Smoke Free for over three weeks!

Hurrah. Today is the 22nd day of my latest attempt to become a non-smoker (hopefully my final attempt).

Really good now. Had a horrible smokers cough for most of week 3, plus sinusitis for a fortnight (weeks 2+3) - according to mum this is what happened to her, just milder (mind you, she smoked for a lot longer).

Getting hungry more. Turning to chewing gum and Jelly Beans. All good.

Today's Twitter #FollowFriday bit

For today's #FollowFriday I'm going to recommend @DuncanBannatyne (I'm a bit of a fan) and @DuaneJackson - because of his recent (and interesting blogs about Sage Live).

As ever, you can follow me / Mattched IT on Twitter.

My desk. DOH.

I've been somewhat slack on the blogging front. Therefore, here is a pic of my desk, which I took this morning to post on a forum (long story - well - no - actually a short story, but one I can't really be bothered to tell).

Film: Jumper

Well. Could have been a LOT worse.

It was actually not bad. Although that was after half a bottle of wine and a curry, and I had a strong desire for brandy (or similar) once the film had finished. Not sure if that was the film's fault, though.

Not bad. Although it didn't really 'get going' - it started mid-paced, continued mid-paced, and ended a little abruptly, really. If it had contained a bit more substance, I would have said that the ending was deliberate so as to leave a second film viable - however, I don't think thats particularly likely.

In short - if it is on TV, or you are offered it as a lend - it's worth watching when nothing else is available. You won't rue wasting 2-3 hours of your life, as with some other films (Golden Compass - pfah). Do not part with money on the behalf of Jumper, though - that you would regret.

A picture. Albeit a rubbish, old one.

Yes. I've finally attached a picture to my blog - along with some other online bits and pieces.

It's a few years old, though. I'll be getting a new one soon when I exchange my UK driving licence for a Jersey one (must remember to do VERY soon), though.

Invalid Postback or Callback argument

I'm going to post this one, because it caused us a little bit of pain recently. The error itself, and one of the (seemingly common) causes are so disconnected from each other that it really can be quite baffling.

Therefore:

We had the following. This happened only in IE (Firefox coped fine), when a LinkButton was clicked in a .NET page.

Invalid postback or callback argument. Event validation is enabled using in configuration or <%@ Page EnableEventValidation="true" %> in a page. For security purposes, this feature verifies that arguments to postback or callback events originate from the server control that originally rendered them. If the data is valid and expected, use the ClientScriptManager.RegisterForEventValidation method in order to register the postback or callback data for validation.

If this happens to you, the first thing you should check is simple.

Do you have more than one form in the page? Is one form nested inside the other?

That's what we had (DOH) - taking out the inner form, and all will be hunky dory.

Not that two forms is valid anyway - it was just a regular joe c*ck up - but nonetheless, I thought it was particularly unhelpful of .NET to spew out an irrelevant error!

#FollowFriday on Twitter

Here we go - something new every day - or at least every week.

If you go to this twitter search for #followfriday you'll see a massive list of recommendations. Essentially 'follow friday' is a sort of game played on the twitter network where users recommend other users as "good to follow" - incredibly this takes place on Friday, hence the name 'Follow Friday'.

The # infront signifies a Twitter Topic, and seems to impact how things are indexed for searching, and so forth.

Incidentally, you can follow Mattched IT on Twitter here.

Meet George. He's approximately 5ft tall, and has lived in our bedroom for some time - this is just for all the people who have not seen him yet!

A whole year in a month?

Hmm. I started my blog in 2006. If you scroll down and look to the right, you'll see I made 17 posts in 2006 (think most of that was at the end of the year, and I started the blog quite late).

That means so far in Jan 2009 I've made as many blog posts as I did in 2006!

I admit that isn't a useful fact, though.

Jersey Telecoms begins 8mb Broadband Trial

Very newsworthy if you live in Jersey. Finally, we are at risk of catching up with the rest of the world!

Jersey Telecoms are trialling 8mb Broadband.

Not sure when it will become publicly available, though!

A busy few days!

Wow. OK. I'm still not smoking (yay) - coming up for two weeks. I believe my personal record is at three weeks, so some sort of celebration will be due at the one month point.

Beyond that, I haven't been blogging because work has been rather busy. In addition to some work on a rather exciting customer project (can't really blog about it here, or yet) - we have been doing some advance publicity for a new project.

Our Handmade Crafts Directory site will hopefully become a wonderful resource for UK based crafters (and those who appreciate handmade goods) - giving them space to promote themselves and their wares, and also helping to build a community dedicated to furthering the interests of local products - and local artists.

More news will be made available via the Handmade Crafts Facebook Page as soon as possible!

Eating out in Jersey: Jaipur

A very honourable mention to the Jaipur Indian restaurant - we had a lovely dinner there last night (they were also busy, for a Tuesday night - and had a few tables of 1).

The Machky noodles and Lamb Vindaloo are highly recommended!

A smoke-free week!

