Chalkysteve.net |
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Home page of Steve White! |
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Name :
Steve White
Location :
Northamptonshire, England
About :
Software Developer, occasional musican, amateur chili grower!
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I am currently employed as a Software Developer for a large retail firm.
My skills include IBM U2 UniVerse/UniData, Databasic/Unibasic, UniObjects, PHP, HTML, MySQL and VB.
Currently I am also developing my ASP.NET and C# skills.
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Chalkboard
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Best viewed in
Main Links
Chalkysteve.net (Home)
Contact Me Here
Things I Work On
Chili Project
Ashan Property
H Crystals & Crafts
The Europa Apple
Webcams
Aquaria
Favourite Links
Youtube.com
Aardschok Radio
Geekbrief TV
chileman.org
Engrish.com
Jimbob666
eUK Hosting
The Jargon File
Media Converter
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Online Banking |
20-04-2009 11:33:55 |
I have been attempting to log in to my online banking webpage for about three hours now. It has been constantly out of action all of this time. I enter my login details, and get redirected straight back to the same page over and over.
It would seem a little hard to believe that a major banking website could be down like this. Surely some kind of backup plan must be in place?
For me it is purely an inconvenience - I would simply like to know how much spare money I have before pay day comes around. But for some users I could imagine this being a real pain. It does not take too much of a stretch of imagination to picture a user desperately trying to make a transfer of funds, failing to do so due to the website being down, and being fined by whatever company they were attempting to pay.
You can bet for sure that the bank would not cover the fine in that instance.
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Nights Like These |
15-04-2009 09:20:25 |
Something tells me today is going to be an interesting day. I am currently running on about two-and-a-half hours of sleep - and multiple doses of caffeine.
Last night I went to bed at about 11pm. That is a perfectly reasonable time given that I planned to get out of bed between 6 and 7am this morning. However, it was not to be...
I went to sleep easily, but awoke again just after midnight with horrible acid indigestion. That probably serves me right for indulging in a rather unhealthy diet yesterday. This kept me awake until probably around 2am, at which point I drifted back to sleep.
Then, at about 3am I was woken again by some drunken person stomping down the street singing loudly. Very inconsiderate. This would probably not normally have woken me, but the window was slightly ajar as it was way too hot in my room. Despite all this, I finally started sleeping again...
...only to be awoken just after 3am by a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm that went on until after 5am, thus making sleep rather difficult (more on account of me finding storms exciting, rather than it being too loud!)
By the time that was all over, the birds had started singing and cars were beginning to pass as the early-shift people made their way to work. So, the remaining couple of hours were spent sleeping intermittently.
I am extremely tired. I think it is going to be a long day.
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The joy of motoring |
26-03-2009 10:06:16 |
About a week ago I had a bit of a run of bad luck with my car. This all started with a puncture in one of the front tyres just as I left work. That is annoying enough after a long, tiring day, but it did not end there.
As with most cars, mine has a security locking nut on each wheel, intended to prevent unscrupulous individuals from stealing them. An adapter is provided that slots into the regular wheel wrench to allow the lock nut to be removed. In most cases that would be fine, but the locking nut in this case was clearly damaged, and with only a small amount of pressure on the wrench, the whole top of it snapped off. Great!
So, that basically left me stranded. An attempt was made to use some tyre-weld to temporarily patch the tyre and get me back home, but - as I later discovered - the puncture was a five centimetre rip. No amount of tyre-weld was going to fix that.
In the end I had to abandon the car overnight and have a friend collect it in the morning, as seen in the picture above. The nut was drilled off and now the spare wheel is on there.
Yesterday I collected a new tyre which has now become the spare. I had a conversation with the garage owner about the whole episode, and learned some surprising things. I always thought it was a legal requirement to carry a spare wheel in the UK, but apparently I was wrong. There is no obligation at all, and in fact many new cars these days do not even have a spare wheel. Instead you get a can of tyre-weld, which as I mentioned, was useless in my case.
On top of that, many modern cars have directional tyres that can only legally be placed on the correct side of the car. Having them anywhere else is an instant MOT failure. Some cars even have larger front wheels than back. How is a person supposed to deal with that in the event of a puncture?
As with most things car-oriented, it sounds to me as though it could all get very expensive.
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The first post - About Chalkboard |
19-03-2009 08:43:31 |
This is the first post to my new homepage blog. I thought I would take a moment to explain exactly what "Chalkboard" is.
Chalkboard is a place for me to talk about the things that are going on in my daily life and in the World in general. There will likely be entries here about technical things I'm working on, things in the news and media that have affected me (or likely annoyed me), and probably any number of funny and amusing things that I come across.
Chalkboard is also slightly more than that. It is my own blogging tool that I am developing. This may seem a little strange given the myriad other similar tools that are already available. Many of those - most, in fact, at this stage - have far more functionality that Chalkboard. So, what is the point?
Well, the main point is that it is my blogging tool. I am a software developer and general tinkerer with computer related subjects. It makes sense for me to create my own solution.
In fact, I have tried a couple of the available blogging solutions already, with mixed results. One well known blogging tool that I attempted to incorporate into this website was Wordpress. This proved to be entirely unsuccessful, and very soon after installation, many problems came to light. I would like to add right now that I have no problem with Wordpress, I think their product is excellent. It just did not fit in well here. Go and have a look at it for yourself.
I have also found some of the ready-made solutions to be rather cumbersome to implement and use. One of the key points about the development of my own blogging tool is that is must be simple to set up and use.
So, these are a few of the reasons for Chalkboard. It is (currently) implemented using a MySQL database, some PHP routines that I have created, and HTML. This may branch out into other areas as Chalkboard evolves.
It is also very much a work in progress. Currently there is not much functionality at all. I have some idea of the things that I will add next - reader comments will be one important area, and searching functionality too.
This is already proving to be an interesting project for me. I shall periodically post updates here as more features are added, although hopefully this will be evident by the appearance of the blog changing over time. If it ever reaches a stage where I feel it would be useful to others, I may look at releasing it as an Open Source solution.
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