Gary Jones

I realised a few days ago that this final week has got just about all of the regular social activities in it that I’ve been doing over the last 8 months or so.

Monday

Squash: I’ve played against the following people during my time here: Tim, Tom, Ian, Paul, Jonathan, Arvin, Dave, and Katie. I used to play squash for a couple of years at school - nothing great, but I did enjoy the running around. I’ve certainly seen my level of squash improve again since I’ve been here, and that’s due to playing those who are better than me, and watching others to see what shots they do! Thoroughly enjoyed my squash once or twice a week, and really helped the fitness level.

Tuesday

Badminton: As well as the regular Friday badminton, over the last two months or so, I’ve been running a free badminton workshop at the Klebang 8 condo, for anyone who wants to join. Not that I’m amazingly brilliant at badminton myself, but I know enough to be able to pass on some tips for those who are just beginning and want a greater understanding so they can enjoy the games more. I’m really happy with how this has gone - everyone has improved greatly, but I’m going to single out Maria has being the person I think has improved the most. Well done to her, and the others who have also been coming regularly and practising: Sarah, Anne, Tina, Alina, Sima, and also Brenda, Miho, Kazumi, Katy, (and some other names I’ve forgotten) who came to a few sessions.

Swimming / playing with M and others: Sarah brings her daughter M (and son, D) to the Ocean Palms pool a couple of times a week. Now I don’t enjoy doing boring lengths (although I did enjoy it more once I’d bought new goggles) in the pool, but I do enjoy throwing the kids around and keeping them entertained. It gets me out in the sun, and it gives the mums a break! Interesting to watch the jealousy of 4 year old girls erupt as M, E and C fight over who gets thrown next! (Initial only for the kids’ names.)

Tandoori: Although there are probably many restaurants doing Indian food in and around Melaka, the one that took our fancy was Pak Putra at Taman Jalan Kota Laksamana Seksyon Satu (which translates, literally, as garden road fort admiral section one, but means, probably, Section 1 of the Admiral Fort Road area). Nice food, cheap, and would probably have gone there more often if it wasn’t quite so far away.

Wednesday

Coffee Morning: A regular fortnightly meeting of the Melaka Ladies. There’s food, drink, chat, and a nice view

Mahjong: Between 3 and 8 of us turn up each week and invade Christine’s or Margaret’s place for the Mahjong game. Note that while the Mahjong solitaire games you play on the computer use the same tiles, it’s nothing like the proper game (Western or Chinese) of Mahjong. Think of it as a bit like the card game Rummy. You make sets and runs (pungs/kongs and chows) and there’s 80-odd special hands as well. A book is required to remember these!

Spring Corner: Thanks to Harry and Christine, the regular trip to the local Chinese restaurant has been going just about every Wednesday since we got here. It may not look the best, and many would carry on by if they saw it, but I’ve yet to find anything wrong with the food at all, except maybe the portions are too big!

Futsal: Something I didn’t start until a bit later into my time here, but this 5-a-side football game has been really enjoyable, and we’ve even had a tournament or two thrown in as well. Some really friendly guys there, most of who work with Katie. Has really helped with my fitness as well. Thanks to Dave for taking me along to it!

Thursday

Craft Morning: Now I’m not a craft-y person, or even a person who likes crafts. Art was my least favourite subject at school, and I have little patience for creating anything out of bits of paper or material. I have been going to the craft mornings as a social event though - back to the cakes, tea and company again. Loni, Amy, Michelle, Gaby, Janelle, Christine and some others I didn’t know so well.

Berts / Cliff’s’/ Quiz: Bert’s Garden and Sunset Retreat (Cliff’s) are right next door to each other, just down the road, and are owned by brothers (or at least members of the same family). These have been filled with ex-pats since the engineering project Katie is working on began. Sometimes Cliff’s gets popular, other times they’ll head to Bert’s instead. The food is much the same, although Bert’s slightly edges it. Cliff has fought back with some re-decoration and bar improvements, and is also the host of the monthly quiz night that started a couple of months ago. The team I was in won the first quiz, so we got to run the second quiz (well, Harry did the hard work, I just helped on the night). The next quiz is tonight.

Now although it’s obvious I’m not working whilst I’ve been out in Malaysia, is your social week as packed as this?

