However! I’ve spent the last half hour googling around for “White Horse Inn Steyning” and guess what, nothing! After finally deciding to drop the Inn (i.e. White Horse Inn Steyning) I found it.

It’s really annoying when all you want to do is book a meal at your local pub but their website is impossible to find. It’s clear they really need the help of the Search Engine Optimisation team at OuterEdge.

Anyway, I though’t I’d write this blog to help those who just can’t find their website, to find it And the winner is:

http://www.the-whitehorse.com/

This week I are be mostly working on a live website. Ha, ok enough fast show malarky! Working on a clients site we needed to roll out quite a large patch to their existing website. As the site they use is E-Commerce based we had concerns that a user might try to make a purchase during the upgrade process so we decided to have the site redirect to a maintenance page using the .htaccess file.

That’s all very well, but what about us, we needed to see the changes we were making working live. This nifty little script below does just that, if you replace the 111.111.111.1 with the external IP of your machine it will bypass the rules below that line thus giving you access to the site whilst others are redirect to maintenance.html. Simples.

The .htaccess file

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^111\.111\.111\.111
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/maintenance\.html$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.co.uk/maintenance.html [R=307,L]

The specifications are:

• HP Compaq dc5700
• Intel Celeron Dual Core E1400 2GHz (512 KB L2 cache 800MHz FSB)
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 250GB SATA HDD
• Optional Used HP Keyboard & Microsoft Optical Mouse for Free
• Onboard Graphics with DVI & VGA Ports (supports dual screens)
• Windows Vista Business Edition
• Onboard Sound
• Onboard Network
• HP 6-in-1 Media Card Reader

If you’re interested you can buy it:

View my HP Compaq dc5700 for sale on Google Base

View my HP Compaq dc5700 for sale on Ebay

http://www.fool.co.uk/press-releases/2009/02/12/23-is-the-best-age-to-start-investing.aspx

According to this similar article a 23 year old investor who puts £100 a month into shares could build a retirement pot that is worth over £500,00 by the age of 65 - nice.

http://www.fool.co.uk/news/investing/investing-strategy/2009/02/17/the-best-age-to-start-investing.aspx

I’m hoping to get some time soon to write a full length blog about the techniques I’ll be using to start building my portfolio and the reasons behind it, watch this space ;)!

11pm - Update, I’ve just ordered the following books from Amazon:

• The Motley Fool UK Investment Guide
• Investing for Dummies: UK Edition
• The Naked Trader
• A Girl’s Best Friend is Her Money: The Motley Fool Women’s Investment Guide

I spent the best part of two days reading about all sorts of techniques from Calorie Shifting to Fasting and eventually decided the simplest thing for us would be to collate the general tips from a variety of healthy living sites and write our own.

We’ve been on this “diet” for three weeks now and are both feeling great, losing weight and fitting it around our lives. Even more importantly we’re not feeling hungry all the time or starving ourselves.

So, three weeks in and I’ve already lost 8lbs and decided it was time to share it with the world. Before you read on, don’t expect anything complicated or detailed. The diet is simply a bulleted list of tips and rules to follow along with a general meal plan guide.

• Eat 5/6 small meals per day
• Reduce portions and serving sizes
• Eat the recommend calories for 2lb per week weight loss based on activity, age and gender
• Drink 4 pint glasses of water a day with and between meals (1 squeezed lemon added).
• Do not add salt or sugar to food/drink
• 30 minutes daily aerobic exercise (walking, running, swimming, bikeriding, stairs.)
• Choose low-fat, low-sodium products (more potassium than sodium is good).
• Eat 3 fish portions per week
• Use extra virgin olive oil (two servings per day)
• Use skimmed milk
• Eat wholemeal bread
• No more than two egg yolks per week
• Use vingarette dressing on salads
• Good proteins to eat are eggs, chicken (skinless), turkey, fish, lamb, lean beef and whey protein powder.

