Year: 2011

2011 in review

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As with the past two years, I’m going to take a few moments of your time to review the goings on of the past twelve months.

Otters

January and February

January started with a trip to Blackpool – despite going to Blackpool regularly in 2010, this would be our only trip now that Christine and I both live in Yorkshire – to see friends and visit Blackpool Zoo again. We also had a flat-warming party with friends, despite it being almost two months after we’d moved in. Blogging wise, January was a quiet month – I only posted twice: a quick guide to restarting frozen iOS apps and my ninth blogiversary.

In February I managed 9 posts, or a post every 3 days, where I wrote about which web browsers university students use, the rise of Serco and the first in an irregular series of posts called Foursquare Thursday. Back in the real world, Christine and I had a day out at MOSI – the Museum of Science and Industry – in Manchester.

March

March brought the first of our two short breaks – four nights in Edinburgh. This included visits to Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh Zoo (you may have noticed that we both like visiting zoos), Surgeon’s Hall Museum, Museum on the Mound, Museum of Scotland and some casual sightseeing and shopping. Back at home, we saw the musical Spamalot in Bradford, and I replaced the hard drive in Christine’s laptop after some worrying startup problems.

On the blog, I made the first major change to the content management system for this site in over 8 years, abandoning Movable Type for Melody, which was a community fork of MT. This turned out to be the first of two major changes. Content-wise I wrote about enabling hardware acceleration in Firefox, which remains one of the most popular posts on the blog, and the start of the 30 Day Song Challenge, which saw me post about a new song (almost) every day right into April.

Hebden Bridge

April

April was quite a big month – we moved flats again, after encountering problems in the previous one. Thankfully we’ve had no such issues in this one and are still happy there 9 months on, which is good as moving twice in 5 months is not fun. Trust me. Especially when you have problems getting the phone line moved across, although to BT’s credit it’s working fine now and we have very good speeds, despite being in a small semi-rural town.

April also brought unseasonably good weather, so we made day trips to Sheffield and Hebden Bridge, as well as some time in York over the Easter weekend. I concluded the 30 day song challenge and stated why I was voting Yes in the AV referendum (remember that?).

May

Naturally, as we had a new flat, we needed another flat warming party, which came in early May, shortly followed by a trip to Manchester to see Uncaged Monkeys at the O2 Apollo. May was also my birthday, which was celebrated with a trip to the Victoria Theatre in Halifax to see Ed Byrne (who was painfully funny). And the second of our two short breaks saw us in London for four nights, staying in a Premier Inn in Collier’s Wood to keep costs down. This time, our itinerary included being in the audience for a recording of Jo Brand’s Big Splash at the Hackney Empire (free tickets), Covent Garden, the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL, watching Wicked at the Apollo Victoria Theatre, shopping on Carnaby Street, Camden Lock Market, the Natural History Museum, V&A Museum and a trip out to Greenwich.

On the blog it was another month. March’s move to Melody had left me underwhelmed so I made a much bigger change and switched to WordPress. 7 months on and Melody has only had one minor update, whereas WordPress has had two point releases with new features, and overall I’m much happier with WordPress.

June

In June, more day trips followed, including a visit to West Yorkshire’s only commercial vineyard (probably) at Leventhorpe and the newly opened Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, plus a weekend spent walking in the Yorkshire Dales. Christine and I also went with friends to see Avenue Q when it came to Bradford – I’d seen it a few years previously but Christine hadn’t. On the blog, there were several entries about changes to the blog and general tweaking as I adjusted to the new CMS.

Piglets at the Great Yorkshire Show

July

Despite having walked past a gym on the way to work every day since November, it wasn’t until July that Christine and I finally joined a gym. 5 months on and we’ve been generally going once or twice a week, although I’ve only been once this month (December) due to being either busy or unwell. It has improved my overall body tone, stamina and reduced my asthma symptoms, but hasn’t really shifted much of the excess fat around my waist. This Christmas’ excesses and lack of exercise will have only exacerbated that, so a new year’s resolution will be more time in the gym.

Also in July I started playing World of Warcraft again – well, I’ve been paying my subscription continually for five years but had lost interest – which included moving a couple of my characters to a new server. Whilst this has meant I’ve been able to play with more of my friends, unfortunately it happens to be one of the most popular EU servers with queues of up to 20 minutes to join at peak times. I also upgraded my Mac to Lion, WordPress 3.2 came out and I joined Google+. Offline, I went to the Yorkshire Show for the first time in a few years, and Christine and I went to Hebden Bridge to see Robin Ince do his Bad Book Club show, who we’d also seen in May at Uncaged Monkeys. I’d see him again in December too. Not that I’m obsessed or anything.

