Ever since upgrading to WP3.3. my site has been unusable.  Honestly, I’ve not noticed as I’ve been mainly microblogging on Tumblr, but over the weekend I wanted to update some stuff and NOTHING would work.  I eventually used Google to try and work out what was going on and that was no help either.  Eventually, I looked on WordPress support and, surprise!, there’s a known JSON issue with 3.3.  Queue one HotFix install and we are back in business.

I’ve had a clear out of the themes sitting in my WordPress install as most of them have been sitting in my repository for a while now and are really old or no longer supported or work with WP3.3 – like Hemingway H2.0 by gaarf and the classic & Kubrick WP themes.  A couple of them, Glossy Blue and iTheme, were also from n.design studio and whilst checking to see what they’d come up with as some of them were outstanding I found their desktop wallpapers which include some awesome Japanese artwork.  Well worth a look and the one below is available as iPad and iPhone versions too.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time and I’m considering migrating off of gingerninja.net.  WHY!?!? I hear you all cry.  Well, Twitter started it, not me!

For some time now, I’ve been getting @gingerninja messages on Twitter for a Danish band called…wait for it….Ginger Ninja.  Oooo, look.  They have a SPACE.  I don’t.  By that I mean a space between Ginger and Ninja.  Not a MySpace space.  I have one of those.  It’s over at http://www.myspace.com/gingerninjanet and that’s part of the problem:  GingerNinja is too popular a nickname.

When I first started this blog and grabbed the domain name, I found that GingerNinja was already in fairly common usage.  So where I couldn’t grab “GingerNinja” for something, I would grab “GingerNinjaNet” instead.  Problem is that that has led to much confusion and a lot of muckaroundiness in some places.  Then Game Centre happened.

I jailbroke my iPhone 3G in order to add some functionality I wanted – LockInfo calendar notifications on the home screen and biteSMS allowing me to reply or send texts within apps without quitting – which meant that I delayed upgrading to 4.1 or 4.3 until a JB version was available.  This was a delay of a month or so and by the time I got on there, “GingerNinja” was gone.  On a whim, I chose “GeekDad3″ (which I have as an alternative gmail account and a test blogger blog).  It snowballed from there with the culmination of the purchase of geekdad3.com yesterday.

Maybe it’s a maturity thing as I’m not the same gamer guy I was when I registered the domain back in the ’90s.  Maybe it’s a convergence thing as I have geekdad3 accounts on Apple Game Centre, gmail, blogger, twitter, wordpress.com and now tumblr (which handles mini-blogs status updates which are automagically sent to Facebook and Twitter).  Could be the new me?  Well, just in case, I now own geekdad3.com and I’ve even come up with a logo that I like:

I’m really excited by the iCloud, iOS 5 and OS X Lion announcements from Apple. This synchronisation of my data has always been a goal of mine and is one of the reasons I am so vocal about Dropbox to my friends but I have multiple accounts to handle it all and still sync my contacts via the cable and my Mac because Google’s handling of it is a bit pants and removes some of the fields. Finally I can also stop bitching about it and with iCloud have it just work. I’m a big fan of digital convergence and Apple are way ahead of everyone else. I’m smitten.

On the theme of convergence for blogs and social networks, I’ve started using Tumblr. This not only allows me to have a mini-blog running alongside bigger articles like this one, but my Tumblr posts are now also my Tweets and my Facebook status updates. This allows me to post once centrally and have multiple social networks updated, something I have long desired. I’ve also back tracked and decided to stick with a self hosted WordPress install for now as I couldn’t get along with Blogger. I have migrated my comments to the brilliant Disqus though.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. I checked my blog this morning and realised that my last actual post was in January 2010, so I haven’t written anything for 18 months now. That is an unacceptably long amount of time. I even said to myself 18 months before that that I should start a journal and what happens? I just don’t bloody bother!

*sigh* So here’s what you missed….

Work

The last journal entry I wrote was in September 2009. At that time I was just about to embark on a new phase of my career as a contractor at Commerzbank looking after data compliance and audit globally. This was to be a temporary posting until they looked to make me permanent after 6 months.

As it turned out at didn’t actually happen. Instead I was poached by BNP Paribas for the same global facing contract role but on more money (yay!) although it adds 30 minutes each way to my previous City commute as they are based in the West End (boo!). I’m now on the IPUG Executive as the Chair of the Data Compliance and Audit Special Interest Group (SIG) and have also given addresses to COSSIOM, the French market data consortium, on data compliance & audits. I’ll certainly be at BNPP until at least April 2012 as the project I am mainly working on will last up to 3 years.

All in all my career has found a new lease of life, I’ve managed to carve a niche out for myself in the industry and I’m happier professionally.

Karate

My karate has also taken off in leaps and bounds. I’m over half-way to black belt and qualified as a karate instructor (Sensei) in January after a 3 month course. Shortly after qualifying I also took over as the Branch Instructor of Sandon dojo in Chelmsford. I took over the class with 12 students on the roll, we’ve had a bunch of new students through recruitment drives & word of mouth and now have just over 30 on the roll with 24-28 students attending every week for the past month which is quite impressive. They are a great bunch and it is a pleasure and a privilege to be their sensei.

