Not a normal strike though. No, Scotrail have decided on a brilliant new method of pissing folk off, it’s called the 90% method!

By telling customers that they will be running “most” of the time they cause more confusion as nobody actually knows when to get a train. If you are going to run a 90% service at least have the decency to let us know which 90% it is going to be.

I don’t care if you strike, fair play to you, if you feel you are getting a bum deal then I wholeheartedly support your endeavours to put things right. I’m in your corner but there are certainly some terms and conditions attached like don’t fuck me about in the morning, strike or don’t strike, partial strikes show a lack of balls and are a major inconvenience.

I’m on my train now but I have been in a cold waiting room for over an hour, I’m late for work and pissed off. To top it off I am going to have the same problems coming home so I’d just like to say thanks Scotrail, you’ve done it again…

Next time please send me an email to warn me and tell me which trains to get to cause least disruption. Failing that, just don’t bother doing a partial strike and go the whole hog and do a proper strike, at least then I can plan to work from home.

Anyways, rant over and this officially my first post using the Wordpress application for the iPhone.

Take care folks and happy travelling!

Here’s what it said about me…

Slow-moving – Web Bears like you browse the internet at a leisurely pace – just like real world bears who like to take their time over things.

Solitary – Like real bears, Web Bears tend to be solitary animals. Your results show that when you are looking for information, you are less likely to use social networks or other sites whose content is created by its users, preferring instead to go it alone.

Adaptable – Web Bears are highly adaptable multitaskers, able to do several things at the same time. Real-bears are also very flexible, particularly in their diet, and will eat fish, insects, salmon and even scavenge in human refuse for new sources of food.

I’m interested to know how you get on so please leave a comment if you find the time.

Hat tip to @briansuda for this one.

More posts coming shortly folks, I am currently in heavy development!

Now for those of you that know what ModX is, your are about to slam me because ModX can be used as a framework, I do realise this but I have never quite got my head around using it in that way, maybe it doesn’t lend itself to that otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up another tool.

Over the years I have worked with a variety of web programming languages however I have always had a desire to go deeper into PHP but because I have been using publishing tools, they have made it easy to shy away from. Wordpress is just bloody good at what it does, once you have used it for blogging I fail to see a need for any other tool. It does however have it’s limitations when it comes to a far more complex site.

ModX is a great CMS, through the use of what they call template variables it has the ability to rapidly customise the data entry and display. Really powerful stuff but because I was working inside their CMS area I always felt a little limited even though it is easy to use and customise a site, I have used it for a few sites now and will most likely use it again. My biggest frustration with it and the primary reason for not rolling it out on this site was that there was no automatic hook or quick hack to get it to play nice with my Wordpress stuff. I could go ahead and move my blog into a sub folder but I am not convinced I want to do that yet, from what I have been reading, Code Igniter plays very well with Wordpress and this is a huge plus.

So why am I enjoying CodeIgniter? Good question! Perhaps it is the tinkerer in me wanting to take full control of my code base, the more I read about CI (as they call it), the more I like it. I have dabbled with many content management systems over the years and also tried getting into the various flavours of the month such as Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP but the learning curve has always got in the way of productivity.

CI seems to be straight forward, yes it does have a learning curve but it is isn’t intimidating me, I have found myself reading a bucket load about it, and what’s more I am finding it fun and am already thinking of how and where I can use it.

Do you have experience of using CodeIgniter or other frameworks? How did you find them? Why do you use them? Where do you use them? When do you pick one tool over another? I will write more on these questions at a later date but for now I am interested in what you have to say…

Quite an interesting process and it made me start to think about what I want to be doing with the site and how I might start to organise it. Some of you will notice this re-design has never ever been completed for a number of reasons, I make no excuses about it but I will do something about it.

I have dabbled in many things over the years from coaxing you all to play asteroids and pacman, stuck my toe into podcasting, made you all reel with bad jokes, tried to inspire others, written about my life and family, written about my goals, acheivements and passions and generally really enjoyed running the site. I’m curious as to what parts of my blog makes good readers like yourself come back? What features did you like, what would you like to see come back?

It’s a funny old game blogging, I think I lost my way a little when other priorities entered my life, predominantly work and families. Not that this is a bad thing but it blurred the lines a little bit, when I first started this blog I did it for fun and for my passion of the web, I ask myself now what will this site do? who is this site for. Soul searching questions indeed!

Oh dear, I can feel a long rant coming on about web sites serving a purpose, solving a problem etc etc but I am going to quel that monster for the time being. This is just me checking in, seeing where things take me, re-drawing the lines to see what picture forms. It’s just as well I design sites on an Etcha Sketch.