August

August, by comparison to the months that preceded it, was uneventful bar me being very busy at work, as usual for that time of year. We spent an afternoon at the Halifax Show, which was somewhat smaller than the Yorkshire Show but still good fun, and I went on a walk over the hills from Hebden Bridge to Marsden. In regular shoes, I might add – which led to some impressive blisters on my feet. This wasn’t deliberate – in the rush to leave I forgot to wear my hiking boots. I also started Geocaching, which I’m still finding fun although I’ve now found all of the caches in easy reach of Halifax, Sowerby Bridge and Bradford so future finds will have to be further afield.

September

As with last year, Christine and I started September by going to Bingley Music Live. This was the only major thing we did that month, as once again I was rather busy at work, although I managed a few further geocache finds. On the blog, I changed the theme to the one you see now. I’ll probably stick with it for now but may adjust the colour scheme sometime. On the job front, my contract at work was made permanent – and thus became the first permanent job I’ve ever had. After several years of uncertainty (see 2009), this is very welcome.

Roberts Park

October

And then came October. By far the biggest news of the month, and indeed the year, was that Christine and I got engaged. We’ve been together as a couple for two years, and it was just the right time to do it. The wedding is likely to be in 2013, and although we have talked about it we haven’t yet sorted a venue or a date. Those are jobs for next year.

October also brought a trip to Saltaire and Salt’s Mill, and quite a bit of drinking in Huddersfield, on a pub crawl and subsequently an Oktoberfest beer festival. I also upgraded my iPhone, now over a year old, to iOS 5.

November

In November, I went to a live gig and three comedy shows. The gig was for the band Within Temptation – arguably my favourite band right now, and their show in Manchester was absolutely amazing. It was their first UK tour for several years and this was one of only four nights in the UK, so as you can imagine it sold out weeks in advance – we bought our tickets around 6 months in advance. Thankfully there’s a chance they’ll be back this way next year; if you like their music, please go and see them as they put on an excellent show. As for comedy, I saw comedians Sarah Millican, Chris Ramsey and Milton Jones, all of which were very good. Chris Ramsey has done many gigs at the university over the past three years and is finally getting his deserved share of the limelight – I’d recommend seeing him if you get the chance.

I also attempted Movember, although cheated a little by growing a goatee beard, rather than just a moustache. It lasted until the evening of November 30th, and I’m glad to see the back of it. Christine started blogging again, this time about her recipes.

December

And to December. As mentioned I spent some time feeling ill – it was just a cold but it hit both Christine and I like a fully-loaded freight train and saw me taking a rare day off work on sick leave. My dad passed his Canon EOS 450D down to me, so I had a new camera to play with, which I took on a wet afternoon at Lotherton Hall Bird Garden. We also went back to Manchester to see Uncaged Monkeys again, which was great apart from a rather sub-standard stay in a Travelodge.

Christmas, as usual, was spent in York. Christine went back to Sowerby Bridge today, as she’s working; I’m here for another couple of days.

So that’s 2011. It’s been a good year on the whole – we visited some nice places, saw some brilliant shows and took our relationship to the next level. Later on, I’ll write about what 2012 will have in store.

SkyDrive vs Dropbox

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Update (April 2012): I have since written a new article comparing SkyDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive which is more up to date. You are best reading that guide, rather than this one, as some of the information about SkyDrive mentioned below is now wrong, although I’m keeping it here for reference.

Sunset Sky

If you’re like me, you’ll have a free Dropbox account for keeping files in sync between multiple computers, as well as having documents available on demand wherever there’s an internet connection, or on your mobile phone. Here’s my referral link. It’s a good, simple service that works well, and it’s free – although you can pay for more storage.

Microsoft has been working on a competitor called Windows Live SkyDrive which also offers integration with its Office Live suite of web apps. There’s now also an iPhone app (and presumably a Windows Phone app as well). Plus, with up to 25 GB of free storage, it starts to compare quite favourably with Dropbox. So, which is best?

