1. September 2008: I won a Sagem MY721X “So Ice” for emailing Ben Smith “Ben Smith is the best presenter on Mobile Industry Review”.
2. December 2008: I won a Dell Mini 9 netbook from Mobile Industry Review’s Christmas Presents competition.
3. June 2009: I won a Nokia N97 from The Really Mobile Project’s WeekOfWin competition.
4. November 2009: I won a Sonim XP3 Land Rover phone from Mobile Industry Review.
5. June 2010: I won an HTC HD2 as part of a team entering Microsoft’s MyKindOfPhone competition.
6. Yesterday (July 2010): I won a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro from SE’s “insiders” competition.

So please, forward me any phone competitions you hear about because I really like entering them!

Funnily enough. Even though I win so many phones, it doesn’t stop me buying another every time my contract runs out:

• 2005: HTC BlueAngel
• 2007: HTC Touch
• 2008: HTC Diamond
• 2009: HTC Dream
• 2010: HTC Desire

I really ought to sell one or two of these!

I wish I could learn more every day. That’s going onto my non-existant daily checklist. I best get that started.

Daily checklist:

• Do a good deed
• Learn something new

I’ll have to expand that! :¬)

Note: all spelling mistakes are left in on purpose.

We arrived in Snowdonia and I wasn’t too happy. I didn’t fancy climbing the same mountain Again. My brother had already walked off to an odd building that looked like a villa to pay for parking.

When he came back, it was decided I would go home because I wasn’t in the mood.

And how might I do that?

By the “15 minute walk to Dunkirk”. Who what?

I began following the walker signposts for Dunkirk but soon found I was on the wrong side of the fence. By this time an old man caught up with me and I decided to jump the fence to join him.

The next stretch of the fence was covered in barbed wire. I have no idea why. To make things interesting, it also became a tunnel with barbed wire as a roof which began to get lower as we progressed.

Eventually this barbed wire gave way but the enclosed crawling space within the fence remained. At this point the old guy gave up and said he would go back instead.

Following so far?

As I crawled along, the floor became slopes upwards on a ramp made of what could perhaps have been kid’s play pen nalls, mostly blue ones. I had to move a lot of them out of my way as I continued my crawl upwards.

Pausing to rate in my surroundings, I realized that I was completely surrounded by beautiful bright sky. I fancied taking a photo but I couldn’t reach into my pocket to get my phone.

So I carries on instead.

Now the play pen balls completely gave way, as did the fence, and I was now walking up a staircase that reminded me strongly of a subway station. Up ahead were about 8 kids sat around looking scruffy and asked me something inaudible as I passed.

I had reached Dunkirk train station at last! (All in about 2 minutes).

I felt lost, so I consulted a sign which appeared to hold a map is the station.

The map reminded me of a university campus, colour coded with different buildings representing he different platforms.

As I grew more confident reading the map, an old teacher from my secondary school approached me, called me by my name, and asked if I knew if this was the correct platform to get to London.

It wasn’t.

The end.

Funny how dreams work.

This blog post has mostly been about me practicing typing on my new phone. I wonder how many mistakes are in here.

My apologies if you read this :)

This morning I posted to Twitter:

T-Mobile want to charge me £170 to upgrade to an HTC Desire. Yet another reason I’ll probably switch to Vodafone next month.

£170 for the upgrade, on a contract that was already costing me about £30 every month? No thank you very much.

People can say what they like about Twitter but it’s great when I start getting responses like these, it makes it a great place for me:

gavinlew: speak to @vodafoneukdeals for a good deal on a htc desire – there is a nice guy called Ben who is helping me out

artesea: if you want I can get you 30% the line rental on any (standard) tariff. Makes £35 a month only £24.50

VodafoneUKdeals: We can do the Desire FREE on 18 month 300mins unlimited sms and data for £30 all in [and] artesea’s staff discount would still be available on the £30 offer saving you even more! :-) ^BH

After a quick chat with Vodafone’s Web Relation team, they knocked that £30 monthly contract down to £25 and signed me up. With any luck, artesea (Ryan Cullen) will still be OK giving me that 30% staff discount too.

Here’s a random graph I thought I’d put together just for the fun of it:

Hooray for the interweb!

Ghost: Silenced UMP45, claymores, stuns, OMA, Cold Blooded, Ninja
Loud: TAR-21 FMJ, claymores, stuns, OMA, Stopping Power,  Sitrep
Anti-air: Silenced TAR-21, stingers, smoke, Sleight of Hand, Cold Blooded, Ninja
Long: M14A1 Red Dot, claymores, stuns, OMA, Stopping Power, Sitrep
Bang: SCAR w/ nade launcher, semtex, smoke, OMA, Danger Close, Sitrep
Rush: Silenced UMP45,  semtex, smoke, OMA, Lightweight, Ninja

So yes, I do use OMA a lot.

