Firstly an apology to the piss poor performance of my site recently, it was never great but recently its gone from bad to worse. Having done a little Googling around and testing I can only put this done to Media Temple’s Grid Server. I’ve just finished a year subscription so will be looking for some new hosting very soon.

Which leads me secondly to apologise for the lack of post, which in part has been due to this performance issue and in part but I have been soooo busy.

After trying desperately hard to go to bed at local time to get my body in sync as quickly as possible, and failing by 6pm I find myself awake at 6:30am trying to fill the time so thought I would write about my first impressions on the USofA.

To be honest it is frighteningly like I expected, in fact I’m surprise by how unsurprised I am. Having said that there are a couple of things that I wasn’t excepting, the food is amazing and it is ten times as intense as the “American” culture we have in the UK.

I’ve only been to one restaurant and so can hardly form a conclusive opinion on the food but I have a feeling that it was at least half representative. The menu was pretty much entirely grilled meat but my god is it good grilled meat. I had the ribs and Hannah had the steak and I think I can say it was easily the best steak and ribs we have ever had, and this was just from a generic commercial estate restaurant, nothing fancy and certainly not expensive.

The decor was staged, mass produced and I imagine exactly like any of their other branches. …

I’m off to Chicago on Saturday, for a couple of days training with Ex Libris on our new Library System and how to make it look nice and pretty. I’m also taking the Mrs and have a few days leave tagged on to the end of my trip which I’m really looking forward to.

Got loads planned, hopefully we’ll be able to fit most of it in, especially looking forward to going to a Chicago jazz club, trying a Chicago style pizza and Viva! the latin music festival, which just so happens to be on while we’re there.

Here are some random pics from my trip to Naples. All are these are by my sister who has a pretty keen eye for photography and just got a new camera for her 21st which she’s been snapping away with while I’ve been out here.

Popped into Naples the other day to see the “underground“, no that that sort of underground, but an underground aqueduct than supplied the Roman city with water. The greeks first started digging caves out for building materials and then the Romans linked them up to use as an aqueduct. Pretty impressive to think that it ran for 400km. It has since been used as a air-raid shelter during the second world war and is now open to tourists.

As part of the tour we also visited the underground foundations of the Roman theatre, with is literally built into an apartment block. Not many pics as I haven’t got mine off my camera yet, but here are some from my sister.

Some more pics from a few days ago, after our trip to Monte Casino and the war cemeteries we went on to see the amphitheater at Capua. One of the largest, it’s pretty unimpressive as there is not much left, and isn’t a scratch on the Colosseum. But here are some pics anyway.

After visiting the monastery at Monte Casino we went to visit the Polish and then Commonwealth war cemeteries from the Battle of Monte Casino. Both have been done well and are a fitting tribute to the men who gave their lives.

The Commonwealth cemetery really bring home how much of a world war it really was, with names from Britain, Australia,  New Zealand, Canada, Africa, and Nepal.

On Saturday (18th July 2009) we went up to see the monastery on Monte Casino (Mount Casino). The architecture was impressive, even more so because it was on top of this mountain. It’s pretty big and balanced precariously on top of the mountain, it’s a wonder how they built it, not once but twice!

I’m just trying out the wordpress, iPhone app and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I’ve included a screen grab from my phone so will be interested to see how that works out.

It’s a little laggy in places and the autorotate is a bit buggy but hopefully this is a problem with the new iPhone OS and will be fixed in an update soon.

Whilst I only have a 3g, I can imagine that support for upload videos from the 3gs would be awesome. But I don’t know how in active development it is.

If you have a wordpress blog and an iPhone I strongly recommend the wordpress app.

I’ve been meaning to launch this site for a long long time, and have finally got round to it. The straw that finally pushed me to getting it done was realising ajaxPager an ajax powered pager widget for jQuery UI. I needed somewhere to put some demos and documentation and I had been meaning to lauch a blog any way so here we are.

I wont blabber on too much here as I have lots to get on with including a security audit of our web systems at the University of Kent, the experience of which I will likely put in a future post.