brett.jenkins

Hey all, welcome to my new post of 2009!

Firstly, the new version of Wordpress is looking nice, they’ve completely changed the look of it, but I like it (i’m talking about the administrative backend here), Wordpress is definately the one to beat in terms of blog CMS!

Secondly, welcome to 2009! Yep we are finally in 2009, and so we say goodbye to 2008. I don’t really have any new years resolutions apart from try and do well in my course at university and the like!

Thirdly, shoutout to Sam Hastings! This guy designed the previous iteration of this site and was on Masterchef on Wednesday! He unfortunately was the first to be kicked out… oh well he can still cook way better than me, which I find scary…

Also, i’ve been out and about doing all kinds of stuff to the Xtreme website which will be unleashed when the new studio is completed…

However the thing I most want to talk about is…

Windows 7

This is the new version of Windows (obviously) and is currently out there in beta form, and I have it I’ve had it installed practically from day 1 of the beta, and I love it. I’ve only gone back to Vista once for a gig (where I had to obviously use stable  – as opposed to beta – software). It’s great! The superbar while initially unusual to see on a Windows machine becomes more and more natural to use, and when I went back to Vista the other day it seemed weird going back to the old taskbar! It feels quite natural to use once you get the hang of it. Plus Windows 7 just seems faster, and this isn’t because nothing is installed on it! I have loads of programs installed as i’m using it as my primary OS, and it just seems snappier it’s great. Even the new Windows loading screen is cool

There are one or two bugs however. I’m getting an occassional screen tearing/flickering which I suppose i’ll put down to drivers? (I’m using the drivers for my graphics card supplied by Microsoft as apparrently they are the most recent drivers for my graphics card – an intel integrated graphics job.) But that isn’t a show stopper and will probably be improved with better drivers. The notes application also is a bit weird, you’d naturally assume you can pin the notes to the desktop, which would make sense with aero peek, but no they are just a normal application, so that doesn’t work the way I would have expected. I’ve sent my feedback to Microsoft so hopefully they’ll take my comments on board, but I am one of many!

I’ll try and make more blog posts on here this year, in fact that can be more of my new years resolutions! However I only tend to want to make a blog post when I have something worth writing about! I try and update my twitter status more often (which you can see at the left of every page on this website), you’re welcome to follow me although I mostly just twitter what i’m doing and stuff I do try and twitter some interesting things sometimes, although lets face it i’m slightly more boring than @stephenfry

Cheerio
Brett

P.S. This is genius:

I’m so immature

Hey folks,

Sorry for the lack of posts, i’ve been so busy!

Xtreme Radio is doing well, and you can check out my Show 1-3 on Monday – Will probably be the last one this year however, and will probably get a different time next semester, but listen regardless or… listen again. THERE IS NO EXCUSE!

Anyway Xtreme turned 40 a few weeks ago and Zane Lowe came down to DJ. He was great, he really does know how to mix!

I’ve been a bit snowed under with coursework lately, but it’s the last day of term on Friday, yipppppie! Can’t wait to have a break, this semester has been really really tough, the courses are very hard.

So that’s a brief update on what i’ve been up to, i’ll try and post a bit more often over the holidays

Have fun,
Brett

Hey, it’s been a while since i’ve posted. I’ve been busy working on the new Xtreme Radio website, over at xtremeradio.org. I’ve installed Joomla and done some integration stuff, and I have pretty much come to the conclusion that Wordpress is the best CMS out there. Unfortunately it’s not quite suitable for a radio site, but if it was more ‘CMSey’ i’d use it in a shot. Wordpress is so well designed, it’s so easy to integrate into a site, the back-end looks really nice and iis easy to use, which I cannot say for Joomla. Joomla’s backend is confusing and awkard, I really dislike it. In an ideal world I’d live without a CMS controlled website. I prefer to get more control over my site, no site i’ve made has ever used CMS (excluding blogs like this one of course, where CMS’s like wordpress make sense). I’ve had to give up quite a bit of control with Joomla, as I don’t fancy editing it outside of the themes folder, because it makes upgrading harder etc.
We’re aiming to launch it for the start of the new university term so look forward to that!

So Google Chrome came out this week then, in fact I’m actually using it to post this! Luckily Google has changed their EULA that made all content posted via their browser usable by Google, not that Google would want to use this for anything but still. I’m quite impressed with Chrome, it’s fast, very fast, it looks VERY sexy on Vista, unlike Firefox (well by default anyway), and even better than IE7/8. I like the minimalistic style, and the lack of Adblock and a few other extensions doesn’t really bother me. Especially because I was beginning to disable it for a few sites that I visit a lot, as you know I feel bad using certain sites pretty regularly and then disabling their adverts. But anyway Chrome is great, I’ve been using it more and more recently, it is very nice.

You may have noticed a couple of new external links on the left hand side. I wondered if it was the right thing to do to put links to sites that perhaps say are not related to me, because it’s kind of a CV style site, but I decided to put them in as they are two very good sites that perhaps some people that come here may be interested in. They are twit.tv and the supersite for windows. Both of these sites are brilliant in their own way. I’ve been on and off reading the supersite for windows for years, I usually visit it when expecting a big release, such as Vista, and reading up about it before it’s publicly available, or just before I can get it. Although recently I’ve been visiting it more often, because it’s a very interesting site. I recommend anyone who’s interested in Windows and the future of Windows, and other Microsoft products I may add, to visit it.

Twit.tv is not a mild insult, but actually a very good podcast network. I first found out about twit, from Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, where I found out that he did a Windows Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. I started listening to the podcast quite late on, but when I did start listening I found it very interesting and informative. I didn’t know who Leo Laporte was back then, but after slowly over the past year getting into more and more of his podcasts, like Security Now (with GRC’s Steve Gibson) and This Week in Tech (where TWiT gets it’s name), it is clear that he is a legend! I’ve also recently over the summer holiday’s got into TwitLive.tv, which is basically a live video stream of Leo recording his podcasts, often with user interaction via the Chatroom, especially in-between podcasts. As someone who is interested in Technology and Radio, this sort of thing really interests me, and so anyone else out there who is also interested in this kind of thing might do well to listen in. He usually starts at 6PM British Time (11PM Pacific, where he’s based). He even did a live Interview with Robert Llewelyn recently, you know that guy who does “Scrapheap Challenge” and the excellent “How Things Work”.

I’ve now officially passed the first year of University, which is nice! Computer Science, while often interesting, is a very hard course! I await the second year with nervous anticipation!

Anyway thanks for reading, you must have the patience of a saint

Hey there!

I’m Brett and this is my new blog. I hope to post my thoughts on current tech events and other things! I’m just going to play it by ear

For those who are interested i’m using Wordpress to do this blog. I installed it the other day and have been playing with it since to get it ready, and it’s a very nice application, very impressed.
I have tried to integrate it with the site, even though it’s actually just a theme that wordpress is using, but again that was quite simple to edit!

Anyway welcome to my blog, I hope you enjoy