Hurrah. Made it through a week, smoke free (even if I came down with sinusitis at the end). Even went to the pub and for a curry without struggling!

Feeling very good about it all.

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Calzone Night: A success!

We had a Calzone night the other night - you know - those sort of folded pizzas. However, to make it more interesting than it might have been otherwise, we made them completely from scratch, ourselves.

For the base you'll need to make some standard bread dough, then after letting it proove for at least an hour, roll it out into quite flat circles. Then you can stuff it, crimp the crust and bake for 20-25 mins. Lovely stuff.

Also made some tomato sauce by roasting two packs of vine tomatoes with a huge red pepper and several cloves of garlic - passed through a mill to remove the skins, then blended with some tomato puree. Add fresh basil when putting into pizza - not when roasting!

We did three fillings:

Gammon ham (which had been fried, then soaked to de-salinate it a bit) with homemade tomato sauce, mushrooms and mozzarella

Mixed pepperoni/salami with tomato sauce and mozzarella

Fried onions (well sweated in a saucepan, until they go all gooey and yellowish - like fairground hotdog onions), with slices of artichoke heart and anchovies

Odd as it sounds, the third one was probably my favourite - and it was inspired by a recipe featured on UKTV Food - Rick Stein's French Odyssey.

Film: Flushed Away

We watched Flushed Away yesterday. Well. Most of it. We both fell asleep for a bit in the middle - which perhaps says more than I can in the rest of this post!

It wasn't bad - probably quite good for the kids, but lacking something for adults - I love those sort of 'kids movies with a bit of humour twisted in for the grown-ups - and this wasn't really one of them.

Decent, and worth watching, though.

Find Mattched IT on Twitter!

Thats right - just posting a short note here - Mattched IT (via me) now post to Twitter on a semi-regular basis. You can see the latest updates here on my blog, you can follow MattchedIT on Twitter or you could go to read the official Mattched IT Blog which also has a post about this!

Stopping Smoking: Day 5

Well, it is the dawn of day five, and it's freezing! That aside, all is going well. I've started to notice that tobacco smoke smells horrible - which can only be a good thing! Apart from that, little to report - it hasn't actually been very hard to date, though I remember last time I had issues around the one week mark.

Lets see what happens this time!

Stopping Smoking: Day 2

Well, here we are - day two. I'm going to do a few more blogs on this topic (until my ultimate 'success' or 'failure'), as it will serve to remind me why I have bothered - a written record of the changes I have noticed. You never know, it might be of value to someone else, though I doubt it!

Yesterday wasn't fun to start with, however, by about 2-3pm, it started to get a lot easier. I did eat quite a lot more crap (particularly Jelly Beans, which I have now hidden), though.

This morning I noticed a distinctly diminuished "ashtray mouth" effect, which was nice. I also feel slightly less tired than usual, although that may be psychological. One hacking cough attack instead of two - the norm - which was nice.

Encouraging, all in all!

QDOS: Social networking gone mad?

Not sure if this is a cool idea, or social networking gone mad. QDOS is a newish site (in beta), which essentially aggregates data from all your webpages, social networking profiles, bookmark lists, etc, and gives you a sort of "your internet impact" valuation.

You can see my QDOS Profile here. If nothing else, interesting to play with for ten minutes.

Stopping Smoking: Day 1

Cigarettes: Gone.

Boots NicAssist patchs: On Standby (don't really fancy using them after reading the side-effects in the instruction booklet, but we'll see).

Hopefully this time (possibly 3rd, realistically more like 5th-6th) will be the charm..!

Blogging about it to try and give myself some encouragement!

C# .NET Simple Predicate Example

Someone asked me this question the other day, and I had to really think hard about the answer, so I'm going to blog it. That way next time I need to know, I'll have somewhere to look right away - and maybe it'll be useful to someone else!

Assume you have a class "Product" with a property called "SKU".

You have a strongly typed generic collection e.g. List and want to find a matching instance inside it:

string skuToFind = "SKU2";

Product matchingProduct = myCollection.Find(new delegate(Product current) { return current.SKU = skuToFind; });

There you go!

New Year, New Projects

This is going to be an exciting year. Apart from the fact that (flying in the face of common sense, perhaps? Popular opinion, certainly) I keep touting 2009 as "The year of the small business", we have lots going on to keep us busy.

You can read all about MattchedIT's latest projects via our corporate blog, but we have now put holding pages up for:

Handmade Crafts - http://www.handmade-crafts.co.uk
Trade Info - http://www.trade-info.co.uk

.. watch this space (well, not THIS space, but THOSE spaces)!

Film: Alvin and The Chipmunks

We were quite bored yesterday.

So bored that we watched Alvin and The Chipmunks (the movie) on Sky Anytime. Amazingly, it wasn't bad. Not fantastic (don't pay for it), but not bad (worth watching given the chance).

Far better than The Golden Compass, anyway!

Happy New Year

First post of the year (yeah, yeah OK - took me a few days to get around to it) - so - Happy New Year to you all!