How did I get here?

Ok how random a post title is that and how random is this for a post? You can sort of blame Wahwer & Melonie for this, kind of anyway. I was chatting this morning to my good friend & colleague at work, Susan. We were just chatting about random things, when I go "How Stupid can I be!" (Moogie, Sharon, Melonie & Wahwer - don't even THINK it!!) Refering to a piece of info I'd asked someone for and realised I actually just needed to go look it up again as it's not written down anywhere not even on my PC, how strange eh!
So this then launched somehow into a potted history of how I got to know Melonie, Wahwer, Sharon & Moogie as well as the rest of y'all. I think this is going to be a series of posts about my life (not sure yet) a bit along the lines of my Honesty post. So how did I end up with a blogspot blog anyways? Well I could go back to '92 but for now we don't need to go that far just yet. I'll go back to '99 instead. This was when I didn't have gainful employment, was on a government funded training course to get me my wonderous NVQ Level III in IT. This is also back when I got my first pc thanks to my good mate stu, it wasn't the Ub3r 1337 thing I have now! It was only a little P1 150 with I think 32Mb of Ram, 1Gb of HDD and running Win 98. I met my good friend and tutor Richard on this course and he persuded me to start doing something useful with my pc, start "crunchinG" SETI@Home work units. The first took 80hrs and I thought why! We then discovered a faster smarter way to crunch them and it took me only 25hrs to do 1. My good friend stu gave me a free upgrade to a shiny AMD K6-3-400 with more HDD space and more ram. Now I'd joined up in the same team as my mate Richard and we weren't doing too well as well being as the team were a subteam of Uber Geek Squad - Arse Technica - Team Lamb Chop to be exact. We then formed our own team before finding Team Free-DC just the kinda team for us. We both then eventually moved to other project as we found out there was more to do than just SETI, I got to know Moogie through Richard and well e-mail and comments left on moogie's blog and my Dear Diary pages. I only had a DD thanks to the persistance of my adopted lil sis and good friend Jen. I then read Moogies post about sharon and her struggle to help Bing, Chatter and Leo in the world. I again left comments, was asked if I minded comments being left, e-mails being exchanged not me. So I eventually moved to Blogspot and set up shop so to speak. That's where I got to know Melonie, and through her, sharons & Moogies blog got to know Heather, Chase, DB, Fiesty, Miss Zooty, Zonker, Acidman, Dax, Ward and whole heap more besides (even if I don't leave a comment I may read your blog now and then). I then one day clicked on Wahwer's blog and well things have never quite been the same. I don't regret anything I've done then, okay maybe some of you will disagree and I'm sorry if I've upset anyone with my actions (many of which don't see the light of the blogsphere). I suppose you could say I'm a bit like an over enthusiastic puppy dog, eager to please and bounding about with loads of energy, I suppose I can say I can be a bit full at times, but that's me..

Hugs to ya all, and don't think you can hide, just come here and get your hug it won't hurt a bit.

Power Blip Panic!

Well I got home, noticed that the programs I had set running on my PC weren't running! Thought hmm it's reset - it's got a virus / spyware / trojen / malware etc.. Thought maybe not but run system checks anyway.. Check another PC - it's was sitting at the XP log in screen (gotta love remote admin that loads as a service before anything!) logged me in, checked the other pc's the same thing. Thought hmm power blip! I was right just enough to make lights flicker but long enough to make PC's go reset :(. Oh and the drive home wasn't much fun either...

It's Snowing!

Yup it's offical it's snowing in my part of the World..
It's just a little bit (well anything under 3 feet is just a little bit to some people :P)
Well I've actually had to move my PC temporarly back to my room from the attic due to this as well it's too cold for the poor thing, that will teach me for misplacing the cover for it. It was well lets just say unless I had the thing running full pelt i.e running the D2oL project it well crashed, reboot......rebooot.......reboot sometimes it would get to windows splash screen often not. So it got moved so I could check it in a warmer place. It works fine - darn cold.

Even I get it wrong sometimes..

