“Hello, Martyn speaking” I said in my posh phone answering voice.
After a seconds silence I hear a click and a thick accent begins to speak, what it said at first I am unsure but it sounded like “Hello, are you home right now?” It was definetly a question.

“What?” I enquired and yet more garbled words in response, this time it sounded like “Hello, am I speaking to the person who owns the phone?”.

“Who the hell is this and what do you want?” I politely enquired.

Click! The phone went dead.

Whoever this guy was he was behaving like a dick.  No stomach for an argument.  Or so I thought…

About an hour later the phone rang again.  I suspected it was the same guy because in the last 10 years I have only ever received one call from someone without a CLI, and that was about an hour ago.  So primed for another call from this guy who forgot to mark my number down as “hostile” I answered.

“Hello, Not the Association of Chief Police Officers, how may I help you?”  I said, and yes the same accented garbled message began, the guy completely missing my welcome message. I turned the fan off and moved to a quiet area of the office so I could get what this guy was actually saying.

“Do you own the phone sir?”
“What?  This one, the one you called me on?”
“Yes sir, are you speaking from your own phone?”
“What are you accusing me of? Do you think I nicked it?”
“Oh no sir! I am sorry, I didn’t meaning to have misleading you!”

I am pissed off with this time waster now, his grammar and accent are really beginning to bug me (call me xenophobic if you must but by now I realised this was turning into phone spam).  So I interrupted his flow of apologies.

“What do you want?  My phone or what?”
“Sir, I am just wanting to ask you [garbled words again]“
“Can you speak clearly please I cannot make out what you just said”
“Sir, I am just wanting to ask you [garbled words again]“
“Chrissakes man! Who do you want to speak to?”
“The owner of the phone you are using”
“What is his name?”
“I don’t know” and before I could say anything else he rushed into his pitch
“We are taking surveys today and I would like to be asking you some questions, is that ok?”
“No it damn well isn’t you twonk, not unless you take the time to learn English.  Now do yourself a favour, take the number you just dialled off your calling list because the next time you might not find me so pleasant”

‘Click’

Remembering what my ‘ol grandma once told me I dug around in the kitchen man-draw and found my pea-whistle.  Oh how I look forward to his next call.

As I read an article today something kept distracting me, it happened so fast it was over before I could see the cause.  My head bobbing trying to find the cause must have been a site.

To find out what was happening I stopped reading the article and watched the refresh gauge on the bottom right of my browser.  After a few seconds there it was!  A brief flicker.  Not a full refresh, just the mere shade of an outline on the progress bar which suggested something was happening in the background.

There was no ticker on this page so that could not be the cause.

I viewed the source and a few lines down spied an odd statement in an HTML comment “PULSE_ENABLED:yes”  WTF?

Are the BBC are trying to annoy me (as if the license fee squandered on pointless court cases isn’t enough)?

Sifting through copious amounts of JavaScript and duplicated dependencies and a bizarre selection of bloated common css errors leads to many more curious comments.

It’s sad, I like their content and I suppose as I pay for it so I should be encouraged to use it but this “pulse” issue is probably the  reason I lost interest in it.

peculiar as I assume this problem is going to reek havoc with their stats, but then why should the BBC be monitoring stats?

My last Seagull is up for sale on eBay (see http://bit.ly/myS3agu11 for details).

I found what I needed, only I don’t think many people would have heard of it so I performed a blog search to see how common it was.

The word is Peripetei and it means A sudden change of events or reversal of circumstances, especially in literary work and this is Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs explaining what it means. He also mentions Anagnorisis – The moment of recognition of discovery

If you have a few minutes take this trip with Mike to a sheep farm and you may experience your own anagnorisis!

Introduction
It’s an ugly thing but its cheap and its cheap to run, and run? Sure it runs, it runs and runs and runs, will sift through silt and throw up shingle, will ride HUGE waves with the audacity of an ignorant PIG.  It grunts, oh how it grunts, never subtle while your eco-friendly neighbours pullout their electronic waders and flappers to go silently gliding by this old Evinrude will fart and splutter and deservedly earn the scorn of all them yacht-types.  But Evinrude (Rude for short) runs and marches on mile after mile and after a long days fishing lets everyone know as it returns to harbour without complaint, its tank still near full, it putts past the flat battery brigade directly to the quay.

