Super Fast Virgins! (That Got Your Attention)

It’s been an painful 3 weeks as I’ve basically had no home internet or phone. Kind of hard when I’m supposed to work from home using an internet connection to my employers.
We could say I gave up the web for Lent – and it was hard. It meant I had to commute down to the office each day, wasting a hour each way every day and burning that increasingly costly petrol. And with only occasional glimpses of my personal emails and favourite web sites while at work, it hammered home how much time I spend/waste online.
So the solution – waste time faster. Yesterday the Virgin engineers came and connected me to their nice shiny fibre cable network. A quick test downloading some programmes for the BBC iPlayer has shown that its running at least ten times faster than the old copper cable. Yes its more expensive but the petrol saving should compensate for that.
A bonus is that the new router’s wireless works with the work laptop, so the option of being in the sun (when it comes) and still being able to work is now real. That’ll improve my mood and the tan! But as a start, just being back online is sooooo nice that sooooo should be a real word.

Transposed Private Hell

Back in February (I think) I posted a pic of my old workplace, partially to test automatic Flickr/Blog/Twitter linking and it was a last chance to see. Now, in order to test Twitpic I’ve post a pic of my new workspace, or rather one of my new workspaces.  This is the nice one with sofas and Radio 4 and cats and more telephones than you could ever think (yet still not one of every kind we supposedly support).

The other workspace is less pleasant but has great coffee and colleagues to talk to (phone calls just don’t cut it and I know that’s heresy for my company).

Dialing and Zip Codes

Had to check 13000 local area dialing codes converted by a colleague into a mapping file. Thoroughly impressed by the job he’s done and glad I was only checking. Huge job that people probably won’t notice as it’ll be one of those things that just works.

So looked at US zip codes as my contribution to the project and wishing I hadn’t. 45000 of the critters in the raw data file and my normal editing tool ran out of memory when I asked it to insert the tags necessary to turn them into a map overlay.  May have to move this from a weekend project to serious time on the work PC since it has 8 time the memory.

Also trying to find the KML/KMZ for ITV regions. I know it exists as I’ve seen bitmaps files clearly generated from it, but can find a site using the actual file. Tracking calls resulting from add campaigns shown in particular regions would be a great example for using this tool.

Going Global

Playing with .KML and .KMZ files. Stunning simple really, especially with GoogleEarth to create the raw initial file (working out decimal longitude and latitude would be a bind otherwise).

Now need to come up with some good sample files to show our resellers how easy and useful it is in order to encourage them to do the same for real customers. Watch out for Acme Pizza and their store and delivery maps.

WordPress

So its been a month and I have to say I’m impressed. Compared to the myspace, facebook and others that  I’ve played with I can say that wordpress is one I’ll be sticking with for a good while.

The templates are good, the blogging fine, it also drives my Tweets so saves time and I pointed two domain URLs at it with ease for an almost out of the box personal website experience.

The static pages are as easy as the blog post. The only thing I haven’t worked out is nesting them in a page structure and that I think is down to the template I’m using. So when I get time I might try a few others or even explore creating a template.

Going through the settings the scope for things like collaborative blogs, private blogs, etc are all very impressive. Summary: WordPress I like.