7th November 2007, 12:12 am
Well it’s the first time I’ve had my laptop that I’ve actually used it from a remote unsecure location for anything work related and in turn, needing a secure connection to do it. My own stuff isn’t important enough and I don’t do online banking if I’m using a wireless hotspot or anything.
However, I’ve been in Southampton since 23:20 yesterday after a lovely 4 hour drive from Manchester with the need to login into one of the company firewalls to check into a suspect customer, so after fixing an issue with my vpn connection (lack of split tunnel) by vpn connection to our DC, then over to the office to make a change to the firewall to allow split tunnel I disconnected and re-connected to the vpn account on our office firewall to start looking into the problem. Gotta hand it to to Swisscomm who manage the connection into this place, it’s been stable as anything and extremely quick!
Anyway, it’s night time for me now - my room mate is trying to sleep and I doubt what he needs is hearing my fingers clicking away on the keyboard all night and my face lit up by this lovely screen I’m looking at 
30th October 2007, 11:20 pm
I’ve always tried to keep all of the stuff I do in a single place, that’s started to change. Recently I’ve split this blog off from the main site and also changed over to using Wordpress rather than using blogger.com. Seems to be pretty good and I have much more control over it than I did with my last one - and it imported all of the posts and comments 
The forums have now also gone to a new home which is here, this is where you can find the gaming side of my life. I’m not into it anywhere near as much as I used to be but it needed to be seperate from my stuff and that way I can give Mannos access to it all as he pretty much runs the show now!
The gallery is on it’s way out as well, it’s new home will be, yeah you guessed it, gallery.lathwood.co.uk, this will house my standard gallery and the digital slr one I have as well so stay tuned for that.
3rd October 2007, 10:30 pm
Really getting into photography now, managed to pick up a Canon 430EX flashgun last week which has helped out with the macro work I’ve been trying to do. The difference this has made to the lighting when I don’t have natural daylight is excellent, shadows are less than before which can really only be bettered by having another flash unit, something like the 580EX and using the 430 as a slave.
Hoping to be able to make use of it pretty soon as I’ve got a christening to go to on in a few weeks so maybe I’ll get asked to take some photos for the occassion
Anyway, at the moment I’m just trying to read as much as I can on how to take better photos as I’ve got a long long way to go. So if anyone has any decent reading material they have found online whether it’s for digital photography or not then I’d appreciate it if you could post them here please.
25th September 2007, 06:55 pm
Well we had another outing planned for Saturday just gone, a 12mile ride supposedly taking around 2-4 hours so we expected it take about 3, Bzzt, wrong!
Giles from work found the route on the site he bought his bike from, sounded like a good route with some decent technical downhills involved which we were still craving from two weeks before. So off we headed just before 9am to lovely yorkshireeeeeeee. Setting off for the ride at about 11am after a nice heary breakfast consisting of an egg roll - with salad! We had 4 of us on this ride compared to last time when we ended up with only 2, we planned to keep it at 4 for the duration this time
Had a good start to the ride where we had a few semi-decent downhills, or sloped hills with a nice technical section leading to some steps to a main road. This is where it all went wrong, instead of turning right through a gate which we couldn’t see, we headed straight over and slightly right through a gate that we could see. The further we went down this trail, the more we realised we’d royally messed up. After we’d done just over the 12 miles we were supposed to do and still couldn’t find the way to where we needed to be we decided to ask and give in 
We got told that we’d crossed 3 valeys before stopping, so we had to head back much to Stu’s disappointment. A relatively leisurely cycle most of the way back and once again we decided to change our course and head another way - this led to some quite good technical downhills which led on to a nice pub for a quick drink before cycling the last 3 miles, up hill, back to the cars.
This is just one of the many views we had whilst up there.
19th September 2007, 10:11 pm
Getting a bit sick of this now on ebay. Having just bought a couple of things from Ebay in the past couple of days, I’ve seen how different people go about leaving feedback for you.
One guy who I collected the new cannon lense from on Monday night was one of the nicest people I’ve met on/from ebay, before I even got home he’d already posted neg feedback from the sale as his part of the deal had been completed - i.e he had my money.
The same can’t be said of another guy who I’ve just bought from, used bin to purchase the item and paid instantly via paypal (don’t even get me started on the stories I’ve heard about using paypal either). So, same thing as above except I want this to be posted to me. So I get an email from the seller saying thanks for the purchase and that my item was being shipped. (S)He requested that I post feedback once I receive the item and in good condition and he will then do the same.
Now forgive me if I’m thinking that I should already have positive feedback posted for this sale as I’ve completed my side and paid but no, instead I have to post pos feedback for him so that he does the same to me, basically threatning that if I leave anything other than that then he would probably do the same. Well they can get stuffed, I’ll not bother leaving feedback at all or just neutral feedback stating why.
Ebay idiots!
18th September 2007, 10:30 pm
Well I picked up what I would consider a bargin from Ebay last night, got a EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM to play around with. This is going to replace my kit 18-55mm lense that I got with the camera. Gonna have a mess around with some macro work using the macro extension tube set I have so check out the dSLR gallery soon….
5th September 2007, 10:58 pm
http://gallery.photoland.co.uk/
Set this up to fill a requirement people might have for a free gallery to host images on. Signup is by activation of the site admin for now so if you need somewhere to manage your photo’s then give this a go.
http://gallery.photoland.co.uk/main.php
28th June 2007, 08:32 pm
So here they are. Only been out on them once since getting them fitted at this point and it just so happened to have been raining all day, so half an hour later and one muddy path and this was the result.
24th May 2007, 09:42 pm
Why is it websites attract unwanted attention
/rant over.