Okay confession time. Time for me to fess up to a recent Balls up I did which resulted in this here pc Im typing on, being left in a state of non-bootable ness..
Here's the story, Im love Win 98se (I know it's old hat now but It works, does all that I need it to do, and I can protect it way easier than XP). I decided to go install XP so I thought I'll duel boot the thing with 98 (defaulting to boot 98 if no key is pressed). I decided last night that hmm I can upgrade to XP from 98 as it's got a wizard and stuff to do it for me, so why not "copy" my current windows setup to the same space as I have XP on - wiping out XP 1st, and then remove XP's boot loader type thing. I did all that, removed the bootloader files (oh silly me!), used my trusty (or so I thought) Win98se Bootdisk that should boot me nicely into a Command Prompt to let me type the 2 commands I knew I needed to do... Only for it to say "Error unable to read file MODE.com page not prepared" etc.. darn Disk Corruption! which left me with a problem as it couldn't actually read and unpack files it needed to the Ram Drive it had created so I couldn't type the following commands:
FDISK /MBR <- this fixes the Master Boot Record to be marked as 98se bootable
SYS C: <- to copy over the Windows 98se system files and make it bootable once more..
Didn't have the time to mess around with attempting to make a boot disk on the 2 other PC's I have that run 98 as well erm they are linked via a Keyboard/Video/Mouse Switch that does it's job but can be a bit of a pain - Me thinks me didn't follow instructions right (Typical!) so I machine been offline all day and has done no work for my Team (Free-DC) and no work in the project this machine does (D2oL - Drug Optomization Lab), Argh there goes a 1/3 of my daily output... Not Much really is it.. But a few units here and there, I will remember next time.. Now just to get Win XP to "upgrade" my 2nd "Install" of windows I hope it works else Im gonna be pissy with it.

For Some Strange Reason....

For some unknown reason I decided to check my guestmap (hmm noticed it was fairly empty - HINT!!)..
Noticed Wahwer's Entry and wondered why exactly it meant.. Hmm then for some unknown reason the song "Country Roads......" came in to my head and I just had to listen to it. That does it 1st place I visit in the US, IF I ever have the money, time and inclination - hmm I can muster 1 of them, the other 2 are harder!.

Suggest ya Go listen to the song and just Smile ;)

Hmm chillin' out (literally!)

Hmm reason for low post rate, well it's getting colder here and hmm been busy adding insulation to various places so I can stay warm(er) than it is outside..
I'll let you know how it goes once I've Finished it all off ;)

I blog there for I am.

Weel Im sorry chase that ya dinnae understand ma lingo, bit weel it's kinna hard tae read yon southern bit I manage nae bother, ken. Oh wait ye'll nae ken will ye, ya've nae idea whit Im on aboot dae yea.
Noo i kid go on bloging in broad scots bit a think I'll gee it a bye. That's better it's not actually that easy to type in broad scots believe it or not you really have to think what it is your typing and how exactly the word is spelt, now that sounds like simple don't it, it's not being as I am used to speaking it but not writing it.. This could of course be worse, I could as easily attempt to write this in Gealic but even I would have difficult understanding it, or worse yet Doric which is a bit like Gealic but they speak it around about Aberdeen and the like. Now Britian is really nice it has well lets see now 6 languages all of it's own, maybe a few more if you count localisations of english. Well we have English, Scots (localization), Gealic, Doric, Irish and Welsh. So watch out because next time i may not post in english :P I may post in welsh or irish, probably welsh although Im sure one read would annoy me by pointing out all my mistakes I make in welsh, but I'll let her off as she's allowed ;).
Oh I am still alive and with it, just have had nothing to report well saying that the server at work throw a disc, not nice it's not responding at all even when something that should have worked was done it didn't - blames the stupid ass that set the thing up in 1st place for sticking OS and Data in the same Raid set, but enough as I don't wanna go over too many heads..

I've Fixed it (well just about maybe)

I've fixed it or at least put a work around in that will force the issue ;) gotta love javascript and the ability to write bits of the entire page on the fly ;). Basically It's a "hack", a fix, a patch, it checks to see if your using IE and writes one style for sidebar otherwise it writes another (proper one :P) darn IE and it's PITA CSS stuff.

Okay Here's what It should look like...

I've grabbed a snapshot of the blog as looks to me as I write this post...

This is a thumbnail link so you can click to view fullsized 1024x744 image..

I've been playing some more...

I've fixed the font size problem and I think it's looking good, the colors actually work now might just need a minor tweak but I think it's looking good.. little tweak here and there and minimalistic imaging :)

I've been playing

Okay I've been playing around with my template, I had a few ideas and got them to work independantly from blogger so I shoved them in, i know the colors are all out but I'll fix it as soon as I figure out the colors I want and the sizes and well lol....