Author Archives: tony

Nearly 2am

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It’s nearly 2am, and we’ve just spent a really relaxed evening in the company of some really cool friends.  We’ve drunk plenty of wine, some of us have drunk some cider and some beer, and we’ve had a couple of decent sized shots of malt whiskey.

I can just about see the screen as I type this, although the room around me is circling in a kind of nefarious manner.

Grete is in bed, our guests are just settling themselves down and once they’ve gone to bed I’ll head up there myself (to my own bed, with Grete, in case that wasn’t obvious).

But I think I’m going to need the bed strapped down so it doesn’t zip out the window or something.

Don’t forget to put your clocks back if you’re in the UK.  See you on the other side.

Friends and Daylight Savings Time

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We have friends visiting this weekend, which means that since our house is always tidy and clean, we can just relax and wait for them to arrive in the pristine surroundings of our lovely house.

Or, it means we spend a week frantically tidying, cleaning and washing.

You choose.

Looking forward to spending some time with them both, I should think we’ll mainly stay in and eat and drink, they’re only here overnight.  It gave us a good excuse to have a solid go at the computer room (mentioned yesterday).  We’ve moved a load of crap off the shelving unit in the room, made space for all my freshly unpacked painting gear (takes up a surprising amount of space), left some room for Grete to store some stuff, thrown away more computer stuff, moved Grete’s spare monitor so she has more desk space, and generally made the place a lot less cramped.

It probably won’t last but it looks pretty good for the time being.

Working and tidying has meant I’ve not had much time to get into any painting and of course I won’t be doing any over the weekend, but I’m sure I’ll get back to it next week.  Clocks go back on Sunday morning, gives us another hour in bed (or more likely, another hour awake), but it messes with the internal clocks on the cats.  Instead of being hungry at 8am/6pm they’ll be hungry at 7am/5pm and instead of being annoying and waking us up at 5 or 6am to go out, they’ll be trying to do that at 4 or 5am.  Usually takes them about a month to get switched over but for that month it’s hell between 5pm and 6pm trying to explain to them that they need to wait for a bit to eat.

I mentioned that to a friend and she commented on her young kids, it hadn’t really dawned on me that kids would pose the same problem on a larger scale, especially when they’re young.  You just get them used to getting up and going to bed at a certain time and then the next day, it’s all an hour out.  Must be annoying for parents and the kids.

Of course, diabetes doesn’t care about daylight savings either, so for the first few days I have to sort of slowly move my meal times.

None stop skipping

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And not the kind of skipping that involves one leg, but the kind that involves throwing things away.  Since we moved into this house we’ve been in a constant state of throwing stuff away.  We just went through the whole dining / computer room and have thrown away a load more stuff.  Some recycled, some binned and some we’ll take to the recycling skip centre tomorrow.

Bits of computer and other random technology, stationary, stuff, junk, bits, things, odds and ends.

It’s a never ending stream.

Not in the mood

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As soon as I put the flesh washes onto the three mini’s I’m supposed to be using blending on I knew I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be doing any painting.

Then I tried putting a highlight onto a hand, decided it looked crap and packed up again.

Maybe tomorrow.

Double Dose of Ranting

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EverQuest released a new expansion.  Frankly I’m not really bothered and may not buy it.  However, Grete is kinda interested so I said I’d get it for her account.  This is the first time we’ve not pre-ordered, and enthusiasm is low (Grete’s pretty down at the moment, so her general EQ mojo is low anyway, hopefully she won’t beat me when she reads this), but I said it would be fine to get it for her account.

So I log on to the Sony website, go to the account management page and try and buy the expansion.  I get a dialog which asks me to fill in our post code, select a secret security question and a secret answer.  Never seen the page before, no prompts telling me why it’s showed up.  The drop down list of secret questions is empty (other than the default entry of ‘please select a secret question’).  So I try ignoring it, but it wants me to select something, I try answering a random question but it still wants me to pick a question.

I can’t pick a damn question.

I search, in vain, for some way to update it via the profile, but it’s not there.  So I go to the Sony help site which if anyone’s tried to use it, knows how terrible it is.  I finally opt for Live Chat, and get a form to fill out with 6 questions and a box to describe the problem which I fill with a couple of paragraphs of text, and then click ‘go live chat’, at which point I get a popup telling me live chat is disabled due to maintenance.  Why the hell did it let me fill the form in then, stop me before I put in the effort.

So I finally go to the e-mail help and rant about the problem and the stupid site.  Maybe they’ll fix it, maybe they won’t, but since we were already just on the edge of maybe buying it and maybe not, if they don’t fix it without a lot of hassle they just lost another sale.  This is typical, in my experience, of Sony.  They make everything as hard as they can, so you have to fight to spend your money with them and they still make you feel like it was your fault.

Gahhh.

Second rant.  I e-mailed a shop that sells miniatures and said specifically and clearly ‘are you able to order this particular miniature for us’.  The reply was waffly and didn’t answer the question, but commented on some vague notion of them not getting that mini in the last delivery and ‘maybe being able to sort it out’.  The mini in question can be purchased direct from the supplier in the US, and we said that to the folk in the shop when we were in there at the weekend (before this e-mail), but they said the supplier’s customer service was bad and it can take ages to arrive.  So, I replied to this vague e-mail saying ‘on Saturday you said it would be quicker to order through you’, and the reply to that was ‘it will be if it arrives before the end of the year’.  WTF does that mean?  Why can’t they just answer a basic and simple question.

Q: Can you order this mini for us?

