Shaky Beginnings

Well well, Christmas In Review (sort of)...

2011-12-31T00:22:00.004Z

Yeah I noticed that my Christmas entries were a bit sparse, and didn't really emphasise how nice it was to be able to get together and spend time with everyone, in a spirit of cheerfulness and Christmassy whatnot.

I'd have to say that the highlight of my year, this year, was our trip to London, where we spent ages and ages wandering around an awesome christmas market, seeing the talking moose (which my brother and wife (his not mine)) did actually see (!) and browsing wonderful Christmassy stalls.

We'd not been back 8 hours before we were up again, on our way to Gainsborough as always, and that was nice too.
At our traditional Christmas Eve food shopping, I had to go back to the car to fetch the forgotten shopping list, and took my ickle nephew with me. As a result, we more or less ended up split into two parties each doing our own seperate shopping, but we got back together in time to pay.

Christmas day itself was great fun, and though I didn't get a single thing on my Christmas list (I did write one, and indeed left it on the fridge for 6 weeks beforehand), I was only mildly annoyed, becuase I got lots of other cool stuff.

More importantly, everyone seemed to like the presents that I got them, which always brings a smile to my face :-).

Christmas dinner was great, tasty, yummy, and though I took ages, I actually ate every single thing.

Boxing day was another fun occasion, with almost everyone coming round to share in our awesome little banquetty buffet thingie which we have, and again it was nice to get together as a family.

I can't remember too much of the two or three days after that. A few days ago I made some nachos with the awesome nacho dish thing that my brother and wife (his not mine) got me. With it, I bought some beer. After the beer ran out, I started on the Mead.

Awesome nachos, nice cold beer, tasty mead, awesome Skyrim (there is no other kind), and awesome music (that fits quite well with Skyrim, and has almost become its surrogate soundtrack), well that sounds like my idea of a good night in. Which is awesome really because it's exactly the night in that I had.

I'll do it again soon. This time round I'll be able to get into the spirit of things a little more authentically hehe (Image is not my property but I'm stealing it anyway because it hasn't arrived yet).
All I need now is a few steel ingots placed around my room, some wolf pelts on my bed, and I'll be all set.

So yeah, that's about it. I've got to reinstall everything on my PC because my awesome shiny solid state drive, having spent too much time hanging around on street corners with dysfunctional Xboxes, is now in the habit of giving me the shiny orange finger, a surefire signal that something is not quite right.
At least I managed to pull my Skyrim saves onto another drive before the SSD went skyward. I would have been annoyed had I had to restart.

That said, I will probably have to restart again anyway. It's a continuing source of consternation/mirth, depending on how seriously you take your gaming, the first thing each patch for Skyrim does, is to fix the damage the last one caused.
Seriously, one game patch made the dragons fly backwards. No, the video is not playing in reverse, the waterfalls are flowing the right way. See?
I can't watch that video without giggling. In the game, dragons are bad news, no matter how long you've been playing, but they look slightly silly wobbling around in a rearward fashion.

This bug is even more awesome.

But hey, tomorrow, today in fact, is going to be fun. 5 hours of absolute crazyness, wobbling around on my pizza scoot, swerving to avoid drunken idiots in the street, getting silly string squirted at me, etc etc etc. Fortunately, I'm back in time to celebrate the new year with my family.
Can't do much drinking though, I'm back out tomorrow night. Then I've got my semester 3 exam on wednesday. It's all happening! Yikes!

But, once it's done, I shall get some more yummy mead, make more awesome nachos, buy extra awesome beer, and have another big lad's (singular) night in. Woo!

Oh well, I'm off to relax and suchlike. I've been studying most of the night :-\.
Have fun!

Christmas Day - Yay!

2011-12-25T08:38:00.002Z

Well, Up nice and early - ish (8am) - , after not being able to sleep particularly well, and now I'm tired, cold, and looking forward to a nice cup of tea and some fun laying all the presents out :-). Let's get it done hehe.

11:58:
I think that may be the name of a voyager episode...

Yep, all the presents are unwrapped, I got some shiny cool stuff, plenty of cool new clothes, not a bad day so far really. I've got a couple of things that I'm now going to be able to pick up for myself in the january sales, not the least of which are the skyrim soundtrack, the skyrim game guide, and an awesome drinking horn.

Everyone seemed to like the presents I gave them, and so far, the day has passed off without any arguing or shouting. Cool stuff :-).

