Friday night, Shell and I went to our local (Cheers/Back Bar) and a band called "Balance of Power" were playing. Quite frankly, they were brilliant and their set list was right up my street.

1st Set
Bad Medicine - Bon Jovi
Why Can't This Be Love - Van Halen
It's My Life - Bon Jovi
Stranger to Love - Whitesnake
Winds of Change - Scorpions
Ride Like The Wind - Christopher Cross
Carry On My Wayward Son - Kansas
One Minute Here - From Out Of Nowhere
Hold The Line - Toto

2nd Set
A 'lil Ain't Enough - David Lee Roth
Walk This Way - Aerosmith
Paradise - David Lee Roth
Sweet Emotion - Aerosmith
Piece Of The Action - Sweet
Live and Let Die - Paul McCartney/Guns'n'Roses
Empty Rooms - Gary Moore
Some track by Journey
Some track no-one knew
Animal - Def Leppard
Here I Go Again - Whitesnake
Jump - Van Halen

When they come back - we're going to see them again! And frankly, my mates Martin & Paul should have seen them - they would have loved it.

We found some car boots to do next weekend around Weston that should mean we don't have to get up at 5am like last weekend. Huzzah!

Today is my first day at my work location. We have eventually been moved onto the main campus instead of being on the customer site! I'm actually quite excited by it all :)

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[link]   Posted @ 07:43

A woman goes to the doctors. She walks into his office and sits down.

Dr. - "What seems to be the problem?

Woman - "Well. My vagina keeps singing 'Is This The Way to Amarillo'. It's very embarassing."

Dr. - "I wouldn't worry about it. Every cunt is singing it..."

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[link]   Posted @ 11:49

Hey there! It's been a while. And after all those promises of more updates too... I'll do an update in chronological order from where I left off:

Rhiannon was 6. She had a great day with me and then had a party at her Nans. Saturday, Shell arranged a picnic and day at Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust. Day didnt go well - ignorant, unappreciative children to blame.

Last weekend, Shell and I did the car boot sale at Cheddar. I had on offer a range of DVDs, CDs, printers, PC bits and Shell was offering jewellery, underwear, socks, etc, etc. We covered our costs and made a little money (not as much as we hoped...) and we shall be doing it again. And some more if we can find them. There used to be a time when you couldnt go anywhere without driving past a car boot sale, but now they appear to have vanished!

Anyway...

Politics and Politians. Let me tell you about one that I saw this morning.

I caught the 8.05 train from Weston-super-Mare station to Bristol Temple Meads and the 2nd stop is Worle Parkway. I am sat on the platform side of the train doing my arrow-words puzzle book, when I look up and see our current MP for Weston, standing with a small campaign team, handing out flyers. Nothing odd about that really.

But as I watched idly out of the window, it dawned on me that he was doing more than just handing out flyers and chatting to people. Whenever a young female walked past him to get to the train, I saw him take a deliberate ogle at their arse.

Now this makes him either a perv or completely normal with a healthy interest in the female form. The choice, taking into account that he is an MP, is up to you :)

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[link]   Posted @ 12:29

The Bank Holiday weekend was blighted by only one thing - the number of tourists hitting my home town.
The motorways were snarled up on Thursday afternoon/evening and stayed pretty much the same over the whole weekend.
Trying to drive through the local town at the weekend was crazy, as lost grockles stopped, started and paused their way around town leaving confusion, anger and hatred from the locals behind them! What joy :)

We spent the weekend doing pretty much nothing. We went out on Saturday night to our local and were less than impressed with the band "Funky Dory" who were playing, so we made our way along to Senoritas again...

Sunday and Monday we visited the ducks at Backwell Nature Reserve, only to find that 90% of the ducks had gone, leaving only the swans (the babies now have several brown feathers to lose) and geese to ignore our bread. The drawback with holiday weekends is that everyone goes to visit the reserve, so by the time we turned up, nobody was eating.

Friday is Rhiannons 6th birthday. 6! SIX! Crikey - how time has flown past. She and Chandler will be staying at their nanny's on the Friday night (I have the day off work so will be spending the day with them) and Shell has something planned for the Saturday (I don't know what 'cos she won't tell me!)

My Dell A992 All-in-One printer was swapped out today. On Friday the 18th I reported it to them as faulty/dead and they have a 1 day swapout contract. Erm. Not quite... But at least I have it now - but I just hope that it lasts longer than the last one did.

