Online Tax Calculator

Theres a free UK Income tax calculator which I find useful - it deals with working out your monthly / weekly take home pay based on salary etc etc. It has the new and much publicised tax bands in it, and it deals with student load deductions. Very handy!

www.listentotaxman.com

Add comment April 30th, 2008

Gliffy - Free online visio tool

Ok, so its not as feature rich as visio, but for drawing tho odd network diagram or flow chart, gliffy rocks!

Here’s an example of a network diagram (my home net)

I need to check this service out a bit more, but its looking good so far. I will probably need to buy a business account if it does what I want it to do - got a few flow charts and net diagrams to do at work…..

Check Gliffy Out.

1 comment April 30th, 2008

2008, fitness, weight and other stuff

Still neglecting my blog. I have been back in the UK for nearly 4 months now, and have made a good start on fitness, but a shambles of my weight management. I put on a stone while travelling, mainly because of physical jobs and skiing lots when I settled down in the Queenstown Area.

It all went wrong at Christmas and has not improved since then - I am eating the wrong foods and eating when bored / down. I need more activites to fill up my time and prevent the boredom that sets in at home…… Which I am working on. The target is 22lb in 12 weeks - which takes me neatly to my first summer holiday.

Exercise wise, I started the c25k plan in January, and ran a 3 mile race for Sport Relief in March which I was happy about. I have now extended to run 5.2k outdoors and up to 7k on the treadmill, without the shin injuries that took me out last time. Cycling is a strong point as well - getting out on the weekends in Wales mountain biking, and also having bought a road bike (more on this another day) I have been logging the road miles and commuting to work (not as often as I would like).

I have moved to a new gym with a swimming pool, which brings me on to this years target - the Helvellyn Tri, which involves a mile open water swim in Ullswater, 38 miles on the bike over the Kirkstone pass and finally a 9.1 mile run up and down Helvellyn. I have some sprint tris and 10k races booked in to help me towards this aim…

Finally I have all my photos of my travels to sort out and post. Should keep me busy, along with some new websites to launch around all this running and biking I will be doing…….

Add comment April 8th, 2008

The Speed of Spam

Yesterday afternoon, I made a new mail server live for testing. It took until 9 pm last night before the first spammer tried to use it as an open relay. Which is scary. The server does not allow open relay of course, but this just underlines the fact that there are 1000’s of machines searching the internet for sapmming and or hacking oppotunities.

118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:11 Connected
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:11 >>> 220 -***********-An Anonymous Mail Server; Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:04:11 +0100
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 < << helo www.MyMainServer.com
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 >>> 250 *********** Hello www.MyMainServer.com [118.169.205.121], pleased to meet you.
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 < << mail from:
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:12 >>> 250 2.1.0 … Sender ok
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 < << rcpt to:
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 >>> 550 5.7.1 … we do not relay
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 *** <> 0 0 00:00:00 INCOMPLETE-SESSION
118.169.205.121 [0F8C] 17:04:13 Disconnected

I hate spammers. On another note, I added a little math quiz to my contact form as spam from that was on the up - again spammer looking for an easy way to send mail through badly written php. Luckily as its all robots doing this, they dont know how to deal with the math question :-). Capatcha would be a good idea, but more effort.

Add comment April 4th, 2008

1 Year Ago

Queenstown at Sunset
Originally uploaded by markc123.

This was a photo I took exactly a year ago - while I was living (in a tent) in Queenstown. April was a big month last year - lots of work at the start, plus road trips to Milford and later around the south coast and walking on Stewart island.

Add comment April 4th, 2008