I’ve never been an iPhone owner, but I appreciate the fact that he gave the mobile industry the kick up the arse it needed.  Arguably, if it wasn’t for the iPhone, Google may never have bought Android and we’d all still be stuck on Symbian (or Windows mobile 6!).

And I’ve never been an iPad owner, but I appreciate that he took a gamble by taking what was close to being a stagnant market, and reinvented it. If it wasn’t for the iPad, I probably wouldn’t have the opportunity to consider buying a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

And I’ve never bought a song from iTunes – but I appreciate the fact that Apple  bitch slapped the music industry into realising it couldn’t carry on living in the 80′s.  I don’t think Apple were key in turning downloading mp3s into an everyday thing, but they were certaintly instrumental in hurrying it along.

At some point today I came across a quote from Jobs that really struck a chord with me.  It’s actually the reason I was inspired to post this blog, so that I wouldn’t forget it:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.

And so, despite not being an Apple user in any shape or form, RIP Steve Jobs – one of the greatest business minds of my lifetime. I hope Apple can keep pushing the industry forward without you.

First was my Xbox plugin – which I never actually got round to publicly releasing – for which the API I was using had apparently stopped returning data. A quick check and it turns out the Xbox API I was using (written by Duncan MacKenzie) had been switched off. To be fair, if he really was receiving 3million hits a day then I see his point – aside from a little hat tip in my plugin code (which he would probably have never even seen) he would have been getting very little credit for his efforts, and maintaining the API, and paying for the bandwidth, was probably costing him a fortune.

I was tempted to berate him for not giving any notice to the people that use it, but then it occurred to me – as well as not having to sign up at all, he was providing it for free. So to be fair, I have no right to complain. I just wish he’s considered moving to a more sustainable model – I’d have paid a couple of £ a month to use it, as I’m sure many others would have, and he may have even been able to turn it into a profit maker. I guess now we’ll never know.

The other was Momentile – a 365 photo project site. They never actually officially had an API, but did provide RSS feeds for each user, which I was hooking into to display your latest photos. Great – except they relaunched yesterday with no warning, and the photo URLs changed – so now that plugin has broke too. To be fair though, it did sound like they’d been forced to launch early as the iPhone app update was accepted unusually quickly, but still – would have been good for at a few hours notice. Crap, if they’d let me know the day before I could have pushed an update out same day in preparation, but right now I’m 250 miles from home and most likely won’t get a chance to go it until Tuesday now. Shame.

So yeah, I’m not sure if there’s a lesson to be learned here or not. To the API providers, I guess the lesson is if your users are willing to spend their free time writing stuff that helps promote you (and even more so if they’re not making any money out of it) a quick email to let them know so that they don’t end up getting grief from their plugin users (complaining it’s not working) would be ideal. The lesson for me? Never trust an API will be around forever.

Anyways, since I started typing this I’ve discovered maybe I can get that plugin fixed today, so I’m off to give it a go. Wish me luck.

So what have I been up to?

• Working on yet another Glastonbury Festival related personal project, involving some crazy Google maps integration… well, maybe not that crazy, but I’m new to the maps API so it’s been taking a fair bit of my time up reading through the documentation and trying to work out how and if I can do what I want to do. I’m hoping that, unlike several of my other Glasto projects, this one will actually see the light of day!
• WPSynergy. Yep, this is still alive! After making the mistake of announcing our plans far too early (and not long before both myself and Jeremie took on some work that has kept us busy for the past year), I have been putting some of my time into building the main WPSynergy website, plus some themes to launch with. Annoyingly, we’ve also been let down by a couple of people – for example, I wasn’t actually supposed to be building the main website, but after 4 weeks waiting for a guy to finish it off before he disappeared off the face of the planet, this also fell into my lap. So yeah, this project is not dead – it’s simply been postponed until we/I have the time to get myself back on my feet and get the essentials ready for launch.
• Spending too many hours at my day job. Do you ever get that feeling that your entire daily routine seems to be get up, go to work, come home from work, sleep, repeat? That’s damn close to how I’ve been feeling over the past few months. The reason for this relates a lot to my next point…
• Having no car. Yep, Vlad the Vectra was finally retired after the head gasket started playing up and it started sounding like it was ready to blow up. Thankfully, 3 months on, I’ve managed to sort out a new motor – a 1999 Ford Focus Zetec. Might not sound like much, but I fell in love with Focus’ the year they were released (1998 I think) so this has been like fulfilling a mini dream for me!
• Moving house. Sure, the actual move itself was only a 2-3 day event, but as with the fun of renting, from the day I handed in my notice at the old flat I’ve had an average of 2 viewings a day. I had no concept of how much effort it took to keep a house tidy enough for randoms to trapse through every day, but it turns out its not easy feat.

