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Just back from my honeymoon today - still on Vancouver time, so forgive me if I sound tired!

I've realised that I'm actually Canadian and just living in the wrong country... It's a beautiful place, and the fact that the Canadian Dollar is now worth more than the American is reason enough to move there - you really cannot get enough of watching big cow-size people from Iowa trying to comprehend that their currency has tanked

I'll be back posting again regularly soon - I may even share some photos from the trip with you (not those sort!)

Glad to be back...

Well, the big day has finally come... I'm getting married this Saturday to the most beautiful girl in the world. That means however that I won't be able to post for a couple of weeks - apparently, taking your laptop on honeymoon is a no-no!

I'll be back soon ;-)

As you know, I hate anonymous proxies. In my opinion, they are the biggest single threat to network security at the present time. It was therefore with interest that I came across Peacfire.org, a site that is devoted to the circumvention of web filtering software - they even go so far as to provide a circumventor mailing list. Looking through the site, much of the content appears to be sub-standard adolescent whining. What really gets my goat however is the page entitled "Why we do this". Please click on the link and have a read.

As a sysadmin, I'd like to respond to some of the points raised in the article:

I am a libertarian. I believe in freedom of speech and all of that good stuff. However... My network is my responsibility. If it doesn't work, I get shouted at. Therefore, I have to make a decision as to how to protect it. I choose to block categories of sites because they are more likely to contain code that can harm my network. I do this not because I don't want you to look at Facebook. I really don't care. All I care about is the quality of service to my users. Filtering software is a blunt instrument, and it sometimes mis-classifies sites. It is however better than not filtering at all.

I have a 100MB connection to manage. This is probably 50 times faster than your connection at home. However, we have 8000 people using it at once. This is why I stop you using services that aren't work related. I don't care if you're watching videos on Youtube. I do care that by doing so, you're breaking our connection and people will shout at me. That's why I block streaming media.

There are lots of free MP3's on the internet. Feel free to download them at home. I don't care. I have no love myself for the RIAA, the MPAA or any of their ilk. However, if you download copyrighted material on my network, I am responsible for it. If they find out, I'll get a big fine and lose my job. I like my job. This is why I block P2P sites.

I don't care if you're straight, gay, bisexual or any or all of the above. As far as I'm concerned, you can look at what ever you want on the internet. However, other people may see it, and they may be offended by it. They may then sue us, which means I'll probably get fired for not stopping them seeing what you've accessed. As I've said, I like my job. That's why I block porn.

Can you see a pattern here? I don't care what you do. If you want to download thousands of MP3's and watch hardcore porn, go ahead. Do it at home. I'll support your right to do it. You know why? Because that's YOUR computer and YOUR internet connection, and YOU can decide what happens with it. When you're here, you're on MY network and I make the rules...

As you know, I'm a long time eBayer... Well, as we're getting ready for our honeymoon, I hope you'll forgive the shameless plug of one of our auctions! If you're looking for SATA cables, head on over to my auction here. The starting price for 35 is just £20 delivered anywhere in the UK.

Please help me pay for my soon to be wife's shoe addiction - New York may bankrupt me!

I haven't mentioned it before, but I'm getting married on the 19th of July to the greatest woman in the world... We've been together for the past two and a half years, and they have been the best two and a half years of my life. She's even fine with me using pictures of her to sell my products - see for yourself:

Through everything, she's been there for me. When I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia / ME, she's been my rock. She's made me take my stupid ideas and make them reality. She's made me realise how much I'm worth. I love her that much that I've bought her name as a .com, .co.uk, .net, .org, .eu and .info. I'm actually looking at a .cn, which I don't even have for mine...

I may be sparse in my postings for the next few weeks - we're going on honeymoon to New York, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver soon, and I'll get told off if I take my laptop :-)

If you're reading my blog then shame on you - you could be writing your own! But thanks anyway! And if you think of it at 2pm on the 19th July, send us some love!

