Well over the weekend I went to London Film Comic Con. It was a fun event, I much prefer this one over the MCM Expo. But then again I do prefer SCI-FI and Films.

The even was quite packed but not overt packed which was nice. I managed to pickup a limited edition fine art print of the Enterprise NCC 1701. Yup that’s right the ORIGINAL Enterprise, from the ORIGINAL Star Trek series. The print comes with a certificate of authenticity, and only 5000 where made worldwide.

However what makes LFCC so good is the fact they have actors there from all your favorite films. I got Sylvester McCoy’s autograph. He signed a picture of him playing the Doctor in front of the TARDIS. I also got to see Christopher Lloyd, and Walter Koenig. However I could not sadly speak to Christopher Lloyd, he was like rammed!

Overall I can’t wait for next years event and maybe even get some more autographs!

Well Italy is very nice and warm. Had some fresh pasta for lunch on Tuesday, was amazing! So nice and tasty nothing much matches the so called “Italian” Food we get back in the UK!!

As my hotel is based on the cliffs of the area, theres not much to do around the hotel. The closest shop is about 15-20 minuets walk away! First downhill then ofcourse back up hill! Although the views are AMAZING!

I hope to try and explore the city a bit more, but depends on the time I get etc. As believe it or not Im here on business! Finally recovered from the trip here lol! Was tired all yesterday as well. Now I feel way more relaxed and chilled out. Thursday will be my last full day here But I believe work are taking me into the city for dinner!

Work sent me over to Naples, Italy to see the Office and meet the other part of the IT Team.
I had to get up at 4.30am to make it to the airport to get my flight. My flight was at 8.00am from Gatwick on BA. The flight took around 2:30 ours. We got a bit delayed coming into Naples due to an ongoing airshow. Got treated to a fly past by the red arrows

Once landed at the airport we got on a bus to drive like 30 meters before we could go through passport control. Then the dreaded baggage reclaim. I managed to find the Taxi rack, get in a Taxi and got a little tour of the city before being driven to the Office. It appears the roads in Italy are free for all runs. Seatbelts seem optional and drivers constantly use the horn. Road lanes seem to just be obstacles as no one really uses them! Cars are like trashed, everyone drives mad, missing bumpers front and pack, fuel caps, dents, more dents.

The Office for my work is situated in an enclosed courtyard. Which has an old style 1880 lift. Which looks rather awesome! Hopefully will grab  a picture or two of it. The Office on the outside appears old but on the inside its very modern.

For lunch I as treated to a proper Italian pizzeria. The Pizza was amazing! Then followed by Coffee, before then heading back to work.

The Hotel is a short 10 minuet Taxi ride away situated on the hills. Which overlook the whole bay area! The room is rather nice and the restaurant is amazing.

Last weekend I randomly decided to walk up a Mountain with a friend of mine also called Dan. It was a spur of the moment thing, not much planning was involved. We decided to walk up Snowdon, the tallest Mountain in Wales & England. The tallest one for the of the United Kingdom is Ben Nevis. The peak of Snowdon is 1085 meters (3,560 ft).

The plan was simple, camp in Wales and walk the mountain and chill out. So I packed all my camping gear and the tent, and we set off on a long 5 hour car drive to Wales, stopping off for food in Birmingham. We had chosen to use my mate Ben’s Diesel for the trip. Mostly because he was sunning it up in Spain and Diesel is very good for long journeys, saved us a lot in fuel costs! Got to Wales on £30 of Diesel! Our destination was a campsite just off the A498, near a lake. It was within walking distance of the route we where going to take. The campsite was lovely, in the valley with a big lake next to it. The only downside was it got really windy, but at least they had showers!

The path we had chosen to walk was called The Watkin Path. Now this is a very advanced path, and can be quite challenging and hard. We decided to do it, as we did not want to do any of the major tourist paths and we wanted a challenge. The route is a 5 hour overall hike. Notable points on this route are scree at top is an accident black spot. It’s one of the hardest walks there, as you start at only 80 meters above sea level and have to walk the 1000 meters which is a steep walk. Before walking we stopped off in the Cafe next to the starting point of the path and grabbed a nice Welsh breakfast and some tea.

The starting point of the walk was only a slight gradient, was smooth to walk and started on a forest path which eventually opened to fields of green. The path then slowly got steeper, as we approached some waterfalls the path changed to rugged stone and so remained throughout the walk. We we finally reached the top, as usual the stupid Cafe happened to be closed, so nowhere to fill up with water and use the toilets! The wind was blustering like made, with speeds ranging from 40-50mph at the peak. However a lovely plaque at the peak was there and lovely views as well.

At about 20 meters before the peak of Snowdon, I took this panoramic photo. It shows the route we basically walked. The route started out on the right side, and snakes to the left side. A shot of the scree slope from the top.

Overall an enjoyable trip, next stop will have to be Ben Nevis!

I ended up purchasing a vintage light meter called a Weston Master Series 3. These are American made. Weston meters were made by Weston Electrical Instrument, started in the late 1800s by Edward Weston.

The Weston Master 3 were made in 1956 and was the last series to be made before the company went bust in the 1960′s. They got bought out by a British company, who continued to make them until the market for external light meters dried up. As light meters were introduced into cameras around the late 1960′s early 1970′s.
The Master III  is the first of the Masters to have the exposure index scale calibrated in ASA, not Weston, so it could still be used today without having to adjust for it (Weston EI numbers are about 1/3rd stop slower than ASA).

The light meter is in good working condition for its age and comes complete with a case and strap, however sadly it’s not for me. It’s a preset for my friend Zoe, who has a fair few vintage cameras but no light meters. But best of all I even for a Manual for it online. Saved here (Weston Master 3 Manual).

