Nicholas Perkins

Lap Band Surgery/Eating Disorders and LoudMouth Golf Pants

Nicholas Perkins — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:43:18 +0000

Today I discuss why it’s important to think carefully about Lap Band Surgery, especially if you have an eating disorder. I also plead for LoudMouth Golf Pants to make me some pants in my size!

ETA: These are the pants I want so bad!

Loudmouth Pants - Sand

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Welcome to Today Tonight watchers!

Nicholas Perkins — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:40:50 +0000

A big welcome and hello to those of you who have come through to my blog from the Today Tonight website after the story they ran tonight discussing fat fashions.

I cover a number of topics on this blog, including fat fashion and fat acceptance. However most of the blogging that I do on fat fashion and fat acceptance is over at Axis of Fat. In fact there is a whole group of Australian people who blog over there on the issues they face finding clothes, dealing with society’s discrimination against fat people and other topics of interested.

Please check out the Axis of Fat and also take a look around my site. Once again, welcome and thanks for checking this place out!

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I’m appearing on Today Tonight, tonight!

Nicholas Perkins — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:39:06 +0000

I have crawled from my sick bed to let you all know that I will be appearing on Today Tonight tonight discussing the issue of why fashion excludes sizes 16+.

Tune in tonight from 6:30pm, Channel 7 and have a look at what I and others have to say on the issue. When I can find a copy online to embed on the site, I’ll be sure to do so!

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Blogging is sometimes hard to do

Nicholas Perkins — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:59:12 +0000

I’ve not been blogging recently as I’ve been struggling to find reasons to. Normally something would make me outraged and I would blog about it. Then I started to post Excel stuff in order to share what I know about Excel. I got stuck after a while and that fell away as well.

Blogging is a really interesting thing to try and do on a regular basis. It takes a lot of hard work to come up with good topics to talk about regularly. One thing I have learnt is that I really need to blog about the things that interest me most. Talking about things that really get me revved up (so to speak) will help me to blog more regularly.

I keep saying that I need to work on a new blog layout, but I think I’d be better off working on what sort of content I want first. Then the layout can be done.

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Poll – Does the tld really matter?

Nicholas Perkins — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:56:13 +0000

I’m running a poll on a question I’ve been pondering recently. I won’t go into it other than to put the poll in for now. I don’t want to cloud your thinking one way or the other.

If you want to wade into this more than the poll allows, leave some comments. I’d love to discuss this with you.

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Testing Excel expressions with the IF function

Nicholas Perkins — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:03:59 +0000

I figured it was time for another Excel tutorial. This time I’m looking at the IF function. IF is really just like it would be in a sentence. If A=B then “something”, else “something else”. The syntax is :

=if(logical_test,value_if_true,value_if_false)

Check out the video for more.

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Is Drupal the best CMS/Framework available?

Nicholas Perkins — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:51:29 +0000

It’s Sunday morning in the Perkins household. My wife, Natalie, is fast asleep still after having a nightmare (should I be sharing that? Oh well) and I’m pondering the future of my website. As you might remember, I moved my blog to http://www.nicholasperkins.com/blog/ a few week ago, and there was a reason for this.

Recently I’ve been working with Drupal a lot. I worked on getting Natalie’s new portfolio site up and looking awesome (if I do say so myself). Drupal is not really a CMS, although it can be used as one. Drupal is more of framework that gives web developers the tools to create very complex sites without having to hand code thousands of lines of PHP.

In the case of Natalie’s site, I still needed to hack into some of the modules code, wrote a few lines of customer PHP database lookups to create the dynamic sub-menu and a few other bits and bobs. What I didn’t need to do is create an entire CMS from scratch. When I wanted to have a new content type for her portfolio images, I didn’t need to design the database structure and code the posting and editing and whatever else functions. Drupal just made it happen.

So I’m now considering moving my blog across to Drupal as part of a larger site redesign. I’m currently looking at creating a main website for my Excel and PHP development business, which is why I moved the blog. It will be a few months before I have the design and content ready to go up though, but that gives me plenty of time to get Drupal into shape.

What I am wondering is whether I should transfer my blog into Drupal and away from Wordpress.

Wordpress is probably the best blogging software I have ever used. The interface is clean and easy to use, the plugin and themes are so easy to install, configure and “just work”. When I helped Natalie with http://www.axisoffat.com/ (it’s on Drupal as well) I wondered if it was really the best option. It did work out in the end but it required more fluffing around to get it to work just the way we wanted it to.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on both Drupal and Wordpress, but also any other CMS/Framework solutions you have used. The decision on what I use for my own site is critical. Whatever I choose I will have to work closely with and become and expert at using and modifying as required so that I can offer similar services to my clients.

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Exetel to ban P2P abusers – excellent!

Nicholas Perkins — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:09:16 +0000

Ben Grubb over at It News has reported that Exetel is planning on banning P2P use (that is Bittorrent, Limewire, Kazaa (does that even exist still?), etc) during their off-peak period. I’m not surprised that John Linton, the founder and CEO of Exetel is considering such drastic measures, however I was concerned for my ability to download Linux ISOs at night. (Yes, all P2P is Linux ISOs — didn’t you know?)

At the beginning of this month, our off-peak time was trimmed from 12am-12pm to 2am-12pm. This was to stop a phenomenon that would basically kill the entire Exetel network at midnight. People just have to have that latest Linux ISO at 12:01am so start all of their downloads at the very start of off-peak. No worries, except people who wanted to browse web pages, use VOIP or do anything else suffered.

As John has mentioned many times over on his blog, most downloads would be finished by 12:30am or 1am and the network would be back to normal speeds. Despite years of trying to fix it, nothing worked.

This was a great cost to Exetel, who would continue to try different ways to combat this, including a P2P cache, asking for downloaders to be fair and push back their downloads and purchasing a ton of bandwidth they didn’t need except for that half hour. Seems this new tactic worked. So since most souls are in bed by 2am, they bit the bullet and moved off-peak back.

So what about the threat of banning all P2P during off-peak? Well this would only be after November, and only after they move back to a 12am-12pm off-peak period. And only if you choose that period over 1am-1pm or 2am-2pm. And it’s only banned during the first two hours. And it’s self-regulated.

A whole lot of ands really.

So I can have 60Gb of downloads over half of the month, and I either avoid P2P for two hours (which I was doing anyway voluntarily after a request another previous post from John) or move my off-peak to 2am-2pm, which since we are late risers would help us out anyway. Woah, I better get the tin foil hat out.

I still find Exetel to be extraordinary value. They usually have good service, and if it is bad they will be upfront and admit their issue. They aren’t for the faint hearted, as you have to know your stuff well and live with a support culture expecting you to find your own help in the forums, but if you can live with that you will get more from them than your regular ISP.

Free SMS from the web, they do email to fax and fax to email ($1 a month – wtf?), and more. I love them. I really do.

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Excel Tutorial – COUNTIF

Nicholas Perkins — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:36:27 +0000

Have you ever had a spreadsheet with 150 lines of data and you need to know how many times “Red” appears in a cell? The COUNTIF function in Excel is for you. Here is a run through of how you can use this in your spreadsheets.

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Excel Tutorial – Using SUMIF

Nicholas Perkins — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:41:16 +0000

Welcome to my first, of hopefully many, tutorial on how to use Excel’s SUMIF() function. My first ever YouTube video too – how very geeky. This function works the same in both Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.

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