Ever Googled yourself?

So I’ve been keeping an eye on where my website (www.garethdickson.net) and this blog come in the Google rankings when you do a search for my name. It turns out that my name is getting a bit more popular than I would have hoped. Apparently there’s a me from Scotland who is a bit of a musician. Plays the acoustic guitar amongst other things and seems to be pretty good. I also play but haven’t been in a band since university.

More worryingly there is another me in BELFAST!!!! He seems to enjoy going to the local gay bar and watching camp TV. Draw your own conclusions. Anyway, he’s not me (just in case my girlfriend is reading this) so don’t worry – I don’t have a hidden lifestyle anyone should know about…

Why you shouldn’t drink and drive

We all know the reasons and yet some people just don’t get the message. We pulled 5 people out of a Citroen C2 last night. The car had gone through a wall, round a lamp post and ended up on its roof and miraculously nobody got killed. And it was a miracle. Bits of the wall ended up 20 metres away from the impact.

Initiations – Part 2

It’s always a bit scary starting a new job – especially when you know you’re entering a tightly-knit team. We have a new guy on the watch and his luck deserted him on his second day. The watch were being shown a hydraulic platform machine (which is stationed at another station) to get familiar with it. Everyone was asked if they wanted to go up on the platform for a ride. A few put on the harness and climbed in with one of the operators. The new guy was encouraged to have a go as he hadn’t seen it before so he got in last. Just as he was about to go up, the operator on the platform got a phone call. Not a problem as the second operator could control it from the ground.

So our new guy gets raised up and shown the view. After a couple of minutes he is brought down and we notice he has put his visor down – he’s seen what’s coming. There are four firefighters armed with hoses waiting for him…

You can guess the rest.

How not to soak your colleagues

People get soaked all the time in the fire brigade for different reasons. Sometimes it can be an unprovoked attack, sometimes revenge. There is one golden rule though – don’t soak unless you are prepared for the consequences. One of our guys (who has a habit of backing himself into a corner) was squirting water from the top of a hydraulic platform when he had the bright idea of soaking one of his colleagues. He looked down and there they were – a perfect target. So, on went the hose and pretty quickly there was a soaking, angry firefighter standing beside the controls to the platform.

Our hero saw the danger too late as the water supply to the platform was switched off and the platform itself began to lower just as 2 other firemen prepared a couple of hoselines. Of course the platform stopped – just too high to jump off – and the water supply to the hoses was switched on…

Just like shooting fish in a barrel.

Initiations – Part 1

The new guy always gets it. Initiations have always been around but you can’t get away with as much as you used to. You do still get the odd good story though.

New Guy comes into the watch and is left alone for a few shifts. One night he’s told that there is something wrong with the communication system at the control room (the people who receive the 999 call and mobilise the stations). For some reason the control room can’t receive 999 calls. So the New Guy is told he’s on “Fire Watch” for the night. He’s given a blanket, a radio (to contact controls) and a pair of binoculars. He has to climb the drill tower in the yard and keep watch all night for fires. When he sees one he has to inform controls via radio. It’s cold and wet and as New Guy watches over the city, the rest of the watch are inside nice and warm….

Of course, New Guy actually stays up all night and manages to find and report a couple of fires…

Clearing the Google Cache

Just an update on my problem with Google and the fireplace website. I was given a link to Google support which requests that they clear the cache for a particular website (perfect for the problem I was having). It took a couple of days but it seems to have worked. The link is as follows.

http://google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=remove_info#

How to wind up your boss…

True story. The watch were away for the Christmas do, staying in a B&B. After dinner and the obligatory pub crawl it was back to the lodgings for some nightcaps. The boss had a few in him and seemed in good form but not for long…

Two of the guys decided to wind him up. They got his room phone number and waited till he went to bed. Then they rang – every 5 minutes for a good while. The only thing they said was his name in a high-pitched voice. As time went on, he got more and more agitated until he got up and started wandering the corridors looking for the culprits. He found their room (knowing who did it) and tried to get in but the lads refused.

They waited till things were quiet and then fireman “A” checked to see if the coast was clear. It wasn’t. The boss was waiting outside the door. The conversation went as follows:

Boss: RIGHT! Where’s your sidekick?
Fireman “A”: How do you know I’m not his sidekick…?

Fireman “B” immediately took all his clothes off and sat on the toilet in a bid for innocence. While the boss was distracted, fireman “A” dropped to the floor and attempted to crawl out of the room unnoticed in an SAS stylee. The boss was still standing in the doorway and fireman “A” crawled over his feet, apparently thinking he was invisible.

The boss eventually gave up and went back to bed. While he was asleep a note was passed under his door. It read,”Please keep the noise down.”

The trouble with Google

Pretty much everyone who uses the web uses Google. And why not? They do some great things there. But as a web developer you can pull your hair out sometimes. As an example, there’s the site I built for Knightsbridge Fireplaces. I made it as search engine friendly as possible and used all the tools I could get my hands on from Google. Then I sat back and waited to see where I came in the rankings. The biggest problem being that the last designer of the site turned nasty when the owners finished with him. For a few weeks the site was simply a message saying that it was down due to non-payment (a blatant lie).

Anyway, I fixed the site but Google didn’t update it’s cache and so the search results still display this message (great publicity I don’t think). All I could do was wait for Google to crawl the web again which it did on the 10th Jan (according to its own developer tools). Great? No. The search results haven’t updated so the message is still there. The weird thing is that I did a search one night (could even have been 10th Jan) and the new site WAS THERE!!! But gone in a day again. I’m now doubting my sanity – was it all a dream? Here’s hoping it gets sorted out soon. You don’t know how many potential customers are seeing the search results…

Isn’t Freeware great?

There’s an old movie that goes by the title “The Best Things in Life Are Free” which stars Ernest Borgnine amongst others. I couldn’t agree more. Look at PHP and MySQL for example. Two great web development tools and both free. For those who don’t know, PHP is a programming language used in the internet and MySQL is a powerful database. PHP and its free add-ons let you do some really clever things on the web like create PDF files on the fly with dynamic content.

Then there’s Firefox. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical at first. I never really got into Netscape and Internet Explorer was just fine until I started actually using this free web browser. I’m a convert. The problem is that some people make websites that only work in Internet Explorer. Not me personally, you understand – other people. You should check it out if you haven’t already. This may be old news to some people but, hey, we can’t all be at the forefront of technology.

Tough Guys

I first saw this on a friends computer then came across it later by accident on YouTube. Check out the guy who does the backflip about 50secs into it…