Couple of things for you today:
Mousebreaker - Fowlwords - a great thing that can be played while working as the Boss will think you are typing. Thanks to Liz for that one.

Play with Sanjeev and win his last 5 tubes of Pringles... - an interactive shop. Hilarious!

More when I get the time...

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[link]   Posted @ 14:27

A friend of mine (Spud) pointed me to a website today that led to a whole world of discovery. He initially pointed me to Music-Map which then led me to find others in the same vein...

Gnoosic - Music
Gnooks - Books
Gnovies - Movies

Add your likes and dislikes to the databases and then check the mapping systems to find what others like. Its helped me find a new author to read, some new films to watch and more importantly, some more rock groups to appreciate.

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[link]   Posted @ 15:16

The seating arrived and they are gorgeous. I will take a picture and post - in fact I will take pictures of the rooms we have sorted out and post them, so that people can slag off our taste in furniture :)

On Saturday, my friend Martin came to dinner (a full roast with a Prawn Cocktail starter) and then we hit Weston for a night of fun and frolicks! There was a decent-ish band in the Back Bar and this was followed by a visit to Senoritas, where Martin was constantly amazed by the level of munters available in our fair town!

I also took a test...

Official Survivor
Congratulations! You scored 77%!
Whether through ferocity or quickness, you made it out. You made the right choice most of the time, but you probably screwed up somewhere. Nobody's perfect, at least you're alive.

My test tracked 1 variable - How you compared to other people your age and gender:


You scored higher than 92% on survivalpoints

The Zombie Scenario Survivor Test

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[link]   Posted @ 10:07

Well - last nights plan for getting the PC sorted out didnt quite work. I got stuck on the train (due to cows on the line) so we got home an hour late!

We then when straight to Pizza Hut to spend our "V.I.P Vouchers" that I had been sent by Pizza Hut for a letter I sent them complaining about an experience we had a couple of months ago. A "Pepperoni Feast" followed by their "Chocolate Fudge Cake" is a feast indeed.

When we got home, I managed to sort out the problem I had with SimpleMail - a reboot to load the correct library into memory - dammit!

Tonight I have to sort out the garage, move the couch from the kitchen to the garage, move the couch from the lounge to the kitchen and ensure that the lounge is clear for tomorrow. Why?

'cos tomorrow, we get our new sofa's delivered by DFS! 2 new 2-seater sofas. Getting quite excited about it :)

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[link]   Posted @ 11:25

So another week and another update.
Doing this weekly is becoming a bit of a chore, so I think I should update more often. Minf you, I say this so often...

Friday night, Shell and I went to our local as the kids were staying with their Nan for the night. The excellent Breezer (cant seem to find a webpage for them) were playing, so we stayed for a while and listened to them. They were excellent as always.

Saturday, Shell went out with her friend Martin and managed to catch Mendip Road - her favourite local band (as she likes the singer!!). My mate Ian came round and we managed to sort out his wife 'puter. He had found a 60Gb IBM drive, but it blanked us at every turn in getting it to recognise it and the original 6Gb drive was FUBAR.

This was when I noticed a jumper setting called "32Gb Clip". So I set it - powered up and hey presto, it found the drive as a 32Gb drive and away we went. The BIOS was so old (we tried upgrading it but had no luck there either) it wouldnt recognise anything larger than 32Gb. Thank god for the "32Gb Clip" mode.

Saturday and Sunday saw Shell and I, along with the kids, tidying up and cleaning the house and it looks a damn site better now. Still a little bit to go (ie my office)...

This evening, I might try and get Shell's grandpa's computers sorted out and liberate anything left over for my own uses. I could do with making Shell another computer (as I sold the one she used to her step-dad), so that mine isnt used all the time. If I can, I plan on moving NewsBinPro across to it, so that all the d/ling, uncompressing, etc is done on that one and not on my main machine :)

I also noticed a couple of days ago, that a new version of my email client on my Amiga had been released. I'm running release 0.24 and now they are up to 0.26 (I completely missed the 0.25 release)! This morning I had an issue with a version of a library file (I need version 18.22 but can only find 18.18) but may have sorted that out now. I'm hoping that this new release solves a memory leak issue with it, so that I dont have to keep rebooting the machine every 2 weeks to free up the memory it has lost cacheing the new mail pointers. Here's hoping!

