September 13th, 2011
As it seems to be the fashionable thing at the moment to write open letters, I thought I’d write one myself. But this isn’t born out of frustration, it isn’t aimed to bringing about change, it isn’t even to offer an alternative viewpoint. Nor do I claim to represent anyone bar myself, though I suspect I may speak for the majority for Rovers fans.
It’s simply a message to the players.
You’ve probably noticed a certain amount of discontent amongst the fans at the moment, you’ve possibly heard about fans vocalising their dissatisfaction both in the national press and via a protest march before the Arsenal game. Whilst I have not been involved with these protests I do understand the frustration that has lead to them, but one thing I think the vast majority of fans want to be absolutely clear about is this is simply an issue with the manager and his exceptionally poor results on the pitch, NOT the players. Most fans, if not all, will acknowledge we now have a very strong squad capable of great things, however a significant section of the fans feel that Steve Kean is not the man to drive you to them (no pun intended).
So, I urge you all this weekend, if Ewood is a little more hostile than normal, if there is booing around the ground, if you hear calls for Kean Out, this ISN’T aimed at the players. I’ve yet to find a single person who blames our current league position of the team itself. We all know we’ve got a talented squad capable of far more than a single point at this stage. You, the players, continue to have the fans full support and we feel it’s important you know this, even if some people’s frustration with the manager does spill over during the game this weekend.
Come On You Blues.
Glenn Pegden
Many readers will realise that I’m one of the admins on BRFCS.com, but as the site is remaining neutral on the issue of the protest, I felt it only right I post this on my personal website instead, for fear of it being misconstrued as and official BRFCS statement
This post is (c) 2011 G. Pegden and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior permission
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September 8th, 2011
It looks like it’s time to dust off my old laser pointer as I’m going to be co-hosting training sessions again! Back when I was at Visionsoft I hosted over 100 session over the years (the vast majority on my own) and I used to really enjoy them (ok, I didn’t enjoy 5am starts and 600 mile daily round trips so much).
The good news is, in an attempt to grow the consultancy side of the business, we’re hosting a number of small group, low cost, training sessions, on everything from PCI-DSS compliance to brand security, content monetization to conversion optimization. But most importantly, I get to take off my sales hat and actually get involved with the teaching.
I’ve been keeping my hand in a little by talking at events like Barcamps and Northern Bloggers, but this’ll be my first time doing it for paying people in a couple of years and I’m very very excited.
My first one is “Brand Security”, it’s basic online security aimed at people responsible for things like WordPress websites, twitter accounts and facebook fan pages of other companies (i.e. digital agencies and web design studios), who don’t have much of a background in IT security and we’ll be talking about things like hardening WordPress, XSS attacks, pass phrase management (especially between multiple users), threat modelling, as well as how to clean up after you are compromised.
If you want to come along, it’s £185 for a 1/2 day course, held at Calls Wharf in the centre of Leeds on 28th Sept. More info at http://brandsec.codingfutures.co.uk/ . I have to admit, I’m really really excited about training again!
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September 6th, 2011
I’m going to break with tradition at write about work related stuff on my personal blog, so if the words WordPress, Membership and Plugin mean nothing to you (or they do and you don’t care), now if the time to stop reading.
This post has come about because almost every day, somebody asks on Warrior Forum (a hang out of online marketers and bedroom entrepreneurs) “What’s the best Membership Plugin to get“. Now I could just do a review site, but I won’t partly because loads already exist, partly because I sell membership plugins so I’m biased, but mainly because IT’S THE WRONG QUESTION TO ASK.
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September 4th, 2011
The idea of Tribes For Forums was devised minutes before the start of LeedsHack 2011 by Toby and myself, although it’s origins are much older. Through our involvement of several large forums (including BRFCS) and some very unique one (such as Mono) we’d spent many hours discussing how to address some of the long term problems facing online forums.
