Before we went on holiday, Georgie and I went out for a delicious Mexican dinner at Coriander on Richmond Hill in Bournemouth. We shared Carne para Dos and it was amazing. Add in San Miguel on draught and 10% student discount and you have the recipe for an excellent evening out. For the brave, they have an extensive range of tequila's too.
After 10 days on the Costa del Sol with Georgie & Meg I've returned a rather nice shade of brown. As yet there is no skin peelage to report either: bonus. Lazying in the sun with San Miguel beer a plenty and lots of lovely nosh has impacted on my bulk to the tune of 2 kg. Ever one for excuses though I'd attribute the gain to my daily exercise routine of the odd length of the pool and lots of head-tennis (keepy uppy with a plastic ball) with Georgie.
I had lots of post upon my arrival back home, including photos of grad ball, footy tour and other random uni nights. Some of these are on Photo CD so a selection should be appearing soon. I've also got a new 60GB Firewire external hard disk up and running with my iBook, though I'll bore you with the details of that soon enough.
This evening I'm off the the annual Old Bournemouthian's Association Dinner at the Royal Bath Hotel, Bournemouth with old school buddies Rich Sims & Sam Spreadbury, who haven't seen in over 2 or 3 years I think! Then tomorrow I'm heading up to Guildford for a belated birthday 'quiet drink' with my uni buddies.
On the jobs front, I've got a telephone interview with MyEmployer, Winchester, next week and hopefully Panasonic Mobile will still want to interview me even though I couldn't make their first invitation last Wednesday.
The web's most comprehensive search engine, Google is 5 today. The google zeitgeist provides a interesting snapshot of Internet surfing habits and trends in browsers usage. Personally I can't remember the last time I used a search engine other than Google, it's tight integration with Safari and it's SnapBack feature enables fast and efficient, and most importantly accurate navigation.
At the moment my website comes in at number three on a search, but whether I would really want to come top in a search for David Jones is another matter. After all there are 10,000 people in the UK alone who share my name. Commoner.
After an evening of head scratching i finally managed to install Gallery on bruv's webspace here. Performance over VNC was hampered by the upstream at his end but by reducing the color set to 256 it was just about bearable.
Hopefully he will find more use for it than simply to advertise what he had for dinner this evening.
Last night I tried setting up Moveable Type & Gallery on my brother's force9 webspace, which comes free with his broadband account. Access to the ISP's CGI servers is locked down though, preventing FTP, ssh and telnet access from remote computers that are not connected to their ISP network.
So this evening we are going to try to set up his Powerbook with a VNC server so that I can connect to his machine, view his desktop and control it remotely via a VNC client. I've downloaded VNCThing and Share My Desktop, tested it on our home network with my iBook and dad's G4 PowerMac and it works a treat. The only complication might come when Mark has to set up his router to port forward the VNC port to his machine. However, according to Scooter Boi it might not be too hard:
Scoot: okay, ports 5800 and 5900 need to be forwarded
Jonah: cool, cheers matey!
Scoot: that is the "base" port numbers for vnc
Scoot: 5800 is the authentication port, and 5900 actually does the business
Jonah: on the server software we have, you can specify a port eg 5901
Jonah: so do you have to forward that port and (port-1000) too?
Scoot: vnc doesn't mind what it works on, but you need the other port to go with it
Scoot: yep -1000 is the figure!
Then while he is doing his huge ironing pile I can get on with setting up his website, allowing him to upload photos and blogs from his New Zealand holiday with Sarah. :)
How long do you reckon it would take for a postcard to reach the UK from New Zealand? How about an envelope? Disregard your experience with our country's world-class Royal Mail service and take a guess. Two weeks? A Week? 5 days? 'The postcard will take longer'?
Think again. Two items post-marked Tauranga (quite a way from Auckland or any major cities) 8th Sept arrived this morning. I'm amazed. And this from a country where as Sarah writes 'Lifestyle here is great, people just 'cruise' along in a friendly manner'. Somehow I doubt the reverse route will be as efficient.
Sarah's latest antics include skiing up on 'Mount Doom' (I kid ye not!) where all the tracks have names like 'traverse of death' & 'slope of fear'. Cool. And this on the same day that she had gone for a morning run on the beach in the warm sun. Sounds like she's having an excellent time - I'm dead jealous!
I've been scanning in some old photies this evening and uploading a few to my Gallery. Until I can afford more hosting space on my account, it'll just have to be a really limited selection unfortunately. There's photos from Placement, UniS and Football tour to Prague. You can also add comments to the photos, thanks to the rather excellent software which powers it.
No news on the job front today, hopefully Panasonic will have a look at my CV tomorrow and set the ball rolling.
I've just uploaded a handful of my favourite photies from Grad Ball (courtesy of Jimbo and Special) into my Gallery. Limited size at the moment due to restriction of space on my 34sp account, but I'm hoping to resolve that shortly with the help of my brothers 250Mb of free space!
