I finally got around to replacing the default WordPress theme. Now it doesn’t look like I don’t care about my site :) With so many freely available themes I found it difficult to choose but I stumbled upon plaintxt.org and my mind was made up: I needed one of those minimalist themes and I opted for the Barthelme which I am liking very much. For posterity I took a screenshot of my old, hand-crafted design:

Over the past few months I haven’t been quite the gym freak that I’ve been in the past but one exercise I have continued to regularly train has been the deadlift. Saturday mornings had become my sole weekly strength session so I had to ensure I was getting as much bang for my buck as possible and nothing works the body like this exercise. I haven’t set a new personal record in any of the big movements since about November so it was a good boost to exceed my previous best.

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As I mentioned yesterday, my broadband had been on the blink and this morning I decided to take action as I need to do some work from home this weekend. Just before 9am I phoned tech support and was surprised to not have to wait on hold: my call was answered almost immediately. The support guy was polite and after I explained the situation he tested the line from his end and without any messing around scheduled to have an engineer sent out between 12 and 4pm.

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For 2 days now the “ready” light on my cable modem has failed to light up and hence I’ve had no internet access at home :( I’ve tried power-cycling the modem, leaving it unplugged overnight and even disconnecting and reconnecting the cable input. No Joy. I checked the Virgin Media service status page and can see that there was maintenance scheduled for Belfast this morning, maybe this will remedy the problem…

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I can hardly believe it, today I’m 6 calendar months into my position as Analyst Programmer at $BIG_CORP. How time has flown. More surprisingly, I almost seem to have grown accustomed to the stress of working with mission-critical systems and getting called-out in the wee hours of the night.

The consensus wasn’t to go live with the new site straight away after all but to create a better impression on the public by waiting on the final design and within no time at all Jordan had worked his graphical magic and delivered the goods. I was supplied with a .psd mockup and got busy with Photoshop. I hadn’t used this app in a while and it took some time to relearn how to use it but I managed to cut things up and proceeded to get stuck into the CSS.

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I’m preparing to push my code for the new Infurious site into production so we can start selling our first application, Rickshaw. The site’s not too pretty but It Works and our freshly recruited designer Jordan has some interesting ideas for the next iteration. All the important stuff is present: people can download Rickshaw, purchase a license and the license details will be generated and mailed out to them. I’ve just had a dry run of this scenario and it all looks good.

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I’ve just finished migrating sickbiscuit.com from my home development machine to my new VPS. DNS records have been updated and decaf is now handling mail and web traffic for the domain allow the only thing I’ve copied over is this blog. Hopefully this will give me the motivation needed to spruce things up a bit as the last iteration of sickbiscuit.com looked like it was designed by a programmer ;)

It seems like I’ve survived another year :) I’ve just finished processing my email and am reflecting on the goals I wrote this time last year: continue bodybuilding write more code blog more increase Linux skills get a “real” job Here’s the outcome: I put a lot of effort into training and nutrition last year and found that when vanity is my motivation then happiness will not be mine. I’m still trying to find a long-term strategy with this

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I met my co-conspirator Aidan in person for the first time today. He’s over here in sunny Belfast for a while and is working up on the third floor of the same building as myself, so we had a bit of lunch and got chatting about our plans for the future, our experiences of working for $BIG_CORP and life in general. It was good to finally put a physical person to the online persona and apparently neither of us looks like the photos we use as avatars ;)

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