So here we are and on Sunday 11th July 2010 I will be making this epic journey and I still looking for sponsors for this moment of madness. Please take a moment to read a little about this below:

To whom it may concern,
Almost 4 years ago my son, Daniel, was born with a defect in his diaphragm which meant that his vital organs were in his chest crushing his heart and lungs. Thanks to pioneering surgery which was performed in London his chances were increased from 10% chance of survival to almost 50%. While these were still tough odd’s in a few short days he will be celebrating his 4th birthday thanks to the hard work of medical professionals. For the first 2 ½ years of his life he was in hospital spending time on a ventilator which allowed him to grow strong. Now that he is home safe and growing stronger and we wanted to do something to help a charity which helps families of children like Daniel, this is Breathe On UK.
I have decided to do a sponsored bike ride from Ilkeston to Ilkeston via Skegness in 1 day, around 185 miles.

I am asking you today if you can spare some money for a very worthy charity who support families when they need it most and who don’t attract the publicity that some of the larger originations do, any contribution would be greatly appreciated.

Why choose Breathe On UK?

Breathe On UK is a national charity dedicated to supporting the families and carers of young people who are life-dependent on mechanical breathing, or long term ventilation (LTV). Such a situation is recognised as being extremely traumatic and emotionally, physically, and financially demanding: often leading to both nervous breakdown and partnership failure.
Recent research and medical estimates indicate that more than 1,000 children in the UK exist with this condition and that the number is increasing by some 15 per cent annually. To date Breathe On UK has:
* Established a respite agreement in collaboration with the Association of Children's Hospices
* Been responsible for a bespoke oxygen delivery mask in conjunction with Respironics (Philips UK) which is now available off the shelf
* Worked together with Contact A Family - Legislation has now been passed to enable The Blue Badge to be given to families of LTV & Technology dependent young children under the age of two years.
* Provided Family liaison support in the South West Helped to re-create the statistics on families and children using tracheotomies

Many thanks

Rob Franklin
 

At this moment in time I have managed to secure £250 in sponsorship, most notable CompTIA as well as other individuals, and I would love to secure more than this for a very worthy charity. If you can afford to sponsor my pain on this event then I would really appreciate it as it will make the suffering all the more worthwhile You can contact me by emailing rob@freethecityone.co.uk

Thank for all the support

- Rob
 

But the end of Tuesday the handset had become very unresponsive. For example when you pressed the 'Power' button or the 'Home' button to wake it up, it would sometimes take 2-3 seconds for it to actually switch on. Also, when calls were coming in the screen would come on for a good 2 seconds before it would display the callers name or even start to ring. All of this was far too much when you use the phone as much as I do each day so I had to find a way to downgrade again.

After a little searching I found a process that claimed that it would to do the job and it did after I did it wrong a couple of time. This is what worked for me:

• Connect the iPhone to iTunes
• Put the phone into DFU mode
• Download Apple IOS3.1.3 or 3.1.2 (you can find this on a number of sites)
• In iTunes, hold {Option} and click Restore and point to the IOS file downloaded
• Allow it to restore. At the end it will error, this is normal
• Now use RecBoot to exit recovery mode (I had to use a Mac for this to work)
• Wait for your iPhone to boot up normally

A full video showing how to do this can be found here. This is not meant to be a 'step by step' guide on how to do as there are lots out there it is meant to be a brief guide. The information here is provided AS-IS.

Hopefully this will help others out there who are suffering with desparatly slow iPhone 3G handsets after the upgrade.

For those of you who would like to upgrade to the iPhone 4 but do not like the ridiculous handset prices from O2 et al then take a look at Tesco Mobile here as they have one of the best prices I have seen and if you didn't know they use O2's network anyway!!

- Rob

What I have learnt over these last months is that I have spent most of the last few years just “getting on with it” without actually knowing what ‘”it” is that I am trying to achieve. Through the introduction that I had made to a book called “E-Myth Revisited” I have learnt a great deal about small businesses and why they succeed and more importantly why the fail, I would encourage ANY business owner to read this as there is something for everyone in there.

