On Christmas Day this year as I have already mentioned we were playing snooker with my nephews new (small) snooker table.  In the end the winner came down to a fluked black.

While trying to play safe after a terrible positional shot on the pink, dad managed to fluke the black into the middle pocket!  See below:

Here are the photographs from boxing day 2008:

Christmas Day 2008 was a memorable day for a number of reasons.  Early morning phone calls from the doctor, a trip to hospital, lack of sleep and the usual Christmas dinner.  This Christmas Day had it all!

It all started actually on Christmas Eve at 2330 (almost Christmas Day!).  The phone rang which we thought strange at that hour, its only ever bad news then isn’t it.  It rang off at first because I couldn’ find the cordless phone.  Doing a 1471 the caller withheld their number.  I was thinking “telesales at 2330 on Christmas Eve, surely not?”  About 2 minutes later it rang again and it was the doctor, to tell us that there was some irregularities in the blood sample that my wife had provided earlier that day at her routine maternity checkup at the health centre.  He advised that we rang the delivery suite at the hospital in the morning.  However there was no way that we were going to sleep with this news so we rang straight away.

I have to say that both myself and Helen was a little annoyed at the doctor for ringing when he did.  When we arrived at the hospital at 0130 on Christmas morning there was no panic with any of the staff.  Helen was simply hooked up to the baby monitor so that they could listen to babies heart beat and he was fine.  A little poking and prodding and they sent us on our way with a prescription for vitamin K.  What annoyed us was why was the doctor ringing on Christmas Eve with the news?  His advice was not to do something until Christmas morning, so why not just ring then?  It would have been less of a worry I can tell you that. We arrived back home at around 0300 and then we did not get to sleep until the early hours, probably still reflecting about the evenings events!

Waking up on Christmas morning I felt absolutely shattered – perhaps a sign of things to come when Harry finally arrives!  Then it was off to my brothers for a Christmas morning with his children and family.  Meanwhile Helen was left trying to find a chemist on the Internet that was open on Christmas Day.  Finally she found one that would be open until 1400 in Euxton nearby.

The highlight of the visit to my brothers was his sons new snooker table – a Christmas present from Santa.  It was excellent and I spend much of the morning either refereeing games between my dad and my nephew or playing snooker with my nephew or billiards with my Dad. Good fun those snooker tables and well worth the money if you have the space for them.  After a couple of glasses of Moet and Chandon it was back home to hunt down the chemist that Helen had found.

We set off for the Chemist at around 1230 and arriving at the deserted chemist we handed over the prescription.  It seemed like the assistant was in the back for ages and ages and then a chap came out with the bad news that they did not have any.  Moreover he said that it was something that he had only seen once or twice every 10 years!  Therefore it was back on the phone to the hospital in order to try and track down whether they had any or not as it was the doctor there that had prescribed it.  Cutting as long backward and forward story short we managed to track some down at a chemist in Preston.

Then it was off to mum and dads for Christmas Day lunch.  Roast lamb and all the trimmings with smoked salmon to start with and Christmas Pudding to finish.  An excellent meal and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it, especially [Helen] Harry!

Then it was back home and I was shattered.  An early night was had ready for the following [Boxing] day were we were off to the in-laws.  As I am sure you will agree it was a Christmas Day to Remember!

View all the photos of the day in this Christmas Day 2008 Flickr Slideshow

Having had my broadband Internet provided by Tiscali now for almost 4 years and on the whole they have been alright.  However I have found that the service has not really moved with the times in recent years although it is still providing a decent service.  It was time therefore to look elsewhere.

Speaking to a number of people at work it seemed that there were two best choices for switching to a different provider – BeThere or O2.  As it happens they are the same company I think.  I could also have gone with Sky Broadband however I have read and heard nothing but bad reports about this as so I decided not to go with it at this time.

Looking on the O2 website their deals seem to be excellent.  They were offering the same broadband package that I was on with Tiscali for a few pounds cheaper or I could more than double the speed to 20 meg (estimated 18 meg for my phone number) for the same price as I was paying now.  Therefore even though there would be some hassle involved I decided to bite the bullet and go for it.

