by Jonny | Aug 22, 2013 | Updates
I am in a pissed off mood today as the college that I signed up to do an “Access to Web Design — Standards” course is suddenly no longer doing the course due to lack of interest/students.
I usually wouldn’t be annoyed at something like this. This is, however, a course that I signed up for last month. I also had to do a Math and English test to get into this course. I passed those with ease and thought I was on my way back to a life of education in a field that interested me.
Of course, as usual with my life — things don’t always turn out to be what they are and whenever something is going well there is always a downer to cause stress or to just piss me off. I am actually quite grateful in this instance that I have a full-time job at a major media agency that is paying me quite well. Otherwise, I would have been left even more pissed off at the fact they had told me on the day of enrollment that they were no longer doing the course and had no alternative courses that I could do that be would similar to the course I applied for.
What’s even more annoying is that this week I received three methods of communication from Tower Hamlets College asking me to enroll on the 8/22/2013 for the Access to Web Design course. (See the image of the letter above) The first form of communication came by post. The second form of communication came by email; and the third by text message. All of the information given was to enroll today for the course that I had signed up for. I was actually in a happy mood today as thought I’d be an adult student studying a web design course, which is the type of future I see myself in.
Unfortunately they did not communicate the fact that they had totally stopped the course giving me only 2 weeks to find another college that would hopefully allow me to enroll onto a suitable course.
It’s quite funny actually. They deleted the the “Access to Design for Web — Web Standards” page from their site after I had commented on their Facebook page:
I get that mistakes happen; however, I’ve now been left at a disadvantage as I now have to spend time finding another course. The fact that I may have to take time off from work doing that is what pisses me off to no end.
by Jonny | Aug 9, 2013 | Opinion, Tips & Advice
I’m glad, ecstatic, amazed, overjoyed and every other happy adjective you can think of. Today I was told that my internship was turning into a full-time job. I’m to start work as an employee on Monday (12th of August) and I’ll finally get paid for the work that I’ll be doing after suffering 6 weeks on no income and purely just burning through my savings.
What’s the job
I’ll be working in Central London of off Oxford Street for a division that does Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for clients in the United Kingdom. I don’t have an assigned title yet, but I’ve kind of crowned myself as an SEO Specialist. I’ll be working on 50% technical SEO and 50% content marketing. Essentially I’ll be doing a mixture of both and I’m hoping to improve my technical knowledge of implementation and simply doing things correctly. The reason I’m doing this type of job is because when I was 16/17 I managed my own web hosting business and it taught me about digital and I naturally learned about SEO. In fact, this job is quite ideal and is the perfect job opportunity and I’m hoping to grow out and become a professional in this field as I’m already quite passionate about this type of work.
What did I do to stand out
This is a question that is quite specific to the job that you’re doing. The main things that I did to stand out was to ask as many questions as I possibly could come up with and to act upon those answers immediately. While I am reluctant to go into specifics of what I had done, I feel I can confidently say that I achieved quite a bit for the team. If you can achieve and become successful by going the extra mile and doing significant things then you’ll get noticed and you’ll possibly turn that unpaid internship into something. I think that getting noticed and doing work that looks credible is essential and being consistent in doing well is another eye opener.
Abolishing Unpaid Internships
I hear the argument for abolishing unpaid internships and I do partly agree with this. I however feel that this argument has been struck down by the very fact that I’ve managed to turn my internship into a job. Also, I don’t think internships are bad and people have a choice as to whether they’d want to do an internship. I mean, it’s not as if you’re being forced to do the work and it’s a way to learn and become part of an office experience and generally looks good on a blank CV. (My CV was not blank!) I also hear the argument that people are desperate and that employers are taking advantage of that fact; I’m afraid this is just the beginning of changing times and while I’m not a heartless bastard and I did indeed do an internship myself and as long as the business or company you’re interning with isn’t forcing you to do things you don’t want to do then I don’t see a problem. I’ve done a 6 week unpaid internship and I doubt the people arguing against internships have actually been interns before and if they have, I doubt they succeeded in getting job through their internship. (Otherwise they wouldn’t be complaining)
What does the future look like
The future looks quite bright. In fact, I’m looking to do a part-time course at Birkbeck University for Web Technologies. It’s a foundation degree that will help me excel and become more qualified in the field that I’m aiming for. They also have a campus in Stratford, although my new job is actually nearby to Birkbeck University’s main campus. I’m not yet sure if the course would be feasible for me as I’ll be working full-time and I have no idea if the part-time course could cater to my needs and if I could do the course around my job. However, if I can then great! I’ll definitely have to look into it and sign up for a course! Though I do have that feeling that I’ll be unable to do any external courses due to the nature of that job that I’ve entered.
by Jonny | Apr 14, 2013 | Updates
I haven’t done a review of a hosting company in a while now and I remember when I used to use dedicated servers and VPSs that I used to do periodical reviews of them to ensure that they’d keep their quality.
Ever since becoming a shared hosted user, I’ve never really done a review for shared hosts as I didn’t consider them that important. That is, of course, far from the truth. However, I’ve got to give my current host credit as they have recently, or especially this year have been very good.
Last year, however, I had a few bad experiences and I very nearly switched web hosts.
Those bad experiences included my entire web directory being exposed for a brief period on an aggregate directory.
