Lots of Stuff, Right Direction?

I’ve got loads of stuff going on at the moment, or at least what feels like loads; Job searching, house hunting, enrolling for potentially 3 college courses next month and at the same time I’ve trying to develop this site, a branch website for the Socialist Party, and have now started a basic online course on HTML and CSS. Not happy with that, as of this evening I’ve also started work on a new e-commerce website, which I’ll be developing offline via XAMPP.

Trouble is, as much as I’m trying to stay busy and improve myself by way of developing skills and experiences, the longer I stay out of the work place the more I feel like I’m heading in the wrong direction. Instead of boosting my confidence and keeping me focussed on job applications, my focus is growing increasingly towards developing new skills, that perhaps won’t be at the top of of the requirements list of any prospective employers, for example I’ve spent far more time on improving my knowledge of WordPress and web development than I have on bringing myself up to date with Excel, which is likely more appropriate for the types of roles I am applying for. I’d no doubt feel better if I was drawing a living from being at home like in my online poker days, but even then it’s not what I’m after, having spent so much time being self employed or self unemployed, having a routine of going to work and keeping home life separate, at least to an extent is very much welcome. I can’t let myself become too pre-occupied with distractions that take the focus away from getting a job, however much those distractions may benefit me down the road.

Petition Against Birmingham University

A petition has been created in protest against Birmingham University’s actions to try to ban any occupation style protests. The main text of the petition is quoted bellow, please support the students fight against these aggressive actions by signing the Stop Repressing Dissent petition.

In November 2011 a number of students entered into a peaceful occupation of an unused property on the University of Birmingham campus. They were seeking to start a serious discussion on whether the marketisation, lobbied for by the university management, and enacted by the government would be beneficial to staff and students.

The university met this show of dissent with unreasonable and unacceptable force. They paid for a special sitting of the High Court in order to force through an injunction banning all ‘occupational style protest’ by ‘persons unknown’ for an entire year. Lawyers judge that the wording of the injunction is so vague that it could be used to criminalize any protest in which participants remain in any location for a period of time. This has led to Birmingham being condemned by human rights groups’ Amnesty International and Liberty who labelled the injunction “aggressive and censorious”.

The university have also reacted to the occupation by attempting to punish those that were involved. One student has been singled out and is being taken through a disciplinary procedure that has the power to remove him from the university.

Working Hard for a Blue Screen

I’ve spent most of the day working on my backup PC which my mother has come to rely on. Their internet access has been really shaky today which has made progress far slower than it would have otherwise been, but it still would have been a lengthy job even without the internet causing further delays. Having re-installed the operating system yesterday, today’s task was to install the many updates, seventy four for the core system alone, not including the service packs. Having successfully installed SP2, and an additional boat load of patches, I setup the firewall, downloaded Open Office and installed several other applications, including media players and a PDF reader. It was very slow going, as the files had to be downloaded over an internet connection that kept on breaking up. Finally I was a good way into installing SP3, with a couple of final applications to install after completion before I could copy the changes to the default profile and setup a new user for the family to use, then it happened, the Blue Screen, I was taxing the system pretty heavy, but it was still a shock, its been a long time since seeing a blue screen was an all too frequent occurrence.

I rebooted the machine, and tried to resume as normal, another blue screen, ah well no biggie, I’ve been here before, and this time opted for Last Known Good Configuration at the boot menu, another Blue Screen. Hoping it would go away, I rebooted once more and mentally crossed my fingers, no luck. Finally I got a message to the effect that hall.dll was corrupted and need replacing, and they seemed no quick trick to get around that fact. With everyone wanting to go to bed, and being rather tired myself at this point, there wasn’t much I could do, so I headed home. In the morning I’ll try a few techniques to fix the issue, recovering or repairing the corrupted file if need be, the only other option I see is to go through the entire process of re-setting up the machine, after the time it has taken, that wouldn’t be a task I would relish doing. My parents may save me from that though, as there coming around to the idea of upgrading the system. I’ve already found a refurbished machine which I think would suit them, at a really good price. I expect I’ll be ordering the new system some time tomorrow, which will make my life a lot easier, though it’ll still be nice if I can get the older machine up and running, so I have a working backup machine once again.

An Appetite for Work

Having a few days doing little but watching video's at home as built up an appetite to get some work done. I've made a few small tweaks to the Socialist Party’s branch website that I'm developing, and its now putting this site to shame, so I'll have to spend some time improving this site once again. Regarding that, I’ve just added another new page to the site, called Downloads it’ll feature various documents or templates that I've produced and have made available. The first addition is a basic spreadsheet I have created to help track items that'll be going into storage whilst I move house.

