The Canal
Been down by the canal over the weekend taking advantage of the nice weather but mainly to escape Microsoft Word and my placement report. On my travels yesterday I saw quite a lot of wildlife including 4 Herons, here is a picture. 
Out and About
As the summer is pretty much here my flatmates and I have taken to our bikes and adventured out in to the surrounding areas to take advantage of the pleasant weather. I’ve been surprised by what we have come across. As it is quite near, we headed to Summerfield Park a stones throw from my house, I’d not been there before in the past for walks I tended to go around Edgbaston Reservoir instead. I was amazed at how big it was and instantly thought I would bring my Nitro Buggy here next time it was in working order. We had a nose about and quickly found a small path leading off which we ventured down it. It must have been an old railway line as a lot of them have been converted into paths I believe.
It was pretty cool, we actually ended up somewhere near Harboure not sure where but we ended up coming back via the reservoir.
We’ve been out and about a few times and the second we stumbled across another park near Asda, its amazing how much you don’t notice when your driving around in the car. This park had a play areas for kids, the standard things, swings, slides etc but it had something else, something different, it had an outdoor gym. It was pretty cool, we had a quick workout that trained various muscles. The machines where quite clever as they mostly required your body weight as a weight for you to pull. I was impressed, I’d say this sort of thing makes taxes worth paying but I suspect this was funded from something else as it was cover in Olympics graphics and logos.
Google Street View
I’m not sure weather to be concerned about the privacy issues that Google’s Street view brings about or to embrace it with open arms. I have to say it is pretty awesome that you can now pretty much view any street in the UK for free. Stuff that is free is always awesome. I can view my work place online now, my home, my old home, my other home and pretty much anything else, I’ve even found my car (twice). I have to say it is pretty cool and quite useful I suspect, I can’t imagine people actually using this with to rob your house, I can’t see how it would benefit, what stops them from going to your street and checking it out in person.
It’s a pretty cool tool. I can remember using it when I first heard I had an interview in Birmingham, about a year ago, and using to find out how to walk to the office and finding out that Google didn’t drive down the street the office was on, annoying! It was pretty useful though using it to view the City and areas that I thought about moving too, saves me driving there and checking it out myself.
All in all I think its pretty awesome!
Linux Hosted
Over the weekend with some holiday time I’ve been back to my home town for a little break from city life. I went back Thursday night and came back to Birmingham very late monday night/early Tuesday. I was late as I had randomly ended up in Leicester with one of my good friends and we had gone to see Alice in Wonderland, which was pretty good.
It had been quite an eventful but great weekend, saw the family and friends, witnessed a car crash in which the offending party hopped up and drove off and moved my website to my linux host. I’m trying to make room for another server so I’m consolidating various services so I can free up an IP address but a new virtual machine running exchange2010.
The move didn’t go as smoothly as I had planned, the application I used to create a dump of the DB has filled it with random text doubling the file size and caused lots of issues when I went to load it up. I instead reverted back to using MySQLDump on the Windows command line console.
Didn’t have many issues with the new setup, Apache 2.0 didn’t like the previous .htaccess and reported an “Internal Error Page” was quite annoying as I didn’t know what was going on until I checked the logs. After loading up the proper .htaccess file I just needed to enable mod_rewrite using the following command.
a2enmode rewrite
I’m pretty happy everything is working now, one thing that did annoy me running WordPress in ISS 6.0 is that the WordPress iPhone apps did not work but now that do as I’m back on linux so look out for a few more picture uploads.
Just one more site to move and I should be able to setup Exchange2010.
Birmingham Snow
Its mostly melted now but I hear more may be on the way for new years! I took this a week ago in Birmingham from the office. Must have snowed since but I can only remember the snow from 2007.
[singlepic id=17 w=320 h=240 mode=watermark float=center]
A Weekend of Work
Well its been a very busy week. I went home on the weekend, back to Newark, for a couple of reasons. The first being that I was helping my sister move in to her university accommodation at Sheffield Hallam. She is a fresher and has a very nice room which is bigger than mine was at Staffs and has a double bed, OK its not a double but its bigger than a single. However all was not amazing as her shower area looked like it had not been cleaned in a while. Other than that it seemed a very nice place to live for a year.
The second reason for going back home was to Read more
