this post has some swearing, spelling and grammar mistakes.. if the first one bothers you then please don’t read this post, if the latter two bother youcorn  then please don’t read this blog..

To celebrate the end of BarCampLeeds08 and the start of our week in wales, Heather and I decided to have Sunday lunch at Weatherspoons, a usual haunt of ours… launch went fine and we decided to have a walk to the bus stop further away since it was a nice night (and lets face it… I could do with the exercise)..

At the McDonalds in the St. Johns Center a group of people with suitcases and a confused look on there face asked for directions to the travel lodge on Vicar Street in town, wasn’t too sure where it was and didn’t want to give them the wrong directions and leave them stranded (and we wern’t really in a rush) so I said I’d walk down with them, if I was right and I knew where it was that would be fine, if I was wrong I’d see if I could get a map on my phone or something…. luckily I found the place before Google Maps was involved..

So Heather and myself end up at the Corn Exchange bus stop.. we are chatting about next weeks plans and what we want to do and suddenly …CRACK.. I turn around and see a bloke on the floor… two guys run straight towards him and try and get him up, I was hesitant because 1) I didn’t see it 2) I was always told that if something like that happens you leave them on the ground and ring an ambulance..

The two blokes who are lifting him up are struggling and I rush over to give them a hand.. as soon as I start to lift, one of the blokes rushes off.. about this time I notice his head is bleeding and quite badly, I prop him up with one hand and start dialing 999 with the other..

Whilst I’m on the phone to the ambulance service and trying to get the address of the Corn Exchange (much harder than you think when your hands are full), he comes to life and wants to know “what the fucks going on”.. I explain that he’s hurt his head and I’m on the phone to the ambulance..

At this point he looks at me and states “No, You hit me you little prick”, he then takes a couple of steps towards me, another bloke who was nearby grabbed him and tried to calm him down (I’m still on the phone to the ambulance at this point).

The 163 arrives which appears to be his bus, he walks off and gets on the bus, I explain to the telephone operator that he has walked off and I’m sorry for the inconvenience..

The bus driver see’s the blood on his hand and head and refuses to let him on, after arguing for about a minute the bus driver turns the bus off and calls the depot…. after a 5 minute phone call, he calls the police.

After about 5 minutes the Police arrive, the bloke starts walking off but they catch up with him and ask him whats going on “That prick pushed me” (I’m sure you can imagine he means me at this moment).  They sit him down and talk to him while two other officers come and chat to me, I explain I was at the other side of the bus shelter when the incident happened and came over to help.. The policewoman took my details in a very stern manner, it was at this point that my mind clicked “This is getting serious”.

After taking my address, birthdate, telephone number, name and other details, I went through what happened again, she then questioned the Bus driver and asked Heather some questions..

At this point another bus arrived and the other couple who witnessed it were getting on (including the one who stepped in when he got aggressive) I got really worried at this point as the people who could agree with my side of the events were leaving the scene, I asked the woman if she could hurry and get there details..

She managed to get them off the bus and get the details and story…. it matched with mine (they’d had a few so I was on edge). She then walks to the group of Police that have arrived with the other bloke and another comes up, asks me a few questions, walks back.

At this point I’ve missed 4 buses and I think they are getting the point that the bloke is pissed out of his tree and has fell, so I ask if I can leave, another 5 minute talk with the group before “its ok you can go for now, we have your details.”

I won’t say that incident hasn’t shaken me a little, I am reminded about an incident several months ago when I was talking to a friend on the path about 3 meters from a nightclub entrance and a Bouncer told us to move, I disagreed and he pushed me out into the middle of the road, this was infront of several police officers who I asked “are you going to do anything” they just told me to forget it and walk away..

I would never leave someone if they needed help and I thought I could, but I think I will hesitate before getting involved and thats not a good feeling..