I had to spend some time working on my spare computer earlier, which my parents have been using connected to their main TV for the past few years. The mouse and keyboard stopped working as soon as the Windows login screen was loaded, after all other options failed, I began reinstalling the Operating System, which as got the keyboard and mouse working again. Sadly another problem has developed, the wireless card is now not being recognized, I didn’t have the original driver discs with me, so either the latest version isn’t recognizing the card, whereas the original might still work, or its broken and will need replacing. As a temporary measure I’ll be using a length of Cat5 to connect the computer to the router upstairs and will continue setting things up tomorrow.

Unfortunately I’m still not fully recovered from my cold, but I’m miles better than I have been, and hope to get more done each day now.”

Another Cold

I’m battling another cold at the moment, and its come at a terrible time. I’ve had to miss an enrolment date at college, which would have been the start of an ECDL course, and still being ill, have had to miss out on attending this weekends Youth Fight for Jobs & Education event in London.

More bad news came the other day when I used up my months data allowance on my dongle, so am back to daily top-ups until next week. I’ve not long since been back online, and although I always miss being able to go online as and when I feel like it, this cold as also hindered me in that regard too, as one of my main objectives that I would be working on through the internet would be applying for jobs, but there isn’t much point whilst I’m still too ill to attend any interviews, or even hold a clear conversation over the phone.

The majority of my time over these last couple of days has been spent on watching DVD’s, and in doing so I’ve identified an audio problem. At first I thought it might just be a bad disc, but it happened on multiple discs, than I began to worry it was my new dvd drive, but the problem also occurred on some video’s playing from my hard drive. Playing around with VLC it looks like there is something wrong with my surround sound system, has switching from 5.1 to another selection under VLC’s Audio Device menu fixes the problem. I haven’t investigated it further yet, happy for the time being that switching devices seems to be a working hack, but its a symptom I’ve not yet come across before. What happens is that when playing certain video’s you can hear the background music, but not the dialogue or the dialogue would be very quiet compared to the background music. It may be that one of my speaker leads have just become loose or unplugged entirely, hopefully it won’t be a more serious problem.

My First Socialist Party Conference

I’ve just got back from town, having attended my first conference with the Socialist Party. The regional level conference ran over the weekend, and involved representatives from all of the branch’s within the region, including but not limited to; Halifax, Leeds, Rotherham, Wakefield and York. The first day of the event focussed more on political discussions after a lead-in from a guest speaker, today had more of a focus on practical matters.

Both sessions where educational, interesting and I’m very glad I was able to attend. I don’t know if it was planned or simply a coincidence but I believe next week is the National Conference for the Youth Fight for Jobs & Education “campaign” and soon after that the Socialist Party will be holding their national conference, so it’s a really good thing I got a taste for things over this weekend, to dispel any nervousness I met have felt about attending the larger events. I didn’t speak in front of the session as a whole on either day, but did contribute to discussions, especially concerning the branch websites and social media which was discussed at some length today. Hopefully I will now feel more able to address the room or a larger audience at future events after my experience this weekend.

I’ve had a few days of focussing on this site and other things now, so I’ll now need to re-double my efforts on the Wakefield Branch website. Most of the structure is in place, at least for a first interaction of the site, it’s mostly lacking content, and as our branch is smaller than some, it may mean that I have to step up regarding writing and producing content as well as doing the more administrative side of the website.

Computer Revives from Heat Stroke

A few days ago my computer suddenly stopped working. In hindsight the symptoms pointed glaringly obviously towards the true cause of the problem, but as I just replaced my DVD-RW drive in a rather too tired state, I temporarily lost all reason and became paranoid that in some way, I’d done something that resulted in a sudden failure of the display to appear, and soon after for the computer to even remain in a powered on state at all.

Thankfully, I returned to my senses yesterday and investigated other possibilities. It seems that my computer suffered a heat stroke. Don’t get me wrong, computers and heat problems sadly go hand in hand, there is nothing surprising about a computer suffering from a beat of electronic heat exhaustion, but when you have a good quality case and six or seven fans circulating the already freezing air in my home around the components, you do tend to take your machines ability to keep cool for granted. Unfortunately as great as my computer’s case fans are, they don’t clean themselves, and my graphics cards especially suffered from a worrying build up of dust around the fans. A good clean of the fans, and the memory chips was enough to revive my computer, saving me the expensive of replacement components.

The lesson I have to accept here is that I can’t continue to keep putting off cleaning the internals of my computer, something I tend to do, as my computer is usually in constant use, it doesn’t have much down time for cleaning. I now aim to clean the external surfaces and the front case fans much more regularly, perhaps as often as once a week, and will back that up with a thorough deep cleaning of the internals of the case unit perhaps every three months.

Blog Update, Poor Title

I pondered the title of this post for a good 5 minutes… okay so that’s not that long, but still. Given that this site will be made up of a collection of different topics, with probably varying degrees of focus, and the fact I’ll repeatedly want to chat about whatever takes my fancy, I really need to develop a system of naming the posts I categorise as “casual chat”, both for aesthetic and SEO reasons… I’ll give it some thought.

