I’m now properly moved in to my new house in Swindon after spending two weeks in London. I was surprised at how quickly the trip from my temporary flat to the place my training was taking place became a normality, particularly the morning tube journey and hustle and bustle of London life. I met lots of great people during the many evenings we spent out and about at the end of the day and I hope I will end up remaining in contact with them all despite being based elsewhere in the country.

Still, no sooner had I got used to the morning routine in London I’m about to start a new one in Swindon. Its my first proper day at work tomorrow and I’m thoroughly looking forward to getting started. I’m sure I’ll end up posting more about work after I’ve settled in.

I’ve just arrived in London for two weeks of training before I start proper with JPMorgan. After a slight kerfuffle with obtaining my keys I’m now in the flat the company have put me up in and true to form have got the internet working on my laptop. Still I can’t hang around as people seem to be starting to arrive (they’ve put all the graduates in the same collection of buildings) and that usually means some kind of pub excursion might be in order 🙂

I’ve pushed out a quick update to Calendar for WordPress. I’d had a few bugs reported with styles that I wanted to fix for perfections sake, but also some more serious issues concerning compatibility with the legacy 2.0.x branch of WordPress. Keen to keep my word on backwards compatibility I fixed the issues, ran some tests and pushed out a new minor version release this morning.

No security issues are fixed in this upgrade so there is no rush to update if you don’t want to but if you are running the WordPress 2.0.x branch I recommend updating as soon as possible so you will be running bug free.

You can grab your copy straight from WordPress.

For those who want to pick up the slightly fixed styles you will need to use the “Reset Styles” tick box on the calendar options screen after upgrading – be aware that you will lose any modifications you have made to calendar styles if you do this.

With starting a new job soon I decided to get my hair cut. Its been a while since I did anything different to it as well so I decided to go to a local salon and by the time I came out my hair had undergone a fair few changes! I’m pretty pleased with the outcome though.

Anyone still recognise me in the photo below? 😉

Just got myself broadband for my new house and wanted to make a few of my techie friends envious by quoting some specifications.

24Mbit download, 2.5Mbit upload and a block of 8 IPv4 addresses. Finally a connection and home setup to be proud of. Even my laptop can have a dedicated IP address with that many to my name 😀

Due to the fact that I rented my house as unfurnished I didn’t have any curtains when I moved in so rather than add rails and hang material I thought blinds would look contemporary and be functional too. I used an online store to obtain made to measure venetian blinds and was very pleased when they arrived and found they fitted the window frames near enough perfectly.

The only issue it would seem was putting them up. The brackets needed to be fitted inside the frames which meant screwing into the wood very close into a corner. Anyone who has done this before will now how difficult it can be, especially when you add into the mix brackets that don’t allow screw drivers anything approaching easy access and screws which burr more easily than butter.

Looking at the number of screws and brackets you could be forgiven for believing that each blind was a 5 minute job. I’m not kidding when I say each one took close to an hour. I burred, bent and snapped a ridiculous number of screws and when I finally got a blind up I found myself in need of a cup of tea and a lie down due to exhaustion from the process.

I guess the lesson here is never underestimate a DIY job otherwise it’s bound to go wrong or at the very least take up valuable drinking time.

My blog reached a frightening milestone today – I’ve received 100,000 spam comments since I started the site. Thankfully all of these comments never reached the public gaze as they were blocked by Akismet, however its worrying to think that such a high proportion of my comments were spam.

As it stands I have round about 1,000 comments on my blog, this means that a mere 1% of the comments I have received so far have been legitimate. Scary really isn’t it.

After the latest testing of the release candidate I was pleased to find few if any bug reports and so I have decided to push the release live. I updated the WordPress Plugins SVN repository yesterday and the 1.2 final version is now available for download on WordPress.org and on my site.

I was pleased to note that the download record was broken yesterday on the WordPress plugins site so it looks promising in terms of uptake. If you are running the old version I whole-heartedly encourage you to upgrade. There are a lot of improvements and new features all of which I’m sure you will enjoy using.

Please also note that support is now only available in the open source area of my business forums. This means that blog comments, e-mails and IMs related to calendar support will be ignored. Using the forums allows people to search for a solution first and for me to place regularly asked questions in the FAQ.