Ben Shephard

This week hasn’t been a good week at all. My relationship with Janine came to an end this week and it’s left me feeling pretty empty. I really liked her and hoped she would be “the one” but sadly not. I’m a person who always likes to have an idea where I’m going in life but Janine never seemed to want to look that far ahead and over time things just seemed less and less likely to work out between us. Everything came to an end quiet suddenly when I spoke my mind on a few of my worries. It feels a bit strange that just two weeks ago we were happily celebrating valentines day and today we can’t even talk to each other. I’m going to miss her and the kids and all of her family and friends whom I’ve come to know quiet well to say we’ve only been together a few months. I’ve spent the weekend cleaning and tidying and working on the computer while I try and work out what to do with the great gaping hole in my life. I think I’m going to sit back down at the computer for a few weeks and work on a few projects I’ve been thinking about. I’ve spent this afternoon creating a fancy USB tool kit that boots all my favourite partitioning and drive imaging tools. So far I’ve got Super Grub, Clonezilla, Parted Magic, BackTrack 3 and Darik’s boot and nuke all booting off a single 4GB USB stick with a customised syslinux boot loader. I’ve never played with syslinux before so it was nice to get to grips with something new. I just want to get Ubuntu on there next then I’m done.

Ben

= 3.5

Once again it’s been ages since I’ve written anything. It’s not that there hasn’t been anything happening worth writing about because there has but I’ve been spending lots of time doing other things. I’ve spent most of my spare time with Janine over the last few months but we’ve not been getting on so well recently and I’m a bit worried about all that but I don’t want to go into detail about it here. I’ve also been getting pretty worried about my finances. I had a pretty bad Christmas and had lots of time off work ill which is rare for me but that resulted in a very low January pay slip since I don’t get sick pay. Also my fridge broke down and I needed four new tyres on on the car and also had to pay for my car insurance which was extra this year since I added Janine as a named driver. All of this plus a pretty expensive Christmas has left my bank account a little worse for wear. It’s not been as empty as it is now for over ten years which is worrying because I’m barely earning more than I’m spending.

All of this had lead me to try to rethink some of my purchasing decisions.

I’m still paying for my car which is something I can’t do a great deal about. I could empty my savings and pay it off but then I’ve got nothing to fall back on should things suddenly get any harder. I don’t think I’ll ever want to borrow money again. It’s like having a ball and chain attached to my leg but once it’s all paid off I’ll be able to chill out a bit more.

One thing I’m constantly looking at is my energy spending. My gas and electricity bills are pretty high so I decided to get my bill recalculated. I’m in credit with my supplier but they won’t return the balance because aparantly with Direct Debit the deal is your supposed to pay up front before you use the energy. Thats a new one on me and I felt like they were just making excuses. They lied to me to get my custom and told me they would be cheaper. I’d worked out my electricity consumption and that worked out right. My gas consumption was a little harder to work out and I just couldn’t quiet get my head around the math. I don’t understand why my gas would have a different calorific value than anyone elses and the imperial to metric conversions don’t seem to tally to me. My meter measures in cubic feet yet I’m charged in Kilowatts. I decided to have a look at Uswitch and compare the offerings from elsewhere. Top of the list as cheapest came a company I’d not heard much about before but they were about two thirds the price I’m currently paying. They were First Utility and their offering looks pretty good. Not only are they cheap but they are the only UK supplier currently rolling out free smart meters which constantly update your account with correct readings by GPRS so no more estimated bills. Also this can tie in with Google Energy Meter which is an I-Google app that graphs your energy usage so that you can tell exactly what you use and when. I like that kind of thing and I think it will come in very handy to help me cut down on wastage. Also I’d like to be able to control certain aspects of my house by remote control such as the heating. Sometimes I’m late leaving work so the heating being on at home then is all wasted energy. If i had a control unit that either had it’s own web interface or could hack something together with something like an Arduino I could get greater control over my energy usage and I think with something like that I could cut my gas usage by a third or more. If I could control my lights in a similar way I could improve my security by controlling lights on the fly when I’m away from the house from my G1 but that would require quiet a bit of wiring and could get pricey and I don’t have a great deal of budget right now.

