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Spode Shirts Are Here!
- bySpode on24th August, 2010 inGeneral
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The latest Spode Shirt design is now available for your purchase! This time, a little play on the idea of CAT5 vs 5 CATS. You'll either end up with poor network performance, or an inactive bed time companion.
As per usual, available in every colour under the rainbow, at £15! Buy it, buy it, buy it!
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Spode's Knee Surgery
- bySpode on22nd August, 2010 inGeneral
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Thanks to my Google juice, I get a lot of people e-mailing me about my Hoffa Pad knee surgery. So I felt I should probably write up a "then and now" on my knee.
The first thing I would say, is that my knee didn't fully start to feel "normal" again until after about a year. Then it frankly felt the strongest it's ever felt in years. Before the surgery, I was in constant pain and on an assortment of pain killers to keep the pain at bay. Although I still get occasional tendon pain now - it's 10000% times better - I take the occasional Diclofenac/Naproxen to keep any swelling down if it gets irritated.
The question I have to ask, and I still ask, is - was it the surgery, or simply the amount of time I took off the bike? Even after I started riding again, I kept...
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Daily Servers?
- bySpode on11th August, 2010 inGeneral
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For a long time, I've been using UK2 for my hosting and I've been pretty impressed - especially with the level of support I received. Recently, I moved to clustered.net after a recommendation on twitter. Their packages are very good for the money, but I've been plagued by server down time - from which it's difficult to say if the problem lies with us, or the server.
The biggest problem I've been having is IO throughput - a common issue with shared VPS systems. I keep getting complaints from the server admin that our IO usage is too high whilst running JournoTwit - occasionally, it snowballs and the whole system just grinds to a complete halt.
What's annoying me - is that the only figure he quotes to me is IO Wait - not IO throughput. As far as I'm concerned - they aren't the same thing. IO Wait suggests...
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Bye Bye Baxter
- bySpode on29th May, 2010 inGeneral
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Baxter, the newest edition to our cat family, at only 10 months old, was unfortunately put down today after a rather severe spinal injury. He went missing for two days and finally turned up at our back door, dragging himself along by his front paws.
As you can see from the X-ray, it was a pretty severe break to his spine. The chances of his spinal cord remaining intact after that are pretty slim. We still have no idea what actually happened - as other than the spinal break, he has no other injuries.
Baxter was comfortable in the end, and he's now gone to a better place (Hannah's garden...). We'll always remember him, I only wish we had more pictures like this...
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Fun with the AA
- bySpode on23rd April, 2010 inGeneral
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Well, last weekend turned out to be rather tough! Friday was our first show for 2010 with Think Bikes and it was in Somerset doing an indoor performance for a press conference announcing which towns the Tour of Britain was passing through.
We haven't done many indoor shows, and so I invested in some protective flooring from floorprotec. These came in 8x4 sheets, so I bought 24 of them and cut them all in half (took a while). Then using gaffa tape I created hinges, connecting 6 sheets at a time together, for a concertinaed section of flooring. Using 8 of these, we could quickly cover the area we wanted to, then simply gaffa tape the gaps!
This worked out really well, leaving no trace on the gym floor underneath. We had some great photos taken of us, which we put on our Facebook/Twitter pages - but this one was probably my...
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Spode Shirts Are Here!
- bySpode on24th March, 2010 inGeneral
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Working with Ben Cardy is awesome - I tell him things, he does it, I smile and the whole world smiles with me. Well, not quite as cool as that - but he's damned good at what he does and has been the design mastermind behind my latest projects.
As Dave is leaving Think Bikes, leaving me in charge - I decided a bit of a revamp was in order and had a new logo designed. This is what we came up with (in this image, we were experimenting with some different colours...).
Certainly it's a lot more lively than the current logo, which is thinkbikes.com in Tahoma
But whilst we were there I mentioned I had an idea for a t-shirt. 5 minutes later, the design was sitting in front of me!
I spent a while researching various print on demand t-shirt companies and found that spreadshirt.co.uk had the best pricing...
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FloatWorks Floatation Experience
- bySpode on13th March, 2010 inGeneral
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Quite a while ago now, I won a £100 voucher for Red Letter Days thanks to the friendly PRs at 3 Monkeys. Finally, I got round to using it and booked a floatation tank experience with FloatWorks. They have been going for over 18 years, so they must be doing something right!
It's pretty simple really - you are put in your own private booth where you strip off and take a shower. Then you put in some ear plugs (partly to block out any extra noises - but also to stop salts getting into your ear canal) - in my case, I also had to smear Vaseline over a large cut I have on my shin from a tumble I took a few days back on the Velo.
Once fully prepared - you step into one of these...
This tank contains about a 12-16" of water, mixed with Epsom salts. These...
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Goodbye Tonbridge, Belvedere I Come...
- bySpode on12th March, 2010 inGeneral
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Anyone who keeps an eye on my domain name WHOIS might have noticed a new registered address pop up. I'd be a little alarmed if any of you answered yes to this, but hey, it's a flimsy pretext to me saying... I've moved house!
I did love living in Tonbridge, and specifically, the house I was in was perfect – only a few minutes walk from the station, huge rooms, garage and garden and at a price I could easily afford. Living up to it was going to be tricky!
The main reason for leaving was so that my girlfriend of 16 months, Hannah, could commute to London at considerably lesser cost. Plus, with Dave leaving Think Bikes to me, I was no longer so tied to Kent.
Our original plan was Orpington, but after months of hunting, nothing came up that was close enough and cheap enough. Finally, we came across...
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JQuery MouseHold Plugin - Improved
- bySpode on9th December, 2009 inGeneral
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While redesigning the scrollbars in JournoTwit - I wanted the ability to click on an arrow and have it automatically scroll. Through Google I found this mousehold plugin - which just so happens to have been written by Remy Sharp - a chap I met whilst doing the Twitterati photoshoot for Wired UK Magazine.
However, it lacked a key element for me - a delay. Just like on your keyboard, when you hold down a key, there is a delay before that key starts repeating itself. So I took Remy's work and modified it slightly. I also re-did the code tabbing and added some comments to explain how it works. I have a rather messy tabbed code layout - but I find it easier to see where functions open and close.
You can download my modified version here.
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Christmas Comes Early
- bySpode on9th December, 2009 inGeneral
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With most of my deadlines now dead, I can finally start thinking about Christmas. And not a moment too soon - considering that mine is coming a little earlier
I booked flights to go and see my parents in Italy for the 11th-16th, from BA for only £85 all in - very impressive! It means I can go from Gatwick instead of Stansted, and I don't have hidden costs like credit card charges and extra baggage.My sister and I are going, and bringing my girlfriend Hannah (been over a year now - scary!!!).
I leave you with a picture of me in my Movember glory, with Hannah, our new kitten Baxter and Karl's kitten Kai
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