Greatest Secret as birthday present which recommend if you have any interest in computer history (it’s huge though!)

Massive geek mode off

Every had one of those days?

It’s said a picture says more than a thousand words and I thought this picture says an awful lot about why the blog has been so quiet lately

I have a select few blogs that I keep up with religiously but recently the others have been left for when I have time to go back and read them (it’s ok though but there was a point I’d worry about missing something!)

A combination of a busy period, followed by some time off (during which I actually turned the mobile off for a whole day, ok an afternoon, shock horror!) and straight back in the deep end hasn’t helped with a bit of a general downturn in my blogging enthusiasm

I had an email conversation with someone recently who had lost their "mojo" and I pointed out that some people have peaks and troughs when it comes to blogging…I’ve never a trough this deep!

Anyway, yesterday I got to do a lot of thinking.

I’d been doing some work in Doncaster and left for the day. Turns out there had been a massive accident on the M1 between junction 24 and 25

I hit the queues at junction 29 so decided to jump into the first motorway services I could find (which ended up being Tibshelf)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that RoadChef were providing complimentary wireless access and their branch of Costa Coffee had a "business lounge" with lots of tables and power sockets to plug my gadgets into

From here I was then able to use various websites to help me make a decision on when to jump back into the traffic

The obvious one is the Highways Agency which has a map of the UK with data overlaid showing where the problems were, updates on the incident and how long it would be until they expected the road to be fully operational again

After that I used the BBC website (specifically the Nottingham regional site)

The regional BBC sites have had traffic information for some time. But what was especially useful was the fact I was able to view snapshots of the cameras that the highway’s agency uses to monitor the road network (Nottingham’s are here)

I couldn’t view all of them (I’m  presuming they turned off any that showed pictures of the accident scene) but it meant I could see when the traffic was flowing well enough for me to get off at a junction that would take me home and I could have something to eat (really bad fish and chips for £10?The only bad part!), do some work and browse the web at my leisure as opposed to sitting in the queues getting frustrated

It was when I tried to download Live Writer for my laptop I realised I hadn’t blogged in some time!

I eventually arrived home at 9pm which made for a very long day and not the ideal way to celebrate your birthday – which was also yesterday, birthday’s naturally make me take stock of the previous year and what I’d like to do in the coming year hence all the thinking!

Hopefully my blogging will be back up on the up and I’m looking forward to the rest of the year

Useful Outlook Tools

One the great things I love about reading blogs is the things you stumble across

Dave Overton had a blog post today about software we rely on

What software could you not live without – tell Windows Vista Magazine? – David Overton’s Blog

Other than the Microsoft stuff he mentioned a program called EZDetach

I clicked through to take see what it was and there are some very useful paid for utilities on that site I’d be taking a close look at (have a look yourself!)

There is also some free stuff that looks interesting too

FBLook = Facebook + Outlook – Update your status, see your friend statuses and be notified about new requests directly in Outlook.

OutTwit = Outlook + Twitter -  With OutTwit you do not need to open any other applications or the browser. Plus you will be able to archive, manage and search your tweets the same way you manage your email.

EZDelete – Purge Messages – EZDelete places a button on the Outlook toolbar which lets you delete messages without moving them to the Deleted Items folder with one click of a mouse.

Interesting!

So what couldn’t I live without?

IE7PRO

I’ve blogged about this IE add-in before and I use it that often I notice straight away when I’m at PC that doesn’t have it installed

I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments to Dave’s post to see if any other cool tools appear

BT Investing In Fibre

Two words on this one

WOO HOO!

Here’s the story on the BBC site

There had been rumblings a while back about BT not wanting to invest in the infrastructure and get fibre into the “last mile”

While this isn’t going to happen overnight (2012 from what I can see) it’s a step in the right direction. I made the move to Virgin for cable broadband a while back as my ADSL connection speeds were pitiful

Hopefully this will spur Virgin on to push forward with their plans to get faster speeds which in the long term will be great for the consumer and business alike

Bring it on!