A couple of years ago I was asked to make a website for someone to promote their marketing plan.

It started out simple enough but the client kept making changes like adjusting colours, swapping fonts, putting new and tacky backgrounds in.

By the end of it he was quite happy but I hated it, so when it came to putting it into my portfolio I slotted it in with the defunct sites so it wouldn’t come up in the general category that people first find. I actually didn’t want to put it there at all.

Yesterday afternoon the owner got in contact with me and said that he felt that the site hadn’t worked for him and he would like to build a different one for is expanded business. He told me that he felt the site looked tacky and implied that maybe I could have done a better job.

I tactfully mentioned that he had made a lot of changes to the design that he originally said yes to, although I really wanted to tell him that it was his meddling in the layout that had killed his site.

I know that some of the links were not working properly because he had tampered with the code after I had signed off on it, something that I would normally fix up as I notice but with his I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

So he called me on Saturday afternoon and again on Saturday evening and then he called at 9am this morning.

I don’t mind clients calling me out of hours, but I get the feeling he is going to irritate me again!

Apparently I didn’t get the email about the security plug for the Image Gallery. The company sent it to me and now the server is up and running again.

One of my websites was hacked yesterday by a pro Islamic hacker spouting anti-Denmark propaganda. This is the third time that the security of that one website has been compromised and I was beginning to suspect that the owner was being less than secure with his password details or personal computer management.

However doing some further research into it, I found a list of other sites that had been defaced with the same hack and I am starting to think that the weak link in the security chain is at the company which provided me support for their image gallery.

I have successfully used theit gallery on that site and another but the problems started when I migrated the site to a new server and had problems getting the SQL database to work again.

The support people were very quick and efficiant in getting the site back online, however two days afterwards someone put an IRC trojen onto the server.

I don’t think the problem is with the company, but I believe that maybe one of their former or current techies is working to a different adjenda.

I’m waiting on a return email before I continue but it looks like I might have to delete the account off the server and reinstall it from scratch.

Fun!

I’m officially broke, thanks to my car.. And it also pretty much wrote last week off as well!

On Monday (31st) I took my car in to get the 90,000km service done. Unfortunately they were unable to complete the all the work that day so they did what they could and booked me in for the following week (yesterday).
When I took it in I complained about some noise coming from the front left hand side which I said could be something in the brake calliper or the wheel bearing. It turned out to be the bearing so I had to take it to Hyundai to get it repaired under warranty.

I knew I wouldn’t have time on Tuesday because that’s when I had my TAFE enrolments that day (which took longer than expected) so I went in on Wednesday.

The plan was to organise a time for them to look at it so I could book it in and not have the car off the road, however the service mechanic said to me that if I continued to drive it, and something else went wrong because of it, then the subsequent damage would not be covered by the warranty. They said they were busy, but they would try to do it that week.

I then drove down the road to my mechanic and asked him how much it would cost to replace the bearing in the car, figuring that it would be cheaper for me to pay to get it done than to have the vehicle off the road!

Wrong!

I knew I was wrong just from overhearing the phone conversation to the parts guy at the Hyundai dealer… It went something like.. “Sorry, did I hear you correctly? How much?” followed by many expletives!

Turns out that just the bearing for my car is around $350.. I don’t know how they can justify that.

So, back I trundled to the dealer to book my car in, raced to the bus station to catch a bus home and then had only a very short time to try and find a car to rent. It was already after 4pm.

I managed to find a car in the city but I only had 45 minutes to get there and although the taxi arrived quickly, the driver was quite slow heading in.

Thankfully my car was ready the next day so I was able to return the hire car early. The repairs were carried out under warranty so there was no charge there.

A week later I took the car back to my mechanic so he could finish off the service and replace the front and rear disc pads…

Total cost for the service – $1250

After a break of three semesters I am back to TAFE in a bid to finally complete my qualification in web design.

My last enrolment was at Central TAFE which I thought I would try as they had a module that I wanted to do in the part time stream, however it got cancelled due to lack of numbers. I am not particularly interested in looking at what they have to offer now because of their lack of flexibility.

Midland is good. They allow me to study part time in with full time students thus allowing me to work at my own pace. It’s not easy working a 30 – 35 hour a week “part time” job, running a separate business, studying and looking after young children, so flexibility is critically important to me.

Because of my holiday last year I didn’t study because I simply couldn’t afford it.

So I am returning next week doing one programming unit and two design units. I plan to do the other two programming units before the end of the semester completing both those two sections.

I have already done a lot of work in the other section which relates to physical construction and coding of the actual site, so the lecturer is suggesting that if I have a new client then I could possibly work on that as the basis for proof of ability, which was handy because I had to speak to a potential new client today.

The new client is keen to go ahead and so it puts that section into place. In actual fact, it’s probably going to be a site above the level expected because it’s an online store (which I have pushed for an OSCommerce setup)

All in all, pretty happy on that front