Enjoy :)
Curious to see if a summer away from academia had rotted my brain, I just took an IQ test at this site. It was a 15 minute, 30 question test and a couple of questions stumped me but I was happy with my results:
Your IQ score is: 144
Average score of all test takers: 100.24
You are in the 97th percentile
Your grade ** High 2.27% **
Standard deviation: 20
Go on, you know you want to try it yourself.
After a further tweak of my CV yesterday I re-uploaded it to jobsite.co.uk, jobtrack.co.uk and gis-a-job.com (see links), where agencies can search for potential recruits by skills, experience, etc. After originally posting my CV earlier this summer I had a few enquires from agencies but nothing much came of them, and today's first call about a low-level programming job at SSTL (On UniS campus of all places) wasn't really what I was looking for either.
This afternoon I had a call from STS Recruitment who had found my CV on planetrecruit.com, a sister site of jobtrack.com. They had a couple of jobs they were looking to fill, with NEC (who I turned down a few weeks back) and a very similar role with Panasonic Mobile, in Thatcham near Newbury. So they are putting me forward for Panasonic and seem enthusiastic about my prospects given the offer from NEC, my experience and my CV overall. Fingers crossed I might be able to get an interview arranged before I head off to Spain on Tuesday.
So for anyone out there in a similar position, I'd definitely recommend refreshing or at least re-uploading your CV to the various job directories. In a competitive job market making your CV float to the top of search results is critical it seems. Old CV's are often assumed to be out-of-date or the candidate inactive, even if they are only a few weeks or months old.
Whitecross got back to me this morning to say they're looking for 3-year Computer Science graduates, rather than other disciplines from courses which had only some computer science content. Their Loss. At least they got back to me promptly. They also said there was no chance for gaining commercial awareness or project management skills, so maybe it's for the best.
Had another good weekend at Georgie's and played the second half for the UniS Oldboys on Saturday. Unfortunately we lost 4-2 but it was good to be playing again, although I was quite alarmed to get cramp after only 45 mins! Time for some more cycling and running this week obviously.
Back to the job directories...
During my time at UniS barely a week went by without popping into the Sports Office, either to find out the latest footy fixture news or to rib Dee and Kris about their latest drunken antics. Well both Kris and Dee have moved on these days, Kris to scummy Southampton and Dee to scummier Pompey! :P
Kris is now a full-timer with BBC Radio Solent where his duties include following the Cherries all over the country and attempting to provide some sort of commentary, a job he's done for over a year as a freelancer. After seeing a short TV spot on BBC South last week (featuring the man himself) I did a bit of exploring and found his regular column, where this week he's talking about his commentating adventures with ex-bournemouth player John Williams. He used to be a bit of a legend back in the late 80's when I started going to see Bournemouth with my dad, and I really should take Kris up on his offer of a place 'in the jump-seat' on a match day. It sounds like Willo would like to hear some stories about Kris... and I've got plenty of those.
As for Dee, I don't know whether she's still looking for a job like me or not. 'Our time will come', he says optimistically.
In response to Jimbo's trackback I'd like to point out that the term 'Speedo' has been used instead of 'Cycle Computer' for yages in my household! There's even a picture of my 12 year old ancient device here!
And it takes a CR2032 :-P
This evening I found the first job in ages that's really been up my street. I noticed several variations of an advertised role but wanted to know a bit more about it to convince myself it was worth applying for. As ever, Google came up trumps, and I was soon browsing the company's own extended advert for the role. And hey presto I was able to bypass the middleman and apply directly with an emailed CV. The role actually sounds really interesting, especially compared to the generic programming job adverts I've got sick to death of reading over the past 3 months. The company seems to be a good place to work too, even though it is in beautiful Bracknell.
They are looking for computer science graduates, but are willing to consider other disciplines with relevant experience. Well with five years experience of C - 12 months of that commercial and on Linux - and a hat-full of modules in the software field (all at first-class honours) I'm sure they will at least consider me.
To make sure of that though I had to ensure my CV was absolutely spot-on for this role. When I rewrote my CV in June I stripped out most of the detail about my course, and put in some references to the my MDDP masters project which had almost sod-all to do with my course. So I've re-written it again and replaced the MDDP guff with a bullet-list of software modules and my results. Hell I hadn't even listed the languages I have under my belt. For generic IT roles though this wasn't important, but the roles I'm looking at more recently are very specific about their requirements.
Reviewing my 'Career Aspirations' section I realised that it wasn't really selling myself for the type of Software Engineering role that Whitecross are offering. It was a bit wishy washy to be honest. So that's had an overhaul too and I'm much happier with it.
So with cautious optimism I emailed my CV with a short cover note. I'll probably re-post my CV to the various Job Directory sites to see if it I get some more feedback from agencies.
Once again those fingers are crossed. I've put my CV online here and I'd appreciate any feedback. click on 'have a word' below.
Despite having had no opportunity to pre-season train this summer, I've been drafted into the UniS Oldboys Reserve's opening game of the campaign. Upon finding this out yesterday I thought I better dust off my bike and do a few miles before the weekend. I broke myself in easily with a ~6mile ride from my house down to the R. Stour at Throop, across to the airport and back via the roads. A 35min ride was hardly busting a gut but I'm so used to using a speedo to pace myself, I realised I would have to get a replacement battery.
