A Film Review: Duma

What can I say be well directed and brilliant film. It's about a boy and his best friend a cheeta who he raised from a cub after his dad almost running over it one night after it's mother had been killed by lions.
They live out in the african wilderness, farming the land. Many names for the "pet" are tried but only Duma seem to fit, we see duma grow up learning to run like a cheeta should, reaching the speed of 80-90 kph in seconds it's breathtaking. It reaches the point where Duma must return to the wild. The boy's dad however takes ill and they plan to take Duma back to where he came from and released. However like many thing in life his dad doesn't see his plan to the end and dies, his mother realising they can't run the farm so they have to move to the city to stay with his aunt and Duma is supposed to go somewhere to be looked after. When the get to his aunts the man who's picking Duma up isn't going to be there for a few days, so duma stays too, but escapes when he gets frighten after chewing on a TV remote, only due to the fact he scares the aunt who runs out the door, this is of course seconds after his mother has left to pick him up. Duma follows the truck and well causes chaos at school when he turns up naturally the boy is not bothered, just scared for Duma safety.
The boy then decides to forfil his fathers wish and return Duma to the wild, on the way running into a drifter who's out to make a fast buck maybe but then realises that it's not the way once he gets to know the strange pair and decides to help but not before being stuck in an old diamond mine when the pair realise he's trying to make that fast buck. After getting himself out the mine, he catchs back up to the pair after duma gets cuaght in a trap and agrees to take them to the mountains, however drifter gets sick as he's bitten by something nasty, the boy saves him by running to a nearby village in the dark and with lions about, tying duma up to protect the stranger but duma escapes and finds a mate but comes back to say goodbye one last time. I highly recommend you rent / buy this movie.

Okay Call me Stupid But......

How the HELL is one after i've uploaded my pics to flikr meant to get them so i can view them in blog without having to do 1 post per freaking PIC aka i wanna update my snow post so my poor webserver can have a rest.

Happy Birthday to My Mum

It's my mum's birthday today, I won't reveal her age even although she doesn't know how to work a pc (dispite years of my attempts to teach her).
Unfortunatly the weather isn't the nicest, it's raining has been most of the day but then again it's March in Scotland and thus I can't expect anything less.
One wonderful thing is that this Sunday is Mothering Sunday here in the UK, hmm nice double presents...

Why......do........I..........even...........bother!

Now dear reader a semiantly-reoccuring theme of my "life" (ha now that is a joke - I don't have one or rather very much of one!) I do sometimes just think "Why do I freaking bother!" Example tonight "dearest" mother said she's seen the griter lorry out gritting the road and said so, you might get have a bit of trouble getting out in the morning - to which I go "I don't think I will, it's going to be ok" now was it something I remotely said - Do I need to go see a "shrink" now I know I'll be fine due to wonderous tool called "ForcastFox" the accuweather.com extension for Firefox, okay so -3C (27F) overnight isn't exactly tropical but expected for time of year. I hear mutterings from mother! I think i should just maybe not say a fucking WORD, so I go to try and smooth things over by saying that I've checked the weather on the computer (that and I do listen to the radio on the way home and catch the local weather forcast). Now my mum isn't into computers and never will I've tried for past 15+ yrs to get her to try and use 'em but to no avail - it takes her to work the freeview box & the Video/DVD combo player that is downstairs, so PC's are beyond. I was told "in future I'll not say a word even if there are 10 gritter lorries...."
Hmm oh that and a good friend seems to be ignoring me in a game Im back to playing even although I said "I was giving it up" I can't I've tried - they coding hurt my head too much, still is because Im determine to finish the id3v1/(v2)/ mpeg frame find and read php class (ID3v2 spec is erm well ya interesting!)
Now Im away to watch "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" on DVD which I got today.

Happy Birthday to Sharon

Yes well it's that time, time to wish fellow blogger and all round wonderful lady Sharon a Happy Birthday. So head on over and give her your kindest regards :D

What's in a Name Eh?

Well what is in a Name?

G	Glamorous
O	Outrageous
P	Patriotic
H	Handsome
E	Entertaining
R	Realistic

Name / Username:

Name Acronym Generator

From Go-Quiz.com
Oh how true this is, Head over to Moogie the "Old" 's and say hi or you could just hop to Lesley The Omnibus Driver and say hi:)

A Review..

How special would you feel if the entire school had made an effort to welcome you on your 1st day, even if it was in the middle of the school year. Oh yeah one thing your profoundly deaf. Hmm you got this one yet.
Here is a story about 1 4yr old girl called Olivia, her local school of 48 pupils (it's only a little village school) and staff made the effort to learn sign language after finding out from Olivia's big sister that she wanted to come. All I can say is If this was me I'd be very proud of my big sister. Hey siblings may fight but love overcomes that instantly.
Full Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/4769456.stm

Another story I read of recently (Full Story):
If you read the front page story of the SF Chronicle Thursday,
Dec 15, 2005, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line (rope) wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so badly off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her -a very dangerous proposition. One slap of the tail could kill a rescuer.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around. SHE THANKED THEM! Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.

The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth says her eye was following him the whole time, and he will never be the same...
----
Now tell me your've not got a least a tear in your eye. Two Stories that show where kindness is shown it's repaid. Remember that.

What I decided and other stuff.