One of my other areas for improvement is my communications bills. I pay quiet a bit for my mobile phone but that said I do use it a great deal and I’m tied into a contract for most of this year now. My broadband is an area I want to look at. I’m currently with Pipex business / Opal and for what you get it’s very pricey. It’s an ADSL line so a maximum speed of 8Mb which is slow by today’s standards. Also I have to have a phone line which I neither want or need and that costs me £132 a year. I do get a static IP address which I find very handy what with running all the websites I host. I did look at other ways to do what I do now with a dynamic domestic broadband account but I can’t really find a suitable solution that does everything I want it to. Business broadband is way over priced for what is is and so far I’ve found the performance to be pretty poor in comparison to previous domestic suppliers. I currently get about 4-5 Mb out of my line and for the same price with a domestic virgin media line I could get 50Mb but that said I’ve been with Virgin before and their customer service sucks. It’s hard to find a good compromise but I think I’ll be shopping around again for the next few months to see what I can get.

On another Internet related matter my site has been down quiet a bit recently and I think this may be down to a faulty router. I swapped out my ADSL router for one I borrowed from work. An old DrayTek Vigor 2600i I’ve not had any outages since but I’m going to give it a few days and swap them back and see if the problem comes back. If so it looks like I’ll have to invest in a new modem / router at some point this year. I’ve also got  a secondary router in my bedroom acting as an extra wireless AP since the signal is pretty weak at the far end of my house but that seems to be on it’s way out too as the wireless keeps dying on me. The DrayTek isn’t wireless so without that I’m tied to the wall all the time now. I may well invest in a decent wireless router and separate network modem if I have to replace them. I’ve wanted a Linksys WRT54GL for a long time as that model can run third party firmwares quiet nicely which come with lots of added features. Also rather than having the extra AP in my bedroom I think I’d go for some meaty high gain antennae and stick with just the one box.

I need to get my spending sorted out and apart from that I’m doing all the other obvious things like cutting back my food budget. I need to lose some weight anyway. I’m also going to try and stop using the car quiet so much because the price of petrol is on the rise again so as the weather improves I’ll try and get out on my feet a bit more and walk places. The best way I find to do this is to walk to the pub because then I don’t waste money on over priced soft drinks and I get some exorcise plus I can spend the petrol money on more beer.

The other factor I’m looking at is my income. I’ve started STS and I’m trying to get my name out there as much as I can but so far I’ve not had any paying customers but there is time yet. I’m also looking around for alternative employment but the economy being the way it is things are pretty limited. I think it will be the same for STS as well because if people in general don’t have much money then they might not see getting the computer fixed as priority right now. But on the flip side of the coin it may be that people are trying to prolong the life of their machines and would like help with upgrades. I’m hoping things take off eventually because I really admire my friends who work for themselves. I  still think it takes a lot of guts to give up your day job but time will tell.

I’m hoping I can sort a lot of this stuff out by the end of the year and become a bit better off but as for the other things in my life right now everything feels a bit uncertain. I’m trying to put things to the back of my mind a bit and concentrate on the stuff I can work on easily as once I’m financially secure I’ll be able to breathe a bit more and hopefully be a bit more relaxed. Relationships can be a roller-coaster ride at the best of times but when the rest of my life feels like it’s falling apart around me it’s difficult to just chill out and get on with life.

Hopefully I’ll be back again soon with something more exciting to write about. The release of Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner now so hopefully I’ll have some nice things to say about that. I’ve tried the alpha so far and when running from a live USB stick I didn’t notice any power problems which really killed 9.10 for me on both my laptop and netbook. but I’ve still got some work to do on that. I just don’t want to wipe out my perfectly usable 9.04 install to do it and then have to go back and re install again. I’ve been without my netbook for long enough this winter and it felt like I was missing a limb or something but my G1 running CyanogenMod helped ease the pain somewhat.