So this is my life for the past 6 months. Right now I’m sat in front of a fresh Ubuntu installation at Lissa’s house (on a bloody 2mb line) waiting for Eclipse to install so I can spend some more time working on Modmat2, then monday it’s back to the grind.

So there you go – I’m not dead, just bloody busy.

Neither release is critical – both plugins should continue to work without applying the latest updates. However, seeing as several functions used in these plugins were depercated in 3.0, this may mean the older versions may continue to work with future WordPress releases.

Just so you know.

Essentials 1 to 6 can be found here.

7. Bin Bags
Bin bags have 1,000,001 uses, least of all to keep stuff dry. Its rained hard and the ground has gone all muddy? Take a few with you to lay out and sit on. Got caught in a rainstorm and your clothes are drenched? Throw them in a bin bag till you get home to stop them getting all the rest of your dry stuff damp. Starting to rain and you’ve forgotten your coat? Tear a hole in the top and sides, slip it over your head and voila! Instant poncho! Plus if it does rain hard and you find the inside of your tent getting progressively more and more wet/muddy, throw all your nice, dry clean clothes in a bin bag so they stay that way.

8. Plasters (ideally good quality waterproof plasters)
Ideally, you should also aim to bring a couple of different sizes. The main reason for adding this to the list is blisters – most of us don’t usually spend 12 hours a day on our feet, and it can come as a shock to the system – hence, blisters after the first full day are fairly likely. Now I won’t lie, its going to hurt regardless of what you do – but putting a decent plaster on it should at least minimize the pain. Also useful for impromptu cuts, which – if it rains and everything gets muddy – are screaming out to get infected. Note – you can probably get these from the medical tent, but they’re likely to be the cheap plastic ones that die as soon as they get wet.

9. Sun cream
This one’s really down to you and depends on 2 factors: a) Do you sunburn, and b) Is it going to be sunny. If the answer to either of those questions is yes, I’d advise picking some up before you go. Bearing in mind the festival is at the peak of the english summer, and if/when the sun does come out, its usually scorching. Its likely at some point this will happen and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a field with nowhere to shelter. Again, available from the medical tent but – can you be bothered walking up there every 2 hours?

10. Toilet paper
In the last couple of years Glastonbury has got better and better in this respect – I’d say at least half my toilet visits I’d see paper on the roll, which is impressive. But its not there all the time, and to avoid getting caught out I;d advise at least taking 1 roll yourself – just rip off a dozen or so sheets when you leave the tent and keep them in your pocket, just in case. And you’ll thank me for suggesting it – especially if you’re stupid enough to get the chilli fries after a night drinking. Also teams up with the wet wipes as a makeshift towel after your festival shower…

11. Torch
Only essential if you feel any sort of guilt about kicking someone’s guy rope out at 3am, or if you’re the sort of person who insists on walking to the toilet in the middle of the night. But also very, very useful once you’re in the tent – once you’re in there and the door’s zipped up, its pitch black. Seeing as you can pick up torches for a couple of quid from homebase (and most motorway services petrol stations apparently), there really is no excuse.

And there you go – between this post and the original, I think we have a fairly comprehensive list of camping essentials. If you think I’ve missed anything, let me know in the comments!

For that reason I’ve decided to hold back on my yearly tradition of publishing a spreadsheet, as I didn’t want to have to be updating every couple of days between now and June. However, it doesn seem to have stabilized enough now to feel confident that I won’t have to fix it too many more times.

If you’re wondering why I bother doing this every year, its because I like to have a alphabetically ordered list with me when I go. Thing is, I already know who I want to see by the time I get there, and when I forget what time/stage they’re playing on its a pain in the arse having to search through 3 days/20 stages of line-ups to find them. Thats why I’ve always preferred to have a alphabetically ordered list handy so I can quickly find when/where a band will be playing. Simplez.

