• NPF closed down today.  This was due to what I can only describe as a revolution whereby the posters questioned the administrators justification for the banning of certain users and their handling of criticism.  They then handled the situation in the same way as an infant child would have by posting:
  "As of 9th May 2011, Newcastle Poker Forum will be closed indefinitely to new registrations and new posts."
  I recall being told by the site administrator that my peers and I "weren't worthy of tying his bootlaces".
• As a result of the closure, I felt that an opportunity for a niché poker forum had arisen and spent 3 hours preparing my latest little love child.  The North East Poker forum

Reposted from http://www.nepoker.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=58

Hi guys, and welcome to the North East Poker forum.

I will keep this as brief as I can but thanks for visiting and I hope you find the time to register and post in the NEPF.

What is the North East Poker forum?

The North East Poker forum aims to be a community where poker players from across the north east of England can come together to discuss poker. It will be a open and friendly community; a place to vent about your beats/experiences and hopefully in time a place where we can come together to support games, organise home games & even some road trips to bigger games across the country/world.

What can I find on the North East Poker forum?

The North East Poker forum will contain up-to-date poker schedules for all casino cardrooms in the north east, tournament updates/sweats and results. In time the North East Poker forum will also provide it's own weekly and monthly schedule via Pokerstars home games.

Who Runs the North East Poker forum?

The North East Poker forum is owned by Stephen Groom and co-ran with the help of Gaz Walker.

 

Reposted from http://www.nepoker.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18

Well I guess it's time I explained myself.

Everybody knows the circumstances under which I created this website today. If you are not aware then I will explain very briefly. Since July 2009 I had made a local poker forum my haunt. Unexpectedly on May 9th 2011 the forum closed, and http://www.nepoker.co.uk was born. The old forum closed at around 5pm on the 9th of my and NEpoker was born 3 hours later. I am the founder, and site administrator.

My name is Stephen John Groom and I am a 3rd year student of BA Music Enteprise. I am a live sound engineer by training, a keen poker player in my spare time, a poker dealer by proffession and for the last 8 years I have been the webmaster and/or administrator of a number of websites with varying degrees of success.

Currently across the internet I have my fingers in many pies.
I created and am trying to launch Rent a Producer. A jobs market for freelance sound engineers like myself.
I write a blog fairly infrequently at http://www.groomi.net.
I am playing $3-$5 SNGs at PokerStars semi-professionally (I break even in my spare time).
I also procrastinate on facebook when I am supposed to be working.

If you don't know me already, I am most often seen at Circus or G casinos playing small-stake cash games. I also work at Aspers casino meaning that I definately spend over 50% of my life at live cash game tables.

I look forward to seeing how this community can flourish and develop.

Freelance music jobs website Rent a Producer (www.rentaproducer.com) is officially launched today.  The website aims to provide a network  in which freelance music professionals can connect with clients.

The website has two aims:

• To provide freelance job oppurtunities for music professionals
• To give musicians and other consumers the oppurtunity to advertise music jobs for free

Artists:

• Post projects for free
• Advertise to music professionals worldwide
• Specify project budget
• Use producer rating system to choose the best candidate
• Pay via Rent a Proudcer secure escrow

Producers:

• Search and browse projects for free
• Promote your business and services
• Build an online professional portfolio
• Bid for jobs and recieve ratings & feedback
• Ensure artist pays before work commences with Rent a Proudcer secure escrow

I am very excited about the launch of this website and hope that you are too.  Don't forget to share this news with your colleagues and clients!

Stephen Groom
www.rentaproducer.com

Rent A Producer is a hub where musicians and producers can get together from across the web to compose, record, mix, master and produce music.

The aim of the website is to fill a gap the music industry as a provider of freelance work for sound and music professionals over the internet.

The website is a directory where bands and musicians can advertise projects which require help from a professional.  This can range from writing and arranging a song all the way to mastering an album and distributing it.

This is the first glimpse of the website and it will be continually developed until it's official release in the coming weeks.  Of course the website is useless without content so I urge all artists and producers to visit rentaproducer.com and join this unique service.

Please post suggestions/reviews and comments about the website on this blog and I will be sure to write back.