Later

Ben

= 4.5

It’s been a good few weeks since I last managed to write a post because things have been getting a bit on top of me just recently. There has been lots of good and bad things happening that have managed to keep me off here.

I suppose the biggest thing to happen over the last few weeks has been my decision to go a bit further with the idea of setting up my own business. I bought a domain name a few months ago but never did anything with it but now I’ve got my site set up and something half decent on it. It’s a brief description of the kind of services I can provide along with a contact page. You can find it at http://sts-it.co.uk I’ve also had a batch of 500 business cards printed up to hand out and I’ve been doing as much work as I can for family and friends to try and spread the word.

Setting up the website and back end software to organise myself and any work I get has posed me with a few new technical challenges. I wanted my emails to go into a ticketing system so that I can manage my time better and keep a track of indavidual jobs easily. I already use software like this in my day job and although it’s neither open source or the most reliable of applications it’s free for single users and the biggest advantage is that I already know where everything is and I’m used to it’s quirks so I decided I’d go with the same for STS. I’m using Service Desk Plus by Manage Engine. It’s pretty easy to set up on a Linux box and it sets up everything it needs including a web server and My-SQL database. The downside of this is that if you are already running on a machine with a My-SQL server on it they tend to conflict as they both run on the same port number. I decided I’d like to keep ServiceDesk reasonably seperate from my main box but I didn’t want to have to run two machines because electricity costs money. I set up an Ubuntu machine in Virtual Box and installed ServiceDesk on that only to realise it wouldn’t talk to my mail server. I had to think this one over for a few days but eventually came up with a solution by setting up Postfix, Dovecot and Fetchmail on the VM and used that to get mail in and out of ServiceDesk. It’s become a pretty complicated set up but it’s working nicely for me now.

I’ve also revisited some old problems with my CCTV and managed to get that back up and running. My Live Video page has now made a return and people can once again watch for me putting the bin out and all that exciting stuff. I thought the problems I encountered were due to changes in the way Ubuntu 9.10 handeled video but it turned out that I just needed to specify a few extra options in VLC to get the image working properly. I’d tried all sorts of things to get it going again even reinstalling the older version of VLC from source which proved to be a learning curve. I’m just happy I didn’t manage to do any damage since I was doing all this on a live machine that already does tonnes of other stuff which I didn’t want to break. The problem with running everything on one machine is that all the eggs are in one basket and if that dies I’m pretty screwed. I make regular backups to a remote location but if my machine died and I had to build another from scratch it would be expensive and time consuming but then if I had the money for more hardware now I’d already have it running so I’ve got no choice. I did see a nice upgrade kit the other day that consisted of case and motherboard with an Intel i7 processor and 6GB of memory. My processor loads are pretty low on my current machine (Intel Core2 Duo 1.8GHz) but It’s the memory that’s a killer because the motherboard will only take 2GB which I’m already up to. Ideally I’d like atleast another 2GB so I can play with more VM’s without running out but sadly that’s a no go without a new moterboard and even case upgrade (since the current one is BTX form factor).

Hopefully I can make enough money out of STS over the next year to be able to get that upgrade

Aside form my personal projects things with Janine and the kids seem to be going pretty well. I’ve taken Janine out on a couple of driving lessons and she’s starting to get the hang of it. It’s a strange thing for me teaching someone else to drive because there is a lot to think about but we’re going out on quiet roads with plenty of room so we can both get used to things together. It certainly feels strange to be sat in the passenger seat of my own car but it’s an enjoyable experience. Things seem to be going really well in that respect and I think we’ve managed to calm down a bit after the initial excitement of getting together and being together is becoming normal but we do miss one another when we can’t be around.

On a less than happy note nothing seems to be changing for the better at work and I awoke this morning and by chance hapened to spot a small brown patch on my blue bedroom carpet under the radiator. Closer inspection revealed the radiator was leaking slowly so I put a loaf tin under it catch the drips but I’ve got a bit of a plumbing job lined up for the weekend now. Life can’t all be a bed of roses I suppose but hey ho tomorrow is another day. and speaking of which it’s time I wasn’t here.

Later

Ben

= 6.2