tin-men

London calling

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Quite a bit has changed in the past four months.

I’ve been at RMStudio for over three months now. I’ve loved every second (well, nearly anyway!).

I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G (I love that too).

And as you may have noticed, I knocked up a new theme because I was bored with the old one. It’s full of javascript-y goodness and as an added bonus, it looks like shite in IE. And I don’t care. They shouldn’t be using the devil’s browser anyway.

So, the job. I’m an all round mac nerd. I do a bit of web stuff, I look after servers, I fix people’s email (“no, click on send, not delete…”). On the whole it’s pretty cool. I’m learning new nerdy stuff every day (ever wondered how Mail.app stores the email addresses you’ve sent mail to? I know more about it than anyone would ever want to, and I also have a series of scripts that will populate that database with email addresses for when people migrate from Entourage and haven’t been using their address book properly – I might do a post on it if anyone cares), and I work with a bunch of cool people. They might be the only people I know who get as excited by the prospect of being able to run OS X Server on a virtual machine as me!

I’ve learnt that I really, truly, deeply hate Adobe Air apps. Thankfully the ones we use here all have a mysql back end, so I can write my own interface to access the data (well, I will be when I stop working until 7-8pm most nights!).

Living in London is pretty cool too. It’s a little impersonal; it feels (and is) much, much bigger than Manchester. There’s loads going on, but I’ve been too busy with work to do anything of note. I am looking forward to meeting up with a few twitter people at the filming of Diggnation next week (must remember to call Nik at some point…).

Well, that was a random post. Sorry about that. I just had a few things buzzing around my head recently and I’ve been annoyed at myself with my lack of blogging.

iPhone 3G

I’m sure I don’t need to inform any of you that the new iPhone was announced yesterday. There was me fully expecting to have to pony up another £269, as well as a more expensive contract, because let’s face it – mobile companies have a bit of a reputation for being greedy buggers.

But get this, O2 have come up with a new business model: (take note Vodafone and the others)

If you don’t shaft your customers, they’re more than happy to spend their money with you.

O2 are going to give me the same amount of texts and minutes, as much 3G data as I can eat (remember it’s twice as fast as EDGE, and EDGE isn’t that bad if we’re honest), and if 3G isn’t fast enough and I need WiFi, I now get BT Openzone as well as The Cloud (which covers pretty much everywhere I will ever go in Manchester and London), all for the same £35 a month. I would have happily paid an extra few quid a month for 3G speed and the Openzone access, but O2 really pulled it off and kept it all at the same price.

And they’re selling the 16Gb model that I’ll be getting for a measly £159 – £110 less than I paid for my original iPhone in November. All they’re asking in return is that I restart the same 18 month contract that I signed up for in November.

So, well done O2. If you and Apple keep this up I’ll more than happily buy a new iPhone every 8 months or so, and you’ve got yourself a customer for life.

Farewell Manchester

As those of you who are following me on twitter know, in a few short weeks, I shall be departing the rainy city and abandoning the lifestyle of a layabout student and moving to London to start work for a small company called RMStudio.

This rather large turning point has made me start to reflect on the four years I spent here and also to think about the future.

The main thing I’ve been thinking about was “did I waste my time doing a degree?”. On the face of it, the answer would be “yes”. I learnt virtually nothing useful on my course (we didn’t even touch any networking hardware until 3rd year – and the degree title was Computer and Networking Technology!), being taught circa 1999 HTML (font tags anyone? I actually got marked down for using CSS in one assignment), how to make basic games in C++ and how ancient processors such as the 8088 worked. Yes, I’m sure some of this is useful to some people, but not to me.

So, what did I find useful? There were several group assignments with me invariably running around people getting them to do work, and of course it teaches you not to leave things to the last minute after you get sick of being up at 5am trying to get that assignment done for tomorrow that you have had lying around for three months. Oh, there’s also the fact that I met some of the best people on this earth up here (leaving those people behind was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make) and will leave with some very fond memories (and some very fond “I think I remember what happened last night, but I’m not too sure” nights too!).

And of course there’s the extra pay at the end of it. Even in my starting role, I’ll be on several grand a year more than I would be if I’d not been to university. That should go some way to help pay off the debts I racked up when I was testing the beer to make sure it was safe for everyone else (what a public servant I am!).

So, what does the future hold for me then? As I said at the top, I’ll be moving down to London in a few weeks to start what should be my dream job – I’ll be making websites and doing other mac related geekery. Yep, basically what I do now, but I get paid for all of it (not just the web bit like I do now). Hai five!

Sure, I could have got more money selling my soul and joining an IT department at a large company or whatever, but I couldn’t face dreading work every morning (and wearing a suit! Yegads! Although I do look pretty good in a suit… ).

So there you go. University was probably worth it since I had lots of fun, met great people and didn’t do a great deal of work for most of it whilst managing to get enough credits to make my way through. Now it’s time for the real fun to start!

Say hello to Gluco

Some of you may have visted firesuite before. It used to be the home of my vlog, but since I’ve not updated it for ages, and I don’t see myself having any inclination to do so again, I thought the domain was too good to waste.

So, I thought I’d use it for a project I’ve been thinking about for a while. Say hello to Gluco. It’s the first theme that I’ve made for Rapidweaver that I’m making commercially available, and it can be yours for the bargain price of $12.99 (US). You can find out more about it at firesuite. A screenshot is after the jump.
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Busy

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet on here recently. I’ve been busy making my final project for uni work propperly.

I’ve also been busy eating toast.

And drinking tea from my apple mug.

I’ve also unfortunately had to read lots…

of pointless…

books.

But, I’ve finally got it working now, and am half way through the report. The end is in sight!