This is a little test to see if my iPad will successfully post to my blog!.

Today creatively started with me building a solution in visual studio 2010 that had projects for…

• Downloading an affiliate window product feed
• Unzipping the file to the local file system
• Scraping content from the merchant site using the deeplinks in the feed to have a more comprehensive end result to this whole concept
• Using the parsed content via an agile xpath project reference to build a SQL compact DB
• Building an MVC3 c# site from the database and a theme based on an existing competitor that I know is doing well
• Automating all the above on a daily schedule…. I can see that my more appropriate, memorable domain name would do better, and the site has several obvious improvements that could be made.. Even things as basic as sorting the drop down list items..

However the usual daily drag got in the way and my after was wasted doing…

• Emails through a messy ticketing system clarifying what someone wanted until I got him to admit he didn’t even want the report in the first place…
• Working out why an access 97 DB is misbehaving… Yes.. Access 97 by a wannabe developer
• Being asked to fix something I fixed in the morning..but didn’t get told it was fixed and they had infact started talking about someone completely separate which they did not test when asked to do so a month ago….

There’s a big gap between what I want to do with my days and what I end up having to do…. Very frustrating…. If you read this.. And are based in London doing the kinds of things that are mentioned in the first half… PLEASE hire me!!!!!!!

P.s. iPad2 seems surprisingly fast to type on!

What challenges will tomorrow bring….

Might start throwing tips into this blog from time to time, here’s a quicky…

In programs such as a web browser where you type something into a textbox and it lists all the things you have typed before, if you are like me and actually use those to save you typing what you are looking for in full this is for you.

To remove stored entries in almost any of them just highlight them using the arrow keys and press the delete key to remove them from the history of that individual textbox so you have less crap to scroll through as you use your computer efficiently.

This probably works on mac and linux computers too, logically it would but I only have time to use one PC OS.

I got my first computer when I was around 10, or earlier… can’t remember exactly – I had two Commodore VIC 20 computers, and two Commodore C64′s, around that time in the mid-80s there was a weekly magazine that came out and had 5 bigass binders that held all 52 editions together. I couldn’t remember the name of it and it’s so obvious… just found it now on wikipedia here. You got little computer programs that took ages to put in to those first generation home PCs and inevitably you would make loads of typos that would take so long to debug you would just give up.

But sometimes they worked, and I guess that has a lot to do with why computers have been such a massive part of my life.

I had a massive purge of facebook friends to strictly people I know, and changed the RSS feeds import to just posts from this blog rather than my network of sites, I’ll keep stuff like Bingo for by bingo facebook alter-ego marketing login etc which makes far more sense all round.

Only a couple of days left until we are all off to Turkey – and me and Natasa got the sneezes… had the doctor check us out this morning and we are not growing pig snouts… just a bit of a cold which will hopefully disappear before we fly out.

Every day at work I listen to internet radio from di.fm, either the techno, classic techno, or minimal channels are sure to give me something I want to hear for a few hours.

Today I heard a techno mix by “technics2000″, looked him up and found his blog where I didn’t quite get the mix I was after but he has a shiteload of other mixes that are cool, I am listening to the vocal house vol1 while I update my laptop to vista SP2.

Another artist I heard today is Tadox, although that will be too hard for some of you :), some MP3s are there for free too. Remember the good old days of audio galaxy when you could search for almost any music and find it on mp3…

Wonder when my new keyboard will arrive from china for my Dell 1520 after I spilled some Beer on it one night, managed to flip it over quick enough to save the bits inside but a sticking enter key can be a bit distracting :), ebay is the best place to buy little tech bits n’ pieces.

Edit: next day, and I find myself remembering I like the Classic Rap channel too!, I like listening to this while painting the house…