shibbyonline

What a busy few months

Wow looking back at my site the last article I wrote was nearly 4 months ago.
Damn the time flies when your on the cross roads of life and life changing decisions mean you have to take a break and access where your going.

So if you know me or have followed this blog you will no doubt know that I work as a sales development manager for Oscar Products; a small local packaging wholesaler.
Unfortunately thanks to this sudden movement in the “save the environment and don’t use a carrier bag” inspired by the Daily Mail and green movements.
Now I’m not going to start the whole debate of should you do this or that with your packaging, but what I will say is that this sort of information damages.
The damage this time around was the downturn in business for Oscar Products; so much so that there had to be some serious cost reductions to keep the company afloat. One of those costs was me.
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Nice one IE

Over the last few days I having been bringing back my old Vaio laptop from the dead.
I purchased the laptop many moons ago, before my adventure into the world of Apple. But once I had found utopia with OSX the little Sony got put away some where and forgotten about.
Meanwhile Microsoft have seen sense and 180′d on their views and IE8 will be the first fully functional standards aware MS web browser. The beta landed at the beginning of March and I’ve been keen to try it out. So what better chance to format, install and rebuild the once forgotten machine.

So off I went, install XP, service pack, updates, more updates. Now onto web browsers, update to IE7, then find the IE8 beta page. Right install. Whilst I was watching the bar as it checks for web updates I thought to myself will this install over IE7? Or will I have to versions of IE I can play with?
It was the first, installed over version 7, so all I have is IE8 beta. Not a problem as also installed on there is Firefox, Opera and Flock (got me some browser love going on).

Thinking nothing about it went about my routine. Ahh rumours of Service Pack 3 for XP are running through the vines, lets do an update and see what is about. As most people know, windows updates are just web pages with activeX magic that update your system, but they need to be run from Internet Explorer. But here is the kicker, not from IE8!
On firing up the update screen I was greeted with an error screen to say my browser was not supported and that I should be using IE5.5 or higher. Clever that I always though that 8 was higher than 5.
Panic set in as I thought I have now upgraded the only web browser that will work with Windows Update to a browser that it not know by Windows Update!
But to my saving IE8 has a clever little feature ‘Emulate IE7‘ this not only makes pages look like they would in IE7 but also convinces Windows Update that you can update your installation.

To Twit or Twitter

I have slowly been growing more and more addicted to Twitter. At first I was not convinced, I signed up in the early stages and had a few ‘twitterings’ but I just could not see the benifit of the service.

For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that let’s you share what you’re doing right now on the web via various formats; web, IM, phone and SMS.
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Did you reboot?

Today is the Autumn reboot. Sites from around the world will release there new look, hopefully completely standard compliant, with a view to gain interest and a better view of their sites.

I’m gutted that this time around I have just not had the time to take part. I had every intention to have another go at the reboot but due to work load and changes in job I’ve been totally snowed under; well I’m still sporting the Pink for October theme.
The whole reboot scheme has actually changed since the Spring version and to be honest it does not appear to have that same level of input and respect of previous incarnations; to demonstrate long standing reboot successor Matt Brett is not on the list, in fact none of the big names in standards and designs appear to be there. That said congratulations to every one that took part.