belial.co.uk

Good Morning Internet!

It has been about two and a half years since I last blogged here. That is largely because it is easier to update facebook than it is to update a medium that relatively few people will even see.

In the last year I have been working at Screen Subtitling Systems as a Web Contractor initially, then a Developer and finally a Product Specialist. I say finally because two weeks ago I handed in my notice, prompted by a huge career offer, which has me all excited!

I haven’t practised (professionally) hypnosis/NLP for about two years now. This is simply because there really wasn’t the market in Ipswich to sustain a specialist as I was through the economic climate… that and the time I was spending travelling to and from clients was more work than it was worth. I enjoyed the 6 or so years I was able to practice, but I think that my days of holding private clients or running trainings is slowly shutting. That is not to say that I don’t use it… I continue to develop techniques for myself, and support the NLP/NHR technologies in the UK as much as I can.

Which brings me to the other news which was a scare I had later last year with my gall-bladder. Turns out it was a closer call than anyone expected, with mu gall-bladder slowing turning in to a cyst and bringing me closer to spetic shock and potentially coma. I’m all good now with 4 punctures on my abdomen, and a new found respect for fatty foods!

Anyway, Mole will be coming over later this afternoon, so I look forward to catching up with him and his (new) g/f.

Just finished my Certified Ethical Hacker course here at www.firebrandtraining.co.uk, and have passed the final exam with a 78% mark… which ain’t bad. 70% is a pass, so it was quite close. But bearing in mind the steeper then normal learning curve I’ve had with it, I’m very pleased with myself. Now to find a job! 

Sacha’s blog www.ladyjames.org.uk has now been updated to Wordpress. It used to be on S9y, and S was finding it difficult to use the WYSIWYG editor, in particular the invariable amount of button presses resulting in her losing her blog posts. Wordpress is much friendlier, and auto saves your posts every now and then as you write them to a draft folder, so you can’t inadvertently lose them if you lose connectivity or hit the back button by mistake… we’ve all done it!

All my blogs and sites now run Wordpress on them somewhere… it rocks.

So my 1and1 exchange problems continue. Last week my wifes exchange account died, and stopped responding to all authentication attempts. The support adviser I spoke to identified that it was ’something’ to do with the upgrade to Exchange server 2007 that was ongoing. Sure enough, and after 5 days of no email for my wife, the lines were back up, and we were happy. I was also reassured that my account had already been upgraded and would not suffer the same outage.

Well they were wrong. Saturday saw the start of the Outlook authentication battle… and it’s continued in to today. Having now rung 1and1 to find out what the heck is going on, they replied that they have replicated the error and are looking in to it. I will be updated as to the status of the case by email!!! Bizzare.

I ‘umm’ed and ‘ahh’ed over purchasing this app for over a month. The available documentation describes it as an:

Essential guitar utility, including an amazingly flexible tuner and library of over 1600 chord variations, all on your iPhone.

Well the screen shots look pretty good and the functionality for the price seems good value. So last week I plumped for it.

It’s super. In particular the guitar tuner is amazingly accurate and flexible. It can decern the tone of the string being played and in real time display the corrections you need to make, down to less than 10Deg turn on the machine head on my Ibanez. It can also account for several unusual tunings, and will set its tone recognition to account for most background noise. And if you want to do it the old fashioned way, there is a set of virtual strings you can pluck which play though the loud speaker to tune-by-ear.

Another function contained in the toolkit is a metronome. You can slide the metronome to a bespoke frequency, and set the time tiganture to 2/4,3/4 or 4/4. You can have it just flash the tick, and/or tick using the in-built speaker.

Finally the chord libary, which is extensive. It gives several options for each chord and variants, each is displayed graphically in a TAB-like format. It is really easy to locate chords and to select their variations, simply using the touch scroll interface.

I am really very pleased with my purchase. For me to have bought hardware to fulfil the functions of this app, I’d be looking at close to £50, if not more. This simple app, available from the iTunes App store, is a fantastic addition to a growing list of quality apps for the iPhone.