New Blog, New URL, New Home

I alluded to this a few months ago, and I feel finally ready to move this blog. WordPress.com has served me well for the past year but I feel that I now want more control so I’ve bought a domain, and got me some hosting. The blog is set up, I’ve transferred all the content from this site, and imported it to the new blog. So please, update your bookmarks to the following, wonderous address.

http://dombarnes.com

How on earth did I think of that one eh?

I’ll be adding more stuff to it over the coming weeks, a few extra bits and pieces to the sidebars, and hopefully changing that header. But you’ll see them appear as and when they are ready.

I’ve also transferred the feed to Feedburner. I thought that it’d be good to host that somewhere else, and I can get some more info on you wonderous readers.

So hop on over and read the new post. I’ll no longer be posting here, I’m afraid. So to catch all the new stuff, dombarnes.com

Look out fire, just reached the frying pan. You’re next!

That title may not make much sense, and thats cos its a really far off simily (look it up) to my current work situation.

As I said before, I’m currently impending redundancy, and this week, we reached the end of the consultancy period. What does that mean? Well they are now at free liberty to give us our 30 days notice at any point. There has to be some formal dismissal hearing, and then 48 hours, but basically we’ll be going soon.

What does that mean for me? Well of course I’m looking for a new job. I wanna take this as an opportunity to get out of my industry and into IT. So I’m spending my time looking at IT Technician, Help desk jobs, anything that I can get for a good starting job, where I can do hardware and software repairs, and if possible, some travel.

I think I wanna get into network admin. At least that’s what I feel like I wanna do so I’ll follow that path unless my heart says otherwise.

So if you’re interested in hiring an aspiring IT Technician, who is A+ certified and working on his Network+, then please drop me a note and make me an offer.

Otherwise, I’ll keep trawling those online job search sites, and watching the hours tick away at work, as the share price drops, as well as my level of concentration and focus.

Until then, I’ll be working more on the new site, perfecting the theme for launch. Which hopefully won’t be too many more weeks away.

And speaking of that, is there anyway of getting my posts on the old blog to auto-forward to the new blog? Maybe not but worth asking. I’d just like to drive traffic away from the old, and make sure I’m still getting visitors to the new one for the same searches. Leave me a note in the comments.

work, redundancy, new job, it technician

IWillBuyMyKidAOnesie

I may have mentioned iBoughtAMac.com - Its a website run by Brent. Well he had a daughter recently, Cadie Spore (lovely name) and it looks like she’s going to be a geek baby. Why is this important? Well because you can get some fantastic onesie’s from his shop at CafePress. If I had a kid, or was going to, I would be buying about 10 of these. They are great. I love the TCP/IP, Beta, and I’m Cute.So if you’re having a kid, like Merlin Mann, and Alex Lindsay did recently, then head on over and buy a few of these. I know I will be when that time comes. iBoughtAMac at CafePress 

New Home soon

I had planned to do this for a while, and the other day I went for it and bought myself a domain.

I haven’t had my own site since I 199-something and I built a very web 0.5 site and hosted it on Freeserve’s space. Now I have my own dot-com domain and hosting space thanks to GoDaddy. I’m in the process of building the site (still stuck on picking a base wordpress theme) but once thats finished and uploaded, I’ll be loading all the content onto it.

I’ll be moving all this stuff over there and will cease to update this blog. There is no point running two duplicates after all.

For now, as I said I need to find a good wordpress theme to start with. If you want to help I’d welcome the assistance.
I’m looking for a two column theme, two tone, black background with a light back to the blog content with rounded border edges, a section for a header image, a date button/box on blog post titles, a button style background on those titles, and widget ready.

Not too much is it? I also need a header logo. I am not much of a designer really, and don’t have the software for it (should’ve bought the MacHeist bundle – support isn’t an issue as I never ask for it) but since this is often a tech-themed blog something like that, with my name in it or the domain name.
I like Brent’s blog over at iBoughtAMac.com and DaringFireball.net. I like the really simple designs, nothing to busy.

So if you fancy helping out with design, or can point me towards some good themes, then it would be grately apprecaited, of course with adequate publicity. drop me an email. My address is on the right in the About section.

Other than that, look out for the new website launch hopefully not too far away.

You’ve been memed!

I’ve been hit! Thanks Grace for the tag. Guess I’ll actually follow through on this one, not like the last

OK. Here goes (is that one word or two?)
RULEZ!
A. Each person lists 8 facts/habits about themselves.
B. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed.
C. At the end of the post, the person then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Right.
1. I hate my job. Is that a good fact? What? Its not? Ok, I play bass. No good either? You’ve read the blog before? Ok, how about….until a few years ago I’d never had pasta (aside from out of a tin in sauce) or chicken. Thats right. My diet seemed to consist of frozen meals heated to perfection, and sometimes burnt. How closed my life was.
2. I tell bad jokes. Well not jokes so much as puns. I get it from my dad. We make the same jokes. How sad we are together (is that the first mention of my family? Not sure…)

I hear they’re dying

There’s a lot of noise at the moment about Myspace and Facebook, and a few other services. They seem to be slowly declining.

Now I’m not the first to bitch about myspace. its a waste of mytime to be honest. Its a horrible web 0.1 website, which gets bombarded with horrible embedded music you can’t stop, horrible animated gif wallpapers (dancing hampster anyone?), let alone all the whiny kids who just go on about nothing all the time.

Now i haven’t tried facebook either, and doubt I will, but it seems similar. From what I gather you can tag people in photos, find old school friends (why? if I wanted to be friends with them still wouldn’t i be? forget them and move on), and generally waste time.

Now there are lots of other services you can use to get a even better effect. Flickr for photos, geotagging, Worpress or blogger for blogging, tumblr for throwing in random things online, twitter to leave “away messages” or just tell everyone what you’re doing at every minute of the day. Some of these are good, all of them seem to go their job better than deadspace ever could.

Recently, I’ve been using Virb. Its a well designed, much more functional, and easier to deal with social website. Its also a lot more band and music driven, so you’ll find a fair few indie and independent bands on there, like Bloc Party, Modest Mouse, etc. If you’re a band, you can post album info, band info, photos, shows, events, make announcements, upload songs for playing, or downloading, post videos, blog posts. Tons. Even if you’re not a band, you can do a lot of this stuff. It seems like a great place for bands to get their music to people. Its also ideal for letting people know about shows that are happening,  along with tons of other info. So good, I’ve signed the Douglas Furs up here. Its a bit sparse now but it will grow.

So have a look, add me or the band if you want, send me a message, check out the music in my playlist, and browse.

The band has split!

I’m afraid its true. The Douglas Furs have split up. You can now find a dedicated blog to just the Douglas Furs at http://douglasfurs.wordpress.com

So if you don’t care about my crap posts, pop over to there and have a read.

New blog

So I decided to move the Douglas Furs portion to another blog page to keep it separate from my personal blogging stuff.

I’ll try to post band stuff on both but then keep anything non-band on this blog. Be sure to check it out at

http://douglasfurs.wordpress.com

and try out those demo songs!