Money for Christmas

Seasons Greetings

First things first: We need to have that Christmas conversation. You know the one. You have it every year and you know you do. It replaces the weather conversation. Got it figured yet? I am of course talking about the conversation we all have every year at this time of year when we haven't even had Halloween (trick or treat or whatever you call it) but the shops are full of Christmas and the TV starts getting in to the perfume ads. It's been gathering pace since the last weeks of September and it will only get worse. Between now and the first week in December our favorite topic of conversation will be... 'I can't believe that Christmas is starting so early this year'. 'Can't they just let us get October out?' Then in December we can start our next favourite topic which goes 'doesn't really feel like Christmas this year does it?'.

Back to Black

I seriously need to find some way to make some money. The wife and I both have hard working decent paying jobs and I swear we've not had two pennies to rub together all year. Every time I look at the money something else comes up to steal it from me. It's the car tax, it's insurance, the caravan, the dishwasher (that ain't even fixed yet), it's endless that's what it is. I've been reading Poets blog about her attempts to work from home and, whilst she's finding it a bit up and down, I'm wondering if I could get a second income from it. I'm even considering getting a couple of back shifts in a shop or something just to have that feeling of having spending money again instead of just paying bills. People say 'at least you still have your health' but actually it's mentally and physically draining constantly trying to figure out what can and can't be paid or trying to learn to do things yourself because you can't get a tradesman to do it. Actually sometimes that bit can be quite rewarding when it works but, it' got to work.

Yep I've got to figure out a way to make some money. Realistically I wouldn't be able to maintain a second job for any length of time unless it was something I could do at home. What I need to do is find a way to market my existing skills and use what I have. I can knock out professional presentations in minutes, on more than one occasion my user guides have been chosen in preference to the official version from the software vendor. I can put together courses on telephone skills, sales, debt collection, complaints, train the trainer, all that kind of stuff and more. God almighty a bunch of Canadians even managed to teach me to train reliability engineering to engineers. There are some problems however:

First everybody thinks that they can do great presentations. (Trust me they can't. It's like the start of xfactor when you get the ones whose friends think they are a great singer.)

Second companies need to deal with a registered business. They can't just pay cash to some guy touting for business.

Third I'm at work during the day and these things need scoped out. There need to be meetings etc.

Forth I don't even have any idea how you go about tendering for that sort of thing or even how much to charge.

So that's what my brain is working at just now. How can I turn my skills in to cash. Please put any suggestions you may have on the back of a cheque made payable to.... Only joking but any ideas gratefully received.

Meta Tags

Last week I talked about a new geeky bloggy thing that I had learned called HTML code and I mentioned using meta tags to ensure that google et al would find my site and list it highly on any searches. Well I've been monitoring the site as always with google analytics and I'm pleased to say that meta tags have made absolutely no difference what so ever to the uptake of my site. Visitor numbers have neither increased nor decreased. The most popular way to find my little corner of the web seems to be to google quitzits or any sentence that includes smoking and spots.

QuitZits

Since they bring people to the site I think it's only polite to update you all on them. When I first read about them there seemed to be some agreement that they were a short term (about three months) side effect of giving up. Utter Bull I'm afraid. I gave up in February and I still get them (as bad as ever) now.

How can you tell that they are quitzits? They may look like any other zit but they are actually a bread apart. They can come on from nowhere pretty quick and you'll feel them like a solid lump under the surface of your skin. The problem is that they sit deeper than a normal pluke so can get quite red and angry but be way too thick skinned to burst. Try not to burst them anyway. Not sure about this one but stick with me. If you do squeeze them they don't empty and go away like a normal spot. They stay there looking just as angry but with the added joy of a scab on top. Burst or not they go down by themselves. The problem is that within seven to fourteen days they come back. They come back in exactly the same spot but the second visit is usually the last. They do have a habit of leaving a red area of skin for a while afterwards but at least they are gone.

So there you have the quitzit. Painful, unsightly and abnormal. But bearable and nowhere near as bad as smoking. Since I smoked for thirty years it's hardly surprising that my skin has some withdrawal symptoms. Smoking drys and eventually ages the skin so maybe I shouldn't be complaining about looking like an adolescent.

Until next week...

T

Geek Week

OK so first things first. Sorry for not letting everybody know how it went last week. So here's a quick recap. Shit happened big time to my desktop PC. Last weeks blog came from an incredibly Pissed off TQ working on the laptop. I was facing potentially hours of work and, what's worse, I had no idea why. My PC had just shut down and was refusing to recover.