Apologies for the blatant plug here, but if I can't advertise my own business on my own site, where can I? For the last year or so, we've been selling Pink Hard Hats on eBay. Strange product I know, but my other half found them and they're a pretty decent seller. As you'll also know, eBay seem hell bent on making it as difficult as possible to sell stuff on their site. We've therefore decided to shift the focus off of eBay and on to our site. If you know someone who'd like one, please point them at the link below, or click on the picture...

www.pinkhardhats.co.uk - go on, you know you want one!

From a technical perspective, I knocked the site up with Joomla 1.5. This is the first time I've used this version, having been a die-hard 1.0x boy. I must say that it's not a massive leap forwards, but there are some really nice features on the admin side that make content management more pleasurable. Adding in more complex HTML to posts still requires that you turn of TinyMCE, but that's really no hardship, and basic code is supported pretty well. The media manager is a nice addition, and grouping together all of the module management tools makes a lot of sense. If you've got a lot invested in themes there is also a 1.0x compatibility mode available so you can put off rewriting your code for a while. As you've probably guessed, I'm a big fan of all things Joomla, and this version just goes to strengthen that feeling. With the abundance of GPL templates on the web, it is incredibly easy to make a professional looking site with little or no artistic skill, which is a bonus for me! I'm still not sure if it's up to handling a large site with 10's of editors and 1000's of users, but for an SME website, it's unbeatable. From unzipping the files to my desktop to submitting the site to Google, about an hour and a half passed. I don't think you can get much quicker than that...

For the past couple of years I've suffered from excruciating pain in my back. I've been variously diagnosed with a herniated disk, rheumatoid arthritus, a slipped disk, spondylitis and God knows what else... Well, finally, I have a proper diagnosis - I've got Fibromyalgia. Obviously, as a dedicated geek, the first thing I do is look it up online... It turns out that 90% of the sufferers are women...

Not only am I likely to be hobbling about like an old man for the rest of my life (I'm 29), but when people ask "What's the matter?", I have to tell them I have a ladies disease! My soon to be wife has been really supportive - a lot of the self help groups say that you need to make sure friends and family are patient with you... She had one look at that and skipped on to the next page

Not really sure if anyone will read this - it's a bit of a change from the usual sub-standard IT rubbish that I write (in that it's sub-standard mawkish rubbish), so I apologise if you were expecting something useful and found this instead.

Normal service will resume in the next post...

I've been a huge fan of Symbian since I got my Nokia E61 nearly 3 years ago. I've now upgraded to the E90 Communicator, which is possibly the greatest phone ever made! It's a borderline laptop, and comes with some fantastic apps. I can honestly say that I would be lost (well, a lot less organised!) without it...

Like the rest of the computing world, Open Source software is starting to play a bigger part in everyday use in the mobile arena, and most applications rival their commercial counterparts and in many respects surpass them. With this in mind, I've compiled a list of free S60 v3 software:

File Browsers

* FExplorer - File explorer.
* SExplorer - Simple file explorer.
* SysExplorer - Extensible file and system explorer.
* Y-Browser - Another file system browser.

Tools

* AutoLock - Automatic keylocking.
* Calcium - Very slick looking calculator.
* cCalc - Simple freeware calculator.
* cCam - Simple camera capture with no flash or sound.
* cClock - Clock screensaver
* Chords - Application for displaying guitar chords.
* Contact Transfer - Transfer contacts between phones.
* Dictionary - A quick look up dictionary.
* DROS - DOS like shell and BASIC interpreter.
* HourPower - Read aloud the current time, best used via shortcut.
* IfInfo - View current network interface Information.
* LogExport - Export the Call Register data to a CSV file.
* mLock - Quick and simple keybad locking.
* Mobile Weather - Detailed weather reports.
* OggPlay - Multi-formt audio player.
* PowerBoot - Start applications on startup.
* PuTTY - A free SSH client.
* rotateMe - Small app to rotate your screen like when in Gallery.
* S60SpotOn - Use camera flash as torch.
* ScreenSnapS60 - Capture screenshots of your phone.
* Screenshot - Capture screenshots of your phone.
* SymbianBible - Bible reader.
* TextQuick - Scans through your Inbox and shows who your SMS the most
* VNC Viewer - VNC Viewer for Symbian.
* Y-Tasks - Collection of development helper tools.

