We are pleased to announce that Rob has finally made it to the UV^d fold, unharmed from Christmas over-indulgence and raring to get cracking on several of our more pressing projects. Rob has come from IBM after successfully navigating their graduate programme and is fully versed in everything LAMP. Just for the record, he is the first of the UV^d crew to choose Ubuntu as his operating system of choice for his desktop (choice is good right?).

Rob has worked his way into the UV^d circle of trust this week and has earned himself a) Office keys and b) Black n’ Red hardback notebook. He almost shed tear at receiving the latter.

We nearly didn’t write this post because our motivation was at a low point following the disappointment of this month’s cake experience: we look forward to our cake consumption with gusto and feel slightly let down by the latest sweet treat.  I’ll hasten to add that the picture in question is NOT the cake we consumed; we were not motivated to take a photo of said cake which was a “Tesco’s Finest” number which was neither “Fine” nor “Drizzly” but it was from Tesco’s, did have a hint of lemon and probably was a cake so they got some of the name right.

Out of obligation I have written this post as a warning to other would be consumers of the “Tesco’s Finest Lemon Drizzle Cake”; beware of frauds in your midst and avoid at all costs.

Due to our exceedingly long url and potential RSI of the fingers we thought we’d look into a secondary shorter url for UV^d. Naturally we wanted to get uvd.net or uvd.com but being a three letter top level domain it wasn’t going to come cheap.

Companies who in the past have gone through random combinations of letters and bulk bought the equivalent domain names whilst they were a bargain price are essentially in a process of domain name prospecting.

UPDATE: Kirsten has just informed me that this process is actually called Cybersquatting.

Below is the transcript from conversation between Patrick Hamann (PH) and an Anonymous Domain Name Prospector (ADNP):

ADNP:
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for contacting us about uvd.net.
The current asking price for uvd.net is $12888 USD.
As you may already be aware, the demand for and prices of domain names does vary. We periodically have discount promotions available on some of our names, feel free to email or call if you would like to inquire about possible discounts on this domain.

PH:
I'll give you a fiver

ADNP:
Hi Patrick,
What is a fiver?

- And this is where it all gets a bit Terry Tibbs, “Talk to me” -

PH:
Alright, you drive a hard bargain. I'll give you a tenner but thats my final offer.

ADNP:
How many zeros in a 'tenner'?

PH:
One

ADNP:
Let me know when you can add 5 more to that

PH:
How about this 10.00000 ?!

With the recent shock revelation that Mrs Kipling does actually exist and was once an actress in Corontation St we thought we should make sure that the exceedingly good cakes were as good as we remembered.

Safe to say that the despite the implications of some sort of power shift within the Mr Kipling marketing machine, the cakes are still high quality. Just take a look at Patrick’s face. He’s loving that Bakewell.

Halloween special – Mooncake! And what a cake; brought back as a present from Hong Kong this cake holds a dirty little secret. Inside, AKA Scotch egg style is a duck egg yolk. You might think this is normal, ‘cakes are made with egg’ I hear you say. But this one actually has a solid egg in the middle and so deserves another picture (below). Suffice to say that it didn’t go down particularly well in the office. In fact, I was the only one who tried a second bite and certainly the only person to partake in the egg. According to Wikipedia Mooncakes are ‘rich, heavy, and dense compared with most Western cakes and pastries.’ You can say that again.

Still, in the spirit of Halloween, these cakes are for the Zhongqiu Festival for lunar worship and moon watching. So fill your boots!

One of the first blog posts on the UV^d blog was about Java application called Wordle which created pretty looking tag clouds based on word occurrences in blog RSS feeds, del.icio.us accounts or any block of supplied text.

It is quite interesting to see a peripheral snapshot of how a blogs content changes over time. Saves the trouble of reading it all as well.

After 8 years hunkered down in the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, in what can only be described as ‘cosy’ surroundings we have moved to a bigger, brighter, fresher and more creative space! We haven’t moved far (physically) but things are far from the same in our nice new airy, windowed office. We even have a sofa. It’s been a long time coming but it was worth the wait – patience as they say is a virtue.

This is the first of our cake of the month posts. Today we found inspiration from an M&S Coffee & Walnut cake. Whilst discussing the finer details of our ongoing redesign we enjoyed moist coffee flavoured sponge with just the right amount of buttercream. Highly recommended by the whole team.

Future cake of the month reviews will consist of a wide variety of butter filled, sugar coated blog posts. Our intrepid team of eaters will be happy to accept free dessert based gifts from readers who wish to raise the profile of their cake making enterprises. Sponge, pie or flan; biscuit, Battenburg or birthday. We will eat it all. Stay tuned.

On the 15th January 2009 we finally found a new member of staff after 9 months of rigorous interviews. We have been waiting 1 month for him to work his notice period but our new developer- Vandon – started work for us today. He’s doing remarkably good for someone with slightly less experience than we had originally been looking for.