http://www.verboon.info/index.php/2009/02/ipv4-vs-ipv6-song/

Listen to this and your inner geek will have a ball!

Conservatives: 28,259 followers, +10%
Labour: 17,073 followers +23%
LibDems: 19,664 followers +63%

I hope this is not an indication of what will happen today at the polls! Surely people can’t let Gordon be a significant player any longer? He has sqandered the good years, and left the country unprepared for a downturn. Now he claims he knows how to fix it. Yeah, right.

I think only the Conservatives have the guts to pull the belt tighter and get things on the straight and narrow again.

We will see how things turn out tonight.

I wish they found some space to add Mandelson there too.

First impression: the red colours of Labour just do not work on a Twitter page

Second : Tories have 25,560 followers, Labour 13,793, LibDems 12,046. Wonder if this can be a gauge of the the potential election result?

In IE, however, leaving ‘var’ out has a side effect – if you use the variable name as an element id in your html, you are likely to get some vague errors form IE.

I recently spent some time trying to figure out why a very simple bit of test code was not working in IE, but worked fine in other (better?) browsers.

This morning was a bit slow – managed 8km in just shy of 50 minutes. But it is early days still….. last time I did any regular running was in 2006 I think.

Target is to beat my previous best of 1:45 for a half marathon and eventually to run a sub 3:30 marathon (my fastest marathon so far was 4:15 in Warsaw a few years back).

Wish me luck

About 3 or 4 months ago I had four identical tyres fitted to our family car by Tyrefitdirect. Since then all four needed to be pumped up about twice a month. Clearly this is a bit of a pain and quite annoying.

I eventually got arount to calling them up today as this is clearly a problem with the way they were fitted – all four tyres leak and the previous set never needed to be pumped up.

All I got was – “not our problem” and “you took too long to let us know”. No effort at all to provide anything even remotely resembling decent customer service.

Clearly this was the last time I dealt with this lot. Hopefully this post will save you some trouble when shopping around for new tyres.

Update 01 Oct 2009

I had the tyres re-fitted at Maidenhead Tyre and Exchaust. All that was needed was to give the rims a bit of a clean, re-fit and re-balance the tyres. Total bill £46.

Two weeks later and tyres are still at full pressure. I’ll be sending the invoice to Tyrefitdirect. Not holding my breath, but I’ll update the post again if they refund this.

By the time I got the flu the National Pandemic Flu Service was ready to spoil my day!

I knew not to expect an expert medically trained person on the end of the line, but I didn’t expect to get a really daft computer script either. It should have been simple. I knew I had the virus as I was feeling crap and at 30-odd years of age you kind of know when you are coming down with flu or a cold.

First few questions basically check that you are still alive. Things like “can you breathe ok?”, “have you got trouble waking up?” etc.

After question number six the computer decides I’m fine and don’t have the flu. Huh? We didn’t even get as far as “do you have a cough?” or “do you have a temperature?”, we only established that I have a pulse. But the computer says – no flu.

I ask the lady to give it another go. We try it one more time. Same questions, same answers. This time the computer says I need to dial 999. What?

I ask the lady to try one more time. This time we get through what feels like a thousand questions. Mostly stuff like “do you take drug x?”, “do you take drug y?” etc. At the end of this I get diagnosed with swine flu. Fine. Why did it take three attempts?

Now it is time to go through the questions for my 16 month old son. You guessed it, computer decided he needs to be rushed to A&E too. I handed the phone over to my wife at that point. She got the operator to restart the questionnaire one more time. Eventually we got his Tamiflu authorisation number too and all was sorted out.

Now, I don’t know if the clearly ridiculous advice to dial 999 was down to a glitch in the call centre computer script or if it was down to operator error, but if my experience is anything to go by I will not be surprised if the NHS A&E departments are soon flooded.

     Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.1.zip.

     Unpacking the update.

Then nothing.

To fix it I had to switch to PHP5. My cheapie 1and1 hosting account that this blog runs on uses PHP4 by default.

If you are running WordPress on a 1and1 shared hosting account, add this to your .htaccess file:

     AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Fixed. Hope it helps anyone who runs into a similar problem.