Welcome to the home of Graham Robinson

Barenaked Ladies and Museums

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

A few things to catch up on since the last blog…

The head of school is back on Monday so the things mentioned in the password protected posts should start to move along from the 31st. There seem to be people who we barely know coming out of woodwork to give support and to quote someone from the school “He won’t be without ammunition will he?”

I have a new favourite song of the moment. It’s only 1 minute 45 seconds long and I’m sure my father (as he works in Physics at a University) will appreciate it.

The big bang theory

Yesterday we went to the Archaeology, and then the Maritime, museums in Southampton. It’s one of those things that you don’t ever get round to doing until you have someone visit. No-one was visiting, but we just thought that 4 years was a bit long to not go and see it. Both places were very interesting and worth the visit, we just should have gone earlier I think.

Finally, I’m having another go at touch typing. Every time I try and learn how to type I fail. I think the big problem is that because I know were all the keys are and I type so fast that I can’t de-program myself into doing it properly. There are certain finger positions for each key and because I don’t use them I type very fast but with very little accuracy. I’ll demonstrate by not using the backspace key

Finally, I’m having another go ast touch typoing. Everyt time tI try and learn how to type I fail. I thinkg the nig problem is that because I know where all thekeys are and I type so fast that I can’t de-program myself into doing it proerply. There are fertain findger pisitions for each bey and becasuse I don’t use them I type fvery fast but with very little accusracy. I’ll demonstrate by not using the backspacekey.

The other thing I’m bad at doing is that I read ahead and end up putting the first letter of the next word in front of the word I should be typing. “fertain finger” is an example.

Anywho. The sun is shining, the blog is on a new version and we’ll get round to booking our holidays soon.

I facebooked your mum

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

I do love the new PG Tips advert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWwUm656iQ

Also, I’m fed up of mistyping mediaguy.co.uk nearly every time with medaiguy.co.uk (because my left hand and right hand hit the keys at the same time) so they both now work.

http://www.medaiguy.co.uk/2008/03/22/i-facebooked-your-mum/ 

Easter

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

My tummy hurts… but at least it’s better news than the last two blog posts.

Hotel Chocolat has come to Southampton and they do some fantastic chocolate. With that chocolate comes fantastic Easter Eggs. With Easter Eggs comes my hugh eyes and medium sized stomach. Yummy, but I really should pace myself more.

My Easter Egg on Flickr 

Protected: More

Friday, March 21st, 2008

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Protected: No you can’t have the password…

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

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Spam

Monday, March 17th, 2008

By the looks of the mail-return emails I’m getting this morning (about 40 so far) I’ve had a spammer send lots of email out @mediaguy.co.uk.

I promise it isn’t me!

Latest progress with C#

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

I’m starting to get somewhere with C# now.

I started learning this language with learnvisualstudio.net, a video-on-demand type site that shows you how to do things.  It is good and gets you started very quickly but doesn’t really explain much. I’ve coupled this with with a For Dummies book and a Microsoft Base Class Library book to give me an idiots guide to why things work (dummies) and lots of example code (class library). These books have cost quite a bit, but altogether it has given me the help I need.

At the moment I’m trying to build a anything-in-anything-out style loans system. I’d written one in PHP already for someone at work so it helps me build a real-world project but without having to worry about requirements or design (as I’d done it already). At the moment it is looking like this

Test01 in Visual C# Studio 2005

Plenty of work to do, but at least it actually looks like it could do something.

Statistics

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Thought it might be interesting to post some statistics from February.

AwStats reports:

  • 1294 Unique visitors
  • 11613 Visits (8.97 visits/visitor)
  • 28449 Hits (2.44 Hits/Visit)
  • 451.82 MB of bandwidth used (out of about 8,000 limit)
  • Most popular day was the 5th
  • Most popular time is 17:00-18:00
  • 10,809 hits were made on the homepage
  • 168 people visited http://www.mediaguy.co.uk/lacie-ethernet-disk-mini-home-edition via Google or another link
  • 40% of people use Firefox
  • 233 people found the site directly from Google
  • Second most popular search engine was MSN Live with 31
  • Top 5 searches were ‘mediaguy’ ‘graham robinson’ ‘hipserv 1.6′ ‘ lacie home edition’ and ‘lacie hipserv’
  • Someone in Modern Languages has been reading, but I’m not going to use my powers to find out who, that would be naughty

Allowed to learn?

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Everyone in IT got an email today saying that ISS aren’t allowed to have personal websites on www.soton.ac.uk/~username. I used to use mine for silly little things like practising php, hosting funny (but fully legal) files and putting large files that are too big to email for other people to download. Apparently this is too unprofessional for our new www.southampton.ac.uk brand, so it’s been taken away.

It made me think about (staff) learning at the university. If I look at my bookshelf in my office I can see

  1. Programming Flash Communication Server [Paperback] by Reinhardt, Robert; Yang -  £23 – Bought by me
  2. VBScript Pocket Reference [Paperback] by Childs, Matt – £10 – Bought by me
  3. PHP and MySQL for dummies – £20 – bought by me
  4. SQL (don’t know the details) – £15 – bought by me
  5. ASP.NET all in one reference for dummies – £35 – bought by me

And most of my programming is done on Macromedia Studio 8, which I bought for £100 ish

The director of IT said that they don’t ’spoon feed’ people to progress, but they don’t exactly give people opportunity either. Anyone looking to learn how to do HTML or PHP better go buy themselves a hosting package in the remaining 20 days of March. Or just don’t learn anything…

Funny stats

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

You find google doing some strange things when you search for as much as I do, but one of my flickr account statistics made me find out that a google search for

archos web browser

Doesn’t actually bring the Archos web browsing plugin as the number one result. The number one result is actually my Flickr photo of the web browser. Strange world.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=archos+web+browser 

* Obviously the result of the above link may change over time