Note: one reason why pcs laptops are better than macs should be noted as their power supplies rarely melt them selves due to a design fault in the power supply.

Also yesterday my BT Anywhere HT 620 arrived, V cool, but the best bit whilst looking thought the docs that came with it is a nice little piece of paper saying “You know that 10Mb data limit, well actually its unlimited” So i have a Voice and data Mobile phone which can use sip, for £4 a month with unlimited data and a free £200 HTC phone thingy got to be bargain of the century.

Also in other news I brought my new son Ben home from the hostpital, both Ben and Sarah are sparko currently.

Download can be found here on the project page.

I have updated the translation bar thingy, which can now be found in the header at the top of every page. I have stripped it bare so it should still be obvious what it does yet its far less obtrusive now

I’m currently torn with the widgets system, while its very handy, the fact you can only assign a widget to once is limiting. Hopefully wordpress will implement a system like the one in K2 which is much more flexible. The odds on me implementing one like K2 is slim to none at the moment. What I may do is create a config.php so that you can edit what appears where in block from inside wordpress, but lacking the nice UI (which is completely beyond me at this stage).

Have started a page here JLBP2 wordpress theme to monitor progress of features etc.

• If you feel the wait is too long then John Lewis keep hundreds in stock normally (all colours) so can get you one to you in about 5 working days.  They even managed to get the percieved to be rare foot muffs in less than 2 days.

or

• If you feel the 8 weeks wait just isn’t long enough JKUK / babies247.com will be quite happy to take your money and then not deliver any goods.  This is just one of thier many great services they offer. Another would be rude and miserable customer services.   So if your sick of getting goods you paid for and just had enough of happy & helpful staff, JKUK / babies247.com is for you.

Currently getting irratated by Microsoft’s stupid browsers. Role on IE8 which is standards compliant. Will try and get some of the IE problems sorted, (may be, probably not).

Update:

Have been trying to fix a problem with my widgets sidebars, the theme has some on the front page and the standard side bar as well. Turns out to be a bug in 2.5.1 of wordpress, who’d a guessed it wasnt my shoddy coding?.

Anyway was about the write a to-do list to finish this theme and figured i may as well append to this post

• Fix widgets (once the bug has gone from wordpress)
• Style all the standard out of the box widgets
• Find a way to remove the twitter-digest category from the recent posts (Anyone ?)
• Translate bar, turn into plugin and put config options in the DB
  • currently the to & from languages are hard coded.
• Create separate page templates (i.e. with / without comments etc)
• …….

Added pages views to the meta, sorted out (a bit the comments template). Am yet to try and have a look in IE. Fingers crossed.

Note: And wouldn’t of even started that if wasn’t for Xbox Live dieing over Christmas due to the amount of traffic Halo3 and COD4 created.

Any way, read it (if you like) its great!

Quote from website:
babies247 is the online division of JKUK and shares its core principles of outstanding range choice, impeccable service and advice and – most importantly – will never be beaten on price.

From the start we we’re informed that the pram would take 10 weeks to be delivered to the shop. This I knew was standard practice with this particular item as every other site selling them said the same (even the people on Ebay). So the 10 weeks come and go, we pop into their store so wifey can purchase some random stuff a magazine has explained how no new mother can be without, I ask the sales assistant how our order is progressing, she passes me over to a senior member of staff as she wasn’t trained on the their ordering system (fair enough). The senior member of staff opens up their ordering system (oh its an excel spreadsheet), and explains the pram hasn’t been delivered yet and as such the other items that we had ordered which have been coming in haven’t been assigned to our order (I had asked that when the car seat arrives, they ring me so i can pick it up, but oh well small over sight). They assure me they will chase the order and ring me during the week to tell me whats going on. Week passes nothing.

• I ring again to chase on a Tuesday morning get a lady on the phone, who couldn’t help me directly as she wasn’t aware how the spreadsheet worked, so she said she’d put a note on the managers desk to ring me when shes free (11:43am).
  
• I get to my lunch (13:30pm) nothing so I ring back again cant get to right person but they will pass the message on.
• (16:00) I ring again yet again cant get hold of the woman with the required MS Excel skill to read the column, delivered YES/NO
• 17:30 JKUK Excel division rings me back and explains that they are having trouble with the orders and she is seeking an alternative source which she will confirm by phone on Thursday
• Thursday goes past
  
• Friday Trundles by and nothing
  • On the way home from work Sarah drops into JKUK aka Babies247.com
    
  • The master of all things spreadsheet related explains that because they are having trouble getting hold of stock they are currently only dealing with customers who make a fuss.
    • This is all part of their “Impeccable Service”
  • She assures my wife that they will ring me on Tuesday to confirm that we will have the Car seat this weekend
    • It’s worth noting the Baby seat isn’t a hard item to get hold of and I could of had one next day delivered through out this entire process
    • Another note worthy point is Sarah my wife is close to popping and with a car seat you cant take your child home

Today is Tuesday and I sit waiting for the Excel woman to ring, classic case of shockingly poor service. My current thinking is just cancel their order and get it from somewhere else, had a great chat with a woman from thebaby.co.uk and she was really helpful.

