Chris's Blog

After all of the saga's with the house move we have now finally moved!!

Lots of pictures can be found of the house before we moved in here.

Few pictures..

 

All of the fitted wardrobes have now been pulled out. Now we are left with carpet that had been fitted around it all, and two different colours on the walls! But we have our bed put up and it's somewhere to sleep. Managed to get some time to go to Ikea last night to buy some blinds for the lounge, now they are all up we can put the TV together ready for the Sky man to come and set up our sky system again.

Also trying to have a bonfire to get rid of all the old wood. Only problem seems to be that when I go outside to try and burn it all, the heavens opens and I get soaked... given up on that idea until the weekend. On a plus note, BT did an awesome job at getting the phone working and also the broadband working on the same day we moved in. Very impressed!

One parachute, used once, never opened. 

Open to offers. 

Up until Tuesday I didn't realise how much you take breathing for granted. After being sat at my desk Tuesday morning I had a sharp pain when I took a deep breath. That didn't feel right.... For once I decided to make a doctors appt, arrive at the doctors to hear the doctor saying, "You need to go to A&E, I've booked you in. You have the possibility of either having a collapsed lung or a blood clot".

Cue me walking out to tell the other half that we needed to take a drive. After spending 6 hours in A&E they decided I had Pleurisy. After lots of tablets and 3 days of work. I'm now allot better and going back to work....

The whole social networking web sites bypassed me due to work. I figured working in a school it's not the best thing to do to sign up to a social networking site as you normally end up with students trying to add you as friends. That was until I found Facebook. The security on the website is great, being able to hide your profile, only let your friends see pictures with you tagged in, I thought that was excellent. It was a great simple website that you had your profile, your friends, information and that was pretty much it.
Now it seems that everybody is adding lots of applications, and when you add a Facebook application you can send a message to everyone of your friends telling them that you've added this excellent application and you want to share it with everybody else. So within 24 hours you have something like this,

To me having all of these extra applications means the website is starting to become like MySpace.

How many times have you looked at a MySpace profile and found it suddenly starts blaring out music when you really don't want it to? Slightly annoying when you have your laptop plugged into the stereo listening to iTunes quite loudly and then you get some rubbish low quality music playing over your music. That just winds me up. So you then start banning all of the annoying music applications with Adblock in Firefox.

 

I do agree with this web link, Facebook: How Complicated Has This Site Become?

At work we have two levels of filtering, filtering at county level. It's good at picking up proxy bypass web sites but that's about it. So in school we have an RM provided solution called RM Smart Cache. Now it's good in some respects, but unfortunately has it's down falls.

Previously I used Censornet, this product does exactly what it says on the tin. It filters the Internet and it does it good! All users get presented with a log in box when they try to browse the Internet. This if your auditing trail of who has done what on the Internet. Now the old version used to be a single CD that was the install and it all worked straight out of the box. But with the new V4 it's a little bit more in depth. Which from my point of view is good. With the old version you couldn't do anything else with the box. But with the new version it's a basic install of Debian and then away you go.

Wow what an eventful past week.

Sunday last week we had a fire in the flat, a heater that we didn't know existed in the bottom of a cupboard decided it would be a good idea to turn it's self on and burn the contents of the cupboard. Cue burning smell in flat for the rest of the week.

Tuesday, meeting about my job at work, I now has a new job title, E-Learning Manager. And I also have a nice pay rise to go with it. It does how ever mean that the Network Manager job role I currently have is being tied in with the E-Learning Manager. But it does mean that I can push some exciting new ideas for staff to use ICT in lessons and push whole school ICT issues forward, like the lack of ICT provision in my new school.

Thursday, picked up the engagement ring that I had ordered so that I could propose to Lesley. We then went down to Brighton. We also behave like complete kids on the arcade machines. It normally ends up with me getting my arse kicked on a racing game that she puts me into a wall so I lose :( But I win at Air Hockey. So after behaving like children we laid on the beach looking at the stars. I then proposed....... And Lesley accepted!! I am now such a happy man.

Saturday, cue the drive up to Yorkshire to tell Lesley parents, (They didn't know we where going to make an appearance.) So we have now told the parents so everybody can be told. So everybody, I'm now engaged!!!

Well it seems that trying to publish the images over xml-rpc comes up with this error message:

It seems that it didn't like posting the images. So if you change LiveWriter to upload the images via FTP, that error message goes away. After hitting publish it comes up with another error,

This it seems you can ignore. It uploads the images, and it publishes everything correctly. I guess it wouldn't be a Microsoft product without random error messages somewhere.

Well it seems that live writer is working how it should. It's a very easy to use application. Yes, something new for MS. Although, after hitting publish on the previous post it did return an error message telling me that it hadn't posted the blog entry. Something I did find amusing after checking it had.

So a couple of screen shots,

A nice easy to use insert

The add plugin takes you to this website that lets you download additional plugin's for your LiveWriter software. I've yet to find a plugin I find useful. I do however like the link called "Insert Map..."
It's excellent. So here's a birds eye view of near where I live... :)

The menu bar is the usual sort of MS thing.

This software has made life slightly easier for posting blogs, it has inbuilt spell checker. Something I missed sorely in the web typing. It also lets you save as you go along, so no more typing out a huge blog, hitting submit, and losing the whole dam thing.

It's also made it easier for letting staff add content to our internal blog at work. They no longer get lost with all of the menus. With this they type, spell check, add pictures and then hit publish.