Christmas Eve

2011-12-23T23:47:00.013Z

Prologue-y Bit: 23:47, on the 23rd...

Well, I'm sat here with my lovely cold 660ml bottle of Stella and my two lovely (too hot) pepper steak slices. The camera battery is on charge, and early tomorrow morning we're off to the supermarket-that-looks-like-a-castle, for our traditional and lovely Christmas Eve shop :-).

I must remember to get some more Mead :-).

So yeah, I've finished for work for this year (apart from 5 hours on new year's eve) so now there's just college, and christmas to concentrate on. Yay!

More to follow. I'm going to finish my supper and have a nap before I do anything else :-).

06:20, Christmas Eve:

Yikes it's cold. Not cold enough to snow obviously, because that sort of thing only happens to people who don't want snow.
But hey, I'm up now, a little bleary eyed, sure, but it'll be nice to go Xmas food shopping again :-).

09:06: Shopping Done...

Well, we've just this minute returned from the supermarket-that-looks-like-a-castle, and we've not had a bad time. I found my yummy mead and bought two bottles, plus some japanese lager and some Hoegaarden which is very nice at Christmas time. I bought another Chocolate Orange because it is the law that you have to have these at Christmas, and I got the ickle guy some Buenos, one of which he kindly gave to the cashier at the checkout :-).

Now I suspect I have tidying up and things to do. Yay, Christmas!

12:06: More Stuff...

Oooh, exactly three hours since last I wrote. Spooky. Well, the christmas cards are delivered, the new neighbours are identified, the rooms have been cleaned, my mead has been photographed, and now I'm in the process of tidying my room so I can have a bit of a nap later on :-).
I might bring forward that nap actually, I'm super sleepy.

16:39: Nap! And Santa!

Well, I eventually had a small nap, despite the best efforts of the dog which would not shut up. I've just been woken up by my cute ickle nephew, and we're going to see santa in 10 minutes, on his van :-).
Aaaand, we're back. I have a very poor quality picture of Santa and his (this year) Land Rover driven sleigh :-). I think the Elves get together each december and buy him a new car as a christmas present.
Yikes, it's become very windy, and pretty cold too. But hey, it's shaping up quite well so far :-).
PS: Wow, my mum's quiches are amazing, as always!

Well Then (23:22)...

Well, nearly time for bed. I've brought all my pressies down to be collected by father christmas so that they can be delivered in the morning (;)), and I'm sitting about with some lovely mead, waiting for the opportunity to finish clearing stuff out of the dining room, so that my services are no longer required and I can retire to bed :-).

Or retire to my lovely mead and ale, it seems. Buying mead is always a gamble because everyone has a different idea of what it should taste like. You never really know what you're going to get.

Fortunately, this Harvest Gold stuff is quite nice, if a little bitter in the aftertaste, and at 13%ABV I picture many happy nights full of Mead ahead.

Today went pretty well, if a little tiringly (no sleep). I went downstairs this morning to find everyone else already up. Helpfully putting the shiny new star on top of the tree, we wandered down to the car and off we went.

Seems that lots of people had the same idea as the place was fairly crowded. We wandered round for a while, finding cool stuff like super noodles, mini mars bars, the lovely aforementioned mead, and some japanese lager.

the lil dude found a pick and mix area, where I managed to catch him on video as he took a cup, compared its size to the cup next to it, then put it back and took the bigger one.. Made me giggle.

We disappeared off to the cafe afterwards, where I had a sausage roll and some juice. After that, off home for some cleaning up, preparing the house, and - for me - delivering the cards.

I had a little nap, and was woken up later on by my nephew, who we took to see Father Christmas. I swear the queue to see him gets bigger.

Ever since, I've been playing Skyrim, as always, drinking yummy mead, listening to cool tunes, eating quiches, and bringing my presents down so they're easier to hand out tomorrow.

So there we go.
I've now no doubt got other stuff to do, but shortly I'm gonna have a nice shower, drink my special Christmas beer (hoegaarden), have some more yummy mead, and go to a warm cozy mead-induced sleep. Some things never go out of fashion it seems...

Ciao.

Sign goes up, snow stays up...

2011-12-20T23:08:00.003Z

Well, a few days ago, the awesome little sign on the corner went up, proudly proclaiming that Father Christmas would be around on his Nissan Navara driven sleigh. Not only that, but Santa has sent a personal message, just like last year, to my amazed lil nephew.
Also, just like last year, my sister's fiancee (Brother in law?) took me to the local shopping mall for some last-minute emergency shopping.