In order to transfer your broadband from one supplier to another you need to obtain what is called a MAC code (Migration Authorisation Code) which allows the new company to transfer the service over to the new provider as you cannot have two companies providing broadband down the same telephone line.  Therefore I got onto Tiscali, my current provider and explained that I wanted to cancel the account and obtain a MAC code.  At this point you get all the questions about why you are wanting to move and are you unhappy with the service etc.  I explained that I could get it cheaper which is when the assistant did what I have hoped and offered me exactly the same service for half the price!  That was 8 mrg unlimited broadband for just £7.99.

Decisions, decisions?  I had previous problems with tiscali broadband when we moved house about a year ago and conversations with colleagues at work had suggested that not only was the O2 service very good but the customer service was good too.  What a dilemma!  Well in the end I decided to stick with Tiscali and take them up on their super cheap, pretty fast service.  After all the terms of the deal had not changed and therefore I was still under no more than a 30 day contract as I was before.  If things got terrible with them I could leave and go with O2 in the new year.

So thats that, I am staying with Tiscali and paying a rather cheap £7.99 for an 8 meg speed (I actually averahe about 6.1 meg) and unlimited downloads.  Pretty good result that I think!

Yesterday I splashed out a little and decided to purchase a new iPod touch, having seen one demonstrated by one of my pupils at school.  They do have a great deal of educational value actually, however I am still amazed at how, well amazing they are!

I managed to get my hands on one of the 8Gb models and I have to say that first impressions are very good.  I have very quickly managed to get it connected to my wireless network both at home and work and it is now surfing the web and collecting my emails with no trouble.  Oh and it plays music too!

A must have gadget for anyone that cannot justify spending in excess of £30 per month on an iPhone!

Yesterday we experienced some downtime with our websites (Equal Design) which was probably about 2 hours in the morning.  Therefore it was time to get onto the live chat and see what the problem was.  This char happened in the evening though which I think confused the support representative a little too much.

I have to say that I have been very pleased with the level and competency of the support that we have received whilst using this hosting company, however this conversation last night was rather infuriating.  It was like “Charlie” just was not listening.  We kept going round and round and round.  In fact it was very much like talking to a politician as “Charlie” was determined not to answer the question of why the sites had suffered from some downtime.

