Wow, I’ve just looked and it’s been 90 days since my last blog post. Considering we do quite a bit of consultation on Social Media, that’s not very impressive is it? Some may think I’ve been lazy. So here’s what’s been going on in the last 90 days or so.

We’ve opened a second office in Norwich as part of our expansion plan. We’re already starting to get enquiries through the new office, which is great, and we’re better able to service our Norwich based clients from there.

We’ve developed a web application for the UK’s Charting Progress project for Defra (due to go live this week), which demonstrates the quality of our oceans.

In collaboration with a number of European institutes, we have agreed funding for 6m Euros for the development of public outreach information hubs and applications, for which we are a partner.

We’ve taken on a couple staff to join the growing team and are now engaged in developing iPhone / iPad / Android applications and other interesting technologies.

We’ve also spent the last 3 months working on countless web design projects, social media campaigns and online marketing. I do need to get our portfolio up to date so you can see them all.

We’re sponsoring the Lowestoft and Waveney Chamber of Commerce business awards this year – so don’t forget to apply! I’m sure we’ll enter for one or two as well.

Our renewable energy project is well underway and due to go live soon too.

On a personal note, those of you that know me will know I’m fanatical about scuba diving and I’ve finally got around to training on a rebreather. A rebreather is a technical piece of equipment that allows me to dive underwater for a lot longer – and without any bubbles! After an intensive week of training in Tenerife, and a long weekend training in a horrible green lake in the UK, I’ve finally qualified. I dived a fantastic wreck out of Southwold over the weekend – brilliant.

So as we enter into the summer months, what does the next 90 days hold for us? Well, it’s all planned….

Preparation for Sage Pay’s system upgrade will commence on Saturday 17 April 2010 at 22:00

We are now ready to start preparing our system for the essential upgrade as outlined by our MD, Simon Black. Once complete this will dramatically enhance the service you receive from Sage Pay.

Please take time to read the important information below and where relevant pass on to your technical contact.

If you have any questions or need assistance with any of the below, please don’t hesitate to contact our 24-hour support team on 0845 111 44 55 or email support@sagepay.com

What’s happening on Saturday 17th April?

This phase of the upgrade will involve moving the Sage Pay Live Payment Gateway service across to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site, which will enable us to rebuild our live site into the much improved and upgraded system. The new hardware enables us to increase the speed and capacity of our systems and will ensure that we are able to cope with predicted demand over the coming years.

Work will start at 22:00 on Saturday 17th April 2010. The upgrade has been carefully planned to minimise disruption to you and your business and the only potential risk of downtime will be the time it takes the internet Name Servers to pick up our new IP addresses. This could be as little as a few seconds, however it may be slightly longer — unfortunately we have no control over the internet Name Servers except to suggest how often they check for new addresses.

Important technical information

We will be changing the IP Address of the following domains during this upgrade: live.sagepay.com, test.sagepay.com and www.sagepay.com – The Sage Pay Live payment gateway address, our test environment address and our website.

How does this affect me?

You will need to make some technical changes to your website if ANY of the following statements are true:

1) You have hardcoded your IP addresses within your website/shopping cart

2) You have cached your DNS entries

3) You have firewall rules in place to only accept access to and from your systems from specific IP addresses

Download technical details you need to configure your systems

Please note: If a 3rd party is hosting or providing your shopping cart, they will need to make changes and will need to download our technical document . We will do everything we can to notify the 3rd party, however we strongly advise you to forward this email to them too.

If you answer NO to all of the above:

You will not need to make any changes to your website and your transactions will not be affected by the IP Address switch. Your local DNS server will automatically update with the correct IP Address

Once again, if you have any questions, at all, please don’t hesitate to call our support team anytime on 0845 111 44 55 or email support@sagepay.com

Thank you for your continued support, while we work to upgrade our systems.

