Paypal Hiatus

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I’m on an enforced break from PayPal. As you may or may not have realised, the old blog has deceased, due to a hack attempt which saw almost all of the data on the host server being deleted. It’s also deleted my account information, so I have no FTP or email access to that account. And my PayPal account was with that email address.

What’s more, it wouldn’t accept my password. I’m sure it’s correct because it’s worked before, but PayPal was having none of it (I’m hoping that didn’t get hacked too). But, there is hope. I’ve gone through the password recovery system, giving over my Switch card number, and a new password will be sent by snail mail. Unfortunately, being based outside the US means that the password will take 10-14 days to arrive, and it will be sent to my home address, so I’ll have to phone my parents when it arrives.

It’s annoying, but I am relieved that even if you can’t remember your password and have a duff email account, there’s still a way out.

Back from Cambridge

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Man, I’m exhausted. Six trains in one day is a lot 🙂 .

The meetup went well – I got to chat again to some of the editors I saw last year, and also got to meet some new faces who I’d previously only known by their user names. It’s always fun when you first meet people and meetings like this trying to work out who people are.

There are a couple of photos: 1 and 2 – regular readers will probably recognise me.

Plan for this evening are to catch up on a day’s surfing, possibly play Worms, and then sleep. Not very interesting but I don’t feel capable of doing anything else.

Off to Cambridge

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I’m going to Cambridge for the day to meet some people from the ODP, like I did last year in Birmingham. It should be fun, but I only have just over half an hour to get ready 🙂 .

A couple of links for the morning: not only can you rent Chris Pirillo’s chest, you can rent his mind, too. Payment via PayPal.

And Jake has linked to a SearchEngineWatch article telling you how to do well on Google. I don’t necessarily agree all with it (not mentioning your company name in the title tag is silly in my opinion, as it defeats the point of having that tag in the first place), but there are some good tips, so it’s well worth a read.

And now if I don’t get a shower, I’m sooo going to miss my train. Toodles.

Only a minor feat

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Minotaur, the Mozilla-based stand-alone mail client, finally reached the stage where a public build could be released this week (which, by the way, can be downloaded from ftp.mozilla.org). It’s only at version 0.1a, and currently only available for Windows, but it’s a start.

Seeing as Mozilla Mail is my email weapon of choice, I thought I’d check it out. It weighs in at a hefty 12MB – the size of Mozilla itself – and as yet has no installer – you download a zip file, extract it to a folder and then run it, like you do with Phoenix (or whatever it’ll be called). It also uses your existing Mozilla profile, unlike Phoenix which keeps its data separate – this is a bad thing because it may mean that you not only mess up a minotaur installation, but your Mozilla one too.

I fortunately had Mozilla running at the time so I was asked to create a new profile (since Moz blocks access to the settings). After adding an email account, it was up and running. And then something dawned on me.

It looks exactly the same as Mozilla Mail. In fact, other than a slightly more streamlined Preferences dialog, I couldn’t find anything unique to it. What’s worse is that you’re stock with the ‘Classic’ theme, which I can’t stand – give me Orbit 3+1 any day. You can see how it looks in the screenshot. It did also seem a little slow at loading, and there was no splash screen to divert my attention…

Of course, it’s early days yet, and much work has been promised. Hopefully it will become as good as programs like Ximian Evolution or Outlook Express (or Lookout! Distress! as I’ve seen it referred to). Like Phoenix, its aim is to be cross-platform, so expect Linux and Mac OS X builds to arrive eventually (unless someone goes and creates Camino Mail or something), and I gather that some Phoenix features, like customisable toolbars, will make it into minotaur at some stage. Anyhow, I’ll give the developers the best of luck.

For a little linkage, try the minotaur Help site (from the people who brought you the excellent Phoenix Help) and reviews from bloggers Chris Gonyea and jorge. There’s also the Talkback discussion at MozillaZine, and it even has its own set of MozillaZine forums.

While we’re (sort of) on the subject of Phoenix, ‘duck’ seems to be the most popular name so far, with the least number of votes. However, the MozillaZine Forums seem to suggest that a name has already been chosen. Now, to update my Phallus Extensions…

Happy Birthday Blog!

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It’s exactly one year today that I started the old blog with this entry. During the past year, I have

  • Changed hosts twice
  • Changed blogging tool once (from Blogger to MT)
  • Made a major change to the design 6 times
  • Posted more entries than I’d like to think
  • Gained several regular readers (hi Kim, Richy, Andy, Quanta, Ciaran, MODatic and everyone I’ve forgotten 🙂 )
  • Inspired at least one other person to start blogging

All in all, I’m happy with my blogging, and hope to continue it for as long as I can. Thanks for reading – after all, a blog is nothing if no-one reads it.

Ho ho ho…

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Merry Christmas everyone!

The screenshot is from one of my presents – the Hornby Virtual Railway. It’s a CD-ROM game that allows you to build your own virtual train set, based on the real Hornby Railways kits. It doesn’t have Hornby’s full range, but I imagine it could be useful for people wanting to build their own layouts from scratch but not wanting to buy loads of track that they don’t need. Indeed, the initial planning of where to put the track is difficult as not all pieces go together; you have to get the angles and lengths correct. A little frustrating but fun once the final layout is ready. It’s quite quick – the layout I built took me the best part of half an hour to do.

I also got the Epson Stylus C42Plus printer that we bought on that expensive day in November, along with chocolate and several items of clothing; 3 t-shirts, 2 shirts, a sweatshirt and some ‘karaoke king’ socks (it wouldn’t be Christmas without socks, now would it?). I also got a mousemat, a portfolio wallet and a FiloFax diary, which was nice.