Another Website quote:
By shopping at babies247 you have nothing to worry about except making and enjoying your family memories.

I totally agree with the above quote nothing more irritating than the people who promised repeatedly to ring you back actually ring you back and ruining some decent memories you might be trying to create.

Would this sort of service make you think “NEVER SHOP AT JKUK or BABIES247.com” would you think your JKUK Complaint would be well received and briskly and efficiently acted upon (with heathly use of advanced excel macros and formulas no doubt)

These are some question I have raised and clearly have no answer for (for legal reasons). However other people do have answers, for example:

bat400 has said “babies247.com - promised much but delivered little” read more

ajswuk has said “babies274 dissapointing” read more

mgdanis said “A pathetic experience of digital shopping. I eventually canceled my order after three weeks waiting for it. Web site has been showing my order as pending with no more information. Numerous phone calls to the web site numbers remained unanswered and the staff in stores was not able to help. Beautiful web site but I am afraid there is nothing behind.”

A review by hatcher56134 on babies247.com
Advantages: very nice website
Disadvantages: They take your money, but don’t exchange it for goods, or refund you !
read the rest here

Hatcher56134 clearly pointing out its not all bad whilst your opinion may be “DO NOT TOUCH THIS COMPANY WITH A BARGE POLE!” its not all bad their web site is quite pretty. These sorts of thing should be taken into consideration when jumping to conclusions regard for example proclaiming that may be, JKUK are the sort of company you’d recomend your enemys to get their supplies from.

I will update later on when they phone back with all their Excel goodness!.

A couple of days ago, I took delivery of my PS3 a wonderful piece of kit that does 99.9% of the things my xbox 360 does. The PS3 purchase was mainly so I have the ability to play Blue Ray discs and also to be able to play GT5. I had no intension of playing COD4 on it, this was mainly because i have spent the passed month or so desperately trying to get my Gold AK47, and BTW was only 50 headshots with the MP44 off getting it. The saturday morning I sat in waiting for the PS3 to be delivered. I thought i’ll knock a few more of the those head shots on the erm,,,, head. The following happened.

So after my RROD I imediately paniced, and tried the towel trick, which worked, however be warned my xbox now crashes fairly regularly while in COD4. So i had to bite the bullet and pay for another copy of COD4 on the PS3.

The differences

• The aim and fire buttons on the PS3 are on R1 & L1 bit of a shock from the Xbox where there on the lower triggers. But this is no great shakes and should only take a few seconds to adjust too.
• Connecting to the games online is ridiculously quicker than on the xbox. UPDATE: This appears be because im not being put with other english speaking players, just any bunch of people who are ready.
• The PS3 visibly drops frames when the action gets heavy, never seen this happen on the Xbox
• You cant mute players in the Lobby, 360 excels in the ability to shut kids up, and the racists too.
• Net Code: Can visibly see people lagging and whizzing about to catch up with where the game thinks they should be. The 360 handles this much better
• You cant add people you meet to your buddy list until you quit the game, again the 360 excels in the xbox live integration.
• You can only invite people to your party who are in your buddy list AND!!!! happen to be playing COD4 at the same time as you!!, same again
• Spawn point: This is an odd one there appear to be subtly different spawns to the 360 version in the PS3
• I maybe imagining this but with the M4A you can sprint a bit further than the 360.
• Because the PS3 isn’t bundled with a headset small percentage of people use voice, where as its about 90% on the 360 (Whether you think this a good or bad point could go either way)

Note: These are all Multiplayer differences there may be some in the single player, but who plays single player these days?

The big problem with the PS3

Now the the biggest problem with the PS3 and some of this applied to the PS3 in general too is the networking support. When Sony announced there would be no charge for the PS Network offering, the equivalent of Xbox Live most people naturally assumed that Microsoft would be forced to follow suit drop the £30 a year charge. The fact they havnt speaks wonders. They didnt need too. The play station network hasnt really advanced much from its initial incarnation on the PS2. All the mutliplayer features in game are clearly designed by the game developer and not using standard libraries made availble rom thier dev kit. Where the xbox shines here is how they have forced (probably kicking and screaming) the developers to make all the xbox live interaction very similar, which makes for a great end user experience.

Overall

While there are some niggly things going against the PS3 version, its still the best title about at the moment by miles. I find it interesting that COD4 appears to run a bit slower on the PS3 rather than the 360 (but then you could argue my 360 got so hot doing so it died). So if you have a Next Gen Console (should really be “This Gen Console” now) you should own COD4, if you have a WII carry on flailing your arms about at your tele.

Its still very much work in progress but I have posted whats there here

How To Be A Lazy Administrator