My goodness, almost a year since I posted on my blog. What have I been doing? For one thing my inane chat and comments albeit briefly have been recorded on the currently more trendy Facebook and Twitter. And perhaps I’ve got a bit quieter and less inclined to waffle on about my life and work. Facebook with appropriate privacy settings seems more appropriate for delivering updates to those I know personally, and twitter has settled into brief broadcasts biased to work matters with a smattering of local and other mutterings.

Otherwise a big aspect of my non-work life has been losing weight – I’ve found a diet that works for me and although it appears to be strange on face value, I’m already 3 stones down in weight this year and sticking in to see how far I can go. It has greatly improved my quality of life, my knees don’t hurt like they used to and my motorcycle kit is looser on me and this makes a big difference to my comfort.

I’ll have a think about what more I can say and get back to you here!

If you want to start an embedded YouTube video at a certain second, then go check what Matt Cutts writes on his blog.

My goodness, it has been a few months since I posted here and that was after a run of postings every month. So what’s my excuse?

Well for one thing, I mucked up slightly with the blogging software hosting this site. I use SubText and I’ve been quite happy with it. The only thing is that I forgot the password, actually more specifically I deleted the email with the latest password reset, and it was then that I discovered that the version of SubText I was running did not have a functioning password reset. So it has taken me a couple of months to get organised and upgrade the software to then get it to reset and send me a password. I just did that with a bit of a manual merge and a bit of ftp work.

Other than that the last few months have been interesting – I concluded my work on a project in Basingstoke with a week off in London with my wife, followed by a week in Berlin on a course about SharePoint 2010. As you can imagine this was an excellent opportunity and the product is excellent, I am really looking forward to sharing my experiences when the product is released later this year. If you want to learn more about that week then check out my work blog – you should be able to find it easily but drop me a line if you can’t.

While working in Basingstoke I did my best to keep up with my voluntary work, which translated into keeping up with my work with IAM Observing. This is assisting with others working to the IAM advanced test, the weather got a bit bad towards October so this work will resume in the Spring with the better weather. Between now and then I will be trying to catch up with my committee work with the local IAM Motorcycle group and bringing together the annual accounts as treasurer.

This isn’t quite my “Thoughts on 2009, looking to 2010” posting, but I am heart of hearts hoping that I don’t go through a repeat of what happened with my job last year in the opening months. I’m as optimistic as I can be with things under my control, but I’ve held back with any further plans for motorcycle training until I am confident things are stable. So in the summer it could be that I cram in some late bookings with i2imca.

As well as here, you’ll catch me on twitter on work and day to day stuff, facebook for more personal stuff, and my work blog for the official line on what I do in my day job. Catch you soon.

I’ve had my Dell Optiplex running Vista 64Bit for over a month now, but I’m still installing bits and bobs and getting the configuration right.

Tonight was the install of the 64 Bit pdf IFilter from Adobe so that search will look inside the pdfs I have already transferred across to my new PC. Although recent releases of Adobe Reader now include this piece of software that allows search to read the text of a pdf, they only include the 32 bit IFilter which will not work with Vista 64 Bit.