When you are working in a shop that is purely for high street presence, and not retail, it must be nice to be able to spend your entire day surfing the web and chatting to your (drooling) customers.  Fortunately for me my local ‘apple guy’ was able to do this last Friday afternoon.  While perusing the new iMacs he was telling me that the the iPhone 2 is due to be unveiled in June at Apple’s world wide developers conference (although everyman and his dog knows this).   My mac guy said that it would also be unlocked for any network usage, just now iPhone coverage has also been announced for Itlay, Australia, Singapore, India, and the Philippines (see macrumours.com and 9to5mac.com for more information).

O2 in the UK have sold out of 8GB iPhones, although it still possible to pay 329GBP for a 16GB iPhone.  I was told that apple are going for a global iPhone 2 roll-out.  There are other rumours spreading that it may be available in different colours, according to appleinsider.com AT&T’s website for existing users now has an option for a black iPhone.  Macprime.ch also suggest that Swisscom are going to be offering iPhones in Silver, Black and White…

So anyway, as I was saying, it must be nice to spend your entire day chatting and surfing about apple products when you are only there for high street presence.  I look forward to reading about the new iPhone…

For now I suggest checking out the new mac ads, they may have been running this campaign forever now, but they are still funny!

There is a handy feature when playing with Oracle databases in SQL+ called rollback.  When working with large databases this can be really an amazing feature, especially when you realise that you have just wiped out a huge amount of the wrong data and that it has cost millions of dollars to the company you are working.  This can have an effect on your position within said company. 

Similarly, wordpress has a great feature that allows you to change the theme, back to what you had.  Assuming, of course, that you didn’t delete it.  So, back to the clean white theme until iron out the creases in the black theme.  I have also added SimpleLife to the black theme, although I can’t seem to get it to pick up my twitters, therefore rendering it a bit less useful to me…  On the bright side I haven’t quite stooped to the level the Nikita and just linking to friend feed…oooh, miaow! 

While I am still feeling catty, I was a bit miffed about a friend extracting the urine about keeping a blog, suggesting that all I would write about is ‘went to work and came home’ and why would people be interested in that.  Well, as my revised about page will say soon, I don’t really give a crap what (as Dr Cox would say) Barbie thinks, although clicky tells me that Barbie spends time on the blog anyway…go figure.

I was planning on doing a lot of the work on the theme over the weekend but unfortunately a really shitty sore throat mixed with a liberal dose of hayfever took care of most of the weekend.  My plans for the new theme extend over the next couple of weeks, hopefully I’ll be able to get it running with SimpleLife going as well.

Was extremely pleased to receive some new Oakley Half Wire HDO’s yesterday.  I ordered Half Wire 2.0 frames with carbon coloured frames and bronze polarised lenses.  These shades were purchased to replace the Oakley’s that I lost last November in The Hague, I have no idea where they went and have been extremely annoyed at myself since then…

Tim brought them back from the USA for me, seeing as Europe prices suck (that and the US $ being so weak right now).  Cheapest UK price I saw on the web 174.99 GBP.  US $ price of the Oakley website $230.  Difference in price at todays XE.com exchange $113.95.  Add in a couple of beers for Tim and I thnk I’ll still be ahead in terms of $’s.  Especially seeing as Tim is starting another new health kick due to the two weeks of drunken debauchery sustained in the US and UK.

Anyway, thanks dude, I appreciate it! 

Having spent a lot of time last week developing a new theme for this blog I can honestly say that I am pretty disappointed with the outcome.  So much time, so much learning, so little beauty!  I have been trying to make myself feel better about this by reading a lot on how content is king, but it isn’t really working. 

However, I do ‘now’ feel that I know how I want it to look and after all the knowledge gained from last week I think it should be easier *ahem* to implement.  So what am I going to change?  Well the header, as much as Nicki likes it, for starters and also the graphics for currently, linkage etc.  If you are viewing this on IE6 you will see that they are png files and that they look terrible on IE6.  I may have mentioned this before, but when will IE6 be wiped out forever.  In actually fact the site now looks best on Safari and FireFox.

I also added Gravatar to the comments which is quite neat, I have seen quite a few blogs now using gravatar and thought that I would add it in.  Get your Gravatar here.  Still to being considered is whether to have full blog posts on the front page or to have the excerpts on the front page.  The reason I am trying the excerpts is to expose my stats counter to what posts people are actually reading.  The downside to this is that if the readers are like me they may not want to click on the excerpts to read the post because they should be fully up anyway!

I am still trying out Remember the Milk as a reminder list, now that I have more to do I should be able to asses it more fully over the next week.

Apologies for the lack of updates over the past couple of weeks.  I am currently updating the Wordpress theme for this site and thinking about another new blog.  As you can imagine this is taking up most of my time…even though I have a little time off work right now. (more…)