I completed my first real training ride this weekend, cycling from Raynes Park, London, SW20 to Deal, Kent, CT14.

Bugger was it hard.

Well, I say hard, up until Hythe (next to Folkestone) I was absolutely great and loving it! It was a hell of a lot more of a challenge than I thought it would be, and further, with 107 miles being the final distance. The main problems being the number of very steep hills, by the time I was riding along the coast with its hill after every town I was ready to give up! I was still easily making 20-30mph on the flat and even faster downhill, but I couldn’t face the hills. It really didn’t help that my new gears (badly adjusted by myself I must add) were slipping like mad!

But the final achievement and the struggling up hills wasn’t what the ride was about. It was training for my 3 capitals in 3 days cycle challenge for MAG (sponsors still welcome at www.challengebee.org) and it was just a test of my capabilities, but in the end it was far more enjoyable than I thought it would be. Cycling through tiny villages with truly quaint village shops and little coffeeshops where the same people must meet for cup of tea every Saturday morning was absolutely brilliant!

Earlier today I was thinking that the London marathon must be great to run, but as much as I like London, Deptford and Charlton are exactly my idea of scenic. Yes, The Mall but The beauty of the countryside (including the hills) was a refreshing change. The tree lined single track roads, the waving at fellow cyclists and the sun shining felt great. Mind you, When I got to Folkestone there was one fella I didn’t take kindly to, with him suggesting I “try harder”. Yeah mate, you too after about 80 miles.

But even though I did have to stop for a few more rests than I planned from Hythe onwards, I did manage to make it all the way to Deal. Although this is probably thanks to Chris Woollard (despite letting me down on actually completing the charity ride with me!) and Adrian H at Evans in Wandsworth for helping me (even if it cost a small fortune) ready to make the trip, and if I am honest make the trip easier. And I do have a new wheel for the June trip!

If I can do 107 miles through the hilly South East of England though, I think I can do flat Holland, although the way my legs felt back on the bike today, I better do a little bit more training, and when I get more time to myself, just ride for the hell of it.

Anyway, I suppose I better give you the unimpressive stats!

**Cycling Time: 7:48:10

Trip distance: 107.3 miles

Average speed: 13.7 mph

Maximum speed: 34.5 mph

**

It has been a fun few weeks! Last week I went to see Velvet Revolver, the super group made up of members from Stone Temple Pilots, Guns ‘n’ Roses and Wasted Youth, and afterwards in the private bar met Slash and Scott Weiland. Both seemed bloody nice chaps, although Weiland appeared to be the only person in the UK allowed to smoke indoors at the gig. Now that’s power.

I was extremely disappointed that while writing this I found that Velvet Revolver have parted company with Scott Weiland, Slash citing his “increasingly erratic behaviour” as the reason! Well I never!

Slash was a bloody nice chap too. And my f**king God was he good on guitar! Unbelievable in fact.

The Friday after the gig was my first sponsorship deadline, which I just about reached, with the rest on its way. Great news – I am definitely cycling to Amsterdam and Brussels in June then!! Hoorah! Speaking of which I did my first training ride on Saturday – only 20 miles, but it’s a start. This weekend I will do 40 miles and then the following weekend I will try all the way to Deal to see mother and Grandad!

The final update is possibly the best bit – for me anyway. Up there with meeting Slash! I was in .net magazine! Now it was only readers sites, but the site Griff designed for www.challengebee.org, that I built over a couple of nights a few months ago is one of the sites featured on page 18. Nice screen shot, blurb that I wrote and picture of me and the Griff. I am proud! Next up is writing a decent article for the mag, which I am sure I could do!! I’ll scan and upload to this post asap! Probably tomorrow!

So just after receiving an email asking why a complicated HTML email didn’t work in Outlook 2007 and explaining that since it uses Word to render HTML it was never going to display everything right. Obviously some people just don’t understand this.

However with almost perfect timing I got an email from xBox Live (Microsoft run) with the disclaimer above shown right at the top! Yes, Microsoft themselves are suggesting you read the HTML email in a browser rather than their own email client!

“Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007”

Now I accept that Microsoft may be correct in that HTML should not have been used for emails at all, emails should be plain text, end of. However if you are then going to support HTML partially, whilst using HTML emails in your own marketing, with a disclaimer against your own product, something is very wrong somewhere! Anyway, all the clients I work for won’t pay for plain text emails, therefore HTML emails kind of keep me in a job!

Anyway, I found this amusing, hope you do too.