So folks, I leave you now to go and solve some stupid IE 6 issues at work, I’ll be back with more on that in a bit but until then hold tight and I’ll catch you all soon.

Feels good to be back already

The original

My modified version

I really enjoyed visiting this design earlier tonight which is why I thought I would share with you lot.

Cheers!

Apparently this thing has been ticking over anyway and I need to go through the useful comments and trash the rest, hopefully we can get back up and running now that I have found a moment to breathe. Perhaps a full explanation will come at a later date as to why I disappeared without trace, for now lets call it the 3 kids, full time job and freelancing monster that many of us battle with.

Not going to make you any promises of where the blog is going and what my plans are but I am happy to be writing this now, feels good to be back, tapping away quite aimlessly.

One thing that can be assured is that I will be trying to integrate my phone into what I post up here, macro blogging so to speak, I don’t have time for twitter and the likes these days but my phone is going to be a suitable medium for delivering certain kinds of content. We’ll take it as it comes though.

With a crazy life work balance it makes sense to slip things in here in an unobtrusive manner (applying progressive enhancement to life… ain’t that a thought? Perhaps there’s an article in there!!!) so that I can do a little bit of everything I need to get done.

On another note, I didn’t introduce you all to our newest addition, back in October we had another baby girl; Lily-Grace White who appears to be crying just now so I am going to cut this short and I’ll write again soon.

Pics will follow, take care folks and I’ll catch up with you all when I can.

Tyme, Mike and Scrivs, I thank you all for having me as part of your network and perhaps one day you will have me back once I have time to channel my thoughts and passions into my blog again on a regular basis.

It’s been a pleasure getting to mingle with my peers, people that I look up to and that I have a lot of respect for, not only that I’ve made a few good friends with whom I stay in touch.

Time waits for no man as I have said before and it’s time for this man to move on. You’ll be pleased to know I am not going anywhere though so it’s a pointless statement, all I have done is retire from the commitment of writing as a part of 9rules.

I’ll still be writing and I hope that you will continue to stop by if and when it takes your fancy.

Take care folks and you’ll see me about. Got about 700 things I need to do on this site but until then I have 700 things to do on other things which I am afraid to say take precedence over entertaining you lot..

Watch this space, I think Tyme said it beautifully when she told me “don’t be a stranger, that very much goes out to you lot too!

Check this out…

Network outage affecting several servers

Posted May 31 at 18:22 CDT by Richard Cooper in Downtime – 0 comment(s)

Issues at one of our data center are causing downtime on several servers. We are working to resolve this problem as soon as possible.

Update: Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. CDT, a transformer in one of The Planet’s Huston datacentres caught fire, requiring them to take down all of the generators on site on the instructions of the fire department. This is one of six data-centres used by WebFaction. All servers hosted at that datacentre are currently offline.

The difference between Webfaction having issues and a Fasthosts cock up is that I still trust Webfaction and know they didn’t hand out my passwords or some stupid shit like Fasthosts would do.

I just hope the poor souls that had to deal with it are getting a week off after a week of no sleep.

Anyway… that’s the why the site has been down, please excuse me if the site is a little wobbly over the next few days but I hope that is now service resumed.

Smoking is a crap habit, it wastes my money, it ruins my health and it jeapordises the future of my family.

I have had relatives die of cancer, I have a history of high blood pressure and heart related bad stuff in my family… is it worth tempting fate?

I just went onto google to go and have a look at images of lung cancer and nearly puked up, it is a very scary thought to die a horrible painful death, it’s a worse thought for my wife and kids to have to watch that.

For years I’ve had a love affair with smoking, it has been my crutch and also my burden, it’s given me space to think and be creative but what benefit is creativity at the expense of death. Seems to me that there’s actually no point if you look at it honestly…

My three year old daughter is shit scared of the fact that I smoke and that it could kill me, I’m scared that it could kill me, I’m also scared of the fact that if I stop smoking I could die of lung cancer anyway so why bother.

Today I haven’t smoked, hearing my daughter on the phone asking if I had been smoking is a potent thing, I don’t want to let her down, Caroline hasn’t smoked since she got pregnant and she also nags me on a day to day basis.

It’s time for it to stop. I know I have uttered words to do with stopping before, I just hope that this time I manage to keep it going…

Don’t watch this video if you are of weak stomach but if you smoke, time to wake up and smell the coffee, we are not just killing ourselves but the people around us to…