After my recent brush with disaster, I realised that my, err, backup strategy relied on me remembering to perform a manual, occasional Wordpress export or a database backup. This was acceptable while I was messing around with this blogging lark but now I realise that it would be a little disappointing to lose the entire contents of my blog. While Bluehost run backups (which have saved my skin once), it would be foolish to completely rely on my hosting provider and the height of stupidity to rely on me ! ...

Excellent article by Seth Godin about the perils of PowerPoint. Just look what it did to the poor pigeon.

Meet Dan Morrison. His main aim in life is :- Currently dedicated to linking all IT professionals together in one network so they can find each other and communicate. Don’t scoff. Dan already has 93,822 connections (including me) on ITtoolbox so he’s very nearly half way there. Dan - Let me know when you’ve finished and I’ll have that list of email addresses in exchange for a box of vintage 1980’s records. ...

Another thing on my todo list was to learn PHP and write a WordPress plugin to randomly select quotes stored in the database to rotate the tagline. An admin interface to create, modify and delete quotes was planned for Version 2.1 (beta) due Q4 2008. Fortunately for me though, a helpful person called Zombie Robot (pseudonym ?) has already produced wp-quotes (and another kind person tweaked it to work properly for taglines). ...

Doug Burns has a new job and is spending some time in Canada, hugging his new colleagues. Like most roving consultants holed up in lonely, bland, nondescript hotel rooms with only an ironing board, TV and mini-bar for company (oh sorry that’s me not Doug), Doug’s thoughts inevitably starts to turn to loved ones back at home (including his cuddly toys and music collection). Fed up with the banality of Radio Ottawa, Doug recently pleaded for suggestions and recommendations for new music. Unfortunately this desperate plea met with a deathly silence from Oracle types purely interested in his detailed investigations into the optimal degree of parallelism. ...

In recent weeks, this esteemed publication (Daily Excess) has been critical of Wayne Rooney’s recent performances for Manchester United. One article ‘Rooney is finished’ questioned his future, his commitment, his mental state and his footballing ability. We ran a story that incorrectly claimed Rooney was ‘furious and livid’ at the amount of media attention, fulsome praise and PFA awards being given to his team-mate and rival, Cristiano Ronaldo. After his performance and two wonder goals on Saturday, the Daily Excess is proud to announce an unreserved, unequivocal and heartfelt apology to Wayne (John, Paul, Ringo, George) Rooney of Wilmslow, Cheshire. ...

I was intrigued by the detailed infrastructure and sophisticated AI techniques powering the ‘world-wide computer network’ that was supposedly hunting down my lost bag. I had a persistent mental image of a person sitting in a dingy, dark corner office buried in the dungeons at Heathrow airport, lazily typing into an old-fashioned, amber, VT220 terminal: Bag Reference: ‘AHL LHRBD70414’ BRU-LHR: Confirm : ‘Yes’ Is the bag at BRU ? : ‘No’ ...

There’s been a lot of excitement and discussion recently about the emergence of a new blogging platform called Habari. A brand new blogging platform being created from scratch with more developers than actual blogs.The prospect of my blog being completely broken by the nightly alpha build was an attractive one. A chance to leave the comfort of a stable Wordpress environment with all those themes and plugins. A change to live on the bleeding edge. I desperately tried to resist but the lure was too strong. In the end, I simply couldn’t help myself. ...

Last night I returned to London from Brussels. Unfortunately, my overnight bag didn’t. I guess this was inevitable after four years of multiple short flights in Europe and I have been pretty lucky thus far. Curiously, two other passengers on my flight suffered the same fate. One gentleman was very irate. For reasons best known to himself, he had buried his car keys in his suitcase which seemed a very odd decision. ...

Sort of. I decided to remove all posts from my newly created Habari sandbox in case my readership and GoogleBot gets confused. As there was no obvious bulk deletion tool, I simply truncated the `wp_posts` table. Unfortunately, I truncated the `wp_posts` table from the Wordpress schema instead of the Habari schema. So, in the space of a mere 24 hours, I had managed to lose my favourite boxer shorts, get a brand new shiny blog and then completely trash my established, trusty, stable blog. ...