I was delighted today to hear that children in England will, by 2011, be taught about keeping themselves safe on the internet as part of the school curriculum. This is really good news, not just to protect children from engaging with ‘the wrong sort’ on the internet, but as a side effect of protecting privacy, young people will learn to avoid doing things on the internet that may affect their futures. Employers do look at what people have done on the internet before offering jobs you know!

So what is the downside? My apologies to those friends of mine who are teachers, but most of you will confess to having relatively little knowledge about the internet in comparison to the students you teach. How then can you educate young people about the dangers of the internet and privacy if you don’t understand it? To be successful, I think the educators will need education too.

Many thanks to Rodney Forster for showing me www.wordle.net , an interesting utility that will read an RSS feed, or selection of words you supply, and produce this interesting word cloud. I did this one from the RSS feed on this site.

Web Design Words

That’s right, Kathryn and I won a couple of business awards the other night at the Chamber of Commerce awards event at Potters in Hopton. We were thrilled to win the Business Link Business Start Up Award and the Innovation & Skills Engaging Education Award. Secretly, we’d really wanted to win the Business Start Up award so were ‘chuffed’ when our business came up.

The past couple of years have been really exciting for us. Since starting our agency, our feet have barely touched the ground. I don’t think any of the team have yet had a moment spare, such have been the demands. Now in our fourth office, due to growth, we’re still expanding – but slowly. We’ve got lots of plans over the coming months and years – hopefully more awards to come

Unbelievable. I don’t often get on my high horse about this kind of thing but the economy is suffering and the postal workers have gone on strike again. Companies expand and contract all the time, due to a number of reasons. If you’re not happy with what your company is doing and you don’t think you’re being paid enough, look for another job – surely!

It doesn’t affect me too much to be honest. I’m sure we’ll get a few late payments ‘due to the strikes’, but several of our clients are going to feel it. Particularly those involved in e-commerce. After a difficult year for many, this is just another kick isn’t it? It’s an absolute disgrace that this has happened.

There, that’s off my chest now. Rant over….until the next strike….

Simon & Kathryn getting ready to dive

Ok, so it’s been a little while since my last post here and the simple reason is that I’ve been enjoying the delights of a holiday. Yep, Kathryn and I took the opportunity to go away for 10 days to the sunny island of Tenerife. Not to sunbathe but to go diving, every single day. I’d never thought of diving in Tenerife before, I assumed that it would be devoid of life and a bit uninteresting. Well I was wrong! Don’t missunderstand me, it’s not like a coral reef, but it is stunning nevertheless, oh yes – and it’s very deep. Being a volcanic island, there are a couple of short ledges out that drop off at 30m and 50m and then next ledge is 3000m+. We took the opportunity to take twin cylinders on our backs and a mix of oxygen rich gas in a cylinder side slung (for faster decompression) to allow us to dive a little deeper and longer than we would normally as the conditions were so good.

We saw so much life: huge rays, turtles, barracuda, moray eels, shrimp, jacks and so much more. There were wrecks, walls, caves and all sorts of other interesting features.

Exiting after a cave dive

During the first week we were there we were lucky enough to be diving with a group from Northern Ireland who had us in absolute stitches all week, so much so that I had stomach pains from laughing – or perhaps it was the endless chips that you get fed out there.

While we’re talking about the food, I don’t think we ate anything Spanish the whole time we were there. We had a good Indian, Chinese and plenty of tourism fried food but nothing authentically Spanish. We did try on one day at lunchtime, between dives, to go to a Spanish restaurant. There was a dozen or so of us and when the food arrived, pretty much everyone had ordered a gut busting English breakfast. Oh well, I guess we all needed the calories for the diving.

So it’s back to work for us now, fun’s over

Ray

For anyone interested in diving in Tenerife, I can recommend Dive 24-7 Tenerife Dave and Nikki, who run the dive centre, are a great laugh and as accommodating as you can legally get

Thanks to Ken and Jane for the photos.