“Lets Double Tuition Fees”.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NohigherFees/

Many universities in England and Wales want a sharp increase in tuition fees, a survey by BBC News has concluded.

England’s Higher Education Minister David Lammy said there was an “important debate to be had”.
BBC News

New Labor – “Education, Education, Education”
Tony Blair said it, and Gordon Brown has re-iterated it. Yet both Brown and Blair have very little to show for it except a big hole in the budget, no one can actually say education has improved significantly, yes in places it has but the overall picture is very much the same as it was 11 years ago.

The net result is a heavily neglected Higher Education System, the solution was to get the student to contribute to the pot in addition to the government. As we already know money is being spent left right and center to get us out a recession we are already well entrenched in and it looks to be many years before we are out of it.

The one sure fire way to make sure we can stay strong through any recession is to make sure we have well educated and trained people, yet the government policy seems to be actively discourage students from pursuing higher education by burdening them with more and more debt.

Stop the government making another mistake sign the petition here:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NohigherFees/

Twitter Updates for 2009-03-15

  • I hate it when I am reading Onion Headlines, and forget its not real news… case in point: http://bit.ly/ZiFER #
  • Sage Accounts is the worst piece of software ever made, all I want to do is import a CSV file. Work god damn it! #
  • More and more I am reminded why Windows is rubbish, I have been waiting 45mins for .net Framework to install, it can’t be that hard can it? #
  • There isn’t much point in having an alarm clock, when the fire alarm keeps doing the same job. #
  • QOTD: I am Maximus Decimus Meridius Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance. #
  • Mmm, muffins http://twitpic.com/23c59 #

Twitter Updates for 2009-03-08

  • Coursework 1 of 2 Completed. SVN is making this alot easier. #
  • I am more than a little pissed off, that #mediatemple (gs) has failed. Transferring to Dedicated Servers ASAP. #
  • Massive CoreImage Bug, caused by safari systematically killing everything. Reboot Needed. #
  • RT @SteveReynolds: @ashleyford Post your feedback on the MediaTemple Cluster 2 outage here: http://tinyurl.com/d8p2zx #
  • Hahaha, I mention @mosso in a tweet and they start following me. Any chance of a discount for referring the spoils of (mt)’s failure? #
  • For anybody affected by #mediatemple downtime. You can force your server to point to a (dv) if you add the domain to account center as a … #
  • RT @brennannovak: A blog dedicated to the #mt_downtime for @mediatemple customers http://bit.ly/mtcustomers msg me if u want to contribute! #
  • Retweeting @SteveReynolds: Open Letter to MT on behalf of MediaTemple Outage Sufferers : http://tinyurl.com/asycd2 #
  • moving all my data to (dv) a little extra downtime is not going to be a problem I have been down over 36 hours. @mediatemple epic fail. #
  • From an morning of RoR to an afternoon of JAVA, now I remember how much I hate java. #

Twitter Updates for 2009-03-01

A Bad Week For The Cloud.

gfail

The world is abuzz with talk of the next big thing in computing, the cloud. Well this week my experiences have told me one thing, the cloud sucks, it is the biggest pile of BS since the bailout of the banks.

First, Google Mail (gmail for the US) failed. Leaving customers both on hosted and the standard accounts, then my favourite hosting provider of nearly 5 years fails on me, there (gs) or GridService. The cloud based shared hosting system, which I decided to put some of my clients on to allow rapid scaling or as it has turned out rapid failing.

fail

The storage cluster of which my server is a part has failed, in a whale like fashion – Spewing its entrails all over the server. Thankfully my managerie of dedicated servers are still up and running, but I hadn’t transferred the remainder of the sites out of the (gs). Meaning the biggest of all my sites is no down for the count, and has been down for over 24hrs.

I love (mt) mediatemple, and there support staff are not doubt taking flak from every corner. But, I would really appreciate it if I could edit my DNS entries so I can get something up to explain to customers what the hell is going on, and no we haven’t gone bankrupt.

I would like to add, that I still would recommend mediatemple to anyone, but just not the (gs). If you want cloud Amazon EC2 or mediatemple (cs) when its out is what you want.

MediaTemple Cluster2 Status

TechCruch GFail