Not new year’s resolutions because they are so last year, and I think they are tainted with a stigma which means that no-one really expects you to follow through with them. But I do have targets. I’m thinking that if I list them here where they can be viewed forever, and if I publish an update every month as to my progress, I might actually think about trying to achieve them. Probably rubbish, but it’s worth a punt. Here goes:

• Finish repair and decoration of the house
• Move house
• Achieve CCIP (Cisco Certified Internetworks Expert) certification
• Become an accomplished CCNA (CC Network Associate) instructor
• Stay fit
• Stop biting my nails
• Run two 5k races and another 10k race (hopefully with my pal Chris)
• See 6 London shows (at least one every couple of months)

I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t meet them or things change, so let’s see how I get on with it. I might also update the list too, as I’m sure there are more things I want to do than that.

Having played golf, tennis and a football match yesterday, as well as attending Adem’s housewarming party last night, then playing another football match this morning, I feel a little tired.

I had a good day yesterday.  It’s not often Chris is up for playing golf, or Ben is available to come out to play so I took advantage of both.  We played Stonelees executive course in the morning, (where I did mostly badly) and then headed off to the tennis courts right next to Ben’s house in Westgate (technically Margate, but Ben likes to thinks he doesn’t live in Margate).

A couple of hours tennis later I was off to my football match where although I didn’t start I played most of the game because of an injury to another player, and did pretty well thank you very much.

Adem’s party was quite a late one last night, so after not a huge amount of sleep, being a little hungover, we had another match this morning for Preston, who I’ve re-signed for after around a 6 year absence.  And we won and everything.

All that good fun appears to take its toll though.  My legs are now all stiff and achy, and I find myself contemplating an ice bath, as per this lady’s recommendations.  Harking back to a previous post, perhaps I am just a little too old for all this youthful larking about!

I’ve been using FastMail for the last few years to look after my personal email.  I have several domains where I receive email and they all go to one fastmail account.  It’s always had everything I need, with a nice snappy web interface and IMAP access which I can use to collect mail on my iPhone.

Recently however, I’ve become more and more invested in Google, using Google Calendar and Google Contacts to keep track of my diary and maintain my address book.  This works great for me, as I can synchronise these things with my iPhone via push notification (meaning that if I update a contact on my phone the changes are synced to the Google “cloud”), and if I really want, to my desktop PC, albeit in a rather non-elegant way.

For example, these things recently meant that when I had to recently reset my iPhone (due to some problems I was having at the time which turned out to be hardware and didn’t actually need a reset), to get my calendar, contacts and emails all working on the phone again all I had to do was configure the accounts on the phone and magic, contacts and calendar items appear and mail starts being delivered again.  No backup/restore nonsense.

I’m searching for an “all under one roof” solution I suppose.  My buddy Chris used to use FastMail (that’s how come I do now, he recommended it) but now uses Google Apps, and is a real Google convert (he even has the crappy G1 Google phone, the fool).

The key features I suppose I need are mail, contacts, and calendar.  Mail and contacts I really want in one place because when I write a mail, I want to be able to select the contacts from within the app I’m working from.  What brought this home to me as being inconvenient recently was when I sent out an invite for a party.  Because my contacts are in Google, I selected them in my Google Mail account and copied/pasted them into FastMail so I could send the mail.  That is ever so slightly madness – I just shouldn’t have to do that.

So, mail.  FastMail does a great job with its IMAP implementation and the web interface is pretty neat.  Because it’s IMAP it lives with folders, whereas Google uses labels – I’m coming around to the idea of labels, it seems to make sense.  Also, if search works properly, I shouldn’t really need to worry about “filing” emails.  I think Google has search fairly well covered.

FastMail has a neat feature which I like, and to be honest, if Google had this I might not even be considering which way to go.  I get spam.  Everybody gets spam.  To help me track where my spam is generated from (so I can call the company up and call them names, ultimately to no end of course), I assign a unique email address to every company I deal with.  E.g. – all my WordPress mail goes to wordpress@mydomain.com, my Amazon emails all go to amazon@mydomain.com.  This works really well, as now when I get any junk mail I look to which address it’s been sent, and then I can decide how trustworthy a company is based on that and therefore whether I’m likely to deal with them again in the future.  If I need to deal with that company, I’ll email from that same address so as not to confuse matters.  This is the deal breaker – Google doesn’t let me do that – easily.

In Google Mail you can sort of do this, but you have to define the email address first (no need in FastMail) and then prove that you own it via a verification process involving them sending an email to that address, and you confirming via a link.  Why, Google, do I need to prove to you that I own amazon@mydomain.com when we went through a verification process for mydomain.com when I signed up for Google Apps, proving I own the whole damn domain?

Email filtering, either via filing into folders or applying labels is pretty much tit for tat.  Both do it, so this is not a problem in either system.

Contacts then.  FastMail sucks at contacts.  It uses, as most email implementations seem to, a proprietary contacts system that you can’t sync with anything, easily export to/import from anywhere.  This is annoying, and email providers the world over take note – you really suck at this.  Why can’t we all use some joined up working to allow us to easily sync contacts (and calendars) across all platforms without me doing anything smart.  Don’t Make Me Think.

