Life of Wiley

I received an e-mail from Tripadvisor today indicating that they’ve just released their “2008 Travelers’ Choice Destination Awards” (pdf).
The list is broken out into the top 100 in the world and then the top 25 in the various global regions. It seems I’m a very well travelled man as I have been to 24 of the world’s top 100 destinations! At the end of this month I’ll be going to two more places I’ve never been before; Dallas, Texas and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sadly neither of those are in the top 100.

It’s been a long time since I participated in a 10K race (I don’t say competed because I don’t enter to win). But I was persuaded to enter the Watford 10K last Monday which, in hindsight, was a little foolish considering I hadn’t done any training for it save for a few laps around Euan’s football training ground the Saturday before. Still, all things considered I didn’t do so bad; I finished the race, and in under an hour too, at 55:37.

I’ve started fiddling around with StumbleUpon and came across this little gem. I hope you like it too.

The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun

Found via dvorak.org/blog

Help construct a free online postcode database complete with geo-location information. New Popular Edition Maps are doing the building all you need to do is add postcodes you know about by clicking on the maps. There’s no worry about divulging where you live as there’s no information kept about who has submitted what postcode. The catch is that the maps are 1940s maps so your streets may not have been built yet!

Found via Tom Coates.

Technorati Tags: uk, postcodes, geo-location

So there’s been quite a lot going on that’s meant I’ve not had time to post here in a while. Well not until this week anyway.

The main thing has been that I’ve been working very hard on a new project…to get a new job! I’m pleased to say it has now been completed and I’m now into my third month with Mobeon, a Swedish company that produce voice and video mail systems for the telecommunications industry.

There are several benefits for me in this change:

1. I’m working with software.
2. I’m working with messaging software, i.e. e-mail servers and the like.
3. I get to work from home.
4. I get to travel around the world.
5. I get paid a bit more!

It’s not all roses though, the travel is quite extensive and can be at very short notice. So far, I’ve been to Sundsvall in Sweden (twice) and Jakarta, Indonesia. This can cause some problems with child care for Euan on the mornings when Louise works, but we’ve managed to work it out so far.

Working from home is cool, but I do have to be careful about not spending all my time working. It will be much better when I get a dedicated home office in which to work. At the moment I’m having to sit at the dining room table, so end up spending almost my entire day there!

Another reason why I’ve not had too much time for blogging is that I’ve been working quite a bit on the websites that I manage for various organisations. In particular, I’ve been working on one for the band I now play in, Northwood Volunteer Band. I’m particularly pleased with this one as it’s my first foray into content management systems, and it seems to work quite well with Joomla. However, now that I’ve been asked to do Euan’s school website I’ve discovered there some reasonably fundamental issues with both Joomla and Drupal. Joomla doesn’t have great frontend support for editors and both Drupal (at least the beta version of 5.0) and Joomla don’t have great permission/role frameworks, at least not natively. I’ll have to try the non-beta version of drupal plus extensions.

This article from The Register made me laugh today. Check out the picture of the train decloaking!

I’ve not posted here for a while as there have been a few changes of late, more on that later.

The reception hosted by Claire Ward, my local MP, at which Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development spoke was very good. The reception was held in Portcullis House, just across the road from the Houses of Parliament. It was pleasing to see a few familiar faces amongst the guests of about 40. My overall impression was that Hilary Benn is very passionate about the work he is doing and cares deeply. He struck me as someone who is working very hard for change, that he does listen to what the country is asking him to do. I suspect he gets frustrated with cynicism and intransigence, particularly perhaps at the EU level. For him 2005 was very definitely a watershed in terms of public perception of and willingness to do something about global poverty.

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Over the weekend I received a letter from my local MP, Claire Ward, in which she invites me to a reception she is hosting at the House of Commons. At the reception, Hilary Benn MP, the Secretary of State for International Development, will be present and I may have an opportunity to talk with him and ask him some questions.

The problem is what questions should I ask in what is likely to be a brief encounter? So I turn to the collective wisdom of the blogosphere for advice and will select maybe one or two questions to take with me.

My invitation has come about through responding to the campaign action of the Make Poverty History campaign, but Hilary also deals with international environmental policy too.

I would urge you to read a speech that Hilary made to the Overseas Development Institute and the all party parliamentary group on overseas development entitled: An international development system fit for the 21st century.

The reception is to be held on the 19th of April so I’ll need questions by then. I’ll post his comments on this blog (if he lets me!)

ajaxWrite is another entrant to the online office application rush. I haven’t used it yet but it loads up fairly quickly, requires no registration and apparently produces documents in Word format and PDF.

It’s looking increasingly likely that I won’t be needing an office application suite installed on my PC at all. Though there is something to be said for having your data and apps close at hand for those occassions when your broadband link goes down.

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