I decided to stop my subscription to World of Warcraft for a while, it was doing my head in and well tonight I think I totally screwed up on my old Guilds Team Speak just hope someone can forgive me, darn my mouth can get me in so much trouble sometimes!!!!
Also since I have the time I thought I'd write my own ID3 Tag read class - you know those nice MP3 type files, it will read the file and tell me what the artist, album, song, year, track, comment as well as information such as the mpeg version / layer / file bitrate / sample frequency but it's glitching - i won't go into it too much just going to say the what Im looking for isn't easy to find I'll just say this
"AAAAAAAA AAABBCCD" < the 1st 2 bytes header data I need to read
where it says "A" it means that has to be a 1, the rest can be mixed so you can see not easy as 11111111 => FF => 255 is a common occurance in the file, most of the time the code I have works, working on fixing the code to deal with the rest (that don't)
Oh yeah and dispite the snow I was able to get to work :(

This is what I woke up to this morning

Well I woke up to snow, it had apparently been falling since 2am, i was still up at that point but never thought to look out window, well why would I.
So thanks to Sharon for the nice e-mail I picked up when I woke up and checked my mail I decided it was high time I went and played a little with my digital camera I mean 3 months and not much to show for it eh well I'll just dive right in and begin with the shots then shall I.
This is the view that met me when I open my bedroom curtains, nice ain't it.
Well this is a set of chinese chestnut trees that are well about 150m from my house, riot of green in the summer but right now all snow covered they look wonderous. Okay Im just gonna stop talking and let the pictures do the talking I hope as they help show of my new camera finally :D. I do hope Rick or someone who has a professional Camera stops by and tells me what they think.







Well That's them all, I only took a few and these link to 1024x768 images, I have the originals too and those are twice that size direct from the camera, best to publish just the thumbnails, Enjoy your morning / afternoon :)
** EDIT **
Ophs my bad I erm did some of the editing not using the bloggers "Add Image" tool and thus mistyped the path to the full sized image, should all be fixed now.

Well That's gone and torn it!

Well it has well and truely gone and TORN IT!
Okay, I've no idea what happend exactly, but I did post to BWTP and the entry did post I saw the post, now I've just checked and the post is no longer there, no even listed as editable. Now all I wanna know is was it deleted by someone if so why and if so then that person can take their blog and stick it where the sun don't freaking SHINE! Ya got me, We CLEAR on this!!!

** Update **
Okay it appears blogger thinks I want it as a draft, I did make one minor change to it but hmm it reposted fine *swear* if SOMEONE could fix this for me as I can't see it

Monday Blues..

It's been one of those days at work.
I came in to 1 more dead camera, thankfully that was an easy fix, phone the site have them reset the trip switch, after that it starts to go wrong but thankfully not just for me.
Colleague gets stuck in traffic on the way to fix / investigate faults with a few of the cameras we have. IT Manager wonders why noone phoned him to say oh btw the tempreture in the server room is a bit warm (a bit warm being 25C), well someone didn't bother telling me Formally that we'd to start to monitor it, it was kinda oh were testing it (nothing more was said after that). Speaking of Camera a site manager wondered why no-one at the company had replied to his e-mail about something that had happened, I did by phone and I said so in the reply e-mail which I made sure was CC'd to one of the Company Directors (and BCC'd to the Boss ;) ) He phoned me up and told me that well basically I was talking CRAP and really shouldn't be doing that especially if I was CC'ing it to a director who was also looking into it. Well to the Best of My Knowledge I did phone him on that day after checking the digital recording and saw nothing. well its not so bad, before I left work 2 more Pan / Tilt units were required along with a telemetry drive board for one site, nice length of new coax for another site (since erm they'd joined it adhoc stylee) and my colleague was at a 3rd site investigating / fixing, unfortunatly he's got the bosses Jag Keys in his pocket, well he is the bosses son so it's allowed ;)
The poor accounts manager tried to kill me as well, her laptop spat the dummy today while she was in mid check of something, machine ended up getting rebooted and well no back up had been made today and well thank god Sage is good software and has recovery tools built in, 6hrs work could have been lost, not a lot you think but hmm enough. I left the boss and the accounts manager to fix it once I seen that well it was okay since nothing I could do would help. She came through and said it was all gone all the data for today.. Then smirked as I went into panic mode! (not funny at all).
Oh and Dear BWTP people Im considering leaving since well I've nothing to post there that would interest and well very few of you come here and leave a comment, also I don't always read everyone's blogs I sometimes only read a few daily, some weekly, some less so and chewy's well erm blue moon time..
Sigh, roll on tuesday.

Nephew's Birthday

Well Happy Birthday to my Dearest Nephew Connor who is 8 today, that's right 8 somehow he has survived this long..
I've no photos as yet but I may post 1 at a later date.
Well let's see Im his favourite Uncle again, after giving him £20 in his card and setting up his steering wheel & pedals for his Playstation 2 - it's a "racing pack" so it's got a seat that's attached as well so it all clips together and I just HAD to set it up (I got no option in this FYI) he's doing not bad, when I'd left he had only done like 3-4 shortish races with it and he was gaining places..
20,9,8,2 - I'd say he was getting the hang of it no bother, he just needs to remember that it's a steering wheel if he ever needs to set it up again for that game (which I don't think he does ;)). Oh and because he's Connor he didn't just have 1 cake he had 2 - a chocolate cake with loads of chocolate icing on it which is very tasty and a "football" cake a nice light sponge with a icing like the outside of a football on it.
I don't know what our other sister is up to, she dropped the card off this morning at like 7am (must have been before her work) and well not been seen since :( - done this before, but hey he's cool with that he just got an extra hug or 2 because I know a few of you out there would want me giving him a hug from them so to speak ;) so it done :)..
Oh it's my dear old dad's birthday tomorrow - I won't post about it, as well it's just dear old dad and not really that exciting ;) - I know Im cruel and harsh but that's life sometimes..