Storage space

On the face of it, SkyDrive wins – 25 GB versus 2 GB for a plain vanilla free Dropbox account. However, it’s quite easy to get more space on Dropbox – you should be able to manage at least another 1 GB for free, and with a bit of effort even more – some have even taken to buying AdWords campaigns for around $20 to get up to 16 GB. And whereas Dropbox lets you use all of your space for anything, with SkyDrive, you can only use up to 5 GB to synchronise between computers using its Live Mesh service (more on that later). The other 20 GB has to be used via web uploads, iPhone app, Microsoft Office or Office Live. On this basis, it’s a draw.

Platform support

Dropbox has official clients for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, plus mobile clients for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. Its open API means that unofficial clients are available for further platforms as well. SkyDrive is available on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X Lion – i.e. not available for Windows XP or Linux; alternatively you can access specific documents in Microsoft Office, on the web or on a mobile app. And as yet, SkyDrive doesn’t work on Android or any Linux desktops, nor is there an open API for third-party developers to use.

Simplicity

Dropbox’s main draw is simplicity – there’s one folder that gets synced on all of your computers, and you can also access this folder online or on a mobile app. As mentioned, with SkyDrive you can only sync up to 5 GB; furthermore, those synced folders then cannot be edited by Office Live apps, so it’s a bit more complex. Plus there’s the whole confusion between the SkyDrive and Mesh products.

I could go on, but frankly having reviewed both services Dropbox wins purely by being simple and ubiquitous. SkyDrive does give you more space for free, and also integrates well with Hotmail if you use it, but it also adds a layer of complexity by only letting you use a portion of your allowance for syncing files between desktops. And because the un-synced portion doesn’t mount as a folder on your desktop, you can’t save files to it directly, so really it’s only useful for more long-term storage, or files that aren’t edited frequently. I’ll therefore be sticking with Dropbox.

Lurgified

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Posts here have been a little light of late because both Christine and I have been ill with some kind of bug that isn’t quite ‘flu but stronger than a cold. We both spent most of Tuesday asleep, and although I’ve managed to drag myself to work over the past couple of days I’m still not completely better yet.

In other news:

  • Travelodge saw my post last week and we had a productive chat about my experiences. I have edited the post accordingly, and will therefore withdraw my comments about avoiding them.
  • I updated this site to WordPress 3.3, which went almost flawlessly apart from it not deleting the .maintenance file from the root folder (the existence of this file basically shuts your site down). It’s easily solved though, and I’m liking the update – the new fly-out menus are very welcome and help to declutter the interface. There’s also drag and drop uploading of images, which sounds cool although I’ve yet to try it myself.
  • Now I just need to upgrade the other two blogs on here to 3.3. I’ve considered enabling multi-user mode and just having one install but I’m worried that it’ll be a little too restrictive for my needs.
  • I’ve been experimenting with DNSCrypt, a new tool from OpenDNS which allows you to encrypt your DNS requests in the same way that web pages are encrypted over SSL. It’s a ‘technology preview’ at the moment, with only a Mac client available which is at version 0.7. Unfortunately, when I tried it, it slowed down DNS requests significantly which made pages load more slowly – especially those such as Facebook where images are hosted on cloud servers on different subdomains. The client is also a bit of a pain to uninstall. It’s promising but I’d wait for version 1.0 if I were you.
  • Christine and I have booked tickets to see the mighty Alestorm next year. After seeing Within Temptation last month (who are amazing live – if you like that kind of music, get tickets if you can), and Alestorm next year, I’ll have seen 3 of my 4 favourite bands live. Just need to see Nightwish now, although they haven’t announced any UK dates for their next tour unfortunately.

The Demise of Gowalla

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On Monday, Gowalla announced that the two co-founders of Gowalla and several of its staff were moving to Facebook shortly and that the service would be closing sometime in January. Having formally launched at SxSW 2009, the site will therefore be gone before its third birthday.

This hasn’t come as much of a surprise for those following Gowalla over recent months. Foursquare has been the big elephant in the room, attracting more attention and having a much larger user base. For a while, Gowalla had a niche – the design of the web site and app was much better, and there were features like Trips (where you could create a list of venues, or ‘spots’ to visit) and virtual items that you could collect. But earlier this year version 4.0 of the app was announced, which removed several features, including items, and tried to focus on travel guides.

This was not well-received. For a while I’d been trying to use both Foursquare and Gowalla, as they both offered something different, but the 4.0 update put me off. Gowalla wanted to focus more on ‘stories’ – not just individual checkins taken in isolation, but say catching a plane, staying in a hotel, visiting attractions and then coming home as one story – or at least this appeared to be the intention. Sadly this wasn’t the reality – ‘stories’ were just individual checkins.

