The Day Before Tomorrow...

Well today's post is going to be super short, so far today I cycled 8 miles too and from work had a nice tasty breakfast then came home to get ready for my friends Wedding which we will be leaving for in 15 minutes.

We will be attending the wedding and then afterwards there is a big massive Garden party with DJ's unlimited drink and a BBQ, it all should be fun if the weather holds out :)

Watch out for the killer hangover I tell myself!

Thursday

Well what an interesting day it has been, yesterday I found an old school friend on facebook and decided to send a friend request, and this evening I get a friends request from the same person via myspace ...

How spooky I thought... But good!

I've just received an email from my old school friend, it's great what you can do online these days and be able to catch up with people and find out what your other class mates have been upto, but I was shocked to hear that one has been sent down for murder.

Today I've spent most of my working day fixing laptop's with broken hard drives that won't startup, I ask myself why on earth don't these people think about backing up their data for anyone reading this and not backing it up now is the time to do it.

A few days ago in Coventry a user comes the office heres a brief description of the chat:

User: Windows will not start

"I switch on the laptop and straight away you can hear Clank! Clank! Clank! (The hard drive is physically broken)"

Me: Have you ever noticied the noise before?

User: Yes but I didnt think it was much of a problem.

Me: The noise means the hard drive is broken, did you make a backup of your laptop?

User: No

Me: When is the last time you backed up your laptop?

User: About 6 months ago.

There you have it, if you have a laptop theres an important lesson in life, always backup your important data.

Alliance & Leicester

If you ever need a new bank account make sure you don't join Alliance and Leicester.

It all started last month I had a direct debit go out and was just £2 short in my bank account, normally in the past with my previous banks this is not a problem but with Alliance and Leicester they bounced the direct debit and charged me £34 for the privilege! so I'm now £34 Overdrawn.. OK fine I've broken the terms and conditions but the charge is unfair and not a true business cost for them.

Later on in the month I have a 2nd direct debit which bounced this time I was a whopping £5.74 short, you can guess what happened next another charge sending me overdrawn again. Jeez Thanks!

A month passes by and I check my bank statement this is the shocking part for each direct debit which failed they charged me the following:

£34 for Direct Debit Bounce + £25 for being Overdrawn Total £59

So that's a total £118 in charges for two failed direct debits! I think I'm going to write a letter to get the money back.

Reason two for not using Alliance & Leicester:

Last night Vicki took my cash card to get some money out of a local cash machine, she inserted the card and then the machine decided to crash and turn itself off.

So I called A&L Lost / Stolen card hot line and was on hold for over 30 minutes with no answer, I got that bored I decided to go to bed and try again today, this morning I tried again and again on hold with no answer...

Great service for the £118 they charged me last month, so I paid my local branch a visit and was told they could not help me and that I had to keep trying the number I questioned "what if it was stolen who would be liable" and they replied "if that's the case you would have to argue the case with A&L". Great service!

I'm now in the processing of moving all my banking to a different bank.

Rain Rain go away!

Phew we went to bed last night hoping that today would bring no rain, as Chloe my daughter was off for a fun day at Twin lakes for a school trip. Last night it just looked like the rain would not stop so we was quite surprised to wake up this morning to see nice blue skies with the sun shining.

So the day looks perfect for Chloe to have a fun day at Twin lakes without getting wet!

Talking about the rain brings me to my next thoughts I was reading the news on the web this morning and found a news article about a chap who died yesterday as his leg was trapped in a drain whilst clearing it out.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2111077,00.html

It's shocking to hear news like this, but leaves me to think surely there was something else the emergency services could have done to get him out, perhaps if they had watched Casualty at the weekend.

Let's hope the UK has had its fair share of rain and that the blue skies and sunshine comes back soon.

For all of you wondering Chloe had a great day at Twin lakes with no rain in sight.

Rollouts, & Sunday's TV

I'm currently involved in a site migration in Coventry which includes new Servers, PC's, Network, and Domain..

Today was the first date of the big change for Coventry so we arrived at site early to meet the contractors who were there to help us swap PCs out, after 30 Min's of being at site we was informed that the planed data migration from the old server to the new server never happened at the weekend...

Now our day was going to start to get more complex...

The problem we now face is that the two servers / networks can't really talk to each other properly well not without some careful hacks, 30 Min's later I've created a snazzy batch file which asks the user for their old login details and cross maps all the drives across two domains, hey presto it works! were back in business boys...

So I leave the contractors to it swapping out users laptops whilst I return to my desk to catch up on some emails, and web my favourite type of work...

Last nights TV did anyone watch Ramsay's Kitchen nightmares on more4 the amount of F Word's which comes out of Gordon Ramsay's mouth is shocking, but on the other hand seeing him rip the restaurant owners to shreds had me laughing.

“Gordon was sent to Spain to sort out a restaurant with dog mess in the dining room and an unforgettable signature dish of prawns in garlic with chocolate sauce, along with chicken and banana dish and a swinging kebab (yes that's right it was swinging)”

Blogging

After finding an old friend on the web recently and his blog http://arctic--fox.blogspot.com/, I felt compelled to create my own.

Blogging seems rather cool. there are a lot of good blogs out there which differ to the normal rubbish such as

1. I woke up this morning
2. I had a wash
3. Ate some lunch
4. Went to bed

Let's just hope my blogs are more inspiring than the usual...

Lets Get Started...

Blue-skimonkey - the idea behind my name is quite simple.

• My Favourite colour is blue
• I love skiing
• and Monkeys are very cool
  

I live in Leicester and spend the majority of my time working, there never seems to be enough time in the day for what I need to do but somehow I manage to balance all the things.

During the day I work as an IT Contractor for a company in Leicester providing desktop support to the local site, and also remote sites in Europe. Alongside this I also run a successful web hosting company, eBay business, and do freelance programming work for small businesses.

So there you have it my working life is quite busy! my goal in life is to be able to work from any location in the world with just the Internet as my source of income.

Apart from working I have a lovely daughter and girlfriend having a family is great it took a while for me to learn the true balance between work and family at first I was working all the hours possible to try and earn more money but then realised my partner and daughter was loosing out and that money is not everything, since my revelation I have cut back on the work I do to ensure I spend quality time with the ones I love.

So there you have it my first blog! I'm amazed that I have put words to paper (so to speak), I'm normally quite lost for words.