Rob's Blog

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:

3864

3849

3852

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!)

Wow, day 3!

Just after I wrote yesterday’s post, we got a new delivery! No, not the baby yet, but the pushchair, car seat, cot bed and mattress. This means we now have pretty much everything we need for the baby (except a few small bits which should be delivered soon). We have got a fantastic Baby Jogger buggy (don’t get excited – I’m not going to start jogging – they make other ones now), which if nothing else is the easiest buggy in the world to fold (see the video on the site).

It’s all getting exciting now. From next week I need to be ready to take Abby to the Jubilee Birth Centre in Cottingham st a moment’s notice, since it counts as full term from then. This of course means no drinking for me (although we are going down to Leamington next week so if Abby goes into labour there we’ll be going to Warwick Hospital).

It’s wierd not needing to get anything more ready, as we are just waiting. It’s of course not good for Abby because she’s gradually getting more uncomfortable.

On the bright side, parenthood can’t be that bad because we’ve just been told that one of our relatives is having another one (I won’t name names in case the news isn’t public yet).

Well, here I am – I made it to Day 2 of writing a post a day!

Recently I’ve discovered Twitter. I’m sure everyone knows about it by now – it’s a bit like posting a Facebook status to a public page. This means it can be searched and read by anyone, and is described as a “Microblogging” service.

I have to say I quite like it. You don’t have to put much (if any) thought into the posts, so it is easy to fit into your day (although Abby is always saying “you’re not twittering again are you?”).

I did try and put it to practical use on my recent Birthday night out. I tweeted the location of the pub we were in, so anyone joining us later could see where we were. Unfortunately I used SMS to update the location, which took a while to update, which meant that the only person who tried to find our location, got an out of date message! He found us in the end (through a good old fassioned voice call). It would have worked much better if I used a different tweeting method.

I am getting into it though, and I even have some followers I’ve never met which is quite nice (although I think some are following the MySpace school of thought – if I follow someone maybe they will follow me – I haven’t been unless they introduce themselves!)

I will leave you with this video, which isn’t exactly complimentary of Twtter (although I found it through Twitter), but is very funny:

Anyone reading this blog regularly (which I’m fairly sure isn’t many) will notice I haven’t posted for a while. To be honest I just haven’t got round to it.

I have been inspired however by comedian Richard Herring (who we went to see on Sunday) who posts exactly one post a day on his blog. He writes about anything, from the exiting to the mundane, and has been going for years now without missing a day!

I thought I’d give it a go, and see what ends up coming from my mind. Being totally honest I doubt I’ll get very far without missing a day, and I have a new family development coming up soon which may prevent me from a regular routine.

I’m not sure what I’ll write about. I suppose some days it will be what I’ve been up to recently, and others I’ll write about something I’ve been thinking about. This one is a bit of a cheat, since this post is just about this post, but I’ll try and come up with something  better for tomorrow.

Feel free to comment on this or any of my posts, I would love to know if anyone’s reading them (if not it will be something for me to look back on in years to come.