Thanks
Stephen Groom

http://www.rentaproducer.com

A Review of the Pirated Windows 7

Blogging frequency will improve when I get finished with my current-uber-secretive coding project

Stephen

OpenDNS is a better DNS service. We make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. It's free, and there's nothing to download.

So I went ahead and switched my DNS IPs to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (if you don't know how to do this post a comment below and I'll reply with a guide ).  Straight away a ping to www.groomi.net showed that the problem was with Virgin Media's crappy DNS servers.

One thing that annoyed me though, was OpenDNS' money-making method.  I mis-typed a web address and was instantly greeted with an ugly search page littered with banners: http://guide.opendns.com/?url=www.qwertyuiop.  This alone was enough to put me off using OpenDNS until I discovered that you can register an account at OpenDNS.com which allows you to disable this feature, track your DNS traffic,  Enable/Disable content filtering + phishing protection and much more.

Since finding this I am very happy with the service that OpenDNS offer and would reccomend it to anyone!

My [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URL shortening service[/url] is now completely ready to use. It is not complete in the way that the pages are still very minimal and have no content on them but what is 100% required. I have, however finished all of the backend stuff.

It checks that a URL is valid;
Checks that the URL has not already been shortened, and if it has returns the short URL;
Checks the URL against two blacklists of known malware/phishing sites;
Shortens the URL; and
Gives it to you!

If anyone has any feature suggestions / feedback / bug reports, please post them here as these are the critical stages of the website

Expect more updates tomorrow when I add some more pages and maybe even more features

Thanks
Stephen Groom
[url=http://www.urlshort.com]www.urlshort.com[/url]

I have been a busy boy today and as-promised, I have some [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URLshort[/url] related updates for you guys. The first thing I did today was put together a little logo image and a little bit of XHTML/CSS to come up with the first layout candidate for the [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URLshort[/url] main page. This is available [url=http://www.urlshort.com/index.html]over at urlshort[/url] for you all to see.

After this, I was pretty bamboozled as to how I was going to create my URL generator. I have been looking at TinyURL scripts' source code for days and none met what I needed. They all seemed to involve some use of a random string generator using rand() or mt_rand(). To me this seemed to waste a good amount of CPU time along with creating huge gaps in URL availability. I decided that I wanted my URLs to start at [b]a[/b], get to [b]9[/b] and then go to [b]aa[/b]. After much trial and error I have coded this with the help of [url=http://lilurl.sourceforge.net/]lilurl[/url] which I had a look at and borrowed it's ideas (but not its code) to make a generator of my own.

I have uploaded a little preview of how URLs will be generated and [url=http://www.urlshort.com/inc/inc.php]here it is[/url]! It shows 10,000 URLs and as you can see, there is no chance of us running out of short URLs with this formula!

Tomorrow I will be adding blacklists and hopefully deploying URLshort for the public so stay tuned!

Thanks
Stephen

So, in the not-so-distant future I am going to be starting a new web project using the (I think quite valuable) domain [b]www.urlshort.com[/b]. I intend it to be a tinyurl type service where you can have www.urlshort.com/123 direct to www.myfreehost.com/server1/users/package1/123/go or w/e. If anyone has any suggestions for features they would like to see from the service, please comment here and I will do my best to implement them.

Cheers
Stephen

I don't have much to share today. Just a quick reblog of something I found by accident over at lifehacker.com (A blog which I have since subscribed to ) which gives some tips on how to clean up Firefox 3's Chrome to save vertical space

[url=http://lifehacker.com/396863/how-to-consolidate-firefox-3s-chrome]Consolidate Firefox 3's chrome[/url] helped me shave a good 30px or more from my firefox, and taught me some basic manipulation of userChrome.css (Which until now I didn't even know existed).

I also installed a new RSS Reader today called Sage to my firefox which certainly beats the hell out of "Live Bookmarks" . Check out [url=https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77]Sage[/url]!

I guess while I'm on about firefox I can't help but plug Naresh's [url=http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/]ubiquity[/url] [url=http://enaresh.com/ubiquity]commands[/url] of which I particularly like his php one

Needless to say, I am becoming happier with Firefox and still proudly haven't tried Google Chrome yet :thumbs:

Love
Stephen