Yep, thanks to various things such as college and work, and hangovers maybe, I've done precious little Christmas shopping. Not to worry however, as we generally do last minute Christmas shopping, and I had quite a few ideas for things to buy people.

A couple of these ideas were (displayed here because I didn't buy them due to them not being available/due to me being told that the intended recipient wanted something else more);

1. A rather lovely aromatic diffuser, that was nice and shiny, that made everything nearby smell nice, and that looked pretty cool. I didn't get this because I was told "Don't get that, this [other item] is what XYZ really wants".
2. An awesome Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Wheel and Pedals... I have been using one of these for a while, and my dad showed a strong interest in having a bit of a play with it. I had been hoping to get him one of his own, but the local game stores don't seem to sell them anymore.

Not to worry, I bought plenty of cool stuff, I avoided slipping into the "buy them anything, it doesn't matter" trap, and after spending ages searching for various stuff, came away from it all with a load of presents that I'm pretty confident their recipients will like.
Good stuff. We spent 7 hours out and about looking for lovely pressies for folks.

Along the way, we had a lovely meal in TGIs, relaxed, and took the little guy to see some jellyfish in a [jelly]fish aquarium in one of the local restaurants. I bought some silly putty, which is incredibly clever stuff, which is why it's taken me the best part of 40 minutes to write this stuff, and yeah, it was a nice, if hectic, day out.

On the way back, I got robbed inside the local convenience store, and by that I mean that I was charged £9.50 for three razor blades. Absolutely insane.
Still, since I've been using blunt blades since september 2010, it'll be nice to be clean-shaven again.

So yeah. The snow still hasn't arrived, but things are going more or less to plan, and I'm beginning to feel pretty Christmassy. I've got the college christmas do tomorrow, which should be fun. If not I'll just leave early and go to the off licence, hehe.

Some pickatures. Just one in fact, as the others aren't great.
It is a picture of my ridiculously large burger I got from TGI Friday's.

Have fun. Christmas Eve, soon :-).

White Christmas? Where??

2011-12-12T22:01:00.006Z

Okay this is getting silly now. It's less than 2 weeks to go until Christmas and while everyone farther north has been thoughtfully and kindly pretending that they hate their large amounts of snow, we, here, are again snowless. I seem to remember this being a recurring thing, except we're about a month behind schedule in the weather scheme of things.

That's not to say that the weather hasn't caused any problems however, as on the friday just gone, it was so cold that the roads started to ice over at 6pm. This being a day that I was out riding a small scooter here there and everywhere, meant that I spent as much time riding with my feet just above the floor as I did with them on the running board or whatever it's called. "Crappy bit in leiu of footpegs", maybe. This was to stabilise the scooter just in case the wheels decided they wanted to go in different directions, as they did when I was zooming down a hill. Quite an, erm, interesting experience I suppose.

It did actually start snowing at one point, but only extremely briefly. Blink - for ten or twenty seconds - and you'd have missed it. So yeah, we're due some more "severe weather", but I doubt that any of that will include snow. Ho Hum.

However, we have been taking part in our regular festivities, which this year included our lovely trip to Kelham Island Victorian Christmas Market Thingie. We had plenty of fun, wandering round, buying miniature presents and whatnot, and the weather was amost not rainy at all.
The place was fairly packed, but we managed to see what we wanted to see. We saw people in period costumes, soldiers, chimneycleaners, maids, lovable street starfishes and thieves. People sold all sorts of cleverly homemade stuff from various stalls. Such stalls sold things ranging from exotic looking rugs, clothing made from recycled denim, home-made cupcakes (a family favourite it seems!) and jewellry

This being the UK, I had a traditional English Christmas snack, a burrito.
There's a joke in there somewhere, but no, it was a pretty nice burrito. Vegetarian chilli though, so it was a little lacking in, I don't know, presence. Still, I casually drizzled it with "medium" salsa (which, while fanning my mouth and trying to find the soured cream, I later described as "nothing medium about it"), and it came with free tortilla chips, so I didn't mind.

Even as we stood outside eating, the Don Engine powered its way through its 5 minute demonstration, the exhaust steam billowing out through the pipe in the roof nearby where, upon meeting the cold winter air, it immediately condensed into water which rained on us quite merrily.

A decent time was had by all, I believe, and after a brief visit to the fairground rides (which included a travelling exhibition making some of the most insanely outlandish claims I've ever heard (Siamese twin monkeys from the amazon! See the puma with 2 bodies, 8 legs, 1 head! Where they got this stuff from I have no idea), we made our soggy way home.

