Life on the beach

Finaly managed to get pics up from Amsterdam ! now the gallery is fixed here are the pictures :-) we had a fantastic time doing all the tourist stuff that I never got around to doing whilst living there. I think Amsterdam is possibly the only other place I could live apart from Brighton, I love the place.

How i’m going to try to write from now on !

• Write it when you think it, save it as a draft - Im going to write articles (or at least the idea) when it comes in to my head (must get moblogging sorted) rather than forgetting about it or leaving it to go stale.
• Do not edit during the flow of consciousness - By this I mean im not going to worry about spelling punctuation or grammar in any way shape or form whilst im getting ideas out of my head (some may say I dont worry about it at all!)
• read it as if you hadn’t thought about it - I MUST remember to read it from the point of view of sombody who hasn’t had the topic whizzing about his head for days and days.
• Have a cup of tea - All Musings are best mused over a good cuppa, it brings clarity where there is none.
• Publish the next day - From now on I’m going to sleep on it !
• check my spelling ! - I will no longer rely on my own spelling……

On the way to work I like to read the compact format of the Times newspaper on the train (I hate it when people sit next to you on the train and then try and open a broad sheet !) and it got me thinking about why I like it so much.

The compact format of the times has a columb down the left hand side of various pages that contains snippets and excerpts from other articles in the paper. and i like reading them as it quickly gets me up to spead on whats happening in the world and lets me know what articles are likley to be interesting to me. then I was thinking about president bush being sworn in and the mumber of people attending the ceromony. the number seemed quite small considering the number of americans on the plantet. do we now live in a world where we like our news to be short sweet and already digested ? I know I do.

I think nowadays people are happy to accept a picture from a mobile phone or a text message about an event as a substitute to actualy atending the event.

I guess perhaps this is a reflection on the pace of life nowadays.

Finaly managed to get some server issues sorted out and get the gallery plugin working ! yey !

here are some pics, myself and becky, dizzy and mr smoo our two cats.

Well, its the 4th Jan 2005 and here I am back at my desk after a few weeks holiday. 5 Days to go till my birthday so there is that to look forward to at least. I will (eventualy) get some photos up here, perhaps intime for my birthday !

My lovely lady Bex got me a moddified XBox for christmas which has been a great release ! Ive even managed to get an SDK for it and have started to try to get doom up and running on it (just for somthing to do realy) I’ve gotten doom compiled for the XBox and running to the point where the game nearly starts(with a little help from bob the brain). If I can chop some of the networking code out I think I will get it running this week :-) - then I will have to figure out some joypad handling to get the game playable.

I will say one thing, us Java Programmers are spoiled, I haven’t programmed in C for years and going back to dealing with memory management and stuff is a realy pain. long live Java! I wonder how easy it would be to get a JVM running on the Xbox ? - hmmm

The mystery of google and how to optomise content for SEO in general continues.

Other than this one I have a few sites I look after that generate income for various people. I myself run an adult toys and novelties store and Dan (other Dan!) a good freind of mine runs an army surplus and boys toys site, we have employed and SEO company for a couple of years now to promote and market the surplusstore site to search engines and all was going well. Dan was on average getting 900 to 1000 hits per day and about 10 - 15 sales per day on the website. the website is well built (by me!) and easily outstrips the competition in terms of looks, usability and features. (one day when i have a few days to spare I will make the site accessable propperly) . about a year ago the trafic dropped on the site and dan now gets on average 500 - 6000 hits per day, a drop of between 30 - 50 percent ! obiously the sales have dropped in proportion to this. we have been through the mill with the SEO company and I have spent countless hours rebuilding pages and re jigging content and site structures as they have requested me to, all of this seems to have had little or no affect on the traffic comming to the site.

