Beardie's Lair

Cannot remember if I ever announced this here.  But my new photo website is up and running at:

 

 

It's a monthly photo competition website where you can submit pictures and comment on other peoples images.  All for fun but it will hopefully keep pushing me to take better pictures with my new camera.

 

Please take a look and let me know how it could be improved.

 

 

Work

I'm not going to ramble on about my current pain points with running the final release of Windows Vista as my main PC as you have to take the rough with the smooth when you adopt so early and there are plenty of plus points also.  Instead Im going to shout about the fact that we have managed to get our application certified in the Vista logo certification scheme.  there are two Logo's you can use and we went for the Certified certification, http://microsoft.mrmpslc.com/InnovateOnWindowsVista/.  More impressive is that we are one of the first 15 Independant software vendors to do this and the first client server application to get certified.  Not bad for a little shop in Towcester.

 

Rest

I'm chilling out now trying to decide if I want to make any changes to my latest little web site.  www.snapmonthly.com is a website where members can upload pictures for others to comment on them and each month there are a couple of categories to upload in.  I bought myself a digital SLR camera so this is keeping me looking for photo opportunities.

 

 

Play

Looks like it might be the end of our 5 a side football games on a tuesday.  I was half expecting it but it's a shame as I really enjoyed it.  One positive is though it's forcing me to use my gym membership so it's not all bad.

New year same old s~@T .  Well no actually things are on the up.  We did up our lounge and now it's actually a pleasure to sit in there now.  The finishing touch was a new TV.  I managed to get rid of the monster 47In Rear projection unit that actually made you feel like you were in there with whatever was on TV.  This was cool watching the latest Pussycat Dolls video but not so good when watching Eastenders, I like to keep that joyfull lot at arms length.  Anyhow I splashed out and got a Hitachi 42in Plasma.  The smaller screen and thinner profile match the room much better and I've found it very hard to pull myself away from the front of it all over Xmas "Yes dear just one more hour".

The not so good news was that less than a week later they had reduced the thing by £200.  Let's say I was slightly less than happy about this.  I had managed to negotiate a £100 off the price at the time but I was still a bit miffed.  Anyway as soon as the new year came I was down there (Comet) and quoting their price promise at them and I am pleased to report that I managed to negotiate another £130 refund (No quibble).  Not quite an xbox 360 but it all helps.  Well done to Comet for honouring their price promise just a pity they couldn't reduce it when I bought it.

On the subject of Hitachi a friend of mine who's into storage and all things hard, floppy and optical sent me a link.  Apparently hitachi have developed a new way of storing data and have a nice animation on their web site to explain it all.

Had a quiet new year in comparison with previous years but it was still nice, a few friends and we ordered a chinease meal from a new delivery firm and it was very nice.

New years resolutions?  well keep it simple, loose a stone in weight and preferably before 16th of Jan as we are going snowboarding in Meribel and i'd rather put less pressure on my old knees.

Dan from work came around one day over Xmas, xbox 360 in his pocket, we played PGR3 and had a look at some other games and i must report that it does indead look pretty cool.  Although I must admit that my new tv has given my old xbox a new lease of life we had good fun playing EA's rugby and Fifa football over the break.

Work feels a bit hectic already as I'm writing custom Windows installer actions to deploy Code access security and installer prerequisiste checks for specific runtimes and libraries so that we can deploy the VSTO application that I worked on last year.  All the while we are testing some exchange server/outlook appointment code that I origionally did over a year ago but there has suddely become an demand for this functionality.  This is in addition to trying to get some traction with another major project and various beta schemes we have signed up with Microsoft.  I get the feeling it's going to be a busy time.

Add to this I think I'm going to attempt to replicate the Formula 1 Dream team site me and a friend run by doing it with ASP 2.0 instead of the current PHP scripting and this should allow us to easily add the extra funtionality we need to make it a bit more interesting.  I cannot make any promises about this as time is quickly running out and I do have a war to win (Call of Duty 2 on my PC) which reminds me.  "C'mon lads get the bloody w.............. "