Expensive day (but not for me)

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My Christmas present has been bought, and at a cheaper price than we originally thought. The NUS have a deal with Curry’s that lets you buy an Epson C42Plus printer for £59.97 with 1000 free sheets of paper, which saves £20 off the normal price. Except today the total price was £49.97, so we ended up saving a further £10. Can’t argue with that.

However, that £10 saving was nothing compared to what my parents spent. They had intended to look for a new video recorder (VCR if you must), but ended up buying not only a VCR, but a DVD player and a flat widescreen TV. All for £550. It arrives on Friday, so I’ll be able to watch it over Christmas.

Noooooooooo….

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I’m rather pissed off this morning. You know that shiny new mobile I spent £90 on Wednesday? Well, it’s been stolen. Already.

I was out at the Friday Night Disco, and about 20 minutes from the end reached into my pocket, to find that it was missing. It was nowhere on the dance floor, security hadn’t seen it and no-one had handed it in to the bar. When a friend of mine tried ringing it, it reported that it had been turned off (bearing in mind that when I last had it it was still turned on), so I imagine someone’s taken it. Grrrrr.

Anyway, I’m going to ring up Vodafone and ask them to block the IMEI number, which should make the phone useless to anyone (even with a different SIM card), and see about getting a new SIM card with my credit transferred over. And I need to ring my parents to see if we get anything out of the insurance company.

I am still very annoyed about this. In fact, if I could find the heartless little toerag who nicked it, I’d be very tempted to kick him in the nuts.

Hello!

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Welcome to the new, improved Neil’s World! The blog is now on a different host, has its own domain name, and is now powered by Movable Type instead of Blogger. This means that:

  • The RSS feed is now hosted on the server
  • Comments are hosted on the server, so they should be faster and work better
  • Weblogs.com will be pinged every time I update, not just when I’m using w.bloggar
  • All posts will have a title
  • A list of recent posts is shown on the side bar, along with links to the monthly archives and a blog calendar
  • You’ll be able to remember the URL more easily!

I’m still setting this up, so I’d appreciate any bug reports, comments or criticisms you may have.

Settled in

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Here I am, settled at University with my own (incredibly slow) internet connection. I would have posted here on Wednesday, but for some reason I decided to plug the modem cable into the ethernet socket (the fact it fitted is slightly worrying). I only discovered this on Friday morning as I was going out to buy a new modem cable.

So, what have I been doing? Going out a lot, getting slightly tipsy and watching my next door neighbour get hypnotised by a random Canadian bloke. And catching up on all of the emails I’ve missed.

I was hoping to write some entries to put in here but I only really got the first entry done, so here it is:

Got up and packed final stuff (music, razor etc.) into the car almost filling it (we had to abandon the stereo box and just take the parts in plastic bags – actually I think we took more stuff then we do when we go on holiday, but then usually cooking utensils are provided and we don’t need to take much food. Or pillows.

We set off at about 10:30am, and arrived at the hall just under an hour later. Me and my mum (unintentionally) left Dad with the car while we jetted off to the main building to collect my keys – all 4 of them, plus an access swipe card. The room is on the fifth floor – the building is 10 floors high I think. 5th isn’t bad, I guess, and there are 2 good lifts, plus two staircases.

The room itself is much larger than I expected – you could easily swing a cat in it, if you really wanted to. There’s a good sized desk, and adequate storage, though I wish the chest of draws were larger – I ended up hanging up some of my jumpers on coat hangers. Which reminds me – next time I’m home (October if all goes to plan) I’ll bring some more back… There’s also a washbasin in the room, which is handy – the showers are separate, and are okay. The toilets do leave something to be desired though – ah well, you can’t have everything.

The kitchen is better than I was expecting too – looks like it has been recently refurbished, and although there’s only one cooker there seems to be adequate storage space (although some stuff is staying in my room since I don’t want it getting nicked). The view is also good – it was built in the 1960′s so the windows are huge (and it’s okay to leave them open as I don’t think people are going to climb in and take stuff) – I get a nice view across to the centre of Bradford.

Although I seem to be on a mostly male floor (damn!) the guys that I’ve met so far all seem quite cool, especially the guy next to me (hi Anthony!). For dinner we went down to a local curry restaurant (oh come on, it’s Bradford for gawd’s sake!) called ‘Posh Spice’ (and yes it was quite posh, but cheap too) and got a takeaway which we ate back at the kitchen (there’s a dining area too).

From what I gather, I’m the only one out of my peer group at Bradford – a few of my friends have gone to Manchester, but most are spread around the country – so I’ll obviously have to make some new friends. Which isn’t too bad because everyone seems quite friendly – although I haven’t spent much time in the union bar I did go to play pool (I lost, btw). But hey, there’s a whole week to get stuff done.

The area is a little bizarre – whereas in York you hardly ever see people of other ethnic groups (bar the odd Japanese tourist), here whites are an ethnic minority. The bulk of people are of Asian or West Indian origin – usually the only white people are students. It’s not that I have a problem with that, it’s just… strange. Well, for me at least. They all seem friendly though, and I haven’t seen any threatening gangs of youths.

The hall is a 5-10 minute walk from the main campus where everything happens, which is good since it’ll give me some exercise and won’t be as noisy (in theory).

Overall? Yeah, I like it. I was certainly expecting much worse. Now if I could just get internet access….