There have also been problems with the API, as mentioned in this blog post by Ben Dodson, which saw several third-party services turn away from Gowalla recently – especially since the 4.0 update. All the while, Foursquare was adding new features to their site, without removing anything or alienating its core user base.

So what now? Gowalla is presently still around and you can still download the app from the iOS App Store, but presumably new user signups will end soon. An export feature has been promised to allow you to retrieve your data but it isn’t live at the time of writing. Even though several of the developers are going to Facebook (the others have been sacked, apparently), it’s a ‘talent acquisition’ which means that Facebook is essentially buying out the staff and not the product, so any data you have on Gowalla will not be transferred to Facebook. This isn’t the first time Facebook has done this – box.io was one of the most recent services to be ‘aqhired’ by Facebook where the developers moved to FB and the service shut down. Still, if you think Facebook is an evil privacy-stealing flying purple people eater, then once you’ve exported your data you can delete your account.

While it’s sad to see Gowalla go, this is potentially good for Facebook, and its new profiles that are aiming to document your life as a story (as far as I can tell). Gowalla’s talent could well be very important in making this a good feature.

As for Foursquare? On the one hand, with Gowalla out of the picture, it has less competition, and could gain favour with ex-Gowalla users if it allows them to import their data and gain badges retrospectively. However, this new deal with Facebook could see Facebook Places resurgent, and while Foursquare has over 10 million users, Facebook has hundreds of millions. Quite what Facebook plans with respect to its location based features remains to be seen but this acquisition shows that it’s more serious about it than some of us thought.

My Travelodge Experience

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A photo of a Travelodge hotel in Manchester

Update (15th December): I have since spoken to Travelodge about this blog post, and had a good conversation about the points raised. We agreed that my experience was below what I should have expected and that I should be refunded; in turn, I have agreed to make some clarifications to this post. The points about poor customer service and the doors not being locked in particular were taken on board. I would like to thank the manager for getting back to me and taking my concerns seriously.

I don’t often rant about poor customer experiences but feel that I tell you about my night in the Upper Brook Street Travelodge in Manchester.

Firstly, some background – we were going to see Uncaged Monkeys at the Manchester O2 Apollo and needed to stay the night as it didn’t finish while 11pm. We’ve used a couple of other hotels in the area when going to gigs in Manchester but as this was nearby and the rooms were recently reduced to £15 in a sale, I booked it.

Upon arrival at about 6:30pm, the bloke at the reception desk didn’t seem particularly interested in us and directed us to the two self-service check-in machines, one of which was out of order. It walked us through checking in and tried to sell us the add-ons (breakfast, late checkout etc.) that we’d opted out of before when booking before dispensing the keycard and receipt. The receptionist also mentioned that the front door would be locked at 10pn and we’d need to to use our keycard to get in – which is expected really.

The gig started at 7:30pm, so we dumped our bags in the room, quickly changed and headed straight out. The gig was brilliant, and we arrived back at the hotel at 11:30pm. It was at this point that we realised that this hotel was, to be blunt, a bit rubbish.

Firstly, the outside door wasn’t locked, as we were previously told – anyone could get in, and this hotel is on a main road – although the intermediary door to the rooms was locked. In the bedroom, the heating was off, despite it being December and during a particularly cold spell. We found that only 1 set of towels had been provided, and 3 pillows – 2 on the bed and 1 spare. As we both normally sleep with 2, I went back to reception and requested an additional pillow and a towel set, and was told someone would bring them up in about 30 minutes – remember, it’s already 11:30pm now. The receptionist wrote a note and I went back to the room. At 12:15am, there having been no knocks on the door and nothing left outside our room, I went to sleep. No-one knocked overnight as far as I can tell and in the morning there was nothing waiting for us outside the door.

The blocked-out windows at the Travelodge

In the room, there were no bedside tables – just a small alcove in the walls on each side big enough for a mobile phone or a couple of inhalers. There were also no shelves in the shower for shampoo, and no bathmat – meanwhile whilst having a shower the floor would end up very wet because the shower tray wasn’t so much a tray as basically a flat surface.

The photo shows the delightful view out of our window – or lack thereof – there was some sort of superstructure on the side of the hotel which was covered with blue plastic panels. This was due to us being on one side of the hotel with privacy screens – a condition of the planning permission as it’s next to a residential area. Considering we were in a £15 room this is understandable.

