Over the past few days I have seen teenagers using social networking (facebook in this case) in a interesting way.

On Saturday (14th June) morning, a 19 year lad (Karl Hampton) was killed in a car accident. Within hours his friends had created facebook group (R.I.P Karl Hampton) which 4 days later had 270 members and 80 heart felt comments?? on his wall

Got my self a NEW Personal phone, HTC TyTn ii, last month, and like a kid with a new toy played with it all the time,

So I get my phone bill this morning ??177, ouch, it would appear I used over double my data allowance !

At a cost of an extra ??108 +vat

I get a few RSS feeds from many sources. This week I added the local paper www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk, however it would seem the RSS feed is busted, as non of the article links contain a Fully Qualified URL, all the link are relative to the site ROOT, so while they work from the site, they are useless in an external feed aggregator

After going the full duration, 3 interviews and an assessment day over 3months
I had “the Call” from Microsoft HR consultants this morning

Unfortunately it is a “NO Hire” that makes it the first job (ever) I have applied for that I have not got ! BUM

Got some good feedback, no surprises for me though

Good points

• General Technical knowledge is good, particularly in web services area
• Presentation content was well researched and has ALL of the appropriate points

Bad points

• Technical knowledge not deep enough in some areas AD GPO, and high end security got tripped up in duel vendor firewalls, I may have even been tripped up on SQL log shipping recovery process (I need to check), I also struggled to explain some of the decision points when I have??built?? HUGE intranet platforms
• Some of the business stuff is outside my comfort zone , which limits my ability to talk to business people
• Presentation style. In hind sight (the wonderful tool that it is) I spent too long researching the content, and not enough time rehearsing, end result is I will TOO reliant on my notes and came across as reading a script,

Just not quite what they are looking for at in a consultant at the moment

I can’t help feeling, the presentation delivery is totally my fault , and I KNOW I can do better
It is not my normal style to be dependent on notes, and running out of time to prior to the event rehearse is totally my fault and in excusable

I will now be wondering if I would have been better missing a few points and get the delivery right

Many years ago??I worked for ABB Kent Taylor as an electronics design engineer.
As part of my tour??I was involved in the design of a product call a MagMaster, and Electromagnetic flow meter, which use faradays principle of a moving conductor on a Magnetic field to generate electricity, albeit 15uV/m/s in this case

Anyway, I was part of the software team that wrote the original software, I personally wrote al the serials comms routines, display drivers and data capture??routines, most the code which talked to the outside world.

A few years later??I was personally responsible for the creation of an enhanced display, with bigger digits and addition functionality.

Well i have just found out that not only is the MagMaster still on sale by ABB, but they have sold over 500,000 units

Over the past few years I have blogged on and off (mostly personal view points on the world, mostly those thing in life that annoy me), recently my blogging activity has exploded, due to the addition of some extra blogging outlets, I launched siliconpizza.com, my professional and techie blog on which I document almost any technical issue or thought I have (gone are the days of the stack of notebooks in the desk drawer). I decided to run siliconpizza.com for two unrelated reasons. Firstly I was getting more and more frustrated with the state of some internet forums, full of people of will reply to any post in the hope you will say they gave you the answer, to your problem and improve their ranking, when in actual fact they have not even read or understood you question. So I figured I would document my techie stuff in an independent manor. Secondly my personal blog (http://blog.species5618.net) which contains lots of personal viewpoints, some of which may be controversial in the ridiculous politically correct world we now live in.

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Like many??I have a blackberry and have been known to check business emails during evening and weekend and often deal with any issues there and then. With many scornfull looks from my wife ..!..

NOW the worm has turned
A few weeks ago, while offcially on holiday, I caught her checking her work webmail and then last night??I found her updating a MSAccess database she had brought home on a USB Stick

I walk past a CEX shop on the way to the office from the buis stop every morning. If an attack of boredom strikes, of the need to get a TECH fix, I have a wonder in.

I have never understaood their pricing structure, in the past i have seen

• 2nd hand Wii’s 30 quid more then a NEW one next door
• Pink DS 40 quid more than a new on, in stock in Argos

yet today??I was surprised to see them selling SIM packs for 3.99 or 4.99 which are available in the high street for free, or 1.99 (in the case of THREE, and that was direct from a THREE shop)??

I am busy designing and building infrastructure for various “as a Service” service offerings

Web as a Service (IIS)
Data as a Service (SQL and Oracle)
Middleware as a Service

So I thought I would float a few questions

What is High Availability?
When do you need it?
How do you create it?
How do you measure it?

DISCUSS !!

[UPDATE]

Here is my two penneth,