Welcome to the new web site. We are still working on things so please come back soon.

Occasionally I blog about a charity event. I do not do this often as the last thing I want is a hard sell every time I read a blog, and I suspect you are the same. This in one charity event that I am not only happy to support, but one you might find fun to follow, and you may even be able to help with.

Paul Smith, a good man, and only slightly crackers, had an idea while waiting in a supermarket queue. We are all users of Twitter. If stuck for something we can say so using Twitter and someone will have an answer or be able to help. Most users are selfless and will go out of there way to help people who they have never met. The idea was to ask the Twitter community to help him hitchhike round the world and see how far he can get. He put up a web site and we (his so called friends) told everyone he was doing it so he could not pull out. :-) He is now scared witless, but very much up for the challenge.

You can follow Paul on twitter and read more about the challange on the the twitchhiker blog. No matter where you are, if you are a Twitter user, please follow him and help him in his travels.

Back in May I decided it was time to move on from Beaumont Colson Ltd. The date was somewhat open-ended and although I expected to have gone by now it is only now that I feel both the company and I are ready. My leaving date is the 30th of November 2008.

For practical reasons my current role is being dissolved and most of the tasks being taken on by thee other employees. This is a logical move and something that should perhaps of happened several years ago.

I have however been persuaded to stay on in an advisory roll working a few days a month. This gives the company access to that knowledge and experience that is not available elsewhere in the organisation and gives me an income to live off.

My plans are not yet set, but I will be taking off December and will work on some old and new pet projects at the start of 2009.

I am planning a leaving doo (provisionally) on the 12th December so keep a note in your diary.

Earlier today I was cycling to a meeting in the west of Newcastle. I was early so was cycling slowly when a kid cycled up along side me. I am no good at guessing age, but suspect he was no more than ten years old. “Nice bike” he said. “Thank you, not as good as yours.” I replied. It was not the most flashy bicycle I had seen, but it had a fancy suspension and was far better than mine. His response was surprisingly profound. “It does not matter how good your bike is, its a bike”. He then cycled off leaving me with a warm feeling of hope for the world.

There has been many times I have wanted an application to lock my Windows console. Originally I wanted to add it to a hot key on my keyboard, and more recently I have needed to use it as a nasty fix to automatically restart some software post reboot that needs a user to log in.

The latter can be achieved by running “control userpasswords2″ and getting Windows to log in automatically. Rather than have the console unlocked for a wile after a reboot I tend to run “rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation”, and that is best done in the registry for security.

So there is a solution, but I still prefer to have an application to hand, and today I finally got round to coding it. It took a whole few minutes and is a whopping 16k. Given time I could have made it fare more compact, but decided it was not worth the effort.

Please feel free to download and use it, but please also do let me know if you find it useful. The app can be downloaded here… LockConsole.zip.

After 14 years at Beaumont Colson Ltd I have decided that it is now time to move on.

I joined the company as a placement student in 1994 and after many varied projects I leave as the technical director.

It is no secret that I have not been enjoying work recently and the excitement that I once felt has now long gone. This is partly because of the work that we are currently doing, but mostly because of the way the company now operates.

I will not be leaving instantly as I have a few projects I want to see through to the end, and there is a lot of knowledge to relay to my replacement, whoever that person may be.

Currently there are a number of options open to me and I am going to take my time in deciding what to do next. I can say that job satisfaction is going to be a key factor in the decision.

I have been interested in amature radio and transition for quite some time but never quite got round to doing anything with it. When when I found out about the Waygood radio club that was being set up to coincide with the AV Festival I thought this was the ideal excuse to do something with it.

To save confusion this is the kind of radio this is kind of like CB radio and not broadcast radio that, let’s be honest, I have had some experience of over the years.

After a few meetings and couple of Saturdays training (and another evening training because we are a little slow at times) we took the exam. Today, after a phone call to Ofcom to sort a problem with the annoying web site, I managed to get my M3 callsign. Wahoo!

I am keeping my callsign private for the moment because I don’t tend to post information that can be used to find out things such as my home address, but if you know me then feel free to ask.

A big thank you to Glen and Graham for the excellent tuition.

QRT (I think)

This is a quick post to mark the passing of DAB radio stations OnWord and Core.

Although I was not a regular listener to OnWord I was pleased it was there for others. I also coded some of the software that populated the OnWord EPG on Freeview so will loose that claim to fame.

Although not intended for me I did tune in and out of Core in the same way as I did many other stations, and I owe them a thank you for publicising my DAB Bar software on there DLS (scrolling text) message.

More background on this can be found in this article.

Today I received a call on my mobile phone and it started to beep that the battery was flat. I was slightly surprised because it had been charging overnight. It appears that the fault is in the actual phone so I need a new one. :-(

So, I need some advice on what new phone to buy. Primarily it needs to be small, lightweight, and have a good battery life. It also needs to not be expensive if purchased without a contract. I do not need a camera in the phone as I carry one most of the time nowadays. Neither do I need any PDA like functionality, but a WAP browser is useful for some tasks. I also would really like it to have an easy to use keypad.

So have you any recommendations.

A night last week I was late light shopping in a local(ish) Asda where I managed to crash the self service till, again.

Late night shopping is something I am doing more and more not having time to go shopping of an evening recently, and although the self service tills are annoying I do use then when there is a queue. The tills at rather annoying because you are supposed to pick up the item, scan it, and then bag it, when in fact I just want to pick up some thing scan them and then put them down. A while ago I managed to find a way round this (that I will not publish here) but it has the problem that I can result in a member of staff needing to enter a pin a few dozen times. Technically this is not a crash, but it is close. I am also pleased to report that the new Tesco tills have a conveyor.

The new bug that I have discovered occurs when you use a “Chip and Signature” card and the shop assistant does not remove the card from the reader before accepting the signature. The till completes the transaction and then gets lost in a loop and needs a hard reboot. The tills run on Windows XP and do not have the start-up sound disabled that I found amusing as it rang out across the store.

For reference my mother was a tester of POS systems (or tills) for a high-street shop chain so I guess this is where I get it from. :-)