Meal Plan

Breakfast - 1 bread or cereal, 1 fruit, 1 dairy
Snack - 1-2 fruits or vegetable
Lunch - 3 vegetable, 1 bread, 1 fruit, 1 protein
Snack - 1 fruit (or unsalted nut’s/seeds)
Dinner - 3-4 vegetable, 1 fruit, 1 protein, 1 bread, 1 dairy, 1 fat

Can someone tell me what exactly is wrong with Mondays, when I get up after the weekend I’m itching to get with work, that’s right I do actually get excited about going to work (Ok granted, I don’t even have to leave the house to get to the office and I have my wife with me most of the time).

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a workaholic, I love the weekend and relish the opportunity to have that all important rest from work, but two days just about cuts it for me. Having said that, I also love my job, the challenges and rewards it brings along with the time spent with friends and collegues. 

Without bragging I guess I do have the added benefit of being my own boss, I don’t have to do what I’m told (not entirely true, right Craig?). I’m hoping now writing this that the staff all feel the same way too, I try to encourage an atmosphere where new ideas, innovation and change are praised, and for good reason; it’s good for the business and they’ll feel the benefits too.

You’ll know you’re in the right job when you go to bed on a Sunday night thinking “I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow!”.

I often wonder what I’m missing, what the latest hype I haven’t heard about is. Only in the last year i’ve discovered how much time I was wasting not writing code using the MVC model and I somehow missed all the hype surround frameworks until recently. Of course it’s essential to stay sharp and up to date with the tools used on a daily basis but at the same time its important to take time to have fun and learn something new (hard to believe learning can be fun right!).

When I was writing the “tag line” for this blog, I was concious of putting “Life” first before the rest (business & programming), that includes spending time with God, Andrea, and socialising more with my friends. However, it’s also really important to spend time on yourself and the way I like to do that is by building my skills which is something I really enjoy doing.

After seeing a couple of other people do the same on their blogs, i’ve been inspired to create a list of those projects and other things that I’ll coin as “Personal Development” here. I’m sure I’ll update this list as time goes on as I have new goals, ideas and hopefully be able to take a few off the list when they come into fruition and maybe even make it into my toolset. So in randomish order;

• Start blogging more often
• Learn symfony using the Jobeet tutorial
• Learn python (using Django framework)
• Spend more time with JQuery/  JS and JSON
• Write a simple web service (with SOAP)
• Learn to play acoustic guitar
• Read about investment and start doing it

Well, that should be enough to keep me busy for a while time to get to work!

I quite liked the last one they did with the Gorilla / Phil Collins song, but this is just taking the mick:

Whilst I was in church this weekend, I began to get distracted by the thought of my shiny new Apple iPhone that my wife had bought me as an “early” birthday present!

I tried to ignore it and focus on God, but I just couldn’t. I’m normally able to tune out my thoughts, so I can honestly say I was getting a little bit annoyed with myself.

Then it struck me, why do people find it so easy to accept how a mobile phone works but so hard to accept that God exists? Today our phones are even able to browse the internet at super fast speeds. There’s no cables, no visible airwaves, nothing to suggest that this little shiny peice of plastic should work or moreso be able to communicate with the outside world. On the other hand with God there’s certainly no cables or airwaves to suggest that we can communicate with him.

How many people have actually visited a mobile phone mast before they believe it exists? Not many right! It’s probably because they can see the signs of its existence when their phone displays some simple bars to demonstrate how strong the signal is.

So, if people can believe that the mast exists without seeing it, why not believe that God exists? Ok, we can’t just see Jesus walking down the street like he did 2000 years ago, but there are so many sign, miracles and wonders that God does every day, if people would take notice they wouldn’t be able to suggest he doesn’t exist!

I’m reminded of the verse in John 20:29 that says:

“Then Jesus told him, You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me”.

As christians we should remember that all it takes is those few bars on someone’s phone that tells them the mobile phone mast exists, so likewise we just need to tune into God and stay connected every day and we will be able to show the world He exists!

Next time you’re worshipping him and struggling to communicate, just remember that he is there, a mast, waiting to recieve your signals and communicate with you. Just send him a message and he’ll turn you from a simple shiny bit of plastic into an all singing, all dancing messenger for him.