Some of you may recognise the tagline I used for my heading for this post… that’s right, it can be seen on some of the O2 advertising from a few months ago.
They now own my services! Yep, I now work for O2 part-time in their technical support department for the newly launched O2 Home Broadband. I am currently in training, which should last for another 6 weeks but it seems like a decent enough job. I am only first line support at the moment, basically a phone monkey, but hopefully some vacancies will open up in second line support soon enough. It is a good place top work in all honetsy, relaxed dress code, good perks and a good bunch of people.
Now, the reason I had to go out and get a job. I have a new house! We signed for it last week and move in around the 23rd June, just after Chris and I get back from the Secular COnference in Edinburgh. It is a really nice house with plenty of room, which is a bugger for wiring it up with networking cable. At the moment it is looking like a good couple of hundred metres!
I will upload some pics of the new house just as soon as I get them off my phone.
Congratulations to all the Computing lot too, they all graduated!
Friends, General, Hobbies, Work
AHS, Broadband, Computing, Edinburgh, Graduation, Networking, O2, SoC, Uni, Web, Work
Having picked up an absolute bargain version of the latest offering from Western Digital’s MyBook range, the MyBook World Edition - a network attached storage version of the ever popular MyBook external hard disc drives, I thought I would offer up a quick review.
It is an excellent piece of kit, I have the 1TB version (2x 500GB drives) in white. It took less than two minutes to set up once I had thrown the MioNet software out the window and just plugged it directly into my switch on the house network. It is a tidy bit of kit, all the wires tuck away nicely and it comes with all the cables you would need - a power cable, a 1m Cat.5e cable and a USB connector to connect further external units to this one. My Windows network picked it up straight away and my linux machine recognises it (as you would expect).
It is a brilliant piece of kit and I would recommend it to anyone that wants any extra network storage!
Reviews, Technology
Computer, MioNet, Networking, Review, Technology, Windows
Just a quick post to say that we have working internet at home now, which means that I can post more and generally be more of an online nuisance to the world from now on!
The internet isn’t perfect, we are still having modem vs router issues and are currently running multiple DHCP servers and the port forwarding is a bit screwed but we can all get online and play WoW. Which is the important thing!
General, Technology
DHCP, Modem, Networking, Router, Web, WoW
Well of the four people that are currently resident in my house, only two are actually paying rent! Thats fifty per cent! Crazy.
Sarann headed off to Ireland today to visit her mum for a few weeks, leaving B and I as the sole remaining rent paying residents, with Maths Chris and Si making up the foursome.
Normally, this would be a matter of contention for me, I hate freeloaders…but in this case I am willing to make an exception. I quite like them being here. It is not often that there are more boys than girls in this house, especially seeing as until July I lived with four girls (now down to three). Excessive Magic playing, network gaming and general geekiness prevails. Throw in the fact that both are relatively house trained and we get a good living environment. One that I think i will thrive in. The only issue is that with Sarann gone and Michelle not back until September we have no maternal figure to guide us - we will be eating fried egg in waffle sandwiches and takeaway as a matter of course in no time at all, plus without lots of girlies to shame me into doing housework I don;t think the current relative tidyness will last very long at all.
Ah well. At least I will survive.
Friends, General
Food, Friends, Games, Magic, Networking
Today is the first day in a while where I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t have a job to dread (I finished my work up at the university yesterday), I have no really pressing things on my to-do list and I don’t have any uni work or anything piled up. I am at a loose end. There is lots for me to do though, the house needs a really good tidying up, my network cable needs laying (I did the rest of the house last weekend, but managed to forget my room!!) and I need to start downloading all the updates to WoW following my re-install of Windows. Somehow, these things are not exciting me as much as they possibly should. What I really want to do is go into town and buy some Magic: The Gathering trading cards.
I was introduced to this game recently by Si and MC and it rocks! It’s basically a trading card game based around magic. Most of my readers will have heard of it and some will probably play it, but it’s new to me so I am still rather obsessed about it. What is it with fads?
Anyway, today is the first real day of my summer and it’s raining. If I believed in omens I would probably take this as a sign that my summer was going to suck! I mean everything and everyone has gone crazy recently. The last two weeks has stretched Kara, Si and my sanity to breaking point. George is really struggling with some personal issues and Sarann is in love again 
B and MC seem to be the only people on a level at the moment, though being loud about it!
Oh well, here is to a very relaxing and recharging summer. I need it.
Friends, General
Friends, Holiday, Magic, Networking, Uni, Work, WoW
After several weeks offline due to holiday, work, festivals and moving house (well room….) I am finally back online, although only temporarily at the moment. I am currently using a makeshift internet connection until our house network is up and running, so I cannot vouch for the regularity of my posts for the foreseeable future. I will do my best to ensure that I try to keep you all up to date on the comings and goings currently making my life about as hectic as it has been in several years!
Firslty, I am currently working ten to eleven hour days for a framing company selling certificate frames to graduates at Leeds University. Good money but hard work! I had to pass up on the last two festivals I was supposed to be working due to a) a better offer and b) the feeling that the work I was doing was going very unappreciated to say the least!
Basically, my life is good. I have a fantastic girlfriend, amazing housemates, quality friends and a bank balance in the black! Not a lot else for me to say at the moment. I am sure that my future posts will include some of the details I have skipped over, but then again they might not. Requests on a postcard please.
Family, Friends, General, Holiday
Blog, Festival, Holiday, Moving house, Networking, Uni, Web, Work
Seeing as I am getting four brand new housemates from the 1st July and I am moving rooms I now have the perfect excuse for thinking up some new toys, gadgets, space savers etc for next academic year.
We have big plans for a home network, 3.5 of us will be computing students next year, so I am acquiring a new computer so that I can a) have a linux machine that I can practice on and b) there is going to be some spare space for extra hard drives and other network paraphenalia. To this end I need to put together a list of stuff for my new computer - I have a case, PSU, fan, motherboard and a hodge podge of hard drives, optical drives and other bits and bats. The computer I have acquired was originally an AMD 688Mhz, with 20Gb hard drive, 128MB RAM, I seem to remember my brother putting a 64MB nVidia graphics card in there and on board sound. There is a prob a network card in it. I was planning on putting one or two new, larger hard drives in there, but apart from that I don’t know where to start to get it up to some sort of spec. I basically need it for running linux and as a storage system. Any ideas or suggestions welcome.
There is also a new stereo system, a new television, possibly Sky TV and i am definitely looking at some kind of back-up storage system. I don’t know whether a couple of large external hard drives are the way forward, or just use DVD’s - again advice would be useful.
I am also seriously looking into a new laptop, as portable as possible but with adequate specs so that I can use it for a variety of things like media, uni work and the odd bit of WoW/mobile blogging.
General, Technology
Blog, Computer, HiFi, Laptop, Linux, Networking, Uni, WoW