Last night was fun. I went with my lovely mum to a christmas concert, which we seem to enjoy going to each year, and again, it was a really nice occasion.

So yeah, things seem to be proceeding okay, apart from the annoyingly un-christmassy weather. The christmas party at college is tiptoeing closer, and at home, our christmas decorations are down, waiting to be put up (mine already are up). So there :-).

Have fun folks :-).

EPILOGUE: 14th December!

SNOW! Snowww! Snoeeee! Et al! Yes, as if in apology for its late arrival, the snow seems to have been coming down fairly heavily for the past hour or so. Woo, snow!

It's actually settling pretty well. Already, some idiot car driver has left tracks in it.

And so, is this year's snow song. Dunno why, it seems epic enough to remind me of epic snow.

Sums up the mood awesomely. After a disappointing winter with no snow, all of a sudden it comes dramatically out of nowhere, with colours flying.
It'd bring a tear to the eye, of a scriptwriter could take the time to write it into a movie :-)

What happened to the snow?

2011-11-30T18:24:00.010Z

I'm not sure what's going on with winter this year. We're in the final few hours of November, and so far I have yet to see a single snowflake! This has been a particular source of annoyance for me, because everyone knows how much I love frozen precipitation. Not only that, but we got our snow (again, after everyone else did!) mid November, last year. No fair. Hmm.

That said, apparently it snowed in Scotland earlier this month, and is due to snow there again tonight, which I suppose is good for them. If they like snow, that is.

However, I'm going to have to wait for my snow, as despite the slowly cooling weather, we haven't had so much as a flake of it, as I said.

Yep, the countdown to christmas is on again (not that it was ever really off), and I've bought um *checks* 5 pressies so far.

And so the weekend just gone brought with it the first of the Christmas festivities, that is, our trip to London:

Part One: Winter Wonderland. Also, London.

Yep, every winter, or for the past couple anyway, my mum and I seem to enjoy going to London to see what's on there. And so, waking up ridiculously early on saturday, we were driven to the coach station by my lovely helpful Brother.

Thankfully, there was no huge long interminable wait, as the coach (a rather shiny, new, and astonishingly expensive one!) was already there waiting for us, and, well, the journey was pretty comfortable and didn't seem too long, I suppose.
I spent a while reading a book or two and listening to tunes while my mum caught up on her sleep.
Eventually, we arrived, as you'd expect really, and off we got. I'd not even taken my first few steps before someone almost walked into me. Yep, welcome to London, a city with - you'd think - a dozen people for every square meter of space.

We had our traditional ogle in the "prestige car's shop" (a run-down looking showroom that seemed to give the impression that the rent was more than selling lamborghinis and paganis could cover), and found a fairly shiny (and fairly old, in prestige car terms!) Lamborghini Diablo SE 30.

We headed, as we do normally, into hyde park, and before long, got to my favourite bit of the entire city, Winter Wonderland. It seems that other people love it too, as I stood and watched depressed looking people instantly breaking into festive smiles as they entered, smelling the foods and hearing the christmassy music. No, really! Okay, so it wasn't lovely and snowing, but it wasn't attacking me with squalls of rain like it has done before. The cold was quite seasonal, and the cheerfulness at being there certainly stopped me from feeling the chill. And so off we went, wandering around, looking at the various stalls around the entrance. These included the traditional Christmas Gift Store, loads of food places including a Farm Burgers place and a Chinese Noodle shack (Hmm, Chinese Noodles, a christmassy treat?!), and, best of all, a rather lovely looking Father Christmas, that actually looked like Father Christmas is supposed to look, and not like some guy in a fake beard.

I had fished out my camera by this point and had started taking happy little pictures of everything I thought might be interesting to remember later, like a happy little tourist, Bob Ross style, I suppose. The place was already beginning to fill up even as we wandered around the "first" bit.

A short sit down later, and we started working our way around the attractions, including a genuine ice rink with real ice (and costumed elves). We wandered up to the official gift shop where we met a couple of tourists who were enamoured with a cake tin, before making our way round to the festively named Angel Market. Here, I was pleased to see that the rather lovely variety of stalls that had attended last year, were in attendance again. After a few free samples of "mountain cheese" (eh?) from the Speck merchants [see last year's entry] (I think), we worked our way down the wide variety of craft stalls, looking at everything from jewelry to candles, from homemade leatherbound books, to the ever-present glühwein, and "long drinks", whatever they were.

