I've survived christmas

Well I can say this I survived Christmas here at the ranch although it was a close run thing let me tell ya. Well I had 5 glorious days off work. Had Friday off, the weekend I don't work weekends :D, and Monday Tuesday off as well. So All in all not bad, sat back, chilled out to my vast music collection, played World of Warcraft but in a totally chilled out way, decided my 2nd Skills such as First Aid, Fishing and Cooking needed to be upgraded as well as my main Professions of Mining and Blacksmithing so with this in mind I set about fishing for some of the strange and wonderful things you can fish for in the various parts like Mithrel Headed Trout and Deviate Fish - hmm Cooked Deviate fish has a party trick up it's sleeve so to speak it turns ya in to a pirate for 30 minutes and your pretty immune to certain spells and the like. Christmas day was fun got up late well 11:00, had a shower. My older sister and BIL arrived so I got them their presents while waited on mother coming back from church so presents could be opened kinda thing. Although parents had already opened the ones they had gotten from me and other people. Mum did like her Phantom of the Opera DVD box set :D, the stuff I ordered from www.lush.co.uk and the Jim Reeves CD. Dad loved his Clint Eastwood DVD Boxset as well in fact he even managed to put it the DVD player and play it amazingly. Well left for a "few" hours to see my other sister and nephew since well you know they ain't on speaking terms yet. Nephew as per NORMAL was spoilt rotten but he's worth it (most of the time). Hmm amongst other things he got a Gameboy Advanced + several games to go with it, A Robosapien V2 (this was to make up for last year when the Robosapien he got didn't ****ing work - dispite a new controller and that being sent - this year it was tested before hand ;) ), a table football game which he set up on the floor and played with anyone that came too close (bending rules to suit him of course), and various other things like a MegaBloks F1 Racing car that well he'd hinted at just a little while ago hmm guess someone heard him (major Kudos to me:D). Instead of 2 hours I ended up staying 4 - oh well had dinner there as well which was much more fun than dinner at home would have been (trust me on this one folks!).
Oh what did i get hmm well 2 litres of Bailey's Irish Cream :), a Winter Car Care kit which is coming in real handy right now (it's gonna be cold tonight -6C [21F]), a powered hand shaving kit, hmm smelly stuff as per normal and a Suduko Computer Game and after me getting my digital camera - I didn't get very many photos hmm shall have to work on that one..
Oh notice anything different about the blog? It's a clue to another gift I got, but can you work it out?

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all my readers. I'll still be around but hmm I think Im busy christmas day. I wonder why, hmm i think I'll be too busy taking photo's of my nephew opening all his presents with my new camera and eatin' and things like that to blog. I may even take a walk and try and get some nice shots of where I live need to take it out for a test drive anyway ;)...
Your in my prayers you know you are
"May Peace Walk Beside You and In Your Heart Always."
I know that could be hard but remember you may just make someones day with a smile.

The act of giving...

I'd like to thank Sharon for the lovely christmas card she sent me last week, I did meant to say I'd got it but erm forgot with everything else. I'd also like to thank my good friend Katt for her card. I'd also like thank Heather even although I don't have her card just yet. Hmm but it's not the actual act of recieving a card that matters even although both times and one more to come it did put a smile on my face. I mean simple things in life like a card, letter or phone call that can brighten someone's day even if they are the electronic versions of these e-card, e-mail, and voice chat. It doesn't matter the distance, the next street, the next town or 1/4 of the way around the world just remember it might just make someone smile :).
I use Aim, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger and hang out in Computers Lobby:1 you can find me on any of them if you know who to look for ;)
Merry Christmas all

A Quiz of Sorts

Well I listen to Radio 1 and the Scott Mills show has a part of the show called "Rate My Listener" which is exactly what the rest of the listeners do, the listener sends in a photo of themselves, it's put up on-line at bbc.co.uk/radio1 and you follow the links normal - this is a direct link. He also gets the dear listener on the phone and asks them a few questions about themselves etc.. Im going to attempt to recreate this quiz kinda, your answers in comments please, this is a random sample of questions asked.

1. What would your ideal date be?
   


2. If I was coming round for the day, say bottle of wine, watch some TV / DVD, what you cook?
   


3. Who would your ideal man/woman be?
   


4. If you had to "bat for the otherside", who would your ideal woman/man be?
   

Im sure I'll think of more to add...

Got an Early Christmas Present

Santa came early this year for me, well actually I gifted this to myself, it's a rather nice
Olympus Camedia C-765. Well What ya think eh? I'd appreciate comments on this one please.

A Question of Raindeer

You can blame Moogie for this.

You Are Comet

A total daredevil, you're the reindeer with an edge! Why You're Naughty: You almost gave Santa a heart attack when you took him sky diving Why You're Nice: You always make sure the sleigh is going warp speed

Which of Santa's Reindeer Are You?

Breaking News..

This just in, I've been updating a few files and well one of them was my Greetz list which now works in IE, Firefox and Netscape (most of the time) might wanna check it out see what I've done with it ;)

Have ya Heard?

They gone and done it now, the Politically Correct Brigade has gone TOO Far this time!
Why I hear you ask?
They've gone and Messed with the Winnie the Pooh stories.. They are replacing Christopher Robin with a girl who's more of a tom boy than a girl - FFS your messing with a classic..
Please leave yer views on this on.
Good Idea or Bad Idea, ie would A.A. Milne be happy or has the planets orbit gone a bit wobbly since he started spinning in his grave. I mean christopher robin was the writers son how can they MESS with this?

I did have a post to write about

I did, honestly have a good post to write but hmm as is oh so typical - no blogger didn't eat it, I was writing it and doing 3,4,5 things at once and the poor thing just locked up and thus had to be reset so thus lost the post. I don't think I could do the post justice right now but I'll think on it and well post about it at a later date. See I am still alive and posting.

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....