When I left education at the age of 18, I spent some time doing odd jobs, picking books in a warehouse, cleaning shelves, and working on the checkouts at Sainsburys during the Christmas period. Clearly this wasn’t going to be enough to pay the bills and live on, so I got a job with Norwich Union, doing pensions admin. 3 years later, I was still there, but a move to Birmingham pushed me out of that job. To make the transition easier, I took a new job in pensions again, working on the sales side of the business later.

Cut to 20 months later and I was being made redundant from my job. It was 2008 and the economy was on its way down. My employer cut me, and everyone else in my office, loose. I took this as a chance to make real change of career, and managed to get a job in IT, an industry I wanted to work in for years, since before Norwich Union. I took a contract job doing installations for the NHS, and did that for 4 months before getting a more permanent job doing desktop support for a private firm. I did that for 2 years, the first 18 months of which were rolling 3 and 6-month contracts. During this time i had pursued other jobs, in case my manager decided I was superflous.

And that takes us to today. Next week I start my last full week of work for this company before I leave to pursue a similar job, in an industry and role that I think could hold a lot for me. I’ll be joining a new company as their first technician, performing Mac desktop, laptop and server installs for their various clients. Needless to say, I’m very excited. I’ve been a Mac user since 2004 (2003 if you count my first iPod) and working mostly with Windows up until now, I see how painful it is to work with, so I’m very excited that my new job is working with and support Macs.

I honestly cannot wait to get started. This is a great chance for me to gain formal training with Apple and experience working with them, as well as having a hand to shape the future of the company, and define my own career path. Not only will I be doing on-site installations for clients, but I’ll be building the backend systems to help improve the workflow, creating predefined images for companies to use, making workflows and scripts to help administer and integrate with existing systems.

All this starts in October. I’m taking some time off between jobs, using up some annual leave, and going to see my folks for my birthday, and just relaxing and unwinding between careers.

I’m really grateful for the chances I’ve been given by the people I’ve worked with, and have learnt a lot from them, and hopefully taught them a few things too.

I’m hoping this will allow me more time to blog here. I’m also working on a new project, which I hope to have launched in the next month or so. It could turn into something, or nothing. But its probably worth the time investment. So stay tuned for more.

I can’t believe its been so long since I updated. What has changed? Well besides from not doing nearly as much photography as I hoped to continue doing, my job became permanent, we’re looking for a place to live and more importantly,

I got engaged!

I proposed to Katie on her birthday after a lovely tapas dinner at Bar Estilo with her parents. I got down on one knee, and just asked her straight. She was shocked, surprised, felt faint and needed to lie down.

We celebrated the following day with a champagne lunch at Selfridges in Birmingham, then relaxed for a long weekend off, as we told our friends and family.

Needless to say, we’re both very happy and have begun the long process to plan our wedding.  We think it will be next year in late August or early September but need to find a venue before we can set a definite date.

I wanna say thanks to all those who wished us well on Twitter and sent us engagement cards.  I will try and do some progress blog posts as things go on, maybe share some wisdom with those reading this.

…I started this project on Flickr and it finally comes to an end. Its been fun. Its been hardwork. I’ve been late uploading, sometimes very late.

And this is the final piece

So how about some stats for the project?

Started on 2 January 2009
Finished on 10 February 2010
365 photos (obviously)
61 in black and white
26 outside
5 in New York, New York
Took over 1600 photos
7 with Katie
4 with mirrors

I had a lot of fun. Hope others did too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love iTunes, and the iTunes app on my iPhone, but it bugs me that I can only download pocasts that are a) in the iTunes Directory, and 2) when iTunes has scanned the feed and detected a new episode. Sometimes that takes a while, sometimes its a day, but either way, I get impatient.

I’ve read a lot about RSS Player as a replacement but unfortunately this either isn’t available right now, or is not available outside the USA. But, I did come across DriveCast [iTunes Link]. Its basically the same thing, but with some benefits.

After paying the minuscule sum of 59p for this app and installing it, when you first launch it, you’re asked to login with your existing details, or are redirected to Drivecast.eu to sign up. As a new user, I went and registered, and confirmed my account with the auto-sent email verification. All pretty standard stuff.