In time, we got around to one of my favourite parts of the day. Ever since last year's rant on Krakauers, I'd been looking forward to another one. Or two. So off we went and bought our krakauers, before scooting into a log cabin to eat.
And there we stayed, eating our delicious krakauers, enjoying the heat from the lovely fire (in one of those log stove things), and listening to a familiar voice mutilating a couple of christmas songs.

Yep, the Animatronic moose had returned for another sellout tour. In fact, according to Winter Wonderland's opening hours, I'm 99.9% certain that he's there right this second, singing Christmas songs in not one, but three languages (GB, D, E). Again, I'm pretty sure I heard him dispensing helpful advice at some point.

I was going along to go and get a second Krakauer, but I thought I'd be best off seeing what the rest of the place had to offer first. However, tired with standing at the table in the lovely warm log cabin, my mum decided we'd be better off sitting down somewhere quiet and out of the way, where we could watch the animatronic moose. She disappeared off for a while, and returned with a trio of fresh potato cakes, which were liberally covered in apple sauce and sugar. Except they weren't, due to um, a mixup on my mum's part I guess. Removing most of the salt from the apple sauce, I ate the majority of the apple sauce, and most of a potato cake, before it turned cold and I lost interest. At this point we were joined by a quartet of Japanese tourists, who I seem to remember seeing take photos of each other.

Eventually, we carried on our tour of the place, before, to my absolute delight, I found a place dealing exclusively in honey and mead. Mead, if you don't know, is kind of like a wine or beer. Like a wine because it's sweet, like a beer because it's made with yeast. It's an old old drink, many thousands of years old (it was especially popular in the early middle ages (500-1500AD)), and is made chiefly with honey, water, and yeast. The alcohol comes from the fermentation of the sugars in the honey.

Now, as a fan, both of all things medieval and especially of Skyrim, in which mead is every other character's favourite drink, I'd been itching to give it a go, and so I did, as they were offering around free samples.
Mead tastes like warm runny honey, with just enough alcohol to make your throat burn slightly. It's really lovely, and so I bought a couple of bottles more or less right there. One of normal mead, the other of Spiced mead (technically a metheglin), dramatically labelled "Feuriger Drache" (Firey Dragon), which featured a lovely warm seasonal image of a slavering dragon with a rather expensive looking sword through its throat (no, really, I'll prove it later).
Mead is an absolute bugger to get hold of, so finding a place completely dedicated to it was fantastically good fortune, and cheered me up even more.

A final tour around, and off we wandered towards Harrods. Before we got there though, we had to take a detour down past a bit of grassy parkland, covered in autumns dry leaves, and absolutely frantic with squirrels (if 8 or 9 in a small area of grass is absolutely frantic).

These little dudes jumped about, searching under leaves for each other's food caches, and occasionally, bounding up to people. You see, there are so many people in and around hyde park, day in day out, that the squirrels are absolutely, totally and completely unafraid of people. Even as my mum rested against the iron fence, one individual hopped on top and came to see if she had any food, even going so far as to climb over her arm (this was repeated by a pigeon a few moments later).

I encouraged the attention of one squirrel in particular, who (without giving me opportunity to get any decent pictures), hopped over to the fence, between the bars, and stopped right at my feet. After a brief pause, (and I have a witness, my mum is my witness) said squirrel then jumped onto my leg, and climbed, bit by bit, up it, before disappearing round my back, much to the amusement of the people around me. He didn't seem bothered by the fact I was twisting around trying to see what he was up to, and seemed quite comfortable nestling under my backpack, in the small of my back. After a short time, he hopped down to the ground, presumably satisfied (or perhaps dissatisfied) that I didn't have any food for him.

A few moments later, another squirrel (or maybe the same one?) climbed the leg of a small girl, who was nearby, before hopping onto the fence nearby, where a couple of other tourists somehow convinced it to stay perfectly still for me to take a few pictures :-).

And yes, off to harrods.

Harrods, wow. Even by its own standards, it was absolutely ridiculously full of people. The only way to move from one room to another was to basically pick a flow of "traffic" that was going in the right direction, and to try and join that flow.
We stayed in harrods just long enough to get wound up and severely annoyed with the crowds.

After that, we went to another few places. We went to Trafalgar Square, to see the olympic countdown clock thingumy.