On a side note, training an average of three times a week and eating salad for lunch, I’ve lost several stone and gone from a 40″ waist and a 44″ chest to a 36″-37″ waist and 42″ chest. I got some t-shirts on Father’s Day and they were Mediums. I’ve only just put the XL ones in the eBay bag and bought some Large ones so maybe I’m still slimming down. I’m certainly physically fitter and feel much healthier than I have for years. My wife says I look hot too as my stomach is flat. Fantastic!

Geekiness

My digital life has totally changed.

I have pretty much completely moved away from using my Windows based PC across to my MacBook Pro (which I upgraded to at the start of the year from my first Mac, a MacBook Black). The only time I boot up the PC personally is when I want to game on there or the rare occasions I need to do something on there which I cannot do on my MBP for whatever reason. Then at Christmas this year my wife gave me a lovely, lovely iPad. This little device goes pretty much everywhere with me and has supplanted both the MBP and the iPhone for the majority of my digital experience. I use the MBP for big or lengthy tasks and the iPhone for mobile quick and dirty stuff; mostly relegating it to it’s core mobile phone and iPod function which is no bad thing. But the middle ground is firmly taken up by the iPad and quite comfortably too. In fact, I’m writing this post on the Blogsy app and can touch type quite well with the on-screen keyboard.

Gaming

My gaming life has also pretty much completely changed. My primary platform is definitely now iOS and even then I now favour the iPad over the iPhone – I’m currently addicted to Tower Madness HD. Leave my sheep alone, you aliens! I still play on my PC and the Wii, but the iPad is the main place. I’ve also tried playing on the PS3 and even bought Batman: Arkham Asylum for £7 to see if I could switch to consoles with a title I enjoyed on PC and figured a 3rd person game rather than an FPS might be easier to get to grips with. Apart from getting headaches dealing with gaming on a big screen, it is going rather well (weirdly I don’t get headaches with the Wii – hmmm). With Steam now releasing more games for Mac maybe I will switch across from PC there too but I doubt it. Certainly for now I want to get Bioshock Infinity on PC rather than any other platform, so watch this space!

Life

As for life in general, all is great: my wife and I are even more in love, which I didn’t think was possible; the kids are happy and all doing stormingly well at their respective schools, one of which I’m Vice-Chair of governors at; I’ve become an Uncle after my brother and his wife had a daughter; and my friends are all sound and hale and living their lives happily with people that they love.

Now. Let’s see if I can keep this blog up to date. Again.

I am truly awful at updating my blog and it’s one of the reasons I am seriously considering moving to Blogspot from my own hosted solution. Yes, I love using WordPress and being endlessly able to tweak things, but there is something to be said for not paying my albeit brilliant web host money every year to provide a service that I don’t really use that much and will use even less when I start using iSale for my eBay auctions. When you consider that I am also paying for MobileMe now which comes with a tonne of webspace the question why bother? raises it’s head.

***TESTING, TESTING***
Hello interweb! I am blogging from my iPhone! Huzzah!

***UPDATE***

I’ve managed to upgrade WordPress to version 2.7.1 so Pete and I can do this from the official WordPress iPhone app. Huzzah again! GN.net will survive as it is until November at the latest.

I received an e-mail from Kev today asking if I had set-up an online pharmacy.

Yes. Had me confused for a moment there too.

Turns out someone has purchased a domain called ginger-ninja.net which is obviously almost identical to my own domain gingerninja.net. Not only that, but this individual is also using the site to sell medical items of a somewhat dubious nature. I’ll give you a taster:

Buy Cheap Viagra, Discount Viagra, Kamagra jelly, Kamagra, Apcalis and many more erectile dysfunction treatment solutions by Ginger Ninja!

Does that really sound like something I would do?

You’d think that after 21 years as my best mate, Kev would have known better than to ask. But, I said to myself, maybe Kev had only my best interests at heart? Afterall, a hacker can still get in and takeover a website if the admin has been rather silly with their security procedures. Maybe Kev was simply ensuring that it wasn’t my site and to ensure that I didn’t have a major problem. It doesn’t hurt to ask afterall and he’d me doing me a favour if that is the case.

And then it hit me. There is also always the possibility that Kev was looking for some assistance with his upcoming wedding and was hoping I could supply him with something to keep his ….morale… up on his wedding night? I’m not sure but I really do wonder if supplying little blue pills is above and beyond the call of duty for a Best Man.

I’d best start off with a big thanks to the GNinja himself for unleashing me on his toy box.  I’ll try not to break anything mate.

I am Pedro (a slightly less boring online name than Pete) and if anyone out there is actually reading this then excuse me for the drivel I’m bound to spout.  From me you’ll get your usual blog type ramblings plus the odd heads up on things I think are cool and of course the odd rant.  Everybody likes a good rant.

Feel free to sign up and leave some feedback.  What have you got to say interweb?

After much debating and discussion, Pedro (aka my long time fellow geek Peter R. Williams Esq.) has joined me on GN.net, effectively doubling the amount of drivel being put on here, which is nice.

Welcome aboard and try to keep the footie talk to a minimum!

I’ve just gone through the entire site and found all the hard-coded “” and replaced them with either the <blockquote> markup or with the inline quotation markup <q> It was quite an effort, but I am happier knowing that my code is further along in following the standards laid down by W3C.

What’s next? Well, replacing all the apostrophies with ’ to make them a proper typographical curly quote instead of a single prime mark as discussed in The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters) over at A List Apart. In fact I’ve already used two in this very post. Go me!