Now, the interesting features. If you login to DriveCast.eu in your web browser, you’re presented with a nice 3-pane view. The top is a menu bar, the left, is effectively a source list, leaving the main pane for what ever you’re viewing. To get going, just hover over Add, and click Add Podcast. You’re given the option to choose one of the 20 suggested podcasts, or clicking Other to add your own. Once you’ve done that, you choose the syncing settings, how many episodes to download, title, description, etc. Then you’re good to go.

Back on the iPhone, after logging in, your device syncs with your account, and gives you a list of all the new episodes available. Clicking one gives you show info, a Play button, and a download button. Hit that and it immediately comes down, whether it be on Wifi or 3G, which means it conveniently steps over that iTunes 10MB limit they impose on 3G.

I’ve just started downloading a few shows, and it happily downloads while you listen to other shows. Of course, if you quit the app, the downloads stop until you relaunch it.

Back on the website, you can create playlists of shows and edit and delete existing show information. You can also upload files from your home PC to sync across to your device.

As well as that, you can set up recordings from your favourite internet stream. Select a country, language and pick a station, in my case I get a list of all the BBC channels. Then proceed to set up the date, and time of the show, set repeating times and you’re done. That show can be recorded and downloaded to your device at any time.

The last feature I’ll mention is that DriveCast is not just for iPhone and iPod Touch’s. They also offer a small client you can download and copy to any USB drive, be it a flash drive or USB based MP3 player, allowing you to use any PC and internet connection to download new shows. They also offer Blackberry integration, syncing podcasts to your Blackberry via USB, a client for Nokia N800 and N810′s, a RSS feed to your DriveCast library to manage your podcasts in your other chosen podcatcher, as well as Mac OS X and Linux clients, so you can get your podcasts anyway you want

So far, I have only found one issue. When viewing episode details, it doesn’t parse HTML code correctly, so you see all the paragraph markers and break points, among other things.

Aside from that minute point, this is an excellent alternative to the iTunes app, and a real bargain at 59p. Worth checking out if you’re struggling with iTunes, or to run on any other device.

As I browse the website, I notice more features I like. Definately a site worth a look if internet streams and podcasts are your thing

DriveCast.eu

iTunes Download Link

Developers Website

I’ve been looking around for jobs recently and made the decision I need to improve my appeal to employers.
I currently have the CompTIA A+ and N+ qualifications, which don’t seem to count for much around these parts. So, the next best step, seems to be to aim for the Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA). For me, its only 3 exams to take, 2 server and 1 client, and I think it’d make sense for that to be Windows 7.

I’m hoping that after that, or perhaps even during, I might get the opportunity to study for the Apple exams, aiming to become a Certified Professional at some point.

Hopefully I can be less slack about studying this time around, since it took me over a year to do my A+ and about a year to do my Network+. Suggestions welcome!

This came to me earlier today and I need to share my dislike. I remember a particular program I used to have on my Mac that scanned your disk and gave you a report of free space, and where your disk space was going, showing large files, and grouping file types so you can see how big your MP3 collection is.

At some point during the course of development, there was an upgrade to this freeware application, which I dutifully installed looking forward to some random bug fixes I would never encounter.

What I did encounter was that the developer had suddenly decided that he wanted to charge for this application, and so pushed out an update to all versions to make it shareware. So the next time I fired it up, I was prompted for a serial number and asked to purchase a copy of the software.

I’ve got nothing against buying software. I’ve bought a Tiger, Leopard and will buy Snow Leopard, I bought VMWare Fusion cos I had a need for it, and I bought SuperDuper cos it was a great bit of software. But I knew going into that that I’d eventually have to pay for the software. It wasn’t sprung on me.
I do have something against being forced to pay for something which I was previously getting for free, just cos the dev had a change of heart. Especially to do it in such a sneaky way as a software update. If you want to charge for your product, then release a new paid only version, stop development and updating the old version, and do a clean cut over. Offer new features and support for the product, but don’t sneak in through the backdoor and demand money.