Mr-F.org

Both Mrs F and I are currently sitting in Strasbourgh visiting our friend Christian. His good lady Chloe arranged a surprised birthday weekend for clj. After much hilarity on the six hour drive from Dunkerque to Strasbourgh, where our navigation system “Rick Rick” suffered nuemrous errors sending us in a variety of direction, none of them directing us towards our target destination. So after a hard reset of “Rick Rick”, which due to it’s age took a while, we swapped to the GPS on my mobile phone. Anyway, once back on track to Strasbourgh and driving in four different countries, we arrived a little before 4 in the morning.

Later that morning, we ventured out into Strasbourgh for a coffee before heading off to surprise clj. Some of the others arrived the night before and appeared at his doorway, to which he was completely taken aback, that people had travelled from the UK to come and see him. Apparently his responsed was “I hate you all”, but obviously in the nicest possible sense. Then to see another three friends standing in the middle of Strasbourgh, he was again suitably lost for words, only able to say “yeah”. Anyway, after a delicious lunch and seeing some of the sights of Strasbourgh, including the Gay Pride parade (think they might have put this on just for clj) we ended up by the river having a well deserved beer, and a lovely ice cream (including surmf flavour!!).

Now, I’m sitting here as Chloe and some of the others prepare some food, just to finish off the day. All in all, it has been a very enjoyable day, and I think clj is completely overwhelmed. Anyway, when I get back I’ll put some pictures up to go along with our little trip. I’m just sorry that we can’t stay for a little longer to help him actually celebrate clj’s birthday tomorrow.

At least on the way home I won’t have to rely on “Rick Rick” so the trip should be more straight forward!

Three days ago, Jenny and I finally got married. After a lengthy engagement we finally tied the knot at Dover Town Hall amongst family and friends. We were both very touched by the number of people that made the effort to share our special day, including some friends returning from the states and Thailand. Special thanks go out to all those people that were involved both with preparing for the day, and those that helped out on the day, we couldn’t have done it without you.
We both feel very humbled by the love and support that we have both received from both our family and friends both on the day itself and over our lives. We both feel that we are truly blessed.

The day itself when off without a hitch; apart from me getting hitched to Jen, and was absolutely amazing. We ended the day sitting in a 4 star hotel drinking champagne and eating take-away pizza! What a way to end a marvelous day.

I’ve been meaning to post these images for a while, but things just seemed to get in the way and I never got around to it, that is until now. Back in January I was lucky enough to be invited up to London on a group shoot with a number of other photographers and models. Even though the weather was pretty poor, it was a very enjoyable experience. So here are the first two images from the trip.

Well it has been a long time coming, but Jen and I have finally set a date to get married. So there are 72 days left before the day arrives. Even though there hasn’t been much time, things have gone pretty smoothly so far. The only issue we’ve had is with the printing of the invitations, but that is a story for another time.

I’ve just read a post by my friend Matt over at Sub Ubi about his experience with Mozy.

“In near the start of 2007, I purchased a new MacBook to replace my Powerbook that had been stolen. I suffered a hard drive failure, but had good backups. When the drive was replaced, I went ahead and subscribed to Mozy, which provided an automatic means to backup all of my pictures and other important data.

In October of 2007, my hard drive failed again. I had 30GB of data backed up on Mozy.

I tried using their desktop client to restore my data; somewhere in the middle of a 600MB test recovery (just one (large) folder), it said that one or more files were corrupted, and could not be restored. Mozy’s software neither 1. told me which files were corrupted, nor 2. was capable of restoring everything except those files. Either of these things would have been useful.”

Reading further into the post Matt goes onto say how poor the support service is, and that in the end he is basically stuck with an 30GB image which is encrypted using a closed-source proprietary tool that doesn’t provide any form of feedback to the user.

If other users suffer the same fate that Matt did then it is only going to sour the experience of backing up their data, which is simply one of the most important things to do.  I personally am trying to convince members of the department to back up their data, after several hard drives had died with data that wasn’t backed up on them.

So basically remember to backup your data, but avoid Mozy unless you fancy the chance of paying money for a service that could leave you with nothing more than an image of your data that you can not access.

