Author: Olly

  • Being Creative

    Im a fairly creative person, and for a while now ive wanted to express my creativeness in some kind of visual or audible form.

    Ive debated doing some kind of music but i;

    a) Cant play any musical instruments

    b) Dont know how to use any music making programs

    I also thought of doing some kind of film/movie/short documentary type thing and spreading it virally, but then i look for inspiration and cant decide on a topic of theme for it.

    There are so many funny videos, characters (some better than others) covering a wide spectrum of topics and all approaching it at different angles..

    So where does that leave me?

    I’m gonna make this a thing for 2011 and give it some proper thought before diving in.

    In the meantime if anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them 🙂

  • Driving yourself mad

    I don’t really do a lot of daytime driving, my car is currently off the road so the only time I do lots of driving is when I have the car at weekends or when we go somewhere in the evenings.

    Due to the snow last week I was driving Gemma to work, so i had the car in the daytime and it brought a few things to my attention.

    1) The overtaking lane on motorways

    If you travel to somewhere like France, the motorways/highways are policed, heavily. People use the lanes properly, and the traffic flows well.

    In England, the outside lane consists of people driving along at 70mph completely unaware of the situation they are causing behind them. Its not fair to blame a particular type of car driver, or a certain type of motorist – it can be anyone in anything.. England just seems to have a lot motorists who need educating about how to properly use a motorway!

    Outside lane = FOR OVERTAKING… Its NOT the “Fast” lane!!!

    2) Traffic Lights

    Now i have no issue with Traffic Lights, they do a good job, and when configured properly they can take care of the most complicated junctions with ease. However that brings me to my point – they are generally not configured very well! The amount of times I sit at some traffic lights waiting to pull left onto a main road, and I’m watching traffic pull in to the road I’m coming from (so turning right) is untrue!

    Why cant my lane also be allowed to go? There is no risk, no crossed traffic streams, no danger!!!!! So why not reconfigure them?? How hard can that be????

    3) Where is the fire?

    It also became apparent how much of a damm rush everyone is in! I mean, sure, everyone has to get somewhere sometimes in a hurry, and I know there are lots of people on the roads so that means potentially a lot of people needing to get somewhere in a hurry – but god, damm!  Where the hell is the fire?

    I’ve seen so many near misses, nearly been run off the road and been overtaken in completely stupid places risking peoples lives – if people calmed down a bit I’m sure we would all still get there on time, and the road would be a less rage’y place 🙂

    4) And finally… The council…

    We’ve had a lot of snow recently and although the council had been gritting the roads a fair bit beforehand – their overall effort failed miserably and most of the roads were un-usable for days!

    The worst part of it all is that literally weeks after, the roads still have “welded” ice on the roads, huge friggin chunks of it! We were driving down to the quarry and we had to move out the way of an oncoming car – *POW* – we were facing the wall and had been spun round in the road!

    ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • Excited for Amsterdam

    In approx 32 days Gem and I will be flying to Holland, and visiting wonderful city of Amsterdam. Ive wanted to go for over 10 years, but i have either not had the cash, time or both!

    Quite a few of my mates have been and have all given me tips to find the best spots, but to be honest as im going with Gemma (not on a stag do or something) i think our experience of Amsterdam will be a different one compared to that of my friends who have been in the past.

    We’re gonna do the whole tourist thing, visit museams and attractions and basically do what we did in prauge and just wander about.

    Our trip lasts about 4 days, so we have plenty of time to soak in the sights and see Amsterdam at its finest, we are also stopping at a really nice hotel called CitizenM which is hopefully gonna make our stop that little bit more relaxing.

    Everything is booked, and we just need to clear the hotel balance once we arrive, i cant wait to spend my birthday in another country – should  be awesome 🙂

    Have you done all your xmas shopping yet? 🙂

  • Another server migration

    We’ve moved for what will hopefully be the last time (I know i said that the last 3 times) but this time we’ve gone for the top options, two mahoosive brand new server with an intel i7 quad core 2.4ghz, 8gb ram and 2TB HDD! Beasty!

    We’ve called the client one, Optimus Prime, and the work one Megatron.

    Hehe.

    I was up until 4am this morning moving stuff across, making sure that the sites that were moved and i had access to change nameservers, got changed, and any that i didn’t have access to NS i wrote down on a list.

    I then went through all the ThreeFifty sites, and updated them – then changed NS.

    Ive had an issue with 123-reg and their DNS – for some reason it wasn’t adding certain things into the registry so it meant i couldn’t change the nameservers for any of the work.COM/.NET (TLD’s) domain names, so ive had to host them on the client server until that is fixed.

    Once i was only left with client site nameserver changes to do, i updated the IP addresses of the old host nameservers with IP’s from the new client server, and bingo bango about 100 website nameservers changed instantly!

    We’ve had some bugs to squash but so far so good.

    The new servers are the sheez-neezy too, if you need a dedi then give me a shout as you wont get one better than from our hosting man!

    Anyone having issues with anything then get in touch 🙂