For sale on eBay

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260650764423

How old is it?
Who knows?  Who cares?  Its old.  It is so old the style is back in fashion for a third time.  If I had to put a date on it I would say sometime after 1850, maybe even seven.

What is it?
4hp with two pots and lots of knobs.  No one is really sure what they all do (watch my indecision during the startup in the video) but once you have warmed up give each one a twist, lean the mixture a bit, twist one to the left and tother to the right, you will find the rhythm and eventually you’ll find the best fuel air mix and the two pistons will whine at their peak and your boat will bounce over the waves like it has four real stallions pulling it.

Good points

• It works

Bad points

• Its embarrassing to look at
• It has a funny name (I thought “Johnson” was a funny name for an engine but Evinrude?)
• It is not inspiring
• It might be fast for 4hp, I don’t know, but I think its slow
• Paint needs a lot of touch-up
• Part of the lid seating rubber (see picture 6).
• One of the clasp handles is missing (also can be seen in pictures) but a wrench of some kind will solve that.

What’s going on in that video?
About halfway through I give a closup of the coolant water exchaust.  On this machine there are three or four holes and it’s not easy to see in a mobile video so I take you in for a close-up.  As I only have a giant flower-pot to test in I cannot do much speed as Rude blows the thing over.  On a boat transom surrounded by water you will see the coolant clearer as you wind up the speed.

1. There is a proper backup strategy in place.
2. An adhoc backup may include a copy, to find these think outside the box, did you zip it up and email it to someone?
3. A deleted file can be restored or pieced together from file cache or fragments not yet overwritten.

I am surprised at the number of hosts that do not perform backups. Some will offer extra disk space so you can do it yourself for a fee, some will handle backups for you for a fee, but few do it automatically. The rule has to be If you do not maintain backups then its unlikely anyone else will.

Relying on your programmers has some merit but you should not rely on it. Programmers don’t like to write their code twice and so we find a way to automate the process to ensure we have the best possible solution.

The best backup strategy
Any backup strategy is better than none but if you want an easy to use and cost effective solution to backup several PCs/Macs/Mobiles as well as your hosted applications then check out Microsofts Home Server. It requires a separate PC to operate but nothing special. This is one of those applications you hear little about. It’s not expensive and is really good at what it claims to do (see this link for the sales pitch).

Expanding the amount of disk space available is as simple as plugging in a new external USB drive. So you can dig out those discarded drives and use them as additional space. Home server not only keeps a backup but you can use it to store important items such as photos and videos and it will make duplicate copies, so if a hard disk fails all you need to do is throw in another and it will take care of duplicating the files again for you.

Access to TV, music and all you media is available 24/7. Connect it to your wirelss router and the process of sharing your media around the house really does become straightforward.

Backup for business
I have a few offsite Linux servers, some more than 4,000 miles away. Home server backs these up every day and retains as many versions of those files as you think is convenient. By default you can recover any file up to 3 months old but I have extended this to 12.

1. Google Buzz. What was that anyway?
2. Orkut.  I honestly never visited the site unless by mistake.
3. Friend Connect.  Not sure I have heard of this either, what was it or will it be?
4. Google Desktop.  I install and deinstall this regularly.  I love it, I hate it.  I sleep better without it.
5. Google Base.  Isn’t that where all the chiefs meet?
6. Google Checkout.  Ahh, now I know about this one, I developed an API for shopping cart software and their API really does suck.  As a consumer I refuse to use them.
7. Google Toolbar.  I use it and like the way it allows me to click through keywords in searches, and I use the spelligna chhecker.
8. Google Lattitude.  Don’t they mean attitude?
9. Google Pack.  Huh?  What do they pack?
10. Photo Screensaver.  Not another one, surely this is innovation at its thinnest?

Although Twilio and OpenVBX are nothing to do with RealCall I wish they were, the quality of the work demonstrated in this video encourages me to think the time is right for a rethink on some of our pre Adeptra strategy. The XML used in the demo uses the same principle tag used in our own XML API.

I do not think we need to reinvent the wheel but unless Twilio decide to bring this to Europe fast they may face strong competition.