However, what I did learn was that I did not yet have any specific goals in my personal life or my work life, both of which are absolutely critical if you are to succeed. After all if you have no goals what have you to gauge success against? So I set about working out what my goals would be for the next year, while the book encourages ‘life’ goals I felt I needed to take smaller steps.  Once I had finished writing them down the list to be quite honest felt almost overwhelming and I felt a little lost with it.  That feeling has been lurking around for some time but recently I had what some would call an epiphany which has changed my perspective a little.

I have always been a keen cyclist but about a year ago my road bike was side-lined due to mechanical problems which I just didn’t know how to get sorted. But thanks, and that’s a BIG thanks, to my dad he took it and managed to get it sorted out (thanks dad!). So about a month and half ago I started back getting up at 6am and cycling. At first I was doing 7 miles in the morning and soon moved on to 14 miles which was a really great feeling. This weekend I stepped it up to 18 miles which was no big deal but along the way there is a hill, not too steep, but it is about a mile long. So here I am 6:30am going up this long dragging hill in the lowest gear at just 5mph. I looked up the hill to see yet more hill and thought I need to walk, there’s no way I can get all the way up there.  It was an all consuming and overwhelming feeling that I felt I had no way of overcoming. Then it suddenly dawned on me and I thought, “if I walk this will hurt, if I cycle this will hurt and while I cannot manage all that way I CAN get just 1 metre further”.  Now logic may well be screaming “all those 1 metres all add up to the same distance you moron”, my heart is saying “I can do 1 metre more”.

So I continued up this hill completely and totally focused on just 1 meter ahead with the occasional look up the hill for any obstacles ahead until I hit the top, where I relaxed and just pedalled on. The strange thing was all the hills on this route after this one was so much easier by comparison and they really did feel much, much easier.

Without realising it I had broken down this insurmountable goal of climbing up this long drawn out hill to much smaller, manageable steps of 1 metre chunks.  By focusing on a ‘micro-goal’ and making sure that I kept looking ahead to check I was on the right path with no dangers I was able to achieve my goal.  I have now applied this same logic to my business goals and suddenly they don’t seem too insurmountable anymore I just need to take one step at a time.

To some this may be obvious as some people work this way naturally but to others it isn’t always and if this has been of use then please let me know. Or if you have any better ideas on how to make goals more bite sized then let me know as I am always interested in new ways of doing things.

- Rob

When we look closer at one of the entries we see the following:

Quite clearly this is a problem. Now the “D” drive is actually a CD/DVD drive and after checking with the client the drive was empty.  The errors were occurring throughout the day as well as overnight when clearly no-one was using it. So I recommended that he call Dell support as the unit was under warranty and it was most likely going to be a hardware fault probably a controller issue.  I spoke with him again later to check how things went and he told me the guy on the phone, in a strong Indian accent, has got him to run the diagnostics and everything checked out fine.  He was told that the error he was being shown was “normal” and was caused because there was not a CD in the drive!!! I really wish someone would have told me about this…all these years I was under the illusion that this symbol combined with the word “Error” was a problem.  I’m so glad that a “quality” support service was able to clarify this clear mis-conception of mine, cheers Dell

- Rob

This film, while I only half watched it first time round, has left a very lasting memory for myself.  The reason for this is that the concept is so simple, so powerful and more importantly it is completely against what seems to have become normal behaviour in society today.  There are still a massive majority of businesses and individuals that will not do anything unless they know what’s in it for them, they only give to receive.  A couple of weeks ago I had a call at the office from a guy that was looking for a job.  He told me that he had been made redundant from his current job and was looking for work.  He asked if we had any positions, I explained that there was nothing at present but I asked him to send his CV through and I would forward it on to some of the other IT partners that I work with.  I said thank you for doing it and almost off the cuff said “if only other companies were so helpful” then hung up.  The amount of gratitude from this guy was enough, there was no promises made as I didn’t know what others had to offer and in reality there really was much effort (2 minutes) involved in forwarding this to some of our partners.  It was just a very simple act that absolutely any one of the companies he had spoke to previously could have done without any real effort but it was clear that none had.