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Back in January I wrote a post about all the web projects that I wanted to work on whilst I wasn’t working. Here’s an update for each of those:

This very blog - I’ve recently changed themes, and it needs updating to fit in with how I want it to look. In fact I eventually want to turn this whole garyjones.co.uk site into something that’s run completely with WordPress.

Well, the site runs on the latest version of WordPress, but apart from breaking one or two things, I don’t think an amazing lot has changed - a few bits, but nothing dramatic. The changes I did make were done to the theme file itself, instead of creating a child theme - so at some point, I’ll reinstall a clean version of the theme, and apply my changes to a separate theme - or I’ll just start with the Sandbox theme and change that all around instead.

I have recently started posting a bit more regular on the site, and I have also added Entrecard (future post to follow when I’ve seen how well it works) to the site as well. The topics are all over the place, but I consider my target audience to be those in the Gary Jones niche area.

MNNC.net has recently had WordPress added to it, so that as part of the re-design, I can use WP as a CMS. I’m supposedly using Basecamp from 37 Signals to keep track of the project.

This MNNC site got abandoned halfway through the re-design, and I haven’t felt obliged to go fix it. The front page directs to a search page, so although my SEO is probably shot to pieces, it *is* still usable. The use of Basecamp consequently got abandoned as well - I’m sure it’s of use to a lot of projects, but working on my own, it wasn’t for me.

For the Battrick game I play, I’ve developed some resources that have become popular within the BT community. I eventually want to integrate it more into the rest of this blog site with WP, as well as still develop the resources that exist.

The resources have developed little due to a potential conflict of interest (see below).

The Battrick site itself could do with some front-end code updating, so instead of moaning about it, I decided to do some investigations and tests to offer comprehensive examples and feedback on how the site could be improved.

This is where most of my development time has been spent. The powers that be and I agreed that I could become a developer for the Battrick site itself - this meant that I could implement some of the stuff that I’d been suggesting, both on my site, and within Battrick itself. Due to the dynamic nature of development, and some limitations on the setup and resources available, not all of my suggestions have been implemented, but a lot of other stuff has been done instead. Due to the upcoming 6-8 week enforced break as my PC gets shipped home, followed by having to re-join the real world and find a job etc., then my time spent volunteering for Battrick will be severely cut.

My Development section is another section I want to add to integrate into WordPress. Lots of template customisation needed, along with some CSS, so I can keep my code examples.

Some of this got done, but I still think there’s outstanding stuff.

Leovanna.co.uk is my Dad’s site that I built, but we now want WordPress to run the whole site, but only look like it’s running the news section. Some templates and static pages will help with that, once I’ve worked out exactly what I’m doing with the MNNC.net site. I’ll also need to find some suitable plugins too.

Well, it did get partly developed - it’s got the latest version of WordPress, and only the news section shows up in a chronological setting - once the CSS design and page templates are done (child theme again!), then this will complete.

I had an “epiphany” this morning, as Katie called it, and thought of a new tool that I would find useful for myself. I often review websites to give constructive criticism on how they can be improved, and this webReviewer tool (I haven’t got the cheek to call it webReviewr in Web 2.0 style) would allow an easier way of writing it up, as well as giving reminders of areas to check. I’ve drawn out some ideas, but not produced anything yet.

The last 4 words still apply.

All in all, had I not become a developer for Battrick, then a lot more of the other stuff would have been done. The Battrick stuff was exciting to me though; I’d originally started with (classic) ASP before moving on to PHP, so this was like going back and re-learning the syntax, but also in getting to see how a production server and database is set up and run. It certainly broadened my horizons and abilities, and I’ll be including it on my CV, even though it wasn’t a paid job. It’s all experience.

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Every fortnight, the Melaka Ladies (a group of ex-pats and local females) meet for a coffee morning. As an honorary member of the group, I usually tag along. Though not every guy’s way to spend a morning, you’ll be suprised at the gossip and interesting things you find out about whilst there (shoes and breastfeeding-related things excluded). As there are four of us due to leave soon, we had a coffee morning leaving do. Most of the photos were taken by Maria; you can find these and the rest of the set in her Facebook Album (click to see the full image).

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