jpdw.org

It's almost 5 months now since the twins were born and our lives changed so completely.

Having twins is quite amazing. The interest from other people really a suprised in a world where (the media tells us) no-one is interested in anyone but themselves. As we take the girls out in the buggy, we get stopped by so many people that think they look lovely (we think they do too, but then we're biased).

The Current Cost unit I ordered earlier in the week arrived today.

Immediately it was out of the box to be set up. Suprised that it actually came with a 20 page user guide I decided to follow the instructions rather than ignoring them till something went wrong. For a change the instructions were clear and useful.

It's now a year since I first got a starter kit of Idratek parts and 7 months since we had the heating system overhauled with Idratek temperature sensor & relay modules at the heart, but till now I've been mainly using Reflex programming for operation rather than leaving a PC on to run Cortex. The reason for this is baulking at running a PC 24/7 and the power that will consume.

I've been meaning to do this for a few weeks, but I've just got round to ordering a Current Cost unit... Looking forward to having a play and then probably driving people nuts by knowing how many pence per year things cost to run!

The other day, I stumbled upon a posting on Digital Grin Smugmug & Drupal?. Digital Grin is SmugMug's forum sister site where there's lots of SmugMug related hints, tips & requests.

The thread was old, originally from 2006, with someone posting that they'd been building some sort of SmugMug integration into Drupal. Unfortunately it seems that it only works on D4.x and certainly not with the current D6.x series - at least not without some hacking - just hacking the .info file gets it to list in Admin/Modules but that's about all.

I was a Bulldog (/Pipex) customer till June 2008 when I bailed out instead of getting the "benefit" of being moved to Pipex Homecall. After leaving their custom, they still billed me a full months billing. Though they promised to pay me the money back, it took in excess of 11 calls to the Pipex "help" desk (contradiction) over a 5 month period before I actually got my money back. Either they are complely stupid, dumb and incapable of organising even finding a brewery (let along the preverbial knees-up) or this was a clear & deliberate corporate policy to provarocate in the hope that people would have enough and not bother claiming their money back. So £20 obtained for services-not-supplied isn't much as a 1-off, but do it to 10000 people and you've got a nice improvement to the bottom line...

My point - don't ever consider using Pipex/Tiscalli unless you want to be ripped off and have a quality of service that would try a saint.

As a spin off from my web host migration, our photo website, previously at http://jonwilkins.smugmug.com has moved to http://gallery.jpdw.org.

The photos are still hosted by SmugMug.

Get your own SmugMug site and a $5 discount with my referrel code http://www.smugmug.com/?referrer=LpqhIaA6wcPS6.

After several years with my previous webhost, I decided a while ago to move to a different host.

It seemed like a simple thing to do, but it's a suprisingly complicated task to move just 2 domains and 1 webhosting service from one provider to another.

I wanted to move the website contact as well, and seeing as the whole excercise required builing the new hosting environment it was also a good opportunity to upgrade the hosting software to the latest version/

So quite a bit to do. Not to mention doing my day job and then there's the twins !

Another long delay since the last post.

Reasons are many but it will remain list this for a few weeks while the site is moved & upgraded.

Useful calculator for showing how much overpaying your mortgage can save:

http://new.egg.com/visitor/0,2388,3_54988--View_1028,00.html

Excel Workbook for calculating repayments etc http://www.thismuchiknow.co.uk/?p=42

The twins were expected at the start of September ... or maybe early in mid/late August.

But they "turned up" even before the end of June ... Little Amelia and Bethany born in the early hours of 24th June 2008 at just 28 weeks.

Being so premature, they were immediately transferred to Chelsea & Westminster's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where they have now been for almost 2 weeks so far.

Oh dear. By 500k votes!

Oh well, I guess we'll just have to see.

Is this a good omen? : [Boris' sister] "He's never really failed -- he's had some spectacular catastrophies"

At last, the long planned heating upgrade has been completed.

The main reason was to replace our old boiler which really struggled to heat the house during winter. The boiler was 15 years old and "F" rated according to the government website, so replacing it with a new A-rated unit should save gas too, which of course saves a few £££ as well. At the same time it was going to be an opportunity to get the rads fitted with TRVs.

Keen to make things even more efficient we also wanted to zone the house so each of the 3 floors could be operated independantly.

I've just arrived in Antwerp for a few days of business at the main office.

Eager to make the most of the day (and originally due to walk straight into a meeting on arrival) I booked for the early journey from London.

Nowadays there are 3 main choices for me:
1) Fly Heathrow (07:00) to Brussels and then a 30-40 minute taxi. Leave home approx 05:30
2) Fly City (07:40) to Antwerp then a 10 minute taxi. Leave home approx 05:00/05:15
3) Eurostar (06:00) to Brussels, get the 09:20 from Brussels to Antwerp then walk 5 minutes. Leave home approx 04:30