MaFt's Musings » Work

Owning Up Time…

MaFt — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:20:05 +0000

OK, ok so my article was clearly(?) an April Fool. See the full retraction here: http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=519784#519784

What Do I Do For A Living?

MaFt — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:01:39 +0000

A lot of people ask what exactly I do for PocketGPSWorld.com that takes up so much of my time… Well, I’ve been writing this article for a few weeks in the spare time that I managed to find so head over to PocketGPSWorld.com to go and find out!

Tech Talk

MaFt — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:38:43 +0000

Today I had a weird instant messenger conversation with my mate, ‘P’. ‘P’ does computer repair down south and often gets frustrated with people who pretend to know ‘computer stuff’ – I do too. It started of fairly normal (although unless you read any of our previous chats the reference to the XP DVD burning update might seem a bit random) but rapidly went a bit weird…:

P: forgot to tell you i found an MS update the other day that adds DVD and ISO burning to WinXP. Installed it to old PC but not tried it yet..

M: cool

P: also Nero 9OEM for £3

M: i have win7 now. it’s the future
M: cos it’s a bigger number

P: sorry nero isn’t the update…
P: i’ve got 7 too but other PC is XP

M: though really win98 should be the best

P: i liked windows word 5

M: how come, right, my windows is windows xp but word tells me it’s 2003?

P: what version of word?

M: it’s windows xp
M: so it shoudl be word xp but it says word 2003
M: so does that mean i’m actually on windows 2003?

P: probably.
P: word XP was 2002

M: damn – my printer’s nt compatible with windows 2003

P: can’t you incrrease the gigabytes?

M: it needs windows USB – apparently won’t work without that version
M: i have 1gigibytes of memory – is that enough? will i run out of space?

P: how many photos do you have in words?

M: think most of them go in there – words is the one where it shows a small version of the pictures, isn’t it?
M: can i delete the small pictures from there as it’s only the full size versions i’m bothered about

P: why does my broadband not make my PC faster?

M: ah, i know this one
M: it depends how many other people are using facebook at the same time. you see it’s only “up to” 8megagigabytes
M: which means you won’t get that full amount – AND even if you DID get the full 8 your hard drive is 250gigabytes so the 8 won’t actually increase your current computer

P: ah so if i’m downloading a game how many emails can i recieve

M: i don’t think you can get emails while a game is downloading?

P: my friend said you can because of the width of the bands and stuff

M: it would probably give you a virus as the email would mix in with the game anyway.
M: i woldn’t risk it.
M: unless it was a really fast game
M: then you could download the game before you even had chance to log in to aol webmail

The sad thing is, a lot of the statements here are things we hear real people actually saying…

Aching Legs

MaFt — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:47:07 +0000

I’ve had 3.5 days in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress (MWC) reporting for PocketGPSWorld and Wired4iPhone. It was great but owing to easyJet’s failure to get my boss over there from Gatwick I was rather busy! Needless to say I’m knackered and my calves are killing me… It’s been less than 12 months since I covered CeBIT for PocketGPSWorld but my mind had clearly removed from it’s memory how much hard work these things are! We have, in the past, been accused of ’swanning about wasting company money’ by some slightly deranged forum users – I really do wish it WAS as simple as gliding around like a swan!

But anyway, short blog as I’m tired…! Have a good weekend!

The Week So Far

MaFt — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:28:52 +0000

I would dearly love to show you some video from Monday’s Green Day gig at Sheffield Arena however my iPhone was stolen and was last ’seen’ in Liverpool, near Kensington Gardens…

On Sunday night my car was broken into as well. Nothing was taken but it did mean I had to pay for a replacement window and the hassle involved.

So Monday and Tuesday of this week have been spent juggling work, phoning the police, phoning insurance companies, phoning and emailing O2 and getting used to my T-Mobile G2 Touch as a temporary measure. Today is Mrs-MaFt’s birthday and if she doesn;t like the Happy Meal toy I’ve bought her then I reckon things can only get worse…!

A Good Pseudo-Holiday

MaFt — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:28:49 +0000

For those who don’t know I manage the Speed Camera Database for PocketGPSWorld.com (among other things). There’s only me who does this so any time away from processing submissions results in having to do the work anyway so my one week holiday in the Costa del Sol now means I have one week’s worth of camera submissions to process as well as those submitted since my return. In other words, my holiday has now resulted in me having to work twice as hard this week. I call it my pseudo-holiday!

On top of the extra stuff to process for PocketGPSWorld I also seem to have had a tonne of stuff to do for my own websites (new links to add, videos to upload, domain names to park and nameservers to edit) – this in itself is a good thing, it’s just a bad time so soon after my pseudo-holiday…

An Early Start

MaFt — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 09:05:00 +0000

I mis-set my alarm last night and instead of getting up at the planned 6.30am I had set it for 4.30am… Thing is I didn’t notice and came down and booted up the laptop to start work. I then went into the kitchen to make a coffee and saw the time on the oven read 4.34 – my initial thought was ‘oh, we must have had a power cut’ then I checked my phone* which confirmed it was still stupid o’clock in the morning…

I actually toyed with the idea of actually starting some work but after about 2 seconds I thought ’sod it’ and went back to bed for a couple of hours!

MaFt

* my phone which now looks rather swish thanks to the awesome free UI, called ‘.Home’ from PointUI.

Why Did I Bother?!

MaFt — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:56:00 +0000

At about 1 this morning I signed up to a handful of free online business directory thingy’s in the hope of drumming up a bit of business. Each one, however, had a warning that they “have been receiving reports of companies phoning soon after adding a listing to try and sell advertising space, these are in no way affiliated with us”.

Needless to say I’ve had three of these calls this morning trying to pressurise me into giving them £500 over the phone to get an A6 advert into their wonderful magazine that no one has heard of but it will guarantee over 11 contacts each week…

Reckon I’ll give them a miss and just deal with customers directly for now!!

MaFt

Nearly Christmas!

MaFt — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:44:00 +0000

For those thinking “it’ll be Christmas by the time he blogs again” well, you’re wrong. But not too far from the truth though!

Been stupidly busy sorting out poorly kids and poorly me as well as trying to get stuff sorted for the Christmas play I stupidly agreed to do…

I’ve been pretty busy with work stuff to – lots to do with PocketGPSWorld.com as usual but I’ve also recently finished the Migrant Workers Information Bradford site as well as completely redesigning the Jalapeno Drums site. The Jalapeno one is still showing the old site while we wait for domain names to be switched between hosts etc etc – all great fun…! I’ve also updated the portfolio part of my site at MaFt.co.uk/design so it’s not been a total loss!

That’ll do for now, I’ll try post more in the near future!

MaFt

—————-
Now playing: Bowling For Soup – I’m Gay
via FoxyTunes

Javascript

MaFt — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:01:00 +0000

I’m currently teaching myself Javascript which is turning out to be considerably more complex than I’d first imagined! I’m using the O-Reilly book by David Flanagan and I’m currently up to page 105 of 591 (and then another 450 reference pages…!) which is pretty easy to follow. O-Reilly books seem to be very good, they managed to teach me PHP quickly enough too! Still, once it’s done it’ll be handy!

Right, back to reading

MaFt

—————-
Now playing: The Sex Pistols – Did You No Wrong
via FoxyTunes