Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot

I was looking at the price of SD cards and it’s amazing how cheap these things are getting. For example on the sale page on buy.com you can get a Kingston 16G SDHC card for around $26, which is a bargain by anyone’s book! My fist SD card was 16M in size and cost me £10; this card is 1000 times as large and only costs twice as much. Isn’t that great!

If you try extrapolating that growth into the future you can make up some really crazy numbers as to how cheap memory will get. And you can apply that to processing power also. Moore’s Law postulates that the number of transistors you can place on a chip doubles every 2 years which is an exponential growth rate rather than a linear one and as long as this holds we’ll be seeing massive growth in storage capacities and the speed and power of computers, digital cameras and all the other gadgets we can find around us. Truth be told, if it wasn’t for this fact, a number of gadgets we have available today just wouldn’t be available if it weren’t for the miniaturization we have available to us nowadays.

Should be fun to see what the next 10 years will bring about!

I downloaded the Edinburgh photos off my camera today and uploaded them onto Facebook for all to see. Here are some of the highlights:

We had a great time at Edinburgh Castle. We managed to get in free thanks to our Manx National Heritage cards (which I must say where the best buy of the year), which allow us access to a number of Heritage sites around the world. The Castle is full of history and Arthur had a whale of a time climbing on canons and exploring all the rooms.

There’s some great scenery around Edinburgh. This is part of the scenery called Arthur’s Seat. The landscape around Edinburgh was shaped millions of years ago by volcanic activity and produce a very rich and varied landscape.

You can’t go to Scotland without trying haggis, tatties and neeps, though I must admit, I wasn’t expecting to be presented in such a fashion. It was great, as was all the food we tried in Edinburgh. There’s an amazing selection of restaurants.

And of course there was the graduation. I don’t have too many photos of that, as you can imagine, but it was a magnificent experience, very rewarding and inspirational. I’ll update the photos when I get the ones on Camille’s camera.

And we had an amazing Edinburgh apartment! As we were 4 adults we got an apartment rather than stay in a hotel and it was magnificent. The apartment was a stone’s throw from the Castle, fully equipped and very atmospheric. The only thing I missed was an Internet connection (maybe I’ll sign up for high speed satellite internet one day). But it was a great place to stay and I will definitely be using ScottishApartment.com again in the future.

Those were just some thumbnails, check out all the photos. One thing I can say for sure. We’ll definitely we returning to Edinburgh.

I had a great time at my MBA graduation yesterday. It was strange visiting Heriot-Watt, the university I’ve been studying with for the last few years and where I had never been before. I had seen photos and pictures so some images rang a bell, but it was great to actually walk through the corridors and see people in the flesh. The ceremony also brought home how truly international the EBS MBA is. There were graduands from all around the world and I was proud to be one of them.

The graduation was pretty inspirational with an honorary doctorate being presented to Douglas Anderson OBE for his outstanding contribution to engineering design and medical instrumentation.

I’ll be uploading some photos soon to show everything, I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts from the day.

(photo at the side is the front-entrance at the university)

I was speaking to a Phil, a friend of mine who runs a limo service here in the Isle of Man and who’s had a spot of bother with his PC. He had trouble for a few days, tried a system restore and ended up in a worse situation than he thought, with his Internet not working and all his applications messed up. Finally, he tried messing around with his Windows CDs and accidentally wiped his PC clean. And when I say wiped, I mean he deleted all his files, his photos, his videos, his emails, everything. And guess what … no backup!

What he really needed was an external USB drive to backup things to. And it wouldn’t have cost the world either. I was looking at the sale on buy.com and saw a 1Tb Iomega Desktop Hard Drive for a whopping $129.99 (at least that’s the price this week). With a hard disk that size you can take backups as many times as you want, and even take a few extra just to be on the safe side. It even comes complete with a license for some backup software that’s designed to make your life easier. Setup should be no more complex than plugging in a cable into one of the USB sockets in your computer.

So Phil, next time may sure you have a backup!

I found a website for a company called Fast-Teks who focus on computer repair, training, recovery and support. It’s an interesting model that is built around having technicians all around the country who had the tools and ability to support individuals and small businesses. They offer a range of services including:

• Troubleshooting
• Virus, Worm, Spyware Removal
• DSL and Cable Modem Setup
• Wireless Networking
• Data Back-Up & Recovery
• QuickBooks Experts
• Software Training
• Web Development
• Virtual Support

It’s worth keeping in mind if you need help with your IT and are looking for local support.

It’s also a model that would translate well to the UK market I think. I wonder if they offer their franchise opportunities on a global basis.

Well, it’s been interesting to see how the blog has been evolving over the last few months. The big changes started happening when I got some comments from a couple of people that my blog was suffering from tehamtic inconsistency issues. This was compounded when I asked Google what it would categorise my site as, and the result came back as “Misc”

From that point forth, I decided to start up a number of different blogs each focused on a particular niche. It means that each blog only gets a few posts a week, but that’s probably a good thing, as content stays on the front page for longer (lower churn). Here are some of my blogs in case you’re looking for something to read:

• MBA Geek: I try to keep my pure business posts here. Based on my current employment in the Isle of Man I’m doing more “enabling” work than actual technology, so there’s been some interesting things to post about.
• A bit of this and a bit of that: My personal blog, which contains a real variety of stuff, mostly personal and my family, my diet, holidays and lots more
• The Joke Shop: Pretty much all my jokes go here. It’s pretty busy I must say
• WordPress Guru: My Wordpress exploits go mostly here, though I do put some more mainstream ones on this one. Might turn this into a WordPress consultancy one day .. who knows!
• AskOwen: If someone asks me a technical question, say about automated OS recovery, then I use it for a way to store the question and it’s answer.

I have another couple of blogs but those are the main ones. But the net effect is that taking those topics out has allowed this blog to mature into something that’s a bit more me. Ok, it’s still very varied and rich, but hopefully it’s a bit more consistent. What do you think? Do you enjoy reading it?

Someone sent me a link to a great service called Twitt(url)y that lets you find out what’s fun and interesting. It’s a great service that looks at what URLs people are talking about and rates them based on how many people are talking about it. So, for example if someone launches a viral campaign about a diet pill called Orovo. If enough people start talking about the link and about the campaign then the link will start getting ranked higher and higher in Twitturly until it gets to the top of the front page.

It’s an interesting concept, that of using “the masses” to help decide what is interesting and what isn’t. It very much depends on the group of people doing the voting. Twitter still has a high percentage of technical users, so a subject like live video casting solutions is more likely to get traction than, say what happened last night on EastEnders. Still, as the Twitter population spreads to other segments we’ll see more mainstream subjects enter the list and the list get more comprehensive.