I was, however, compensated for that and I actually haven’t had to pay any hosting bills, for the past 5 months, as they credited my account with $50; my web hosting monthly bill is only $3.95. – I still have 3 months of free web hosting left.
While the host has not been perfect, they haven’t done anything else to make me switch to another web host. However, I still am thinking very hard of switching hosts due to other reasons.
In 2012, however, I faced serious problems with things being slow and I asked if I could be moved to another server. They did this and I saw improvements. But, as I’m writing this now, I’m getting really bad loading times on my websites. It has made me want to move hosts and I’m still thinking about moving.
I’d like to add that for the first 3-4 months or the majority of 2013, things have been running smoothly. I haven’t really had any problems. However, I can’t always monitor my site and at times I do get rather annoyed with how slowly my sites are loading. Whether it’s a user on the same server using a lot of CPU or their servers not being up scratch; well, I don’t know.
While their servers speeds have been an issue, their support is superb. I’ve been with Stable Host since December 2nd, 2011 and I whenever I’ve needed to contact them, I haven’t been left stranded and they do reply. After checking my support tickets, they seem to respond within the hour, which is pretty decent for a shared host. I remember the last host that I left in-place for Stable Host responded within 1-3 hours.
I’m quite content and happy with their response times; however, this year, I haven’t really had to contact them all too much as their service, for the most part, has been going well. Aside from periodical slowness, I can’t complain too much. But that is also a deal-breaker for me. If my sites are running slow then people won’t like browsing my sites and that simply is not good. Are their servers being overused? Who knows. Are they pro-actively taking care of it? I don’t know.
While I think this host is ‘okay’, I definitely think they need to make improvements. I would rate this host 3 out of 5.
Armour.ws – Website that debates/posts news updates on current world affairs and armoured military vehicles.
Political website that talks about the US president and his election win.
My personal blog, which you are browsing right now! 🙂
My
photography website. I take pictures with my Lumix FZ-28 and post them up on that site!
Download 3 of the best
simple templates you’ll ever need to use. (Slight exaggeration)
by Jonny | Aug 24, 2012 | Updates
Recently, my 500GB hard drive failed on me and I looked on the internet for anything that could recover my files from the hard drive, which admittedly, I should have backed-up.
F:\ is not accessible. Data error (cyclic redundancy check).
Cyclic Redundancy Check Error & what I did.
I searched on the internet for a solution and found out what the error message means. CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check), I looked at a few solutions however none of them worked for me. So, I thought instead of trying to get my hard drive accessible again, I thought I’d just get the data off first that I needed. (The data I should have backed up)
Recovering files on a failed hard drive
Recovery
So, I found this as a solution. I’ve managed to already get access to around 1,000+ files (Though they aren’t the files I need, so I’m continuing the scan), however there is a data-limit on the program, since I’m using the trial version. (The program, bought, costs around $59.) The paid version allows you to download as much information from the defective hard drive, while the trial allows you to only take off around 1GB of data.
That’s all I need as I’m purely trying to recover a web design which I originally bought and I want to place it for free on my website over at SimpleTemplates.org. It’s only a small file.
How long?
However, according to the program to scan the entirety of the 500GB hard drive, I need to wait 255 hours, which is around 2 weeks of concurrent scanning. I can do this, but eventually or before all that, it will find this web design, so I no longer need to continue any more scans.
So, what program are you using to do this?
The program I’m using was created by Power Data Recovery. (Google search; not direct link to their site) – They make other premium programs for hard drive failures which includes automatic back-ups and the like.
Also for future reference, I have also done some research into other programs that have been recommended in the blogosphere:
- PC Inspector File Recovery
- NTFS Reader
- Restoration
- Undelete Now!
Hopefully, someone will have found this useful. Hardware failures, especially hard drive failures are not fun at-all.
by Jonny | Jun 29, 2012 | Updates
A few days ago Google revealed its new tablet called Nexus 7 which it hopes to release into the market by 2013.
Specifications:
7″ 1280×800 HD display
1.2 megapixel camera (Front camera)
1GB of RAM
Quad-core Tegra 3 chip
4325 mAh (Up to 8 hours of active use)
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Android OS 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
Micro USB
Price: $199
[Source, more info]
Although the screen is only 7″ and the only camera (The front camera) is quite poor comparison to the $499 iPad 2’s 5 megapixel camera, for the price of $199, you can’t ask for much more. However, if you just want to use this for browsing the web, then this is the perfect tool. Granted you need to be in a WiFi equipped area to use most of the tablet’s functions, you can in-fact use your phone’s 3G connection to create a WiFi hotspot. That’s really my main concern, as it’s quite troublesome or inconvenient to be setting up a connection like that every time you want to access the internet.
I guess the main advantage on this tablet in comparison to Apple’s iPad is that you can connect this to your computer and then you can download films onto it without too much hassle.
I really want to buy this when it gets released, but hey, it’ll be released by 2013. I wouldn’t be surprised if they released it by Christmas time to rake in some Christmas sales.
I’m definitely looking at this as a serious buy as a gift I’d like to buy for myself. However, at the moment, I think my current smart phone is more than capable of doing the job that I require it to do.
Also, the actual tablet is being developed by a Taiwanese company, the large firm ASUS which has created previous “Google phones”. You would really have thought they would have contracted Motorola to develop the hardware for their new tablet, seeing as they bought Motorola for quite an expensive price tag. But hey, I’m glad they are supporting a company that operates in my country. (Taiwan) 🙂