Hello magazine. That is the reason I have just felt a moment of pride for where I work and what I do. Yes I enjoy doing my work, love where I work and when the two combine and a website where I did all the front end and had some influence in the functionality and design (Griff, as normal, was awesome) is a great feeling. Although it would have been nice if it hadn’t taken me getting all the way back to Durham to mention possibly being in Hello magazine, only to find out my mother has a copy with a Gyro ad in it, and I didn’t even know for sure we were in! It was Hello for God’s sake. I have had emails saying we are on fecking petrol pump, so tell us properly when my work shall be in one of the best sellers!! Apart from that rant I am quite proud that a website I built the front end for has been featured in Hello magazine (even without sign off, eh Barnaby!!). I also asked for 4 weeks, not the 2 and a bit I got (with luck) so well done me on getting the job done anyway, God knows I don’t have time to go back and improve it! Unfortunately.

Other news includes that CodeIgnitor is awesome, still. TotSocks are gonna be big, hopefully.

Stephen Fry and Boris Johnson are my heroes and I wish I could be either of them!!

I have also found that Hot Shots: Part Deux has ruined any possible chance of me enjoying either Rambo 2 or 3 without giggling at the slightest hint of a Charlie Sheen joke. Or any other joke in that film, to be fair!!

And finally, in the top of Division 3 (Hackney and Leyton league) clash, Hospital Tavern (my current team) overcame the favourites for the league Highstone FC in a 3-2 victory. What a great result, and it must mean that we can go on to challenge for both the league and the last remaining cup. Although if being picked up on one error in that game means I get dropped for the quarter final cup game, I will be so disappointed, I’m not sure I could handle it!! Here’s to the slim chance of us winning the league!!

Today I went to the Technology for Marketing and Advertising show with little expectations, however I ended up in the Mobile Internet seminar. This is where I found that QR codes (which I had briefly investigated last week for a work pitch) are already usable and being used in the real world (although they are old news in Japan and China I hear – they are even on McDonalds wrappers there).

The above is an example code – use it and I’ll know when you do because it is a text message to me, telling me how modest (awesome) I am. All automated.

The programmes I installed to test the QR codes on my Windows Mobile Orange SPV E650 (aka the HTC S710) were the i-nigma reader and the Quickmark reader both of which work really well if the QR is large enough (anything over an inch in print was fine – screen worked better but that defeats the object!).

The QR code can include all manner of information – popular uses I have seen include sending direct to mobile web pages, auto dialling phone numbers, short texts and even full sms messages with number and message! If you want your own QR codes you can create them for non-commercial use on the kaywa web site. hey also have an excellent reader on there, just one not compatible with my phone at time of writing.

So I will be pushing for these codes to be used more in my line of work and looking out for them and using them when I see them. Apparently current uses include on “Lost” posters, on the labels of England shirts and The Sun ran a piece on QR codes when they printed a code in the tabloid back in December.

Now I’m off to make QR code t-shirts – and you won’t know what they say unless you’re as cool as me and my phone!QR code

I was very disappointed with CSI:NY tonight going all online and most of the programme being set in Second Life. But if that is what Second Life is like then I was absolutely impressed!! I will have to look into Second Life because it looked more like what I would have thought of as a combination of World of Warcraft. From what I heard of Second Life it was merely an online world where you could do what you wanted, but realistically. According to CSI:NY that isn’t the case.

Anyway, I thought it was all a little far fetched, but maybe not, let me know if you know! If I had time I would go back for a second look at Second Life!

I have finally acquired a spare laptop from work following replacement of machines, now it isn’t the best but I didn’t mind because all I wanted was a basic machine to play with linux on, specifically Ubuntu.

That isn’t the case anymore because I have fallen in love with Ubuntu! It has been an absolute dream to use, the GUI is beautiful and the ease of use is much better than Windows.

Installing I had some problems with v7.10 however, where it just seemed to hang after showing the Ubuntu progress bar when trying to load the install. However I thought I would try v6.06 as a last resort – it worked. When installing I loved the ease of set up, Microsoft should take a leaf out of the Linux book (or maybe a full chapter!). The installation did collapse at first attempt (at some point during the Open Office install) but following a retry I was away.

Setting up my wireless network was a little easier than Windows, not completely trouble free however. I could connect to my wireless network fine once I found how to choose the network to connect to, but I still couldn’t load any web pages by domain name, only by IP address. A little investigation and I found that Ubuntu had set the DNS to be my router. Once I had changed that to my ISP DNS servers I was cooking on gas.

I have yet to really try to use the machine for any serious work, or really get stuck into any programmes or terminal exploration – but I’ll let you know when I do.

