Posts from — January 2008

I’ve just heard from Adam that Dmitry has posted news that Scotty McLeod, leader of the UK Windows Server user group and  a member of GET-PSUGUK’s  is currently critical in hospital after being hit by a train last night whilst travelling home. It doesn’t sound like a great deal is known at the moment, but we’re obviously all thinking of Scotty and wishing him a speedy recovery.

You may have noticed the blue overlays appearing on images on TT now, I’m experimenting with Photocrank which is a service to allow images to be commented and tagged by users without wrapping special code around each element on a site.

They offer a neat Wordpress plugin which once installed adds the necessary code to ‘Crank’ an image, for any images you want to prevent being tagged (the header here on TT is a good example, I wasn’t keen on the idea of random comments appearing there) just add crankstate=”false” to the img tag.

So, good idea? Bad? Here’s something to get you started:

 Yes, I know, LOLCats=BAD but after the recent release of the LOLCat compiler for the CLR I just had to. Sorry.

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately and concluded that the easiest thing to do would be write a post (mostly for my benefit) on the topic of why I registered and keep seeming to fail blogging here on TT.

To answer the question I’ve been asked several times lately, I came by the name back when I was in Year 10 at PGS. One of my lecturers wasn’t entirely keen on the direction our discussions took and one day dubbed me the “master of tangential thinking” and when I was scrabbling around for an apt domain to register it came to mind… It’s only more recently when looking at site maps and SEO I find that it’s also a symptom of schizophrenia (I’m not, thankfully).

Anyhow, this blog, originally I started it with the intention of writing about the things which interest me in my everyday faffing with gadgetry and trawling of ‘teh intarweb’ but since the transition back from journalist to SysAdmin I seem to have lost a lot of the organisational skills which I developed and feel much more like a monkey at a typewriter when I sit down to post.

It’s frustrating as nearly every day I encounter things of interest which would be worth discussion, one of the reasons I began getting in to GTD was to start capturing all these ideas in a logical and structured fashion to begin making more sense of the various todos which form my everyday life.

There’s a whole range of topics I’ve yet to cover in any detail, my day is spent working on products such as Exchange 2007, ISA 2006, Office Communications Server 2007 and Windows Server 2008 but I’ve posed on none of them. Nil. Nada.

 I’d say there’s a fair share of procrastination too in the sense that being a bit of a  perfectionist (read: picky sod), I’ve changed the design of the site countless times - I’m not quite sure how I want TT to look or behave but seem to have adopted the tactic of changing it frequently because that elusive layout is obviously going to be produced by my next redesign (or the one after that) - imagine more monkeys + typewriters here…

All these changes don’t just hold the process of blogging up, they’ve been fairly counterproductive in other ways too, a recent ecto upgrade hosed 90% of the larger posts on the site, I’m not sure which button I pressed but as of now I vow to stick to Live Writer, the Wordpress WYSIWYG or Scribefire. I should probably schedule some regular backups too :).

So, from tomorrow I’m going to quit thinking about layout, lists and what the best topics would be and just make sure I post something daily. Actually make today my first day - not an interesting post but one I had to write so that I could get on with the task in hand.

Ah, the "great" british rail system.

Following the failure of my AppleTV last night I visited the retailer where I picked up my unit and was told that they couldn’t simply swap it, instead insisting it had to go to their repair center for diagnosis, I’m not sure what that would do to the manufacturer warranty but I gave up discussing it with the counter staff and instead opted to call Apple this evening.

Within 15 minutes one of their support people had diagnosed the machine as dead and arranged a replacement to come out to me. All they needed was a delivery address and VISA details (in case I run off with the dead one, obviously) - I should be back up and running before the end of the week. Hurrah!

I’ve no doubt cursed it and the courier will lose/drop/throw/eat my replacement unit, but what the heck, I feel like being optimistic

Technorati Tags: Apple TV, Apple

They’re announcing a new Apple TV. How do I know? Because tonight mine died. Failed harddisc. Right on cue. Bravo Steve, or is Evil Steve at the helm these days?

Wondering what apple have up their sleeve… Is it a 12″ ultraportable with multitouch, appletv and 3G?

So it finally happened. Vista x64 begone.

The one year anniversary meeting of GET-PSUGUK (UK Powershell User Group) will be held in Reading on Tuesday 15th January 2008.

The meeting will consist of a talk from Jeffrey Snover on version 2 and Richard on PowerShell thus far, looking forward to Windows Server 2008.

A LiveMeeting stream will be available - email powershell-uk [at] hotmail [dot] co [dot] uk for more information of the meeting location or LiveMeeting URL.

Technorati Tags: powershell, get-psuguk

Testing mobile posting

Farking around with my blog. http://tinyurl.com/2a2rqx

Nothing to see here…