Luke Sheldrick's Blog

Here we have a friend of mine, trying out a DIY Gimp Mask / Chicken Mask

hahaha made me laugh, especially when it snapped

I previously posted about going back to o2, as my personal mobile provider, having second thoughts about it now.

First off, EDGE wouldn’t work at all. Emailed ‘Tech Support’ and they come back with the usual speal. 4 email later they blame it on my post code (Southend – SS1) as service there is ‘Variable’. Excellent I thought, I had spent the day in Central London. Only after about 5 or 6 emails did it actually get tranfered to ‘Tech Support’ and sorted.

Today I thought I would have a browse of ‘My O2′, and to my shock, apparently I have already used 5 sms’s, well I never, I haven’t even used it yet! Waiting until my number is ported over.

Hmm did I really make the right decision here?

We shall see what excuse they can come up with for my mystery sms’s, maybe it’s the post code again.

Last night I spent the night out with my brother Paul. We try to catch up as much as our busy lives allow, which is usually on a Tuesday to go to an amateur poker night, held by Bubble Poker. Last night I was on my usual top form, and got taken out pretty early on in the night. My brother got taken out, pretty early by a Royal Flush, he had a straight, and someone else had four Jacks… a hand you wouldn’t see again. Totally recommend the night though, I always have a good time.

Then it was off to the Empire casino, to loose some more money. I have never lost before, as I usually only play red or black on the roulette. However last night, Mrs Luck had gone on holiday. It’s cool though, as I only take out what I’ll happily lose. So it was back home on the train, with a burger king, what more could a guy ask for.

It’s amazing how many people you can actually get in contact with on social networking sites, such as facebook. Years ago I was pretty impressed by the likes of friends reunited. That particular site seems to have died off now. This was again proven to me yesterday, when I managed to get in contact with another person, Laura, who I went to primary school with. Someone who I thought I would never talk to again, after I moved away from London about 10 years ago.

As per any site, you get people who just add you to bump up their numbers, but I have always been a bit of a prood, and will only add someone if I actually know them. So was a bit amazed when I checked this morning, and it says I know 397 people. If I had to guess, I wouldn’t have said I knew that many people.

An interesting application on there is the ‘Friend Wheel’ which shows you who you know, and then if the people you know, who knows each other. It is actually quite scary, how people from totally different parts of my life know each other. Below is my wheel (click to get in a new window)

If you do actually know me, and I have missed you, feel free to get in contact my facebook profile.

My personal site, and my blog were the last couple of things I needed to shift off my servers I run at home. I’ve since bought some colo space for a load of my stuff, but had neglected to actually sort my own stuff off.

This weekend I actually got around to doing it. First was to move the MySQL from a 2003 Windows server, to a Linux server (Fedora). That was pretty straight forward, but some how managed to corrupt my wordpress blog. Not a huge problem as had exported it using it’s own migration function.

The next was to get IIS to play with PHP. I remember the original setup was a nightmare, it just never seems to work… tried the installation package, what a fool. That managed to kill of IIS. So then un-installed that, and went for the manual approach. A few registry entries, and a few ini files later, and we were rocking.  Well after convincing it, that it did have the MySQL dlls.

Decided to give it a bit of a face lift, but as I am totally shite at any graphical stuff, I have got hold of a free template, took out a load of the woffle in it, i.e. the users ability to change the background image. Will migrate the rest of the site over soon enough, but have convert a few scripts from ASP to PHP, and oh I hate php

At least the site should be a bit more stable..