This blog was brought to you by an Acer Travelmate 290 running Ubuntu 6.06.

So for part of my development at work, I have been looking at the various PHP frameworks there are around and trying to find something that I can not only use at work, but also use at home for my own sites.

Now I do a little PHP and it is my aim to one day be the front end “that is better than most back enders at back end stuff” coder, but that day is many moons away. In the meantime I have tried and looked at the hype about a few MVC style PHP frameworks.

Symfony

This was recommended by Manda Poo, my former colleague. Her new company Blu Halo use this and apparently to superb extent according to their web site, which utilised the framework (Blu Halo). They also use jQuery superbly, but that’s one for another blog. Blu Halo do have a quite excellent web site there. Pretty much a perfect example of what I want to do at Gyro (I’ll be lucky, Virgin Atlantic is a little heavy on my time right now…).

I found Symfony to look a powerful and all round excellent framework. Some massive sites have used the framework, as well as Blu Halo mentioned above, for example Heriot-Watt University, ASDA (press release source) and Shoot magazine (brilliant). I did have a few issues with local development, using the command line PHP interface and getting it to work with WAMP. Incidentally I just found a load of solutions, a little too late unfortunately. I must try harder to work through things next time!

CakePHP

Next was Cake PHP and I found pretty much the same as above, but without a personal recommendation I kept going back to see what I could see about Symfony, hence only spending a little while with Cake PHP. This is quite possible the most useless review of anything ever.

I’ll try Cake again, but not quite yet!

Code Ignitor

This has proved to win the competition to be come my current obsession. From seeing the ease of install (upload – that is it!) to the simple database set up and querying I have quite literally got stuck right in. Hopefully over the next few weeks I won’t find any problems with it because it would be heartbreaking.

The best bits I have found in very limited experience of CodeIgniter are that the organisation of the framework is excellent, the way the MVC works and the code helpers are clear, without any experience of them, is brilliant.

I also briefly looked at KohanaPHP, which is based on CodeIgniter and I think it probably is the way forward, if it is as flexible as claimed (which it appears to be). The choice cam down to the fact CodeIgniter had better tutorials and support to unfortunately.

Obviously not being a back end specialist and an especially insecure programmer, I need more input on what might work as a development tool at Gyro. There is always the chance we don’t need one at all, but if we want to be considered a serious digital agency, then we better get in line and use the powerful frameworks. Not that there is anything “wrong” as such with the current set up, but surely better is, erm, better.

I think I will go with CodeIgniter for the back end of my next web site incarnation, but when I get a little more experienced with OOP I reckon I’ll go back to Symfony. Only time will tell.

ASP.NET will never be mentioned in a blog here, except then, because it smells.

Warning – Philosophical comment below…

Yesterday I thought about what I might have made of myself if I had either staying in the call centres or really pushed to be a teacher. I thought call centre manager would be about right, at LEAST whereby teaching would have been a struggle to get up the ladder. Then I realised what I have already accomplished with only 4 years of web programming experience. Building Xerox, T-Mobile, SportsAid and Tate and Lyle web sites. Even coding Virgin emails most days is a feather in the cap – especially as I seem to be the only email author that can make emails almost perfect in every client, even Lotus Notes 5. The best bit is I will only get better, so I’m not thinking about what I could have done any more, but thinking about what I will do for the Internet and myself in the next 10 years.

Photo from www.bbc.co.uk

It’s always a shame when a home town player leaves his hometown club, not least when he only joined permanently a matter of months previously, is your favourite player in your position and your idol (even down to hairstyle and choice of hair bands!)

So Woodgate is off to Spurs, was he just gutted since he’s not going to get back in the team over Huth and Wheats?? Very probably. But it’s all a bit sudden, from him “living the dream” only a few months ago to suddenly wanting to go back to Newcastle, Spurs or change his nationality to French and join Arsenal.

Anyway, sod him. Just means that Alves can embarrass him when the Brazilian signs on Wednesday. Hopefully.

I have had my confirmation through, so now I really better start training and fund raising. To help I have put the site www.challengebee.org together, designed by my mate Griff. Hopefully that’ll give some easy methods for people to get money to me. The PayPal option has been quite popular.

I’ll be doing all sorts to try and raise money, from raffles and auctions to gigs and parties, so keep checking for my upcoming events. They will be fun. I hope!

SO there it is, the easy ways to donate are set up and now I can get down to the hard part of making people part with their money and preparing myself for 300 miles on my bike.

Chas ‘n’ Dave were awesome, by the way…