Well it’s finally 2011, and I spent New Years down in Southampton with some friends of mine, Zoe, Jerrie, Emma, George and Mark. Was a really awesome evening. Spent watching films, TV, Drinking and Monopoly. Oh yer!
The journey down by coach was long took about 2 hours but was glad when it was over. Only got the return trip back to Victoria.

Anyway let’s hope 2011 is an awesome year! This is my first post of 2011, and figured might as well bring in the New Year on my blog.

So it seems 2011 is nearly upon us. As its New Years Eve! Let’s bring in 2011 with a bang and celebration. As 2010 has been a cracker of  a year, so let’s hope 2011 is better!
I am travelling to the South of the UK to visit my friends and have some drinks. I believe it’s a posh dress code as well. This should be interesting. Although the trip down there will be long. Getting a train to London Victoria, then a coach from Victoria down to Southampton.

See you all in 2011! Let’s hope everyone has an awesome New Year!

Over the past week or so the UK has basically come to a stand still. In-fact looking at my road you would think it was a war zone. There’s abandoned cars, damaged cars, demolished walls. But sadly it’s no war zone, it’s just snow and ice, and everything seems to stop.

I live on a slight hill and have seen many a car or van come spinning off on the slight S-Bend corner with islands on them. They always land in the same place, the poor guy who’s house is diagonally inline with the corners.
I have lost count how many times that wall has been rebuilt!

It’s just amazing how a country can come to a stand still with just Snow. What’s even more amazing is they know it’s coming but never seem to be quite prepared enough for it. There’s never enough glitters’ putting grit out, never enough clearing roads. Why is it my rubbish can be collected but the glitters’ “Can’t get out to do the roads” The same goes for Rail and Airports. The whole rail network grinds to a halt if there’s leaves on the line, so I can only imagine the scale of panic in their control room when snow came out. “Oh noes there’s snow, and it’s the wrong type of snow, and it’s on the line! Quick let’s cancel all services!” Honestly our rail service is a pure joke. At least get more snow clearing trains and improve the service, would then probably justify the increased rail costs!

When there’s snow on the road, why do drivers always insist of either trying to floor it and wheel spin slush everywhere or just go so slow it forces you to slow down and get stuck! If your going up a hill for the sanity of those behind you, DON’T slow down! Keep the traction going as it will help you get up the hill! Try also removing a bit of air from your tyres to increase surface area, which means more grip. Another thing is when driving on ice and snow, guess what your breaking distance has to increase so don’t tail gate, then crash then hold up more traffic. As that’s just plain selfish!

If your going to abandon your car at least do it safely and not some half assed attempt of just “Putting it over there” Because there’s nothing worse than finding access to your slip road blocked because some twat can’t seem to either drive their car or choose a safe place to park it!
Also if your driving in snow at least make sure you have some form of equipment with you, be it a shovel or some cardboard. As at some point it could be useful…….

When driving your car can you please take a bit of time to remove the build up of snow from the roof of your car, as there’s nothing worse than walking or driving and being hit by snow from a car room that went by. If you have your lights on at least take the time to remove the build up of settled snow on them, as guess what might as well not have your lights on! I honestly think the DVLA need to include some of these things in their tests! As honestly some people have no clue, even if some of it is just common sense.

I hope this snow is going to stop soon, because it’s getting annoying, even if it is the worse we have had in 25 Years.

So the day finally came, the day we had to move the Exchange server. The old exchange server was being transferred off site and into a cloud based system. However things where not going to be simple. The problem we had was, we run Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2003 files are not upgradeable to 2010, and upgrading to Exchange 2007 was out of the question. So we opted for a less complicated option but involving a bit of work. We basically got everyone’s local Outlook pst files and copied them to an external drive so they could be transported to the data center. However issues arose because we use Macs. The Mac version of Office does not save data in pst files! So we had to recreate around 30 or so profiles on virtual Windows installs. Then we also archived emails to bring mailboxes down to size because everyone’s mailboxes where massive, we are talking around 5gb plus!

We began by redirecting the MX records to a special setup holding server for our email while the process began. As we would then have to manually download email and extract the pst files, a process which took around 8 hours to do. We then handed this data to the server techs who took it to the data center for us. However we ran into issues. Office 2004 for Mac does not talk to Exchange Server 2010, so we had to upgrade to 2008, then we found without patches that to wont talk to the Exchange server. So we had to apply the “Web Service Edition” patch. We then began the laborious task of updating the 20-30 Macs around the Office, then re-creating user accounts for the emails. However we ran into major issues, Web mail failed to work because of Security certificate errors, then when they where importing the data the process crashed and wa snot restarted for some time! But once we where certain emails where being correctly transferred and that we could email each other locally we turned off the holding email and had it forwarding to our new server.

So in two days we had managed to archive email accounts, extract the PST files for around 90 email accounts, reset them up, upgrade 20-30 Macs to Office 2008 and test email. So a really hard weekend! But it was not to stop there! Come Monday morning issues arose, the email was DOWN! yes our cloud based email was down! Must have been a little story or something! Overall we where not impressed!
Basically the vast amount of PST files they where importing caused the servers Information Store file to crash! Even though they where running 3 at a time on schedule it still managed to bring down the server! Then to make matters worse our BT phones went down! Even more NOT IMPRESSED at this point!
It took them till midday to get the email working again, and even then it was still not running perfect. Still a few issues here and there! Overall it’s been a rather stressful weekend! The phones are well who knows, when BT can be bothered to fix, heck they even blamed our internal phone switching system etc.