The World According to Tim Skipper

I found a really useful article on Private Parking Companies and how you should not pay their usually outrageous demands for money. If you’ve had an invoice, probably with Penalty Charge Notice written on it, from such a company for allegedly parking somewhere you shouldn’t have, then you need to read this article from Pepipoo before you do anything else!

Private Parking Companies - A Guide To An Effective Defence

Pepipoo is a great resource for the victim du jour - uk motorists.

Tags: Parking Fines, PCN, Pepipoo

I’ve been aware that my Sony VAIO TZ series laptop tends to thrash it’s hard drive a lot, even when it’s seemingly doing nothing. Since this has got to be adversely affecting the battery life – currently an excellent 6 hours in Power Save mode – I decided to investigate it further.

The resource monitor tool was showing me that Vista was hammering away at a file named C:\System Volume Information\{<guid style value>}

A bit of Googleing later revealed this to be the Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Basically it creates System Restore points at critical times (such as when installing programs or Windows Updates), but also runs on a scheduled basis.

If you’re good at keeping backups, then you can safely disable this feature and stop all the thrashing. Go to Computers -> Properties -> System Protection and un-check your drive(s).

It seems to have done the trick nicely.

Tags: Disk Thrashing, Sony VAIO, Windows Vista

Why are drivers so scared of overtaking these days? I wonder, is it because of the idiotic and poorly thought out way we are all slowly being brain washed into believing that Speed Kills? Whatever, it’s very annoying to be stuck behind a queue of cars who are all driving too close to each other (but slowly, so that’s ok, only speed kills remember) and afraid of pulling out and getting a move on.

Today coming home from Norwich I came upon a typical scenario on the A140. It’s a pain of a road at the best of times, but today I was stuck behind three cars doing 35 mph for almost 10 miles. The reason; the lead car was following a Moped and was afraid to pass it. Not an HGV, or a coach, a bloody moped!

Now I know you should give mopeds and cyclists room (well maybe not cyclists, they mostly deserve to be run over), but come on… at 35 mph any modern car has enough power to pass a moped with a brief gap in oncoming traffic.

But no, speed kills; overtaking is dangerous so we’ll all just plod along. Not me. Eventually I spotted a gap and took the whole lot out in one go. It goes without saying the lead car then starting flashing and hooting at me. A typical response from that other oh-so-British species; The Overtaker-Hater.

Please support the Safe Speed Road Safety Campaign.

Tags: A140, overtaker-hater, safe speed

I’ve never seen this before tonight

Google has apparently taken a dislike to my IP address. I suspect this is because earlier this evening I installed SEO for Firefox, one of the tools on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook site. Whilst it’s a useful tool for retrieving PageRank and Cache data for any results returned from a Google search, I suspect Google doesn’t like the bandwidth it consumes.

I’ve uninstalled it now.

Tags: Google, SEO Book, SEO Tools

Have you ever wondered how many people there are out there sharing your name? I’m sure most regular Internet users have at one time or another Googled their name to see what comes back.

I thought it would be fun to collect a list of Tim Skippers and link to their web sites in a kind of new-age Tim Skipper Web Ring (remember web rings?). Maybe some of them will link back, or stop by my blog to leave a comment (probably something like “stop stalking me!”).

Here’s the list of Tim Skippers I’ve found so far:

• Tim Skipper Photography. Based in Dothan, AL, USA, this Tim Skipper has a photography business (a passion I share, although not to this quality). Nice pics Tim!
• House of Heroes. Tim Skipper is also the lead singer and guitarist (hey, I play guitar too!) of House of Heroes, a three piece band from Columbus, Ohio. I’ve not (yet) listened to any of thier music.
• First Counsel. This Tim Skipper is the founder of London based recruitment firm First Counsel, specialising in the recruitment of law firm professionals. I too worked in London for two years consulting in IT at a couple of major law firms - the similarities continue!
• Another Tim Skipper likes building Model Terrain, and I think might be the same Tim Skipper who has the photography site at the top of this list. Let me know Tim!
• Tim Skipper is also a mysterious actor, starring in the 2007 film Eight Days and Six Hours. Details of the SuperStar Tim Skipper are sketchy - can anyone fill them in? I wonder if I can make money selling Tim Skipper autographs… I was on the TV once, which is almost exactly the same thing.
• The Fresno State Bulldogs are also lucky to have a Tim Skipper as thier Assistant Coach.

From this list I think we’re all building a picture of who a typical Tim Skipper is. I shall comment no further!

Tags: Tim Skipper