A wheeley good idea

August 25th, 2007 1 Comment »

For some strange reason on the drive home from work Thursday evening, I decided it might be a good idea to cycle in to work.. So Friday morning, myself and two other colleagues biked the 18 miles in to work from Bedworth to Warwick via Kenilworth. My bum now has visible evidence of the 36 miles cycled on a mountain bike in a day.

Getting in to work was one thing, but sitting back on the saddle at 4:30 for the return journey was pure pain…. extremely tender cheeks. Anyway, I might try it again in a couple of weeks – it can only get easier.

On a different note, www.atherstonetaekwondo.co.uk is now up and running. It’s lacking photos at the moment, but I’m working on a user guide for my instructor so as he can update content on his own. We will also have a bit of a photo shoot at the next grading so keep your eyes out for a picture of me in my dobok.


Flying Toys!!!

August 16th, 2007 No Comments »

Ever heard of a Storm Launcher? no? It looks a bit like this:

Storm Launcher

and I’ve got one!! Problem is on it’s second flight in a car park, it landed a little awkwardly and the tail-fin thingy snapped off. So now I need glue. Should be awesome once I’ve worked out how to fly it though. It goes on water, land, and air… in theory. What I need is a whole box full of batteries and an empty beach with no wind to learn how to use it.

Check out this youtube video which shows what they should look like in action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDH8HoBszqA

It never rains, it pours.

August 16th, 2007 No Comments »

So yes, I managed to fix my server by Sunday evening.. but it died again on Monday morning. I now know that was due to lack of disk space cuz the error logging went crazy. All sorted. Normal service is resumed… I hope.

My apologies for the down-time

August 16th, 2007 No Comments »

Yes, I know that the web site has been down for a few days – the reason being that the main hard drive with the operating system on in my server died. I have now purchased a new one and took the oportunity to upgrade the OS to Fedora Core 7 while I was at it. I am pleased to say that my backups were fine, and I am working hard to ensure that next time the hard drive dies (which I am sure it will), I will be able to restore service as normal even quicker. Those of a slightly geekier nature might be saying but Oli.. surely a single drive failure to a person of your sad geeky skills should not pose a serious problem and take your entire server down – havent you ever heard of RAID??, to which Id reply, yes, and my data drives were fine on their cosy RAID 1 array.. but not so for the operating system. The server is a mere laptop with an ordinary 2.5inch hard drive in you cant fit any more drives in the bay or I would have done.. so when the drive dies, the server dies. Previously I had a backup routine scheduled to back critical configuration files up to the data drives over night. I now realise that even though this makes it easier to reinstall my server should it die, its still a pain in the buttocks. I shall be scheduling monthly Clonezillas too from now on. I aspire to owning a bigger server room than the cupboard under the stairs.. it shall have a rack, two clustered servers, shared storage, and it shall be so. One Day.

Off it comes…

August 4th, 2007 1 Comment »

Sorry readers. Despite the slightly more popular suggestion of growing my hair, I decided while at my Tae Kwon-Do class this week that longer hair was too annoying. I was starting to look like a very bad Beatles impersonator. I’m now back to my #7/#2 usual short and practical ‘do’.

I’m also now the proud owner of olivershingler.co.uk and olivershingler.com as I noticed a couple of other Oliver Shinglers starting to appear around the internet – I can’t have other people tarnishing my name, I have a reputation to keep up here. For my Tae Kwon-Do club I’ve registered atherstonetaekwondo.co.uk and intend to create a nice site to promote my club… I’ll let you know when it’s up and running. All sites are running in the Bedworth data centre along with speaktothegeek.co.uk which I transferred across this week too. Once I’m happy with the stability I’ll put oshingler.co.uk on there too and my full hosting dream will be achieved. Are you still here? I’m practising my cure for insomnia.

Today we went to the Coventry transport museum – was quiet interesting and even Poppy enjoyed herself. The highlight of the museum currently being the Thrust SSC complete with a computer simulation ride of the record breaking run. If you’re ever in the area it’s worth checking out, especially as it’s all free.

Tomorrow is work.. yes, work on a Sunday. Never mind… I managed to fit a barbecue in this evening!