The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

My new profile picture

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I started out this morning with the realization that I’m not ready to go to China.  A visa for China requires 6 months time remaining on your passport.  Mine is due to expire in a few months.  So, I need to renew my passport, transfer my UK visa to the new passport, and apply for a China visa.  This is going to time-consuming and expensive.

One thing I really needed was some passport photos.  The London U.S. Embassy site puts the fear of God into you about not having the right type of photos:  “Don’t get them from a machine.”  “Make sure they comply with standards.” “Any problems with the photos and your application will be REJECTED!”  So, I decided to use one of the photographers they recommended.

I went to a tiny place at Charing Cross called The ID Photo Shop (http://idphotoshop.co.uk ).  It’s a nice little hard-to-find place in the Charing Cross underground station.  It’s not a chain, but they have a nice informative website. 

The shop is hard to find.  On entering it looks like a sandwich shop—I think the business shares the location with another shop.  I actually walked into the place and asked the sandwich guy to take my picture.  He directed me around the corner to talk to the guy who runs the other id photo place.

It is run by a guy named Samir.  He knew all about the photos I needed for my US Passport and for the Chinese visa application. 

In addition to passport photos, the shop also advertised “professional photos”.  I asked what this was (I’m ever the hayseed sometimes) and he told me that this is what people use to put on CVs and media types use it for press releases etc. 

I have been having a hard time finding a new photo for this blog and other places like Facebook, etc.  It was a big self-indulgence, but I asked if he could make a professional photo for me.  After he took the passport photos (no smile—not even a smirk!), he took about a dozen photos for my professional picture.  He talked me through various poses and let me choose one I like afterwards.  The price for this picture?  Same as the passport photos: £4.95.  It’s much better than anything I could have done on my own and I think about as well as any portrait studio could have done for much more money.

So, here’s the new look as compared to my old pic.  I’m not used to looking at pictures of myself, but I think Samir did a great job.

image iphone 231
Old picture (taken by me)

New picture

Yeah.  I’m getting older.

This place is hard to find, but well worth the visit if if you need a “professional” picture.

It was a nice find and I highly recommend it.

Moving On . . . Again

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For the past couple of years, I’ve been working a contract for an investment bank.  I finish up in 5 weeks.  It was a nice work with good pay.  The people are great.  I was very comfortable doing it.

I was working for a company that I had worked for before.  This time around, I used some of my experience with offshore development and helped set up the offshore development team.  I helped introduce SVN and we stumbled through collaboration in the enterprise.  It started out being very difficult and challenging, but then got easier and easier as the offshore team became more confident and didn’t really need me around much at all.  It’s bittersweet– I’m proud of how well they are progressing while seeing myself fade more and more into the shadows.  All as it should be.

But it’s time to move on.  More challenges await. 

One of the tough decisions of being a contractor is knowing when to leave for something more challenging.  Every time a contract comes up for renewal, the client has to decide if they want to keep you and you have to decide whether you should stay on.  If money were the only consideration, the choice would be easy–just stick with a job until they stop paying you.  But stay in a place too long and your skills start to wane.  You become a company guy instead of an industry guy. 

The market changes and you have to adjust to it.  If you stay in one place too long, you end up stranded.  This philosophy has worked for me so far.  In technology, as in so much else, diversity it king.

Plesk Upgrade messed up Mysql and PHP

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My site was down for a little over a day because I upgraded Plesk to version 9 on my VPS.  It caused the PHP and Mysql adaptor to stop working.  The site gave me this error:

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

It took me more about an hour Googling this to find out what the issue was.  Plesk modified my php.ini fil while upgrading. 

The guy that helped me the most was Donncha O Caoimh which his blog post on Holy Shmoly: “Cannot load mysql extension. Please check your PHP configuration“.  I’m really glad he posted that.  I’ve never met him, but he really helped me out.

Problem solved in less than an hour.  5 years ago, before the blogging explosion, this problem would have taken me days to resolve (at least!).  Thanks to Donncha.