The good news. I settled in for a marathon session. This required lack of cleanliness and old comfortable clothes. It helps when you're working with PCs if you can grow stubble as you work (sorry ladies but it's true). My first start had enough oomph to get into windows once I'd cancelled disk checking. First task therefore was to basically steal as much as I could copy before the blue screen could catch me. With every file my mood lifted. I may lose the PC but I was recovering the files.

Next, after several failed re-starts, was to try and defrag a drive that looked like it only ever surfed the net for Viagra. I honestly can't ever remember a defrag taking longer. When it finished the drive still looked rough so I started again. The PC seemed to be getting more stable plus I could take risks because I had the important files backed up. Yep it took two days and I have no idea why it happened but I'm back on the desktop and it's working.

It was just time consuming but, file by file, cluster by cluster, I recovered to the point where I had a stable PC. I'm still a bit disturbed because I can't find an event that caused this one. How do I know it won't just happen again? I'll just need to keep my fingers crossed because there's stuff higher up the list than a new PC. The dishwasher is broke for instance which is much more of a crisis because the temporary replacement is me.

10 Cheers for Binary

Ten past ten on Sunday should really be a big date for geeks and binary enthusiasts the world over. It will be 10:10 10/10/10. Actually my first phrase can't be right. There's no such word as should in the world of binary. It either is or it isn't.

I'm a Photo shop Pro
One way or another it's been a really geeky week. There was the PC to fix. At work I was trying to help someone use some HTML tags to add interest to an online presentation that they were putting together. Now I don't really understand much about HTML myself and the little I do know has been kind of self taught from editing my blog so I printed some stuff off from the net. It was from this that I heard about meta tags. Meta tags apparently help google to list your blog. Who knew? So I've added a couple of rows to the Head section of my blog. I'll check google analytics periodically and see if it makes any difference before I bore everybody with a how to.

I also had a couple of things to do in photo shop. Now I've had a version of this kicking about on my PC for ages but I actually find it to be one of the more difficult image editing software's to learn so I've kind of avoided it even though I know that it's supposed to be the best. The thing is I had a couple of things I wanted to do that the easier image editing stuff wouldn't do so I gritted my teeth and went in to photo shop.

I always make my wife's birthday card you see. It's not that I'm too tight to buy a card, honest, it's just that you want to do something personal. It started about 13 years ago when we got married (and coincidentally got our first PC)and I've made a card for every birthday, anniversary and Christmas since. My wife reads this blog so I'm not going to give away the details of the card however: I had found an image that would have been perfect except for two things. It was completely the wrong colour and it had stuff in the background that I wanted to remove. This is the sort of thing that photo shop was invented for and I have to say, after much googling and perhaps the odd swear word, it worked perfectly. Go photo shop. Actually I'm kicking myself because I did one image perfectly in photoshop and then (time was against me) I did another very quickly in PowerPoint and the difference shows.

Phone Home

So when I was working with photo shop I had an idea for the phone. Whilst searching for images for the wife's card I came across a picture of an old fashioned British red phone box. Wouldn't it be cool to use that as the icon for my phone? But then I'd need to redo the other icons on the dock at the bottom. A post box for SMS, a map for Tomtom but what about settings? Maybe the IPSW icon that apple use. I lifted and tidied the images using my new found photo shop skills and I think the results are pretty good (if a little bizarre looking). I have an idea to take this further but I haven't completely made up my mind yet. What do you think?

It's Raining It's Sn0wing the Whole thing is B0ring

My iPhone has now been upgraded to iOS 4.1. I finally managed it on Friday when Redsn0w released a windows version. It worked flawlessly and there were no scary moments except when cydia came up with a white icon. I clicked it and it did stuff and before you could say 'screw this I'm going back to HTC' it was fixed. I do have a slight concern that when I click the remove background program in SBSettings it crashes the phone but otherwise it all works.

Thank god it did work because the whole Jail breaking scene has gone off its head this week. I love the fact that these geeks help us to mess with our iPhones but they truly are a bunch of geeky divas. Greenpois0n was to be the jailbreak to end all jailbreaks. An exploit called Shatter was discovered before iOS4 had even been released and it was to be the first to break all models of phone for life. The problem is that they didn't release it. They kept telling everybody how good it would be and showing videos of how it broke various devices but they never released it. Up until this week that is.

This week they announced that it would be released at ten past ten on Sunday. 10:10 10/10/10. The bad news however was that it wouldn't jailbreak the bulk of our iPhones. Only the iPhone four and the iPad. Bummer. Given that Friday saw the release of Redsn0w for windows and that Sn0wbreeze should work on the 3gS I think most of us are actually already able to jailbreak our phones anyway but it was none the less disappointing given that we've been waiting for more than a month.