A: Yes, it will take 2-8 weeks or
A: No, we don’t do specific orders, if it arrives as general stock we can let you know or
A: No, but I’m sending a full order in for re-stocking and it’s listed, should be here in 3 weeks

or anything else, other than totally vague randomness.  This is a niche hobby with low turnover and a small market, you’d think they were keen to retain any direct customers they could get.  I was polite, clear, concise.

So I bought it over the web from the US supplier, and they shipped in 24 hours after I placed the order and sent me a nice e-mail to tell me so.  I’ll pay the $16 shipping charge on a $7 purchase to get service from someone who’s clear, concise and polite (I actually bought another two mini’s, to take it up to around $12 worth of mini’s, but that’s not the point).

In this day and age, I get very frustrated when technology gets in the way of simple purchases or when people can’t, don’t or won’t answer a straight question with a straight answer.  It’s my money, they either want it, or they don’t want it, but I’m not going to fight to give it to them.

Probably really bad of me

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What motivates you to do better?  Knowing you can still improve?  The pure challenge?  Knowing there are people who can generate better stuff than you but that it’s within your reach?   Totally internal drive?  You don’t need to do better, you just do what you do and see how it turns out?

I’ve covered this in other blog posts, but basically, I’m easily discouraged.  If I find that something I can create isn’t very good when compared to everyone else I’m prone to be discouraged.  It’s odd because I’m really not competative in the normal sense, so I’m not sure where it comes from.

Anyway, after looking around the interwebnets and seeing a lot of very impressive painted mini’s I was feeling discouraged.  But, and this is why it’s bad, I found a huge site with thousands of posted pictures (rated by the site members) and I don’t truly suck.  I’m about average.  I can cope with being about average and not sucking.

That’s something I can build on.

edit: Oh, and the site has a lot of display quality mini’s for sale (rather than gaming style mini’s which tend to be generic) and for some reason, the ones that are out of stock tend to be the half-naked female characters.  You’ll never guess the general demographic of mini painters ….

A month with WordPress

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It’s just over a month since I left Blogger and started running my own WordPress site.  I’m not new at hosting sites, I have several (some phpBB, various custom stuff, previous goes at CMS’s) and I’m comfortable with apache and mysql.

Here’s a few random thoughts about WordPress.

  • Easiest, cleanest and best ‘default settings’ install of just about any web-app I’ve installed.  Really impressed with the ease at which it goes on, and how it works out-of-the-box without having to worry about any settings.
  • Solid and robust plugin architecture.  It’s a constant battle when you host your own sites to keep the number of plugins down while still adding some stuff to the site which makes it easier to use.  WordPress handles the plugins really well, I’ve not had any conflict with each other yet and I’ve not had any cause any weird issues.  I’ve added one or two that I think really add some value and I’ve added a few that are just fun stuff for me (like Pull Quotes).  Overall I’m really impressed, and the automatic one click upgrade for plugins rocks.
  • Because WordPress is popular, there are a lot of templates and I was lucky enough to find one which is basically bullet proof and ideal.  I usually have a lot of problems with templates and CMSs, either having to do a lot of customisation or losing out on features because the templates are old.  This isn’t really a WordPress ‘good point’ since it’s the template designer who’s done the hard work, but I guess the popularity and template system in WordPress helps.
  • The actual process of writing posts is pretty easy.  Sometimes I find the editor a bit clumsy, and having to flick between HTML and Visual editing mode for the more complex post styles can be annoying.  The built in media manager seems powerful and I’m probably only just scraping the top of that but it does what I need (allowing me to upload images and then including them in posts without having to FTP them to my hosting provider and work out a URL).  Compared to Blogger it’s far more flexible and powerful.
  • I like the pages feature – I felt it was a major issue that Blogger didn’t provide a built-in method of including non-dated pages/posts.
  • Managing posts / tags and categories is a pain (in 2.6 you have to edit a post to change the category / tags).  I think they’re changing this in 2.7 or later.  But, a simple plugin fixed this for me anyway and made it a lot easier.  Blogger’s tagging / category feature was reasonably limited and although I don’t think I’m benefiting yet fully from WordPress’s tagging / category system it is far more flexible.  I love the tag to category and category to tag feature, which has saved me a lot of work in restructing the posts.
  • Overall page views are down a great deal since leaving Blogger.  This is party because of the (bizarre) popularity of my posts on my thumb pain / tendonitis and party because the site doesn’t rank as highly in Google for other random topics.  Generally, I don’t mind.  This is a personal blog for me to vent and my friends to read, so how highly it ranks on Google isn’t an issue.  I could have spent a lot more time with the redirection from the Blogger blog, sending visitors to specific posts on this site, but I decided it really wasn’t worth it to preserve the people reading about thumb pain.
  • I think i already blogged about the fantastic seamless import of Blogger content into WordPress.  If not, it was fantastic.
  • I like trackbacks.  I like sending pings when I link to another blog.  Part of the reason why I left Blogger was a lack of trackbacks / pings.  If I link to someone’s blog I want them to know it, so they feel like their blog is valuable and being read.  Even if they don’t display the pings / trackbacks on their site, it’s just a nice easy way of letting people know they’re being read.
  • I never did find a plugin that worked as well as the Blogger blogroll one (which shows the last post in an rss feed you choose, for each entry).  Which is a shame.  There are some, but they seem over complex.

Overall, I’m more than pleased with the move.  I feel more in control of how the blog looks (even though I’ve hardly touched the template I’m using) and I have direct and immediate access to the content (I back the mysql database tables up each night).  WordPress itself performs flawlessly, and there aren’t any major features that I wish it had.