Earlier in the week, as I mentioned I had an appointment to picked up some contacts to follow-up regarding some courses I need to take. I ended up being distracted by other things Friday, so I’ll be following up those leads on Monday. Another in road into improving my career prospects is to get my CV up on here, which is now listed under my new page, Hire Erika! The new page will only feature on the menu when I’m seeking work, so I’ll probably link to my downloadable CV via my about page too. In fact I’ll get that done after I publish this post. The new page is very short at the moment, effectively just acting as a place holder for my CV. I was planning to publish my CV on the page itself as well as making it available for download, but at the time I was too tired to lay it out nicely so I’ve left that for the time being. If I do publish it up, I think it makes sense to expand it and elaborate on my experiences, as the version I host here doesn’t have to be limited to the standard two or three page limit, that you’d aim for if you were mailing it to a prospective employer. There are probably some sophisticated techniques for displaying online CV’s in an interesting and creative manner, which I will have to investigate. Even if they don’t work on my current WordPress.com hosted domain, becoming familiar with the methods will help me should I move to another host.

Always trying to improve the site, and in doing so learn new, and refresh old techniques for working with websites and WordPress in particular I’ve made a few small changes to the sites navigation. I’ve created a new drop down menu entry for the site’s blog categories, and also removed the category widget which was displayed at the top of the sidebar. I did investigate placing other widgets up on the side bar, having created a little more room, but the ones I’m interested in are not suitable for my hosted domain.

Yesterday was a really good day, I did a proper good shop at the supermarket. Having ran low on so many things over the past few weeks it was really good to stock up again. I could still do to pick up more groceries, as a 1/3 of my shopping seemed to be taken up by toiletries and household items. Before hitting the supermarket I visited a local farm shop and picked up a bag full of vegetables and free range eggs. I hope to make use of much of the veg by making some vegetable pies, something I’ve only done a couple of times before, the first time making a bulk supply. There always a great thing to have in your freezer, easy to cook, surprisingly filling and packet full of veg I’d imagine fairly healthy despite the pastry, especially as I only use pastry on the top of mine.

WordPress support got back to me today regarding a problem I’ve had on the Socialist Party’s branch website I’ve been developing, so I hope to complete a couple of pages on their a bit later on. So far this morning, I’ve already finished the hoovering, had breakfast, done the dishes, emptied the washer and topped up my internet dongle, so its set to be a productive day.

Ecover Fabric Softener

I went ages without using fabric softener, never spent much time down the laundry isle at the supermarket and still don’t, as I get my laundry powder in bulk, but I’m happy my impulse to buy lead me to adding a bottle of Ecover’s fabric conditioner to my shopping basket over at Able & Cole. You’ll also find it at Big Green Smile and descent ethical stores in town.

In my opinion the best use of fabric conditioner is to ensure towels don’t over dry and crisp up when you hang them on the line, and in this regard Ecover’s line performs flawlessly and does so with a wonderfully refreshing sent. As with their washing up liquid, its available in bulk, comes in a variety of “flavours” and the packaging is made from their green plastic which is 100% renewable, reusable and recyclable.

Please check out more of my content featuring Ecover.

Ecover Washing Up Liquid

I’m really happy to have come across Ecover. I probably first found them via Able & Cole whom I order organic groceries from now and then. They offer an extensive range of environmentally friendly alternatives to household cleaners, laundry products, etc. My first purchase from their line was their washing up liquid, which is a available in a range of “flavours” shown in the pic bellow.

Its been awhile since I placed my order, so I can’t recall where I purchased it from, but it would have been Able & Cole or Big Green Smile. Thankfully a growing selection of Ecover products are now available in the supermarkets, and local ethical stores. The official Ecover website has a section showing you where you can purcahse their products from.

So, what do I think of it you ask… well essentially its awesome! I know this reads like a blatant add, hint hint Ecover lol, but its actually a really good product, way better than I expected actually. The flavour I’m using at the moment is grapefruit and green tea, it has a pleasing aroma which isn’t too strong, and in my opion much nicer then some products which have an over strong lemony scent to them. Contrary to expectations it bubbles up at least as good as the populour high street brands I have used before, but where it really shines is in its “softness”. Despite advertising their hand-friendliness washing up liquid is actually rather harsh on your skin, not so with Ecover’s natural versions, which truly is nice to use, with or without gloves.

Another great benefit of the brand is that both their washing up liquid and their fabric softener which I also recommend (and presumbly more products) are available in bulk quantities, so you can order a bottle for your sink top, and when its ran out order a 5 litre bottle to re-fill it, which will save you money, and produces less waste. Speaking of waste the packing is manufactured from Plant-astic a green plastic that’s 100% renewable, reusable and recyclable – and made from sugarcane!

Please check out more of my content featuring Ecover.