info: You are now chatting with ‘Charlie’
Charlie: Hello and Welcome to Live Chat Support.
Charlie: How may I assist you today ?
Mark: My websites experiecned a lot of downtime today. Could you please advise of the problem. Domains effected where penny4them.com, equaldesign.co.uk and cliffbashforth.co.uk to name a few
Charlie: Give me a moment please. I am looking into this.
Mark: thanks
Mark: any idea?
Charlie: I am still working on the issue, Please allow me few minutes
Charlie: I will update you shortly
Charlie: Please check now
Mark: they are live now but were down for most of the day for some people
Charlie: The issue is fixed now
Charlie: You should not face this again
Mark: what was wrong?
Charlie: I have made necessary changes for your account in php.ini
Mark: i am now down to a 99.90% uptime
Mark: you gurantee 99.96%
Mark: this is over a period of 11 months
Charlie: This was not server issue.
Charlie: The issue with your php.ini
Charlie: I have uploaded the php.ini file and made necessary changes.
Charlie: The domains are working fine now
Mark: but it was an issue with you not me
Mark: i havne’t and am pretty sure that I cannot change php.ini
Mark: if it affected my uptime then that must be part of your guarentee
Mark: as the uptime guarentee doesn’t stipulate only server problems
Charlie: I have uploaded php.ini for you.
Charlie: This was not the server issue .I have made necessary changes for you.
Mark: back to my original questions then – WHY did the problem (whatever it was) occur
Charlie: As I said there was issue with your php.ini file under your public_html folder
Mark: and how did this ‘issue’ occur?
Charlie: You did not have php.ini file under your public_html folder
Charlie: I have uploaded this one for you. and made necessary changes
Charlie: you could also make changes with php.ini file under your public_html folder
Charlie: The server was not down
Mark: i have never touched it – which domain are we talking about here were you have uploaded the php.ini file
Charlie: penny4them.com
Mark: think we have wires crossed here
Mark: the outage was this morning between 0615 (or earlier) and 0840 when I first got the site back
Mark: however some other people have said that sites (not just penny4them.com – i am on reseller) were down much of the day
Charlie: Yes, have you checked your all account for php.ini
Mark: but all sites are now working so that couldn’t be the problem
Mark: even if php.ini is not there now
Mark: I haven’t touched the sites all day
Mark: I went to bed at 2300 with all sites working
Mark: woke up at 0615 with NO sites working
Mark: what went wrong as I did not move any files
Mark: especially no php.ini
Mark: *not
Charlie: Okay.
Charlie: The domains are working fine now. If you are still having any issue please mail us at support@eukhost.com
Mark: i am NOT having an issue I just want to know what the issue was when they were down
Mark: i have clients websites on my reseller and they want to know (rightly so) what the problems are
Charlie: Mark, There was not any server wide issue.
Mark: so why were they down then?
Charlie: As I said there was issue with php.ini and it has been resolved.
Mark: sothat was an issue on ALL my domains?
Charlie: I have made changes for those which you have asked
Charlie: penny4them.com, equaldesign.co.uk and cliffbashforth.co.uk
Mark: but they were working before you changed them
Charlie: Mark, You can ask to reseller that the issue has been resolved as it was with the php.ini.
Charlie: If any of your reseller still having issues please ask them to contact us
Mark: so let me get this straight – at some point this morning before 0615 all the php.ini files for all the domains that I have were deleted, but no t by me, my clients or you?
Mark: then half the world could see domains again at 0840 without you touching anything and half couldn’t?
Charlie: We do not make any changes on the server without client permission.
Mark: so who made the changes then?
Charlie: Give me a moment please. I am looking into this.
Mark: i have now just conducted a little experiment. I have renamed the php.ini file that is in the public_html folder of penny4them.com to php1.ini and the site still works – proving that it could not have been a problem with this file that you cause the downtime
Charlie: Allow for few minutes
Mark: k
Mark: any idea?
Charlie: Mark, Still checking on the server Please allow me few minutes
Charlie: Will update you shortly
Charlie: Mark, Please check the logs
//
Mark: Yes that would have been when I was updating my site to WordPress 2.7 so it was down for about 5 minutes
Mark: but that is all at 1910 not this morning at 0615?
Charlie: Mark, Your all domains are working fine now.
Mark: I know
Mark: But you still have not answered my initial question
Mark: My websites experiecned a lot of downtime today. Could you please advise of the problem
Charlie: Mark. There was not any issue with the server.
Charlie: If you will again same issue please contact us immediately at the moment.
Charlie: If you will face*
Mark: so you don’t know then?
Charlie: As I said there was any issue on the server and I am still investigating it for you.
Charlie: Will mail you on your registered mail id once I have done with.
Mark: ok
Charlie: We need more time as the logs get rotated for your previous down time.
Charlie: Mark, Your patience appreciated

As you can see if you have managed to read all that, he just didn’t get it.  What I think is important to say is that this conversation lasted around 2 hours!  I think you are right Charlie – my patience needs to be appreciated!

Finally after 1 month over due the new version of WordPress, called WordPress 2.7 Coltrane is finally released.  With a completely new interface than previously seen before it was time today to upgrade this blog from 2.6.1 to 2.7.  It was a doddle!

This video below gives you some idea of the new features that you can expect to see in WordPress 2.7.

Personally I like the new interface, especially the fact that you can customize any section of the page depending on whether you want to see it or not, or even move it around a little to suit your needs more.  At the moment it seems to be running smoothly, which is good news.  I am especially looking forward to the new update feature without having to do any messy FTP connections etc.

I suppose time will tell as to how good this new version of WordPress actually is.  What do you think of it?