Today I had some horrible news, in that my Grandfather past away in the early hours of this morning.  I’ve spent the morning with family just being together.  For the majority of today I just haven’t really be able to process the fact that Grampy has gone, especially since he has always been around.  It is only now that it really is starting to go in that he is no longer around.  I’m not a writer by any stretch of the imagination, so I really don’t have the word to express how much of impact he had on my life and how much I’m going to miss him.  I think I’ve been extremely lucky with the guidance that both of my mum and dad have been able to give me over the years, but Grampy also provided much insight and inspired me in many other ways.  He was without a doubt a very kind, caring and creative man, but even more so also liked to play tricks.  For example, when we were both really young we used to play the card game “pairs” with him.  One time he used a mirror under the glass table to aid him in matching the pairs.  It took both my brother and I a while to work out how he suddenly became so good at pairs.  Another example of the fun he used to have was the way he taught us to recycle the washing up making the person doing the washing up confused.  After we dried something up he would encourage us to replaced it on the dirty side of sink for the person in the sink to wash up again.  This caused many hours of amusement watching and waiting for the person doing the washing up to realized they had washed up a number of items a couple of times.  Indeed, we actually managed to pull this prank off on Grampy himself a couple of times, however, I think he was well aware of what we were doing and just going along with the joke.

Even though Grampy never really spoke about his time in the army, I think this greatly shaped his view on the world.  In particular how important it was to look after each other, something that is not often considered within modern society.  I just don’t have the words to say how much I’m going to miss him.  Whilst both Jen and I knew Grampy was not well, we were hoping that he would make it through to our wedding.

I’ve been working on a new teaching system for a couple of weeks, and finally we got to the stage where some of the work needed to be marked by hand. Although I had completely overlooked the fact that some of the students would be submitted Word 2007 files, I realized this wouldn’t be a problem since they can be accessed using Word 2003 using a patch or by simply installing 2007 for the member of staff.

However, a nasty shock was in order for me when a number of staff members said they couldn’t access some of the student’s files. After some investigation it turned out that the files causing a problem were the Word 2007 files. I couldn’t understand what the problem was until I stepped outside of my nice warm Firefox environment and fired up Internet Explorer 6. Apparently when you try to download a Word 2007 file using IE6 it detects the file as a zip file. I thought this was a little strange but continued to look at possibilities and got a colleague running IE7 to test it. Again a “.zip” file appeared on the desktop instead of “.docx”. Completely confused by the whole situation we continued to test and installed Microsoft Office 2007 to see if that would allow Internet Explore 7 to download the file as intended. Guess what, it didn’t work!

Now for someone like myself this isn’t a problem, since not only am I sensible enough to run Firefox, but also can easily spot that the file should have been a word file and rename the extension appropriately. However, many of our users here in Psychology arn’t that savy. So a bit more searching in the bows of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and we came across the option to stop IE from trying to work out the file type based on it’s content rather than it’s extension. Surely disabling this feature, which can be useful would solve the problem. Alas no, instead of trying to download the file it display garbage on screen and when you right click to download the file it tries to save a “.txt” file instead of leaving it alone.

Guess this is just another good reason why everyone should ditch Internet Explore and move over to the more user friendly Firefox.

UPDATE:  After some searching about on the internet I have found out that the problem can be fixed by adding some sort of definition to the Apache config file.  Apparently Internet Explorer is trying to be clever and determine the correct file type of the file you are downloading and then append this new file extension to the file.  Of course you can download the file with the .zip extension and then just rename the file but for many of the users in the department that just adds further complications and more chances of something going wrong for them.

It seems that I’m having one bad day after another at the moment.  A number of small projects I’ve been working on have seem to taken on a life of their own and now become overly complicated monsters.  Looks like it’s going to be another busy weekend just to try and keep on top of all these projects.

It’s the end of another era for me. As a student I been honored and blessed with meeting a wide range of interesting and different people, which I’ve been able to call my friends. However, and this shouldn’t really be a surprise, but over the years many of my friends have moved away while I’m still in good ol’ Canterbury. With the latest departure of Matt and his wife Carrie, it made me think how empty campus has become, the small little hole left behind after each person has departed. Of course I still have plenty of friends on campus and in the surrounding areas like Rick & Akiko, Matt & Mary, Kary & Nic, Dain & Jez and Liz & John to name but a few. It’s just different here these days, and possibly not in a good way.

On the bright side though I now have friends dotted all over this country like Michael (Devon, though this could be seen as another country ), Mark & Vic and Vikki (London), Simon (floating somewhere) and Ian (again somewhere but I’ve forgotten). Even more exciting is the number of friends I have in different countries including my oldest friend from primary school Steven (Connecticut, USA), Ed (Thailand), Matt & Carrie (Boston, USA), Ralph (Austria), Christian (German, I think).

Anyway, best to you all that are not here, or as one of my friends once called it “deepest darkest Kent”. Take care and speak to you all soon.