Posts

free upgrades from Virgin Media

I currently pay £92 per month to Virgin Media:

• Telephone Rental - £5.50
• Talk Evenings/Weekends - £11
• Digital TV (L) - £11.50
• Broadband (4MB) - £25
• Additional Set Top Box - £15
• Sky Sports 1/2/3 - £24

I just called Customer Retentions on 0800 0730591 (not 150) to try to renegotiate my package after the recent loss of Sky One. It took a while (15 mins) to get through on the Freephone number but it was worth it.

Sharpcast versus Picasa

Curiously, after reading about the Picasa upgrade, a related article about photo management software popped up in Google Reader, courtesy of Robert Scoble’s excellent link blog.

Robert Scoble had published a couple of podcasts featuring a product demo and an interview with Gibu Thomas, CEO of Sharpcast. Sharpcast is yet another photo management software tool and appears to offer a number of advantages over Picasa:

• Unlimited free storage
• Automatic synchronisation between PC and Web albums
• Original images are preserved

The unlimited storage seems too good to be true and is very useful because, at some point in the near future, I am likely to exceed Picasa’s storage limit unless Google follow suit. Secondly, if I ever edit an image or perform any housekeeping, I will have to manually replicate those changes to Picasa Web Albums. As I am very lazy, that is unlikely to happen.

Picasa Web Albums upgraded to 1GB

Google have increased the amount of free storage to 1GB (previously 250MB) available at Picasa Web Albums.

This means I can now backup all of my photos comfortably (854MB) in one place.

If you have lots of photos of your cat, $500 upgrades the capacity to 250GB.

incest is best

Patrick Stuebing from Leipzig (near Germany) has a few issues

• A curious red object growing out of his head
• A penchant for redheads
• Unhealthy obsession with Catherine Tate
• Unemployed burglar locksmith
• Father of four young children
• The mother of these children is his, err, sister.

And I thought I had problems.

rapid fire service from Dell

I celebrated my recent promotion (to BMI Silver) by ordering a brand new Dell computer running Windows Vista (Premium) and proudly attaching the tag to my suitcase.

I then spent hours ensuring I had secured the cheapest price possible and placed the order at 23:12 on Sunday night. Yesterday afternoon, I received a call from Dell confirming delivery for Thursday (at an unspecified time somewhere in a 10 hour window between 08:00 and 18:00).

in praise of Google Desktop

Like most people, I store information in many different places. Lots of data is stored directly on my work laptop while yet more data is stored on my computer at home.

• Mail folders
• Address book
• Text files
• Corporate blogs
• Presentations
• Word documents
• Intranet resources
• Whitepapers
• Web history
• RSS feeds
• Photos
• Music

Even more data is stored on external servers

• Gmail
• Blinklist
• Web site, blogs and mySQL databases at Bluehost
• Post-it on fridge
• Mobile phone
• Palm PDA
• My head (last resort)

I first used Google Desktop a couple of years ago when it was first launched. Back then, the ongoing indexing process seemed to add a unreasonable load on my laptop, so I decided to uninstall the program and revert to old-fashioned searching in Windows Explorer and Outlook (and now Thunderbird).

rolling upgrade

Until 30 minutes ago, this blog was running Wordpress 2.1 courtesy of the Fantastico installation at Bluehost. The blog was fairly stable and worked fine.

However, I was investigating upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2 to plug a security issue. The Fantastico Installer currently only offers an upgrade to the flawed 2.1.1 release.

In any case, the Fantastico installer now refuses to upgrade my WordPress installation because I have installed new themes, configured additional plug-ins and even added database tables to the schema.

Top Of The (Oracle) Blogs

Oracle blogs I read by Technorati ranking. Cue Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

1. Life After Coffee - Jon Emmons - Rank: 18,499 (405 links from 190 blogs)
2. The Tom Kyte Blog - Tom Kyte - Rank: 24,521 (345 links from 145 blogs)
3. Oracle BI and DW - Mark Rittman - Rank: 31,939 (458 links from 112 blogs)
4. Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis - Rank: 44,328 (242 links from 83 blogs)
5. Eddie Awad’s Blog - Eddie Awad - Rank: 60,122 (175 links from 62 blogs)
6. Doug’s Oracle Blog - Doug Burns - Rank: 83,319 (216 links from 46 blogs)
7. Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog - Kevin Closson - Rank: 87,506 (100 links from 44 blogs)
8. The Oracle Sponge - David Aldridge - Rank: 102,376 (72 links from 38 blogs)
9. The Oracle-Base Blog - Tim Hall - Rank: 112,139 (57 links from 35 blogs) 10 So What Co-Operative - Jeff Hunter - Rank: 154,372 (62 links from 26 blogs)
10. Pete-s Random Notes - Peter Scott - Rank: 161,008 (92 links from 25 blogs)
11. Radio Free Tooting - Andrew Clarke - Rank: 168,201 (70 links from 24 blogs)
12. Oracle 10g Blog - Chris Foot - Rank: 168,201 (51 links from 24 blogs)
13. Oracle WTF - William Robertson - Rank: 194,372 (70 links from 21 blogs)
14. Dizwell Informatics - Howard Rogers - Rank: 194,372 (61 links from 21 blogs)
15. OracleBlog - Robert Vollman - Rank: 194,372 (44 links from 21 blogs)
16. Oracle Stuff I should have known - Andy Campbell - Rank TBD (55 links from X blogs)
17. We Do Not Use Blogs - Mogens Norgaard - Rank: 259,194 (26 links from 16 blogs)
18. Laurent Schneider OCM - Laurent Schneider - Rank: 322,022 (176 links from 13 blogs)
19. Oracle Newbies Blog - Lisa Dobson - Rank: 322,022 (29 links from 13 blogs)
20. OraMoss Oracle - Jeff Moss - Rank: 347,530 (150 links from 12 blogs)
21. Confessions of a database geek - Beth - Rank: 347,530 (32 links from 12 blogs)
22. Oracle Alchemist - Steve Karam - Rank: 413,015 (13 links from 10 blogs)
23. The Eric S. Emrick Blog - Eric Emrick - Rank: 413,015 (12 links from 10 blogs)
24. Oracleoid Blog - Alex Gorbachev - Rank: 656,741 (27 links from 6 blogs)
25. BobaBlog - Robert Baillie - Rank: 656,741 (7 links from 6 blogs)
26. Igor’s Oracle Lab - Gary Myers - Rank: 766,996 (6 links from 5 blogs)
27. DBA’s R US - Nuno Souto - Rank: 1,220,048 (11 links from 3 blogs)
28. Optimal DBA - Daniel Fink - Rank: 1,220,048 (11 links from 3 blogs)
29. Oracle on Windows - Edward Whalen - Rank: 1,724,033 (3 links from 2 blogs)

lost without 'Lost'

‘Good evening. Blueyond - sorry - Virgin Media Customer Services. Carol speaking. How may I help you ?’

‘Slight problem. I can’t get Sky One any more.’

‘Yes, Sir. I know [sighs inwardly ‘Oh God please not another one’]. Those nasty people from Sky increased the prices and Sir Richard called their bluff. Unfortunately, a horrid Australian man called Rupert then called his bluff back so we can’t show it any more.’

not dead, just resting

Darren Prowse kicked off an interesting discussion asking what makes you unsubscribe from a feed.

This prompted me to revisit my list of my inactive blogs in Google Reader. Normally, I tend to leave most blogs intact because I don’t religiously unsubscribe purely because an author hasn’t posted in a while. However, I find it useful to occasionally check the status of sleeping blogs to see whether the feed has actually died or migrated elsewhere and prune my subscription list accordingly.