About 8 months ago at barcamp Leeds 2007, I talked to Manoj for a short period of time, we spoke about getting him on northcast and edocrs current status, I mentioned that i noticed edocr.co.uk was available and he should buy it before someone does and tries to sell him it for a lot of money, we laughed….

8 months later I was looking at the edocr site as I was considering writing about it for news.northhub.co.uk, feeling in a funny mood I tried edocr.co.uk again and realised it STILL wasn’t registered (8 months), I registred it and for a bit of fun placed an homage to manoj (note I used text and photos that were written from / by manoj), I also placed a link to his facebook fan page and a HUGE link to the edocr website incase anyone got there by mistake…

Afterwards I thought that it looked a little ananomus and dodgey and it really should show who did it so that Manoj could contact me and get the domain.. I placed some images refering back to the convrersation we had (a lot of money) and a joke price of an iPhone, I also placed a picture of me and a link to my website to make it easyier to contact…

the aim was to get a couple of people to visit the website click through to edocr and the refer logs will show edocr.co.uk, Manoj see’s the link and sends me an email, job done…after all we are all friends here in the north.

So tonight I met Manoj at the geek girl dinner… well I say met him I honestly didnt get a chance to speak because I was videoing the whole thing for Gem, I was trying to get to him and talk about it because I honestly didnt know if he knew or not and to be honest the joke was getting a little thin..

Anyway… whilst getting on the train home from Manchester I recieve an email from some bloke with a double barrel name subject edocr.co.uk, I knew what this was and to be honest my heart sank…

The email that was sent to me says I carn’t tell anyone the contents of the document, which is bollocks but I carn’t be arsed with any more legal mumbo jumbo so I’ll just skip to the juicy parts and my comment..

1) I have bought the domain name to stop edocr ltd buying it… - edocr were told to buy the domain almost a year ago but chose not to..

2) I have bought the domain to decive people trying to find edocr…. HAVE YOU SEEN THE BIG LINK TO THE MAIN EDOCR PAGE

3) I am cyber squatting this domain for profit.…. yeah because the website looks serious, I mean the buy now button is just wanting to be clicked…

So the email says I have to give the domain over free of charge within 14 days…. well fine and dandy but that gives me 13 days  to do what I want with the domain… or you can stop playing around with laywers and… I don’t know speak to me when we are in the same room, send a twitter about it, (I would say send a direct message but you followed me, I followed you and then you isntantly unfollowed me and thats not nice in my twitter book), I’m happy to give the domain back, but be fair and at least refund the registration fee (about a tenner)… (I won’t even charge for my HTML Skillz)

The truth is, I like you, I like the way your market and what your doing, I think edocr is a waste of time for you and you should move on to something that is going to work, but I think that you’ve handled this wrong….. You’ve got my phone number, email, twitter, my address, facebook, linked in and a tonne of other contact methods… Are you seriously saying that you’d rather pay a laywer a £150 an hour or whatever rate they are on to send me a prefabricated document which doesnt take into account any of the history…

Seriously thought they are lucky that I registered the domain because if it ever get popular, one of the first things a domain bot will do is buy all the free tld’s for the domain and point them to spammy pages, and they won’t have there contact details on hand  and you’d have never got it back…

So they only got my name so easy because I made it CLEAR that I registered it (put my picture at the bottom of the page… *sigh*, I’m worn out, today was my last day at my current job and this email really has brought me down…

Last summer I wanted to do something good, a run or a walk (I eventually settled on the great north run) but I found the 1^st St. Gemma’s Hospice midnight walk, all was good and I was up for it until I read the small print that it was yet another women only event (much like the race for life) , I called up to ask why and was given the blank response that men are too competitive and less women would enter. I was quite pissed off at this overgeneralised statement (at 17st with some good sized man boob’s a competitive run was the last thing on my mind) but was assured they would run this years event and reconsider for next yet (which is on this year and still a women’s only event).