Google, also sucks at contacts (you didn’t see that coming did you?).  It is totally lacking in detail.  I need more fields Google.  Where they win though, is that you can at least sync with your iPhone (or Android phone, if you must).

Calendars, well FastMail doesn’t do calendaring so this is another Google win.

Oh yeah, I should mention that FastMail costs me money, and Google Apps is free.  This doesn’t bother me so much, as it’s not expensive, but it is a consideration.

Reading this back, I’m leaning towards Google, if it wasn’t just for that darn outgoing “from” address thing.  What I’ve also just noticed to my annoyance is that it I export my contacts from my Google Mail account and try to import them into my Google Apps account, the pictures are lost.  This is stupid Google, fix it – it’s from Google to Google dammit!

Ideally someone at Google will read this, think “oh, how could we have been so stupid, this Tom chap is so correct” fix things, make me president of Google and we’ll all live happily ever after.  You never know.  Ok, you do.

Myself and Mrs Tom are due to get married later this year, making things official after seven years together.  An exact date however is not known, which is possibly a little unusual at this stage – we are hoping to get married in October.

Our main reason for this late arrangement is cost.  We will be able to make things a heck of a lot cheaper for ourselves if we leave the booking late, and as we are paying for everything ourselves (no donating parents here I’m afraid) this is pretty much a must.  We’ll be heavily dipping into an ISA that Mrs Tom has been keeping for around ten years, as well as a maturity fund which I have which pays out next year (essentially I’ll be borrowing money from Mrs Tom’s savings and giving her back what I get when my fund pays out).

It’s not as difficult as you might imagine.  We will have things like suits, dresses, invitations, flowers, favours, cake etc all taken care of, so when we do finally know the date it should hopefully just be a case of popping the invites in the post and taking care of some final arrangements.

Now we’re getting down to booking a venue, we’ve found a couple that we like and now we just have to negotiate with them to make it affordable for us.  This may or may not be successful, but we have to give it a go, anything we can save will help us hugely.  Hopefully we’re not too far away now.  I’d post links to the possible venues, but I’m scared my one reader might book it before we have a chance!  Perhaps I’ll report back when it’s all sorted!

Hopefully my nominated best men (plus helper) will sort me out a nice stag do to preface the big day.  I’ve been holding my breath, but I’m starting to turn blue!

After my two week training course it has been nice to get back to normality this weekend and do things at a slower pace, catching up with household chores, arranging vet visits for pets, reading etc.  Having done a few things around the house I’m now gearing up for a run, which will be my first for some time having been off the radar for a little while.

In September my friend Chris and I ran the Cancer Research 10k in Finsbury Park in London.  I quite enjoy running but do need a kick to get myself up and out of the house.  This year I set myself a goal of competing in three more races – one more 10k and two 5k races.  Eventually I would like to be able to run in half marathons and maybe even a full marathon.

I’m hoping that there will be some local races starting soon that I can join in.  I’m not necessarily interested in the competitive element, but rather having a target to work towards and therefore a reason to get myself out and on the road.  If anyone who knows of a good place to find races in the Ramsgate area I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Right now I need to get into my running gear and get on with it!  Then back to the chores….

The National Rail website for UK travel information is awful, truly awful.  It’s badly designed to start with, and functionality is worse.  Trying to find the times of trains on their website is a cumbersome business because of the way they have put this thing together.

It’s refreshing then to see other people putting together sites and applications which feed on the information available via nationalrail.co.uk but do a much better job on presentation, speed and ease of use.  I have an iPhone, and have a couple of applications I use to look up train times, Trains and MyRail which has become my favourite.  If you follow either of those links you’ll find that neither application is available any longer.

National Rail is incredibly protective about their data.  I’m not sure why, it’s already in the public domain via their website.  If they did a good enough job of providing the information in the first place then people wouldn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel, but their service sucks and so people do.

Trains and MyRail are not the first or last to have been pulled due to National Rail asking for the service to be removed.  My buddy Chris Roos setup a National Rail Twitter Service which he has now had to take down due to a request from National Rail, and other services will come and go.

Somehow, Matthew Somerville has been allowed to persist with traintimes.org.uk, a slimmed version of the main National Rail website.  The horrid usability has been replicated but Matthew’s site does seem more responsive and has ‘bookmarkable URLs‘ which the main site does not.  How Matthew has been allowed to continue where others have not is a bit of a mystery though.  I should clear up now that I am not advocating the removal of Matthew’s service but rather a uniform application of policy and allowing everyone to access this publicly available data paid for by their customers.

The National Rail service also suffers from obvious scaling issues in times of high demand such as now when we have very bad weather.  I’m in IT, and I understand that you do not normally scale a website to cope with absurd peaks just in case Stephen Fry mentions your site on Twitter.  However, a service like this which a heck of a lot of people depend on should be able to cope with high demand – the operation of the country depends on it.