Housing market improving?

People keep asking how the move is going. The fact that I’m still here should give them a clue really 🙂 Having said that I think the market is improving as we have had a couple of visitors around to look and yesterday my parents put an offer into a house (not mine unfortunately) that was accepted so they are now looking forward to moving yet again. Hopefully this will be the last time they move though (and the last time I’ll be asked to move loads and loads of large potted plants)

WordPress banner image maker

I’ll try not to turn this blog into a WordPress blog (especially as it is on MT) but I will be blogging some of the tools, hints and pages related to WordPress in the near future whilst I play with it.
A useful tool for creating a banner to go with the default kubrick scheme, is Red Alt – Kubrickr which takes an image from flickr and resizes and “corners” the picture ready to replace the default blue square.
Its a basic tool, but with a good choice of photos and colours the final result is pretty good.

Flickr account

I finally signed up with flickr and have uploaded a couple of old photos to the site to play with.Flickr: Photos from absoblogginlutely is the home page. It looks like a good tool to share photos online and for people to find out that you’ve posted new pictures online. The tagging is really handy too as it doesn’t tie you down to directory names when assigning categories. What would be really cool would be integration with a tool like picasa2 so you wouldn’t have to re-tag everything.

New hosting company

After posting about qiq earlier and the recent hassles I’ve had with hasweb I decided to get a new hosting company and the offer from qiq seemed very good. I’ve also had some correspondence with the owner and this allayed some of my worries. I signed up on Thursday and received the password information within the 5 minutes they promised. I wasn’t able to get into the site using ssh until the following morning, but there was some confusion over the password synchronisations between the control panel and the actual server itself. Its now all sorted and I’ve installed a test implementation of wordpress to play with. The one thing that I really like is the ssh implementation as i was able to download, extract and install wordpress from the shell without having to download to my pc.

Dryer fix

The dryer conked out this week and stopped heating the air. I popped the back off the dryer this morning and was pretty shocked about the amount of dust and cat hair in the dryer. I think there was easily enough to make a lifesize cat out of it all. Anyway, after taking the side panel off and still not finding the thermostat I took the back off the dryer and there they (both) were. After shorting out the second thermostat, the dryer started to heat up so I know that is the fault.
When i went to the repair shop in town they couldn’t find any record of the model number on their system. Fortunately I had found the part number on ezee fix’s website and when I quoted that, they were able to look it up. They didn’t have any in stock but will have some in on Tuesday and its cheaper than online (just) as I don’t have to pay postage and the online shop wouldn’t have shipped it by Tuesday (and this way I’m supporting the local shop)