So the Geek Girl Dinner is soon, a good mate of mine (Imran Ali) has been on about organising one of these for months in Leeds and we’ve had the discussion several times that it defeats the point of the group if he organised it..

I think splitting things up into sexes does more harm that good in most cases, but with technology, I think that its such a visibly male dominated industry, I think we need groups like PHPWomen and GGD to provide not just support to women in the same field but also ideas and discussion.

This isn’t a dig at Imran (or Manoj)  for helping with organising these things (I know I’ll get an MSN message about it as soon as he reads this) because hes working on whatever he can to get the community working together however I carn’t help but feel that with (at least partly) male organisation and presence, the discussion, questions, answers and ideas generated will be affected.

Whilst thinking this it brought me back to the overgeneralised statement that the hospice made last year and how not everyone is the same but it also reminded me that just last year when I went to my first Geekup and didn’t know anyone how difficult it was to have the ball’s (a pun) to go to somewhere I’ve never been with a group of people I’ve never met).

I don’t think I can go to a Geek Girl Dinner as a participant (I’d go to give it some coverage from northcast if they wanted it) but I know I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from being the big gobbed guy from Leeds and I think that would be detrimental to the event

IE8 doesnt pass the ACID2 test…. am I right?

in a default feedburner set you your feed is at feeds.feedburner.com/yourFeedName, thats all well and good but what if you want to leave feedburner at a later date, maybe you’ve developed your own feedtracking service or you’ve decided to go without… you carn’t change that feed and you’ve lost all those subscribers…

When Google bought feedburner they made all the “pro” features completely free the best one of these has to be myBrand with a simple DNS entry you can have feeds.yourdomain.com/yourFeedName and have complete control over the links and the subscribers and if you feel at a later date you want to leave… you just create that subdomain and 301 people to the new url (which I also hope is on your domain name)

Heres a few I found but none of them I really Like to be honest..

http://dev.portalzine.de/index?/Horizontal_Accordion–print

This is a nice effect but it doesn’t seem to work locally, it really does look like the xbox 360 menu bar but it wasn’t the effect I was going for..

http://www.nyokiglitter.com/tutorials/horizontal.html

This menu is not as smooth as I would like and I don’t like the fact the text overflows for a couple of seconds in mid transision

http://www.arbyte.net/f4/

this seems the one I am leaning to at the moment but I’m going to need to look at the code a bit more..

Whilst we are on the subject most of these scripts use moo.fx or prototype… I’ve found these communities ( mainly the prototype community )… elitist and unhelpful.. whilst visiting the IRC room recently I was kicked out because I asked about an accordion script I was developing, the reason was that they had too many queries on accordion and were sick of them, surely if your getting too many queries about a bit of your code, you might need to… work on it or at least work on the explanation and documentation instead of ignoring people’s questions..

And please don’t get me wrong the examples above are good examples of an accordion and the developers did a good job, I’m just astounded at the lack of examples compared to every other menu/navigation type javascript ever made..

What really pisses me off and I mean REALLY, are the people that go to work, use Microsoft Office on Windows and browse the internet on that big blue E, then go home and use Microsoft Office on Windows and browse the internet on that big blue E…. without trying anything different, because “linux is too geeky” or “open office doesnt have the features I need” or “firefox just doesnt work with the websites I want”. THEN they procceed to completely go on this “I HATE MICROSOFT and WINDOWS crap” these people seem to be the most vocal crowd in the conference’s.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t love Microsoft, Vista has failed especially at our workplace where every ten minutes it resets file permissions for someone or UAC pisses someone off, IE5.5 still has wayyyyy too big of a market share and don’t even get me started on the Zune, I love certain parts of office 2007 and hate other parts and I think Microsoft has advanced computing a lot and we wouldn’t be were we are today without them (apart from I.E.) they won the browser war and left that project to rot until firefox got some decent market share.

So the bottom line is, I don’t mind people bashing Microsoft, but try the competition and don’t be a hypocrite.