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About parties, banners and invitations

Owen — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:24:18 +0000

The twins will be 1 in a couple of days time and we got a special banner made for their birthday. It’s great how you can find these things online, I believe my wife bought it from eBay. It cost a couple of pounds and the was over the moon that she could have something custom-made for her. You can get Wedding favours, Baptism invitations, custom-tailored clothes and anything you can imagine online. And it’s not usually hard to find. eBay is a great place to find stuff like that, but there are also other places.

It’s great to be able to find anything you can imagine!

Top Tweeters in the Isle of Man

Owen — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:40:20 +0000

Sherrilynne‘s put together another list of the top 10 Tweeters and Influencers in the Isle of Man. It’s an interesting ranking list that she’s been running for a few months and it’s been fun watching all the different account jostling for attention. It’s mighty good of her to be doing this every month as it helps give us all perspective and keeps us interested in Twitter

One of my Twitter accounts@MBAGeekDotCom is in there, but @OwenC isn’t quite there yet as it isn’t all that old (and so doesn’t have the benefit of all the network effects that older accounts have). Maybe I should stay up longer at night (though it’s not like I’m taking sleeping pills or anything like that, it’s just the babies that tire us out)

Maybe next month @OwenC will make the list

Carpal Tunnel?

Owen — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:38:09 +0000

You may have read from my recent tweets that I have a slight numbness in my left hand that might be due to carpal tunnel syndrome. Well, I’ve been reading about it online and there are a whole bunch of other things that can cause the same thing, but they’re mainly linked to some sort of nerve problem (whether inflammation or something similar). I did pull something in my shoulder at the gym a couple of weeks back and I’m wondering if it may be related. I’m not one to suffer from joint pain or anything like that, but this is getting really annoying now. I spend most of my day typing and it’s weird that my left hand feels different to the right!

After some insurance

Owen — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:26:48 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Hmmm I just noticed that my car (the Jaguar not the BMW) isn’t taxed at the moment as the tax expired at the end of September. The problem is that I need to show my car insurance to get my new tax disc. And my insurance doesn’t get renewed till next week. Bit silly really, but I think I’ll just wait till next week and tax it properly. I’m sure there’s an easier was to check if I have valid car insurance than having to dig up last year’s certificate (that’s assuming I still have it)

I suppose insurance is a pretty great innovation because it minimises the worry you may have about losing something or having it lost. You can insure practically anything nowadays, the other day I saw an advert by a company that specialises in insuring mens wedding rings, I wonder if that’s because they lose them more often then women do I wonder. Do you reckon you can get insurance for a website? There are quite a few risks you probably would like to mitigate against, including your site getting hacked and any unscheduled downtime you may have. I’m pretty sure you can insure against anything, but does anyone know of any website insurance?

Great lunch at the Velvet Lobster

Owen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:37:58 +0000

Went out with James and Nick for lunch today and we ended up at the Velvet Lobster. Was great but I noticed they didn’t have have Wifi or any sort of Internet access, which was a bit of a shame. With technologies like WiMax and satellite internet services, there really is no excuse, even if they couldn’t run a line to the shop (wasn’t really a problem in this place though).

Most of the coffee shops around here seem to have Wifi, but there’s also a couple of free places around. Nice to have the connectivity you need when you want it. You never know when you need to look up how many calories a tasty snack has, or that acne cure you promised someone.

WP Auctions, pool and other animals ..

Owen — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:08:36 +0000

I’m working on some enhancements to WPAuctions at the moment. The free version is available for download and everyone can have a shot at selling their stuff on their own blog. We’re working on a premium version now that will have some more features and ship with a number of new styles. Should be ready for launch next week.

The great thing about the plugin is it’s versatility. You can use it to sell anything you want, from pool cues to tadpoles. Look out for the new version, I’ll be outlining the new features here.

Speaking about pool cues, it just struck me precisely how long it’s been since I’ve played a game of billiards or pool. Not that I was an extremely good player, but I used to be able to hold my own. I think I managed to get a game in last year, but you could tell that I hadn’t played in years! Thing about pool is that there’s a lot of physics involved, balls colliding, bouncing off walls etc and the best way to get it right is to practice, practice and practice some more. I’m pretty sure I could get it back if I spent some quality time playing.

To tell you the truth, I prefer pool to snooker. Pool is the one where you have yellow and red balls, while snooker is the one where you have to keep score. Not there there is more skill involved, just that I find it a more enjoyable game.

What about you? Do you play pool?

Merry Xmas

Owen — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:21:23 +0000

I’m in Malta at the moment, so much time to post, but wanted to drop a quick "Merry Xmas" and wish everyone a prosperous New Year. Here’s a cute card I was sent:

See you all soon! Have a good one!

Back to my posting routine

Owen — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:44:47 +0000

So I’m back home following a great holiday in Finland. It was a strange experience having no land line, no mobile phone and no Internet for a whole week, but I seem to have survived. Instead I spent my time skiing, enjoying to quality family time and pulling Arthur along in his sled and throwing snowballs at Camille. Brilliant! I’ll upload some photos shortly.

My Xmas Present is here

Owen — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 22:10:52 +0000

Found a surprise on my desk this morning, my Christmas present arrived! I blogged about it before but for those who hadn’t seen the post, I bought myself a 2Gb MP4 playing watch. And today it arrived! Here’s the unboxing:

The box shows what’s on the inside:

Opening the box, the watch is arranged in a nice display holder.

Here’s the watch and all the bits it comes with. A driver disk (with software to convert movies to SMV), badly written instruction manual, a USB cable, a power adapter (which is pretty cool because you can just plug any USB cable into it), and headphones.

Here’s the edge of the phone showing the micro-USB connector.

Will play with it a bit, then blog some more, but so far I’ve already uploaded some photos and converted one movie to watch on it.

WordPress 2.3.1

Owen — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 20:27:01 +0000

Looks like there’s a new version WordPress around. Here are the highlights:

WordPress 2.3.1 is now available. 2.3.1 is a bug-fix and security release for the 2.3 series.

2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

Tagging support for Windows Live Writer

Fixes for a login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
their WordPress Address

Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries

Link importer fixes

Hmm, the biggest problem I have at the moment is the sheer number of blogs that need upgrading every time there’s a new release. I’ve come up with a rolling schedule for blogs that need updating, however, until I’ve finished my Project Management exam, I won’t be doing too many updates.