One analogy always made with forums is the pub, but one part that never fits the analogy is in a pub situation, as the size of the group chatting grows, it eventually splinters into subgroups, often aligned upon common interests or demographics, so each conversation is kept between a manageable size of participants. However on a forum, even though these groups can be artificially created (breaking discussions down by subject for example) the problem is the users with sufficient time can still join in (and even dominate) every conversation. Imagine in the pub situation if the “pub bore” (see the Fast Show’s Billy Bleech for what I mean ) could be involved with every single conversation, all at once, he’d love it, everyone else would hate it.
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April 13th, 2011
We have both local elections and a referendum coming up in the UK and whilst I worked as a Poll Clerk at a polling station for the general election I am no longer eligible (as I am now a member of a political party), therefore I am no longer obliged to stay silent on the subject of POLLING TELLERS and how to help rid our elections of them.
Polling Tellers are normally the first people you see when you get to a polling station, they will normally ask you for your voter number, write it down, then point to inside where seeming the the process is repeated. What a lot of people don’t realise is these people are not part of the polling team and you have no legal obligation to speak to them. What they do is examine the numbers given to spot whether people they people they believe they know the voting preferences of (e.g. party members) have voted yet. I have no issue with what they do (in fact, anything that encourages anyone to vote is a good thing) but I take exception to the fact that in a lot of cases they masquerade as officials and rely on people’s ignorance of their purpose to obtain the data.
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March 26th, 2011
I’ve just got back from BarCamp Barsnley which whilst being a great day with some great speakers and excellently organised (more on that later) felt a little odd. I realised at the opening welcome talk why this was, almost everyone there was a first time BarCamper and almost none of the usual suspects were around (you know, the hardcore that attend almost every UK BarCamp and are often involved with organising them). It was also the smallest BarCamp I’ve attended (I suspect it peaked at around 50 people) That said, this didn’t detract from the event, in fact it probably helped make it better, for once I didn’t miss too many sessions I really wanted to see and I actually got a real chance to talk to people.
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November 15th, 2010
Whilst I’m fairly new to geek events, this wasn’t my first BarCamp (having been to BarCamp Blackpool in the summer) but I still didn’t know quite what to expect. BarCamps are “unconferences”, where geeks get together at give short talks (normally 20-30mins or so) on any subject they are knowledgable on, from computer security to cross stitch, social networking to sushi. Nothing is pre-scheduled before the weekend, it’s all done at the venue by posting a description of your talk on a grid of times and rooms
(much more after the jump)
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November 7th, 2010
Well, I’m back from LeedsHack and I’m a special kind of tired/drained that actually feels like jetlag and focusing on simple things is tricky. But what a brilliant weekend.
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November 5th, 2010
After years of people being dismayed that despite watching a lot of movies, I’ve missed out on LOT of the classic movies (Casablanca to V for Vendetta, The Wizard of Oz to Bridge on the River Kwai) a few months ago I started working my way through the Empire Top 500 films list. I chose the Empire list as a lot of the other “best film ever” lists seem to be very heavily stacked towards pre 1950 films (which have never been my thing).
So, what have I been watching ? Here are some on line reviews. Not all are in the top 500, but they are all things I’ve watched recently
- The Godfather parts 1 & 2. Described on many lists as the best films ever and whilst I enjoyed them a lot and don’t doubt they were probably truly excellent in their day and undoubted landmark films. I found them over long and badly paced by modern standard. Don’t get me wrong, they are both very very good films, but not the flawless masterpieces many describe them as.
- Casabanca. I loved this. Compelling yet simple story, excellent acting.
- Singing in the rain. Inoffensive and pleasant, but nothing special. I found the behind the scenes stuff I read about it’s making on the internet afterwards far more compelling.
- This is England. Not sure if this is on the Empire 500 list, but I feel it should be. A gritty but very believable story made even more interesting as I’d have been around the same age as the main character and whilst I didn’t live in such a hard hit part of the country, I certainly remember the feeling of desperation around the country at that point. My only question is where was it, the coast was obviously Grimbsy, Woody’s accent was an odd mix of Bolton and Wigan, Shaun’s mum was a mix of Blackburn and Salford, Milk was obviously West Midlands yet they were catching a Yorskshire Rider bus. But other than that, it was excellent
- V For Vendetta. Given my love of both comic book conversions (and before you say anything, Tank Girl was excellent, anyone that disagrees is obviously wrong) I can’t believe I’d never got around to seeing this. Was probably even better than I expected.
