Lost In The Web

So the last week we have been having somewhat of a good turn of weather, the Sun has been out and essentially “baking” here and everyone has been enjoying it.
Well except for today, which has been grey, dull yet still boiling… that was until the rain came.

One lovely thunderstorm later, and its feeling somewhat cooler I pity anyone who was caught out in it!
(embedded video courtesy of the WordTube plugin for WordPress, using the Flash Player from Jeroen Wijering)

Seriously where the fuck have all these sales calls came from? its like a spate of morons calling up looking for someone looking to flog the Next-Best-Thingâ„¢.

My boss is now off on the sick, his road trip to Germany for his new fancy Trike has knocked him back to suffering from the dreaded lurgy.
The Senior Manager Brian is on an away day with the rest of senior management, so isnt available. (its that bad, he  has his mobile turned off, as I discovered) This means that I am the only person available this week to do anything, as everyone else is sick or off on holidays.

I also now have to deal with the wallies upstairs, the finance and accounting package is playing up and they come crying to us, and when we tell them to contact the supplier of said package for the support they shout about having, they get grumpy.  Scrap that they are phoning the supplier, its now an irate user who cannot manage a simple password reset in Windows

You cant win at times.

I wonder if going on a toe-curling, blood hungry rampage using a plastic spoon as a deadly weapon would be beneficial?
(note: they should include plastic spoons into the deadly weapon range, you ever seen how easy it is to scoop out a heart with one? )

Or maybe taking a week’s holiday would be better…

Has social networking sites made it easier or harder to loose touch with people?

We have all read how MySpace and Bebo bring people together, its the new “watering hole” of the digital era where it allows groups of people to communicate quickly with their peers, but has it introduced a new affect, where its in fact harder to contact people?

You might be wondering “what the fuck is he talking about?” but there is a key point here, its the method of communication used. Back in the dawn of time of the internet (post-ARPA) there was E-Mail, then came Internet Relay Chat, then Forums, Instant messaging (which continues to grow today) and now Bebo. The forms of communication has changed drastically in these years to what is now common to being “bite-size” remarks, and has coined remarks like BMB (Bebo Me Back)

E-mails were always long-winded detailed accounts of actions and remarks of events. Forums made it a more public form of communications with friends and peers.
Instant Messaging and IRC made it smaller and quicker, and a faster response to almost instantaneous communications. This made people slim down their discussions to make it more reactive with the other person
Bebo has reduced the communication down to essentially shout-outs between people and groups and its effective communication, where the reaction to the message published is much like the initial where its a shout-out and remark over something.

Bebo has also created the E-Peen existence, where friends will strive to get more friends or “Luv” than their peers on the site, just to have boasting rights. In this effect you can have people with over 50 friends (and sometimes over 100) on their lists. So how can someone keep in contact with over 50 people on a single website?

This leads to the “bite-size” communications, you end up giving out “shouts” to people and not communicating effectively with people you would normally talk to at length because you have more people to talk to. This is where electronic communication lets you down. Early communications was a discussion, Bebo is like shouting to someone as you pass in the street.

The biggest benefit of Bebo? In my eyes it is the affect of bringing long-lost friends back together via the “friends” of others, There was an experiment done many years ago where they discovered that within one group of friends, there is 6 degrees of separation between one individual and anyone else. People seem to forget how inter-connected societies really are, and by using the Internet it increases the effective communications of individuals.  Recently I had two old friends and an acquaintance add me to Bebo, one of which I wasn’t aware was on-line.

I hardly use my Bebo, its my choice not to use it purely as having another “place” to look at regularly. I already have this site, my emails, forums I frequent, IRC and even MSn to keep in contact with (as well as mobile phones and SMS messaging). By adding Bebo to my communications list, I have to effectively stop communicating with other friends…

Which means its making it easier for me to loose touch with friends I have.

Of course there’s a far easier way to solve this communications issue, its called unplugging and sometimes the easiest option is also the most enjoyable, the social effect of being with friends far outweighs sitting posting comments and instant messaging.

All we need now is the good weather to return so we can all start enjoying the Barbeque’s

Last month I decided enough was enough, I threw the head up and asked Eclipse Internet for a MAC code. 5 Days later I gave Zen a call and transferred my service across. Why you might ask?