Anyway, we checked out. The receptionist, who may also have been the duty manager, asked us how our stay was and we mentioned some of the problems. His answer implied that – get this – they only provide one set of towels in each room, even though two adults had booked to stay in it, and we were supposed to request an additional set. This would have been fine (and understandable, providing two sets when not necessary would mean more washing and higher costs) but it was never explained to us, and we didn’t have time to sort it out earlier in the evening. And after requesting them, to have our request forgotten about was adding insult to injury.

[A couple of paragraphs removed].

This isn’t the first Travelodge I have stayed in – in the past 18 months, I have stayed at Travelodges in Edinburgh and Liverpool and, on the whole, I was reasonably satisfied with them.

As for alternatives – in the past we have stayed at the Ibis Hotel on Charles Street and the Holiday Inn Express on Oxford Road – the latter of which I would especially recommend. It’s a bit pricy at £71 per night (although may be cheaper if there’s an offer on, I think we paid about £50 last time) but the room was really nice, and far more was included in the price, including a hearty buffet breakfast. Similarly I’ve been impressed with my stays with Premier Inn but haven’t yet been at their hotels in the area.

New camera!

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Canon EOS 450D

I’m now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 450D (or EOS Digital Rebel XSi). Like last time, it’s my Dad’s old camera – he’s upgraded to an EOS 600D and so he’s passed his 450D to me. In turn, my old EOS 300D will be going to Christine who presently has a small Nikon point-and-shoot camera.

So far the main benefits have been higher resolution images – 11 megapixels, rather than 8 – more intuitive use of advanced features like adjusting the focal length (since it actually makes decent use of the LCD screen), larger LCD screen, lighter weight and use of the more ubiquitous SD cards rather than the big old CompactFlash cards.

I’ve taken a few photos with it but with it being winter and therefore generally rubbish weather they’re not the greatest pictures. I’ll link some tomorrow though.

A year out of the city

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Rochdale Canal

It’s now been a year since Christine and I moved in together in Sowerby Bridge. It’s also therefore a year since I moved out of Bradford, where I’d spent most of the previous 8 years. We like the town – it’s small, relatively quiet (apart from the main street) and full of interesting pubs and restaurants, of which some we still haven’t been to yet. It’s also an easy commute for both us to get to walk, and has good public transport links with regular trains and buses, so we haven’t felt isolated.

Although the first flat we moved into didn’t work out, we’ve had no problems with the second one that we moved into in April – and it ended up being cheaper, larger and generally nicer than the first one, all things considered. We’re hoping to stay in the flat for some time to come, after which we’ll probably look at buying a house rather than renting as we do at the moment.

This year has also seen us build upon our relationship, going from being 65 miles apart and generally only seeing each other at weekends, to living together and ultimately becoming engaged last month. Living together has worked well – Christine’s a great cook, and so whilst she does most of the meals I’m happy to do other bits of housework.

So here’s to another year of living together.

Movember

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I haven’t blogged about it much but I’ve decided to passively participate in Movember by growing some facial hair. Rather than settle for a simple moustache, I’m instead going for a goatee beard, and have been posting photos on Twitter every 5 days – day 15 being last night.

This is the first time I’ve ever intentionally grown a beard – in the past it’s generally been because I couldn’t be bothered to shave – and is now the longest period I’ve gone without going through the customary removal of facial hair from around my mouth. Christine was consulted on the decision to grow a beard, in case you were wondering.

While there’s still another couple of weeks to go, come December 1st it’s highly likely that the beard will come off. It’s proving to be an interesting experiment but I prefer the clean shaven look; not at least as it makes shaving easier since you can just shave right across your face and not have to avoid certain areas. There’s also the general build-up of crumbs and loose hairs in it, and the fact that the hairs get soggy when you drink.

Also, I’m not doing Movember for charity, but others are – if you know someone who is, chuck a few pennies their way, will you?

Making a Mess in the Kitchen

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Food

Christine, the amazing woman that I’m planning to marry sometime in the near future, also happens to be a very good cook, and luckily for you, she’s decided to start a recipe blog called Making a Mess in the Kitchen. I’m hosting it, and it sits in its separate installation of WordPress (I had considered enabling Network mode on WordPress, since I now have 3 WordPress installs on here, but decided it was too much effort).

There’s a few recipes, and some other general cookery-ness, on there now, and I’m sure she’ll continue adding to it as she continues to experiment new things. I’ll just keep on washing up after her.