Geohotz Rains on Chronic Devs Parade
Now came the bit that no-one expected. Ahead of the greenpois0n disappointing release came news from someone who claimed that they had bowed out of the whole jail breaking scene. George Hotz released a jailbreak one day ahead of greenpois0n that worked on most types of idevice. Limerain instantly became the jailbreak of choice and no-one even wanted greenpois0n any more. So much so that greenpois0n hasn't released. They say they are keeping it to jailbreak 4.2 when it comes out next month. I for one won't hold my breath.

So there you go. What a week to be a geek.

More next week

T

What Would You Like Windows To Do Today? F*cking Work!!

Where have I been? There were a couple of blogs for the iPhone crowd and then nothing. The whole jailbreak scene is very interesting if your in to that sort of thing but where did the blog go?

Anyone who followed my stopping smoking attempts from the early days will remember that I got a bit upset about a couple of computer hiccups. I spent a fair bit of February working away on my laptop whilst I used a variety of software to first fix my desktop PC and second try and recover at least some of a dodgy hard drive that had just crumbled. In the process my desk became a clutter of cables between the laptop and the desk top and the hard drive and it wasn't long before I ended up spilling a whole can of beer into the keyboard and killing it too. I was gutted.

Like many of these mini tragedies that we face it did have a kind of perverse upside. There was the triumph of getting the desktop working at all. The pot luck that was recovering the defective hard drive whilst knowing that it was possibly a waste of time, certainly an inconvenience and also potentially lethal to my now semi repaired PC. In terms of success though it was pretty good. Almost everything got recovered and the PC worked once more. What's more it was made all the better that my home built, home spec PC at over five years old was still able to hold its own against most of what's on the market now. In PC terms that's pretty amazing. I'll grant you that when I designed it it would have held it's own against high end gaming PCs where as now it was more like a run of the mill high store model but I was still pretty proud of it. Many of you guys already have me down as a geek and I wouldn't argue except that, I'm 41, didn't do PCs at school (even calculators were a bit of a no no) and have pretty much self taught or used the internet as the font of all knowledge. Fixing things and getting them working properly is still therefor quite an achievement to me.

Where is this going? Well...... One of the main uses for my PC is watching TV. I love being able to watch what I want at a time that suits me and, here in the UK, you can pretty much get all TV via the internet. It fascinates me that this works in most countries however you can only access most of the content if you are doing so using an IP address within that country. Some of you people from the US and Australia would probably love some of the stuff that we get and I'd love to get HBO etc but they have that restricted at the moment (you can get round it but then you need to know what your looking for and what shows are what etc. I can wait).

Anyway we're sitting watching a show on Tuesday night when..the picture freezes. The sound continues but the picture has frozen. Control, Alt, Delete? Pain in the arse but I've noticed more than once recently that control, alt, delete has a habit of bringing up the task list but being just as frozen as the system you're trying to close. Screw it. Hold in the power button and force the stupid thing to restart. Press restart, disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Finally after about fifteen attempts at the above windows logs in...'error finding a file in the registry but have restored from a copy', 'Error with Java script', active desktop needs to close, AVG process could not start. one of your....Blue Screen Of Death. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Few trys later without even getting as far as windows then 'Scandisc needs to check drive C for errors, press any key..' Scandisc is deleting lots of your good stuff and it ain't telling you what it is or why it's deleting it or giving you an option to stop. Blue screen....shutdown. At least scandisc stopped. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Few more failed log in attempts but wait...I'm getting in to safe mode. It looks awful. There are still quite a few errors but it's stable enough that I can get restore point to run. Finally there's a chance. Or maybe not. Thousand errors and then blue screen. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Yip. The laptop rides again. Hence the blog got put off a bit. Sorry to those who like a weekly dose of Glasgow life but don't have iPhones. I will be trying to resume normal service as soon as possible. For those that do have iPhones: No Jailbreak yet but until my PC is back up I can't get my itunes so I couldn't test a jailbreak anyway.

The plan for recovery borders on crazy and shows a true lack of thought. I still have that dodgy hard drive from the breakdown in January and it's clear. I had a half idea of trying to do some deep rooted recovery to see if there were any last remnants of the drive that could be recovered so had purposefully never written any data to it. I plan to put a clean(ish) install of windows on the dodgy drive and use it to boot the PC. If that works I should then be able to copy all my good files from my normal PC hard drive. Then I should be able to format my normal PC hard drive, re-install stuff and see if it will start running again.

Sounds like a possible plan although it's easy to see failure points at almost every step of the way. Even if it does work, recovering properly and getting stuff back up to date will take a while. You never really get it back the way it was. By the time I go to work on Monday my eyes will be those of zombie and my skin will have the pallor of a man who has lived on coffee for 48 hours and has not left the house. Wish me luck

TQ