Games

* Bantumi - Stategy board game.
* Frozen Bubble - Use a cannon to group 3 or more bubbles together.
* MiniBlaster - Game inspired by the old classics Bomberman and DynaBlaster.
* S-Tris 2 - Tetris clone.

P2P Downloads

* PeerBox - Access open P2P networks from your mobile.
* Symella - Gnutella file-sharing clien.
* SymTorrent - A symbian BitTorrent client.

Nokia Open Source Projects

* Mobile Web Server - Apache port to Symbian.
* Python for S60 - A port of Python to the S60 platform.
* S60 Internet Radio - Internet radio streaming.
* Symbian Perl - Perl for Symbian phones.

Apologies if you're expecting a computing thread this evening, or maybe something vaguely amusing, but this is a topic that I've thought about for a while, and a conversation today has really made me wonder if there are people who will gladly swap an extra £500 a month for the chance to moan...

I work in a fairly small team, inside a very large organisation. This is the first permanent job I have had in more than eight years, as I've always preferred contracting or being self employed. As a result, I still have a number of business contacts, and I still do a small amount of business from home. This is anything from private consultancy work to eBay sales (I'm actually still a Powerseller on eBay, though only a Bronze one), and brings me in as little or as much as I need, but never really less than £500 a month for a few hours extra work a week.

One of my colleagues, who I'll call D, and I were talking about money, and he mentioned that things were a bit tight. I told him about what I do, and basically gave him a list of products that would turn a £50 initial investment in to a £500 a month business inside 6 months. All it would require is about an hour a day, and a bit of initial searching for suppliers (literally calling up everybody on the first 10 pages of a particular website)...

The response I got was, in my opinion, unbelievable. D told me that he couldn't be bothered...

This is not a get rich quick scheme I'm floating. It's not going to require a massive investment in time or money, and it could add another £500 a month to his income. He's not bothered.

I know it's not a symptom of where I work, because another of my colleagues runs 6 online stores in his spare time and is looking to get VAT registered because he's taking that much cash...

This reaction quite frankly annoyed me, and as you'll know if you've read previous posts, in this sort of situation, I'll try to see how far I can take things... Here's what happened:

I research the products and find one that I know is selling on eBay for an average of £30 a go with a 100% auction success rate. I tell D what it is. Reaction? Don't know if I could find a supplier...

I find a supplier who will supply and deliver 12 of this product to the UK for £68. I tell D. Reaction? I don't know if I've got that sort of money spare...

I offer to front the money, which he can pay me back as soon as he's sold 3, which means that, even including eBay fees, Paypal fees and shipping, I am basically offering him £15 with no risk, plus the prospect of another £270 when the rest sell. Reaction? I don't know anything about eBay...

Finally, I offer a tutorial on how to create the listings, free hosting space for photos, and help with packing. Reaction? I don't know...

I DON'T KNOW!

I am offering this man, who is constantly complaining of financial problems, free money. I will provide a ready made business for him, where all he has to do is put something in a Jiffy bag and post it, and he is turning me down!

So, what happens after this...?

I am selling them on eBay. I am making around £200 a month at the moment with no effort on this one product, and have just found a new supplier who is half the price of my current one.

D is still moaning about being skint...

I know we get some visitors, and I really would appreciate your comments - I can understand most things, but this has left me flummoxed!

And NO, I won't tell you what I'm selling! I might be bloody minded, but I'm not stupid!