The SEO company have been comming up with ideas and trying new things for 6 months now with no success and we are realy comming to the end of the line with them. the point of contact at the SEO company has been baning on about how we are the biggest site on the internet for our market and how we have 32,100 pages in googles index. Hang on I thought to myself, that doesnt sound right !? I had a look and google did indeed have 32,100 pages from our site in its index. I then sat down and figured out that we actualy have about 1,134 pages on the website, a long way off the 32,100 that google knows about.

I quickly figured out that one possible explanation for the problem was the way that the shopping cart handles sessions, I recoded parts of the site to stop spiders from creating sessions and forced any session id’s to be stored in cookies rather than getting apended to the URL (this only happened in some realy bizarre conditions)

google comes round to us on a daily basis and im not sure how often they update there index theese days but I hope that after christmas we should see some better rankings for the surplusstore website, the number of pages in the index has started to drop already…

Fingers crossed for a prosperous new year !

Woke up this morning in a rather abrupt manner when my boss who was suposed to be meeting me t East Croydon station called me to say that the trains where a mess due to some works on the line that had over run from the weekend. Dont panic I thought to myself as I Jumped out of bed and in to my suit via a quick freshen up in the bathroom. I will take Beckys car and drive to Gatwick(from brighton) and get the train from there to East Croydon thus missing out on all the disruption.

anyhow, pulling on to the sliproad at Gatwick i notice that the car is running a little hot and i sat in the stationary traffic it gets hotter! I made it to Gatwick, parked the car and got the train to work. send Becky an email when I got in to say i thought the car needed som attention. this is the reply I got back.

You should have taken the merc if you were going to drive! My car isn’t up to it!
It has just failed it’s MOT, has a flat tyre, no screenwash, dodgy radiator
and RUSTY BRAKES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I always new that lack of Communication killed IT Projects never thought it would come close to killing me :-S

In a word, no, darwin most definatley did not get it wrong.

I read in the current issue of national geographic that a gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand interviews conducted in febuary 2001 no less than 45 percent of responding US adults were satisfied that “God created human beings pretty much in there present form some time in the last 10,000 years”. Shockingly this means almost half the american population actualy belive that darwin was wrong !

It strikes me that the idea that seems to prevail in quite a few states in the US with regards to Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection being “just another theory” is incredable, it is “just another theory” in the same sense that Relativity as described by Einstein is “just another theory” the Earth orbiting the sun rather than the sun orbiting the earth is “just another theory”. the existance and atomic makeup of atoms is “just another theory”. even electricity is “just another theory”.

I would sugest that by the evidence in front of me at this moment in time, by the fact that I am sat in front of a computer that is powered up that electricity is a lot more that theory. I would sugest that all available evidence points to Darwins theory of the origin of species being correct.

To a Creationist (and in the US there are many in places of influence) a theory may be a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but to a scientific mind a theory is an explanatory statement based on the given evidence. the scientific mind will embrace such an explaination confidently but provisionaly taking it as there best available view. at least untill somthing comes along and proves otherwise.

The origin of species is a theory that has stood the test of time and has been ccepted by the scientific comunity, a lot of medical science has been based on darwins work and the idea is so elegant it cant be wrong. how can so many people be so very blind ? Dispite all the available evidence they can still cling to the idea that the book of Genesis is the infallable truth. writings suposedly written by moses himself in around 10th century BC are still guiding there lives as much now as they where guiding the people moses was sent to save.

I would sugest that the book of Genisis represented an explanatory statement Based on the given evidence at the time. people in the 10th century BC little or no explainations for the seemingly mystical events that happened around them. The ancient Romans attributed volcanoes erupting to the wrath of there Gods, we know better, we realise there is a scientific and logical explaination for the earth ejecting hot magma on to its the surface simply because we have technology that we can apply to the study of volcanoes.

Science is prepared to move on in the face of a better more feasable explaination, why are creationists so stuck in the past ? In my life I am my God the only person that has a direct affect on my life is me, to other people God has a direct influence on there day to day living. is it such a wacky idea that there God had a hand in evolution ? or that God set things in motion to start with and evolution has happened since then ?