Byte Night was started in 1998 with just 25 attendees. The event was organized by National Children’s Homes (NCH) to help raise money in support of young people who are coping with abandonment or facing homelessness. Each year IT professionals throughout London gather to sleep outside and raise money for the organization.

Since the standard goal for individual sleepers was set at £2,000, it would not have been possible to me to raise the necessary funding in time for the event, especially since I found out about it just three weeks prior to the deadline. Nevertheless, I thought Byte Night was a creative way to give back to the community, so I decided I would volunteer and join in on the fun.

Byte Night helped to give some much needed visibility to homeless children and was a great networking opportunity for those who participated. Throughout the night I was assigned to sell drink vouchers to the sleepers. The atmosphere was refreshingly social and seemed increasingly so as the night went on while more wine was consumed. At one point, Dell took on HP in a trivia challenge… and won. I even had the opportunity to discuss Google’s competitive market prospects with a few Micro$oft account managers.

I’ll be sure to update this with the total amount raised.

Expect to see some content expansions in the near future. I felt slightly guilty about neglecting this site for so long, so I decided to do something about it.

Based on some good advice from a friend, I’ve decided to include an RSS feed link for this site (it’s hiding in the “Meta” section, which will soon be renamed). After all, every good blogger and technology evangelist uses RSS, so it seemed like a good idea. Additionally, Wordpress provides native support for blog feeds so it was simply a matter of creating a hyperlink.

Somewhere into the process I decided it might be interesting to see if I could outdo myself… Following the popular crowd, I decided to switch my RSS feed over to Feedburner. It’s free, easy to setup and quite powerful. The migration was extremely simple with no complications. Feedburner updates and auto formats the feed every 30 mins or so. It also provides visitor tracking and support for linked media objects such as podcasts. Needless to say, it’s quite impressive.

To test the setup, I added my feed into Google Reader. The first test went well and all of my posts were downloaded from my site. I was a little curious to see how quickly Google Reader updated itself so I created a test post on my main page…

Evidentially, Google Reader didn’t like that very much. While Feedburner updated almost instantly, Google Reader failed to pull any site updates. Instead, I was left with the same previous posts I had before I created the test post. After playing around with both services for a while, I still can’t seem to understand the problem. I have yet to test my RSS feed with another reader but I’m hoping it will work.

At this point I’m not sure if it’s a Feedburner error or just Google Reader but either way, I’m not happy. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication but so far, it hasn’t been really simple… Perhaps my internet tubes are becoming clogged… Maybe I should just write a letter to Ted Stevens and praise him for his stance opposing net neutrality?

On second thought, I would prefer not to be seen defending the ignorant.

• The Downloads section now contains a listing of popular freeware programs that I have found to be highly useful over the years. I will strive my best to keep them as up to date and complete as possible.
• I enlisted the help of Google to utilize several of their services. Using Google’s apps for your domain service I have created a themed start page and transitioned to domain wide gmail. I am also using Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for SEO analysis. Google’s tools are highly useful, configurable and scalable. I am firmly convinced that Google is one of the greatest assets of the internets.
• After several failed attempts, I have finally managed to sync my growning music library with my web server. The solution was to use someone else’s internet… It appears that the FTP issues I was having are all related to Wenworth’s policies on bandwidth management. Although it may be a great product, I am becoming increasingly more annoyed with PacketShaper.
• I am working hard on updating my resume and the About Me section of this site. In the meantime I appreciate your comments and I will post further updates as they happen.

Thanks for visiting.
-Ryan

It hasn’t all been champagne and strawberries (English joke)… I originally attempted to design the site from scratch. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know a fair bit more than the average person when it comes to a computer, but I don’t know jack shit when it comes to .CSS. The funny thing is, it’s quite a simple language. Like seriously. I just can’t code.

So after a few failed attempts, I settled on Wordpress. I’m completely in love. It’s an amazingly powerful and equally fantastic content management solution. With that having been said, I’m curious to see how much I can develop this site over the next few months. We’ll see.

-Ryan