So tomorrow morning I'm going to retrace the route and find out how far it was, and to beat the last time. Hopefully the weather will be as good as today - it has less than two weeks to get awful before my birthday (like it is always guaranteed to do). Then in the afternoon I'm off to Weybridge for the weekend to see Georgie. Pirates of the Caribbean is lined up for Friday night and hopefully the England game Saturday night.
KO for the Old Boys Reserves vs Pyrford Reserves at Fortress Varsity is at 3pm Saturday, I hope they're not relying on the young blood to be uber-fit!
After a significant amount of time and head scratching, i solved the following problem with some PHP code. Read on if you like.
Whoever is first to spot the error of my (or rather someone else's) ways can have a beer!
I'm trying to use a bit of php unashamedly chaffed from a chap called Tim.
The script references a file which stores a recent list of itunes songs (in kungtunes.php) and he suggests two different snippets of code to embed either this list in a page or only the most recently played. The second snippet which embeds the most recent song works fine, as shown in the bottom of the sidebar on the left. The second one (which lists them all) however produces a php parse error ("unexpected '\' at line 511" or whatever). The php code is shown on the link above, towards the end.
As i say there's a beer in it!
{edit} not any more there isn't! {/edit}
After weeks of jumping through hoops it turns out that MyEmployer had ignored my desire to be based in Winchester and were trying to recruit me for a role in Manchester or Macclesfield. So now they're forwarding my CV to Winchester where the whole process will start again. I am less than amused. On a positive note each of their UK divisions work out of all the offices so in theory the same sort of roles are available at each location.
Meanwhile a job I forwarded my details for last night with an agency is with AMS, based either in New Malden or Portsmouth (where my old school mate Jason works for them). Its a graduate scheme position but sounds a bit more flexible than NEC (who the agent was surprised I had turned down, because there are so few grad jobs available).
My fingers are growing tired of being crossed.
While I'm writing this my iBook is updating my replacement T68i with all my contacts and calendars while it sits in my pocket. Apple's iSync is the dog's danglies, syncing my contacts, calendars and even bookmarks between my .Mac account, iBook and phone via Bluetooth. It can even sync everything onto an iPod but that toy will have to wait until I've got a job.
The replacement T68i is running firmware version R6A012, which isn't the latest but I could still roll into Carphone Warehouse and get it fully up to date. It's not a brand new phone though (although it looks it): the test menu registers 10,990 clicks and the total call time is a shade over 10 hours. But at least the speaker works fine, and after 7 I'll hopefully be able to hear Georgie on the other end of the phone okay!
After a second call to Orange they have at last acknowledge that my 11-month old T68i is faulty and they are sending me a replacement! Yay :)
The CS rep was much more helpful than the last guy who tried to blame it on local basestations being down for maintenance, and didn't even bother testing the phone to see if it was faulty. This time round they performed a remote test on the phone and diagnosed a fault right away, and tomorrow evening a replacement phone will be arriving on my doorstep. Result. Well done Orange, you've just improved the odds of me upgrading with you in a month's time rather than moving over to three whose range of phones still leave a lot to be desired. But then some of you know that I have a particular dislike for NEC these days!
Knowing that the firmware on my phone is over a year old I wondered what version the new handset would have. A little research reminded me that i could access the hidden service menu by using the following key combo after unlocking: >*<*<<* (where < and > are directions on the joystick). Within this I was able to find out the version of the firmware (R2E006). Comparing this against a list of known firmware releases I was flabbergasted that there have been at least 10 updates in the past year:-
R1AXXX
R1BXXX
R2AXXX
R2B025
R2E006
R2FXXX
R3AXXX
R3C001
R5C001
R5D007
R6A012
R6B001
R7A005
R7A013
R8A015
I was more than relieved to learn that a niggly bug with the T68i was fixed with the R5C release, whereby text messages from alphanumeric (eg. Oranges "Email alert" mechanism) rather than numeric (07xxx xxxxxx) senders would not be acknowledged properly, resulting in two or more copies being sent. So fingers crossed this has been fixed in the phone that I'll receive tomorrow!
On another bright note, the latest software extends the number of games from 8 to 11! I've made note of my Erix high score: (218,562 on Easy setting) - stop laughing at the back! Also logged my joystick moves counter (158,385) and total call time (11X:35:49). The X is a weird non-ascii character so I guess it should read ~1000 hours. Wow!
I didn't get the tour name 'Uber Geek' for nothing you know!
It turns out the Richmond job has more Electronics than Software, so that's the end of that one. However MyEmployer got back to me late Friday afternoon to invite me for an office interview, which I'm trying to arrange for later this week.
It's good to see Liverpool back to their best after a poor start to the season.
Time to wish my buddies good luck! Got-a-job Jimbo MEng starts at Consult Hyperion today on the Research Park in Guildford, and tomorrow Special has his MRes Project Presentation/Viva. All the best lads!