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[link]   Posted @ 16:45

So Dave had his operation on Thursday and all went well. He woke up with a new metal knee and today he came home! Excellent progress. Of course, there is still some way to go before he gets full movement back, but he's been here before and he'll get back to being perfectly mobile. Welcome home Dave!

On the weekend, Shell and I made a fleeting visit to Amsterdam. We had a 13:10 flight out of Bristol with EasyJet. As the plane was taxi-ing to the runway, the pilot came on the tannoy and told us that the weather in Amsterdam had been -16 that morning and that there was 6inches of snow. And when we arrived...

Indeed there was 6ins of snow and it was very cold (about -2).

We got the train from Schipol to Centraal station and then had a 3km walk to our hotel which took about an hour and a half due to the ice, snow, cold and getting lost. Fortunately, we had though to being gloves, hats and extra layers, so it didnt turn out too bad.

The hotel was basic but very clean and warmer than outside, so it was fine. It cost �75 for the night including breakfast which had to be paid up front. Just down the road from the hotel was a street of designer shops and further from that it led us into the centre of Amsterdam.

So we headed off into the centre and decided the first thing to do was eat, so we found a traditional Dutch restaurant and enjoyed pancakes.

Thats a complete lie. What we actually did was ran into the nearest Italian, where I had a Pepperoni Pizza and Shell had Spaghetti Carbonara. And damn fine it was too.

Then we walked around until we found a coffeeshop/bar called De Rokerij and spent some time in there.

The following morning, we got up and went down to a pretty measly continental breakfast, where Shell managed to almost not eat anything. Being the seasoned European traveller that I am (mostly France though), I tucked in to toast, juice and coffee like it was going out of fashion.

We then took a leisurely walk back through the centre to Centraal, taking in the sites and buying souvenirs and gifts for back home.

All told, the flights would have been about �200 and the accomodation was �70 or so. We saw cheap B&Bs when we were walking around (hostelries) for about �15-�20 euros a night.

We will definately be going back later this year when the weather is more favourable. Venice was cold but we hated it. Amsterdam was colder but we loved it.

Todays game of the day is Flying Gonzo. Enjoy!

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[link]   Posted @ 13:35

A pinch and a punch, its the first of the month! Just though I'd get that in while I had the chance.

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had started to feel pretty rough - sneezing, bad throat, etc - as I appeared to have caught the dreaded lurghi from Shell who had been ill for over a week.

Thursday morning saw me voiceless but still in work, but it was too much. I got home Thursday evening and went straight to bed, leaving Shell to prepare dinner. This is unheard of for me, and it meant that Friday was also spent in bed. Over the weekend, I was still pretty rough, but my Nan advised me that when I got to the "coughing up coloured phlegm" stage, I was getting better!

The fans, etc I was waiting for turned up, so over the weekend I changed and revered the side window fan and attempted to put in the fan filters. That failed miserably, as the fans are in a removable fan tray and I'll need something else to fit in front of them. From research on the net, it either need some thin (or spun) foam or possibly an old pair of tights. I also need to change my fans speeds a little, so that more air is being sucked in than is being pushed out, as that will stop dust getting it from around the edges of the case.

I upgraded the firmware on my ND-2500 and it can now do 8x Dual Layer burning (DL on +R only) which is an improvement. I'll get the ND-3520A in this week and that will leave me with 2 faster burning setups. I also need to relocate my SME Server box into my comms rack to allow me to have the other desk back for Shell to use and get the other Amiga running. What joy!

Plus get a PC sorted for Shells grandpa, as I still havent managed that yet.

Tomorrow evening is Parents Evening at my daughters school and I need to visit to ask some question about some bullying that was happening (its now stopped it would seem) and ensure it doesnt happen again. Hopefully, I'll be told how angelic she is at school - as she's a little so-and-so at home!.

And apart from a couple of cockups with my Boots and Dell orders...

I've been going on for ages about getting my film reviews up and running on here, but havent ever really got round to sorting them out. Well, I now have all the text, and just need to get them organised and into some kind of system to manage them. I suspect another little CMS system will be required for this :) Hello Andy!

I'll update later in the week and then again early next week, when Shell and I have returned from a 24hr break in Amsterdam. Which reminds me - I've got to book a hotel room...

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[link]   Posted @ 14:20