So do something special today, tomorrow, everyday or whenever the opportunity comes available.  Do something for somebody without asking “what’s in it for me” or expecting something in return.

If you have any thoughts then I’d love to hear them.

- Rob

The first job when we got onsite was to get a full backup of Exchange as the client had not done this for sometime due to technical issues they had faced with the tape drive but had not dealt with previously. While the backup job was running and copying the data to a USB drive I set about configuring the new server for use. Unfortunately Dell had seen fit to pre-install the server with the 32bit version of Server 2008 despite knowing it would be installed with Exchange 2007 so I had to get the server re-installed with the correct version.  Then we had to prepare the directory for the insertion of the new 2008 directory controller as the forest needed to be prepped in order to accept the server. Once the server was finally running as an active directory controller for the 2000 Active directory it was time to get Exchange 2007 server installed on the new server and integrated into the existing Exchange Organisation. Sadly during the backup of the old server another drive in the RAID5 failed and that was the end of the Exchange 2000 server. In most businesses this would have been a complete disaster however due to the way that they have worked for some time, most mail is saved to PST files on the server, this was a real pain and caused a little hassle but it was not a massive disaster. It was a case of removing the legacy mailboxes from the new Exchange 2007, which were non-existent, and replacing them with new Exchange 2007 mailboxes with the same details using the PowerShell.

Now while the failed drive was always a consideration with this process but unfortunately they did not want any action done on the issue. The fact is that regardless of how much planning is put in to a job, no matter how detailed the project checklist is and more important how much effort you put in; sometimes shit happens! The important thing is not what happens but how you cope with the event and ultimately how you recover from it.

The outcome of this is that the client is now looking to put in our latest BDR solution that gives near-seamless fail over in the event of a server failure for up to 5 servers.

The lesson of the day is do NOT neglect your backups, if they fail or if you fail to do them you are screwed. No two ways about it; ask yourself how long could you business survive without its computers or its client information? Does £100 for an external USB drive to backup your data real sound so expensive now? Contact JPT Solutions to discuss backup and business continuity solutions in more details.

- Rob

It was not just the public transport system that failed miserably it was also the hi-tech systems that run the UK.  Mobile networks creaked heavily under the extra load of trying to call friends and colleagues, it’s reported that some of the networks experienced up to 73% more calls that usual and a steep increase in the number of picture messages being sent as snowmen make rare appearances in gardens.

There was also politicians that venture into the fray making bold statements about how sadly unprepared the country was despite having plenty of warning from the Met Office.  Liberal Democrat shadow transport secretary, Norman Baker said it was "an absolute disgrace" the country’s transport networks were unable to cope with bad weather.  He went on to say "The lack of preparedness is astounding and damaging for the economy. I have travelled from Stockholm to the Arctic Circle on a train that arrived five minutes early, yet Britain lapses into chaos at the first hint of snow,".

So why was this country so unprepared?  I don’t have the answer just an opinion; that is that we are just British, no matter what type of “extreme” weather we experience we just panic with hosepipe bans in summer while pipes lay leaking gallons of water per hour.  The economy stops when snow falls because a lot of people see it as a great way to get out of work.  Either way we need to sort ourselves out and get prepared as the country cannot afford too many of these “snow” days..

This was the scene in Nottingham today.  Not too bad considering how bad the weather gets in other countries but as true Brits we were totally ill-equipped to cope with the snow.  Still it was fun and apparently there’s more snow on the way, lets hope so then the media can blame the recession on Snow!!!!

http://tinyurl.com/9cj5el

Just for the record I would LOVE to do this…..