As you may notice, I gave in and rethemed this web page. I took the minima-plus theme and tailored the sidebar to match the old one. After that, I was forced to make my own masthead since the supplied one was just the name of the theme. I hope people don’t feel too ill when they see it ;-).

I have been struggling with having to write documentation at the moment. We have a medium size back office system to put together, and it needs a full functional specification. I am finding it very heavy going, and progress with this is slow too. This article has given me quite a few ideas.

I recently jumped on the VoIP bandwagon, and now use SipGate to carry most of my calls. My monthly phone bill has dropped from £45 per month to £18 per month. It cost me a £100 for a telephone adapter, which has been covered by my savings by now.

My parents live in Spain and have recently ordered broadband, so I am putting together a configured equipment bundle for them to take out there. They will be able to make calls to the UK at 1.2p/minute and people will be able to call them at normal UK rates. It will be interesting seeing how this technology revolutionises telephone charge rates.

I am rolling out a larger Asterisk system at work with 10 ISDN channels and 25 extensions.

I am still the same weight as I have been for the last week and a half, and I’m trying not to think about it. My clothes are looser fitting though, so something is going on! I just wish I knew what. Oh well.

I have spent most of the weekend upgrading our web sites. I have given Tiffany her own Blog, and also made one for my Mum & Dad and here you can see their epic update of life in Spain. I also migrated Alisons weblog to WordPress which involved writing SQL scripts, because there was no way I was going to type in so many entries. She was very pleased.

Tiffany, Mum & Dad all wanted their themes changed, which was very straightforward, since they picked standard ones. Unfortunately, Alison wasn’t so easy to satisfy and had to have her own customised theme showcasing her beautiful sports car!

As if that lot wasn’t enough, we moved our photo albums across to Coppermine for ease of integration with WordPress. Now the gallery and weblogs can share their pictures. Cool.

I have been running a home grown, low key journal for years using a bit of PHP and MySQL. But now I’ve moved to mainstream blog software WordPress I have started to discover many little features such as in link monitoring, RSS and Atom feeds, pinging monitor sites, searching on Technorati.

Using these tools I have discovered another WordPress blogger just starting out on the Paul McKenna “I can make you thin” book and CD – inblognito. I like the categorisation, and may adopt a similar technique here. Good luck.

I have moved the web site to WordPress, at the moment the skin is set to the default, but I hope to have time to customise it a bit. I have also put TIffany’s site across to WordPress and she is very keen on putting up some posts – although us older types will probably not understand a word of it!

The web site is now being hosted on a colocated server in a full blown data center, air conditioning, generators, etc.! This is a side effect of having a dedicated machine for Lands of Stone. Also, it relieves some of the bandwidth on my poor ADSL link.

Angier.co.uk is now being hosted on a nice new server. It is a bottom of the range Duron 1.1GHz with 128Mb RAM and 40G Hard disk. Compared with the old server (100MHz Cyrix, 32Mb RAM, 2G HDD), it is a major boost and only set me back £219.

The transition was totally painless, and parts of the site such as http://gallery.angier.co.uk now get served before you can fall asleep!

For the full spec…

I have another project at SourceForge, it is called FuelLog and records petrol useage for up to 15 vehicles on the palm. It’s home page is here.

SourceForge have accepted my application to become an Open Source developer for a little utility that I am developing for Linux.

The program is for tracking your weight while on a diet, and it smooths out daily fluctuations in weight readings producing a nice graph of diet progress, It is called diettrack.