Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 22 July 2007 at 19:30
Since the end of June I have been in Basingstoke, Hampshire. I am working for a web development company, Sygneca. It is a small company with four employees; the Managing Director is Jon Pretty, who until June was IT Officer for TCMS (Trinity College Music Society). I have mainly been working on a project management system for internal use, and some other small projects from time to time.
I am renting a room about twelve minutes' cycle from my work (although there is a big hill in between). There is also the landlord and one other man living here. The landlord was originally an engineer, but now an executive coach; and the other man trained in telecoms. Basingstoke is full of hi-tech companies. While it had existed as a small town before that, it was mainly built in the 1960s with lots of very similar estates separated by dual carriageways.
I am coming home to Belfast on Wednesday. On Saturday I am going to Zambia with a church group to build houses with the charity Habitat for Humanity. After two weeks in Zambia, I will be back in Basingstoke for another month.
Tags
accommodation, basingstoke, sygneca, zambia
Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 15 July 2007 at 16:35
I'd really completely given up posting anything on my old blog, but I've decided to start again. I never really liked many features of the Blogger blog, especially its appearance. I know you can adjust this a lot, so I came with an open mind as to whether I would be able to fix up Blogger to something I was happy with. However then I discovered that in order to access my Blogger blog I needed to have a Google Account. Now I am very nervous about the power of Google, and don't particularly want to sign up for a Google Account, so this made up my mind that I would switch to a blog completely under my control.
This blog is hosted on the Student-Run Computing Facility, who kindly provide a server with pretty liberal usage policies for individuals and societies in Cambridge. It runs on Simplelog, an application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. A lot of the blogging software out there is written in PHP. Now most of the PHP code I have seen is pretty ugly; in addition it is far too easy to write insecure code in PHP. So I wanted to avoid PHP if possible. I have never worked with Ruby before, but it seems fairly well-designed. For the sake of history, I have copied and pasted the posts from my old blog but not the comments.
Tags
blogger, blogging, google, php, rubyonrails, simplelog
Posted by Martin Orr on
Tuesday, 23 January 2007 at 19:44
I lost my phone on Friday. I have done my best to find it but not succeeded, so I will now buy a new one. I have no interest in having fancy features in my phone: my main consideration is price (basically the cheapest I can find, certainly less than £40 including £10 credit), and having decent ergonomics. If anyone knows anything about this end of the market, your comments will be very welcome. Do you think looking on Ebay is a good idea?
Looking at networks (note: I use my phone very little, so definitely pay as you go and we may assume I will not be taking advantage of any offers which depend on using a certain amount), it seems that 10p/text is standard everywhere except O2, where it is 12p. Calls are generally 30p or 35p a minute, except for T-mobile, where it is 12p a minute: does anyone have any idea why that is, or have I misread something? Given how often I use my phone, the difference between 12p and 35p is worth at most £3-£4 per year to me, and I imagine that after a year they will have changed their rates anyway.
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Martin
Tags
phone
Posted by Martin Orr on
Sunday, 19 November 2006 at 09:19
Just to continue a little on the food theme, I thought I would clarify to you how I normally eat. The College Hall does three meals every day, except for Sunday breakfast. Lunch and dinner are cheap - £2.30 for a main course and dessert. Breakfast is pretty expensive. I usually go to Hall for dinner, or sometimes for lunch if I prefer the menu. Normally I have a simple lunch in my room, and a bowl of cereal for breakfast.
I am too lazy to cook for myself - going to Hall is much quicker, more friendly and probably cheaper. In any case, the hobs have been removed from our kitchens last month, because they do not meet recently-introduced safety regulations. The College are looking at what can be done to bring the kitchens up to standard, but say that it does not look likely that this can be done - I think because the kitchens are too small. Such are the difficulties of living in an old building - it turns out it was built in the 1820s, although I would have imagined it was older than that (hence the name "New Court" I suppose).
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Martin
Tags
accommodation, cambridge, food, trinity
Posted by Martin Orr on
Wednesday, 08 November 2006 at 16:11
I resolved to try not to buy anything in a supermarket this term (mainly Sainsbury's, which is next door to Trinity). This is because I am concerned by the monopolistic impact of supermarkets - reducing the number of customers of smaller independent shops, and damaging producers by using their buying power to push prices down. So I decided to see how easy it was to do without. For the first week or two this was hard as I didn't know where any alternatives were. I can buy bread and fruit in the market, and I am sure I have seen a cheese stall there, but never when I have wanted to buy cheese. Eventually I found two shops where I can buy things like milk - one Spar and one independent grocery shop.
I have been entirely successful in not going to a supermarket, except when buying drinks for TCMS. Will I continue with this next term? To a large extent, having developed the habit, it is quite easy to continue although it does mean walking a bit further. But I'm not really sure how much benefit there is - for example, in Sainsbury's I could buy organic milk which I am now not able to do.
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Martin
Tags
cambridge, food, supermarkets