Benefits of One Man Army classes:

• You get infinite equipment and ammo
• You can change your class as often as you like to suit the circumstances.
• You can switch to a Cold Blooded class while enemy UAV or killstreaks are up
• You can switch to an explosive or FMJ class when you know an enemy is occupying a building

Compared to Scavenger:

• OMA uses up the secondary weapon slot. A big drawback but it is manageable.
• Scavenger lets you absorb new ammo faster, but requires you to be nearer the enemy. OMA suits longer distances. That’s especially useful with Search and Destroy matches, since the enemy will know where their team mate died.
• You don’t get the extra ammo clip given with Scavenger Pro

Overall, I’d say OMA best suits slower paced games such as defending in Search and Destroy, since it allows you to quickly set up defences with claymores and C4. I find it works equally well in Team Deatchmatch and other gametypes too, although that does increase the chance of getting caught with your pants down trying to switch class.

Some general tips:

• As I mentioned above, you can shoot down UAV and counter-UAV drones. This helps your team significantly.
• Learn the maps. I went as far as to watch a youtube walkthrough video for each map to learn some of the areas. It made me a much better player on Highrise and opened my eyes to the non-house areas on Estate.
• Aim! 20% of my shots are on target according to the leaderboard stats. Even when I play lasertag games in real life I typically have a higher hit ratio than most others. I can’t say for sure if this is a) because I don’t blindfire bullets all over, or b) because I’m a good shot
• FMJ is a fun weapon addition and really works. I often use FMJ on my Loud build to do clever stuff like a) blindfire through barrels, b) shoot the explosive barrel in the main Afghan bunker from outside – wiping out every in there, c) taking out people in the Terminal plane.
• Blow stuff up. Blow up cars to kill people beside them, blow up any big gas cylinders (especially in Terminal and Highrise) where you know there’s someone camping.
• Lie down to avoid being shot, especially when stunned. More effective against bad players.
• Play dead – works amazingly well sometimes.
• Turn a corner and aim where you expect an enemy to be. When you’re moving you should always be aware of where an enemy might be. There’s a bunker around he next bend? You should be aiming at the window/door already. You’re walking out into the open? Take a brief scan of rooftops or other places you expect to be shot from.
• Move, cover, then move again. Your running distance is fairly short but that’s not a bad thing. Run with the intention of zig zagging (slightly) to cover. Never aim to run all the way down one street without thinking someone probably saw you walk in.
• AC130 lasts 30 seconds. You can a) hide, b) shoot it down with 3 shots from launchers, or c) die lots. I typically go for b.

It took me three hours to drive the 25 minute journey home last night through the extreme weather conditions (2 inches of snow). Luckily I was allowed to leave early so it actually averaged out ok in the end.

So above is my little setup.

• Dell Mini 9 netbook
• hooked up to my 24″ monitor
• with my N97 providing my music for the day
• and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox providing lunch time pressure release

Completely different to my usual remote working setup where I take my 17″ laptop to my girlfriend’s and work from there. Now I just wish that work’s VPN had Windows 7 support.

So today starts the rework. I’ve said this before, but this time I actually have an aim.

An aim? Yep. I want to increase my online presence. In an ideal world this means that a) searching for “david carrington” in various search engines brings back this site as the top result, and b) this site actually contains useful information about me and projects I’m involved with.

This particular blog post is aimed at myself. It’s a pile of textual nonsense inspiring me to do something new: blog frequently! (Can it be done?).

I’ll continue to write about similar topics to the past, but this time I actually want to get something useful blogged each week. That means planning ahead, writing drafts, and putting some daily thought (half hour?) into writing some useful posts. Along the way it will make me look at my own website and think eurgh, that’s butt-ugly! and hopefully make me do some spring cleaning and visual improvements.

Give it a month, you’ll see I fail.

Screen 1: Mr Left

Mr Left is a creator and a developer. He loves code, databases, and image manipulation. This is where all the real work gets carried out. If I’m being productive, I’m working with Mr Left. Left is currently showing me a SQL query. We’ve also been working together in Visual Studio on some reports. He has the windows start menu, so he’s the one that dishes out work to everyone.

Screen 2: Mr Right

Mr Right is about results. He loves websites, files, task management, and emails. As soon as Mr Left has done his thing, he passes the work over to Mr Right to test. Mr Right gets the final say on whether something is right or wrong. If the final result on the Right isn’t good enough, it gets given back to Left to deal with.

But Mr Right has a secret: he’s all about fun and media. He runs Mozilla Firefox and browses the web. He listens to music on Winamp through the day and occasionally watches videos for lunch. He loves to keep in touch with people, through Outlook E-mails, internal IM using Office Communicator, and keeps an eye on the web in general using Google Reader.

Thank you, Mr Left and Right, for making me more productive.