I’ll update the spreadsheet when I hear word of bands being added/removed from the lineup, and as the details of more stages are released.

Enjoy! And see you at Glastonbury!

Extra kudos for the “meet the people” footage around 2m30s. Pure genius.

The re-sale of cancelled tickets for Glastonbury 2010 will take place on Sun, April 11 – info at http://bit.ly/tixresale

Tickets will be on sale from 9am. Don’t count on them being available for long!

So there you have it. Put in your calendars, set your alarm clocks and make sure you’re up in time!

Good luck!

48 hour grace period for those yet to pay the balance of their tickets (you have until Tuesday night) – http://bit.ly/cdGIxr

So anyone who paid their initial £50 deposit and have not yet paid the rest of the balance now until 23:59 on the 2nd March to get their final payments in. How you read into this if up to you, but an announcement like that seems to suggest that a lot of ticket balances are still unpaid. if this is the case, its great news for those of you that didn’t manage to get tickets the first time.

In somewhat related news, in response to a tweet with regards to Glastonbury ticket resales, GlastoFest have also announced:

We’ll be announcing the resale date in advance here and on the official site …[snip]

More great news for those of you looking to get Glasto tickets the 2nd time round. In previous years its been a case of simply "keeping an eye" on the website and waiting for the "Buy Tickets" link to reappear. This year, it seems, the Glastonbury organisers are taking steps to be more transparent and give advance warning to those that are actively checking the website or Glastonbury twitter page.

Some have even gone to great lengths to give people a way of keeping an eye on the ticket page status - the banner below, written by GlastoWatch, checks the SeeTickets ticket page every 5 minute and builds the banner based on the message on the page. Very elaborate, and I applaud him for doing this, but the fact people had to go to these lengths shows that a change in policy from the Glastonbury Festival organisers was long overdue.

I have a few friends out travelling at the moment (currently in Thailand) who I promised I would let know as soon as I heard tickets were back on sale. For them, advance warning could be the difference between getting them or not (as I’m sure is the case with a lot of people) so hats off to the Glastonbury organisers for being more pro-active and transparent this year and not springing the resale on people.

The one down side to all this – all this talk of Glastonbury is making the remaining 4 month wait seem even longer!

Update (3/3/2010): Some rumours are flying around that SeeTickets customer services have stated a resale date of April 11. However, as noted, this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve made something like this up so don’t take this as fact! I’ll be sure to add details here when I hear more.

Update (16/3/2010): Resale date has been announced! More details here.

]]> http://mou.me.uk/2010/03/01/glastonbury-2010-ticket-payment-deadline-extended-official-resale-date-to-be-announced-soon/feed/ 0 http://mou.me.uk/2010/03/01/glastonbury-2010-ticket-payment-deadline-extended-official-resale-date-to-be-announced-soon/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/moumeuk/~3/cg6FsUObKPY/ http://mou.me.uk/2010/02/23/server-move-complete-linode-rules/#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:58:20 +0000 mou http://mou.me.uk/?p=900 Anyone who visits this site regularly will probably have noticed the page load time has decreased about 10 fold. I’ve been with Media Temple for nearly 2 years, and I decided enough was enough. Slow load times, dodgy password policies and a rather high profile server wide hack was enough to convince me that it was time to put my new found sysadmin skills to use and move all my sites over to another host.

And so, as from this week I am now hosted on a sparkly new, lightning fast Linode VPS (feel free to register with that link and I get a free months hosting! w00t!). It comes with everything you’d expect from a VPS, including some of the most responsive and helpful customer service I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with (see here). Its also hosted in London, so although my US visitors may not be seeing the same speed I am, my UK visitors should be seeing a HUGE performance boost. Even then, the response time from the US to my UK Linode is still faster than from a US ISP to my old US based Media Temple host, so everybody wins.

But the best part is the price. You get a fair bit for an unbelievable price compared to similar service offered by VPS hosts such as 1&1, and you even get the added bonus of being able to choose what OS you use from a fairly comprehensive list.

And so I embark on my Linode adventure. May our sordid love affair be a long and pleasurable one.

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