Some time ago I stopped using Gmail. I was criticising it increasingly regularly and it seemed only right that I should explore alternatives. The alternative I’ve been settled on since then has been IMAP, in combination with Thunderbird on PC and Mail.app on the Mac. That’s worthy of a separate post at some point, but [...]

It seems that the effectiveness of Akismet for comment spam protection is starting to wane. It still catches huge amounts of spam (need to clear another 1600 spam comments from my cache in Wordpress after I write this) but slowly but surely spam comments are sneaking in.

It seems that spammers are learning that cramming a [...]

On a related note to all of this employment talk, I’m currently spending summer at home and trying to pay my way by taking on some small-scale web development jobs.

Therefore, if you’ve got some HTML/CSS needs fixing, templates building from Photoshop mockups, CMS theme building, PHP hacking or similar then drop an email to smalljobs@ben-ward.co.uk [...]

There are two things I want to write about, both positively.

Firstly, I’m still job hunting. There are some interesting options on my proverbial table, which I may yet take, but I’m yet to sit bolt upright and say ‘that’s definitely the right thing for me to do’. I’m looking for a large-scale .NET software development [...]

Yes, the official conclusion to my university years is upon us and I’ll be back in Manchester for the day on Monday 10th for my Graduation. It’s strange, for a long time I was a bit indifferent towards graduation, perhaps I’d just not really thought about it very much. Now I’m quite keen to stop [...]