- 3:10 to Yuma. Probably not on the list, but I love a good western and this IS a good western and as popular as bashing Russell Crowe is, he’s actually very good in it.
- Harry Brown. People call it the English Gran Tourino, but frankly it’s not that clever. It’s pretty good and Michael Caine is excellent, but it’s more a modern day Deathwish.
- X-Men Origins – Wolverine. Rightfully not on the list. Pap, not worthy of the X-Men name (even some brief Gambit action didn’t lift it).
- Sherlock Homes. Better than expected. Didn’t feel like a Guy Ritchie film, but suffered by being watched the week after the excellent TV mini series ended.
- Invictus. Excellent story. Made me regret not going out to the World Cup as planned.
- Alice In Wonderland. Meh, 5/10, must try harder.
- Mesrine. Brilliant Two Part French (subtitled) gangster movie based on a true story. Compelling watch. I encourage any fan of violent gangster films to rent this.
- Brazil. Why did I not watch this years ago. Classic Gilliam. Loved it.
You can track how my project to watch all 500 films at
http://www.framerater.co.uk/list/u1348/l31
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November 5th, 2010
Just over 12 months ago, after 13 years working for the same software development house, working my way up from IT Support Peon to IT Manager, I watched the company go into voluntary liquidation and I made a big decision. I was going to go back to my original career plan devised as a teenager, I was going to get back into being a developer. Thankfully, I’d done bit of programming during the intervening years (as the company shrank I went from managing our web team to being the entire web team) but I knew I was very very rusty. I also knew things had moved on, JQuery made much of my Javascript knowledge irrelevant, php had gone all OO, being able to do 6502 and ARM assembler in my head counted for little and 6 years of ASP Classic (VB) counts for little in the world of Ruby, Scala, python and other languages I’d not touched.
So, I’ve spent 12 months re-learning, working on bigger and bigger php projects, learning how to think Object Orientated (the last proper OO stuff I’d done was LPMud ! Which looking back was years ahead of it’s time) but whilst I knew I was improving rapidly, the people I was meeting at whole range of local geek events I previously didn’t know existed (GeekUp, WYLUG, NorthernBloggers, WordCamp, BarCamp etc), made me realise that I’m still a long long way behind the brightest and best.
However, this weekend sees for me what is a monumental step for me, I’m attending my first ever hack day weekend – Leedshack. A 2 day event where I’ll be judged by my peers on my coding abilities and whilst I’m quite excited about it, I’m also very very nervous. For those unfamiliar with hack days, they are simply an event that brings together developers of all types and challenges them to make cool stuff. There is an optional competition element with some impressive prizes , especially considering the event is free, in fact there was mention of free beer, pizza and chocolate too! It’s obviously all funded by sponsorship, but it’s an impressive that they’ve got so many companies to throw money into the pot.
I’m part of a two man team with fellow mono spod Toby and we think we have a suitably cool idea, although I’ve realised I do all my development on a desktop PC and I’m not sure if either of my laptops will run Eclipse, which could make things interesting. The “official” plan is to code throughout the night and catch a few hours kip on a beanbag, but I’m going to take advantage of the first/last buses so I can sleep in my own bed, get a shower and change of clothes (so Sunday morning I can walk in smelling great, like the Old Spice Guy, although in reality I’m more like Grover).
My main concern is whether I’m up to this levelling of coding. The few people I know at this event, mostly know me as a sales guy not a coder like them. I know I can “get things done” code wise, but don’t have the depth of experience of most of them. I guess by Sunday evening, we’ll know one way or the other. Either way, if it improves my development skills and or gets me interacting with more developers, it’ll have all be worth it.
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