• Eclipse throttles p2p traffic, and I suspect nearly every other bit of traffic on their “oversubscribed” network, of course I cannot say for certain as I’m neither a techy for Eclipse, or privy to confidential information (and if I was, it wouldn’t be up here either). I found it slightly “lethargic” to say the least when surfing websites or even viewing youtube videos.
• Strange stability problems, One was due to their service hating my Netgear DG834GT router which seemed to sync fine but only manage 20k/sec downloads (sync was 2814+ most times) on MaxDSL
  The other was when using the replacement D-Link router I had bought (to solve above mentioned problems) where it would sync slightly higher but would suffer massive drop-outs throughout the evening.
• Lackluster support calls, everything goes through their ticket system for support and most people have reported similar “sudden closure” calls. They are insistent that the problem is not on their end but something to do with our ends.

So, 7 days later I was on Zen (funnily enough Eclipse had “switched off” my access a day early and Zen was kind enough to have pre-activated my connection a few days in advance) and my stability issues disappeared. The D-Link router (one el-cleapo DSL-G924T courtesy of Argos) runs fine with Zen, and after digging out my Netgear to test its been running fine for the past month with no problems, except for the one time it overheated because it was laid flat on the table..

Its great being able to download an ISO of Ubuntu 7.04 through Bittorrent in just over an hour finally and I might be able to finally try 4od (I tried it on Eclipse and got nowhere)
So, thumbs up to Zen Internet so far. Lets see if they still work great after a few months

Aah Bollocks.

That was my first thought on Friday 6th April, when I walked into work to discover our major business system being out of action with a dodgy error, a quick phone call later to the “support people” and…
it was still fubar’ed

Its now the 14th April, its 9:33am and I’m in work doing overtime… the system has essentially been offline for over 7 days now (well there’s a slight discrepancy to this but i’ll get back to it in a second.) and we are trying a different course of action.

So, our great business system is a case management system, with an Oracle8.1.7 Back-end (oracle have released a version 11 recently) and the problem has occurred within Oracle, or so we are told… as nobody here in the Company has a clue about Oracle we have to trust what we are told by people who work on it.

When I say its been offline for 7 days, its a bit of a white lie… The support team and the contractors we dragged in to assist us (they have oracle specialists ) managed to get us a working system from a backup of the 30th March, with some patching and bug fixing it was operational… until Senior Management (Brain cells optional I believe) decided that since we do “backups” that we can get all the information until Thursday 5th back.  This then got complicated very quickly.

 So today, we have the contractors back (I hope, Im currently the only person in the bloody building beside Security ) to try some funky stuff with Archive Logs, Monday Nights flat file Backup, and jiggery-pokery™ Lets hope something works!

On a side note, Jaymes(my boss) and his wife now has something else on their hands apart from renovating his house, a bouncing baby boy congrats to them both on a job well done!

Now, lets see whos for turning up next…

I was right about it being a movie being shot, the Belfast Telegraph carried a story on Friday about Heather Graham shooting a movie called Buy, Borrow and Steal in the Clements coffee shop (News post here)

Also its Mothering Sunday tomorrow (and St Patricks day today) so the shops in full swing.. last estimate was 250+ orders for delivery alone.  Only problem is with it being so busy, they have had to turn people away from the counter after midday because they cant handle the orders for them

Guess I might be getting roped into deliveries tomorrow then!

Okay, so today is definately a strange day.  I decided to go grab myself a bottle of lemonade from the nearest shop (no vending machines in my workplace ) and I spotted a couple of grey vans with G&H on them.

Now if you live in Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast you immediately associate G&H with the likes of movie film crews, or independant TV production companies.  This means a little bit of interest in the surrounding area particularly with the main thought of “I could end up on TV or in a Movie!”

So after getting what I needed out of the shop, I went a walk to be nosey and see what the fuss is about only to discover that they have set up within the local Clements Coffee shop.
Grabbed my Phone and took a quick snap of whats happening outside, then looked to my right and noticed 4 photographers with huge telescopic lenses on their cameras

Im just glad I didnt decide to go grab a coffee instead now!

I would say upgrading WordPress is easy…

Except this time something broke god knows where the problem was buried, or if the problem was due to all the previous upgrades and tweaks that was ran (Oh, that and the fact that it was dragged across from my previous hosting provider) I started getting MySQL errors and Blogroll got a bit fubar’ed

so theres a new easier way of upgrading WordPress, its called “Export then nuke the fucker”
One fresh install of WordPress 2.1.2 (courtesy of Fantastico) then a quick import and some minor tweaks like installing the plugins and theme again and we are back in business, well I’m guessing we are as I havnt really checked anything except core blog settings. 

I really hate those phone-in gameshows now, the producers should be lined up and shot.  I vote for choice television shows, not random crap of two complete tits reading out the phone number (which is on the screen at all freaking times)
Seriously, the tit has read the number out 5 times on ITV Play while I’ve typed this out.