We went to Garfunkel's for a quick meal, where we met a nice family from Norwich (thus confirming my suspicion that no one you meet in London is actually from London).

And finally, we went to Fortnum & Mason, which is apparently a very popular and prestigious department store. It's famous for being the first place in the UK to sell Heinz Baked Beans, and the birthplace of the Scotch Egg. Yummy.
Admittedly, its decor, based mostly around seminaked Vaudeville style mannequines wasn't really to my taste, and would have looked more in place in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but hey, it's a privately owned business, so I suppose they can decorate the place how they want :-).

After that, we zoomed off to a pub, before catching the coach home.

And that's that. A nice, festive, if tiring day, out.

Some pickatures. In no particular order whatsoever, of course:

PART TWO: Gainsborough.

No sooner had I got to sleep after returning to London, than it was time to go to Gainsborough. The day was bright, the sky was clear (I think) and I was looking forward to it.

Arriving in Gainsborough, we went straight to the hall and wandered around looking at the lovely stuff that people were selling. As in London, varieties on a theme of hand made clever stuff were being sold throughout the hall. We did our traditional sitting down by the fire in the kitchen for a while, then went out to watch a sextet (it's a word) of minnie dancers (like morris dancers, but female I guess) who were quite capable of doing some interesting dance moves using nothing more than two shoefulls of bells and some bits of rope.

I have to admit, Morris Dancing's not really my thing, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves (with the exception of one woman who looked like she was there for a bet), and this was a medieval themed day after all, and so we watched for a while before heading off into the town.
There, I took the opportunity to do some shopping, buying a couple of inexpensive stocking fillers, before we had a small wander round what Gainsborough calls "A christmas market". I have to admit, in comparison to winter wonderland, it left me a bit underwhelmed, but since it was technically approaching Christmas time, and it was a market, it didn't feel fair to complain. Besides, I was in a happy christmassy mood :-).

A short car journey later, via the jeweller's with the unfortunate typeface (he has CHANGED his sign, so it's no longer unintentionally rude!), and we were at the local garden center, exploring their christmas decoration department, and trying to ignore their absolutely horrifically bad CD of musical nobodies (all with a diploma in writing severely dated 1980s gameshow theme tunes) butchering a few of my festive favourites. I recorded 3 home videos in the same room as that CD, two of which I have since deleted, I hate the music that much.Hammond organs do not belong in Christmas carols :P.

After that, off home, where I relaxed until I went to bed :-).

So yeah, we're getting slightly more christmassy than normal. Could still do with some snow though!

Halloween Stuff...

2011-10-31T16:59:00.007Z

16:59: Ahh, Halloween.

Well, I'm hard at work, studying (no, really!) for wednesday's exam, my dad is hard at work getting the kitchen ready to be redecorated, and going by the shrieking outside, it looks like tonight's first group of trick or treaters are musically and noisily wandering down the road. Though they haven't gone into any houses yet. Maybe they're trick trick or treaters, meant to trick people.

17:05 Yep, and we've just had our first group of trick or treaters! And it looks like I'm not going to get much studying done heh. I'm currently creating a miniature presentation on "Administrative distance and equal cost paths (and why the two don't mix)". It's quite shiny. Maybe I'll even show it you one day.

Temporary Wild Tangent:

The thing I love about writing this blog is that while in a few months or even a few years I can reread this thing and smile at the memories, this is all happening now! It's really happening, the real halloween wind keeps blowing my door closed, trick and treaters are wandering up and down, and it's all actually really happening :-).

and I think one thing that my blog has taught me, is to enjoy life more :-). I hope that doesn't sound too weird. I'm going to take the opportunity to go out and enjoy it later, too :-).

Back to Normal:

The dog is making distinctly weird grawr grawr noises, and is currently doing an oscar-winning impression of a tauntaun. She's our furry alarm system.

17:47 Well the trick or treaters are coming regularly now. My ickle nephew is here getting changed, and the dog is giving herself a sore throat and everyone else a headache. :-).

20:45: We've been back for a while now. My ickle nephew got plenty of stuff, and we all had a pretty cool time. He seemed to turn the halloween thing into some kind of racket with a "You knock on the door and I ask for the sweets" motto heh.

Rather endearingly though, every bunty (bounty) he got, he passed to my mum, every mars bar he got, he passed to me. Really sweet of him :-).

We've since returned, examined his stash, and now he's busy watching cartoons while I've resumed my revision.

Halloween Weirdness (Halloween Eve)

2011-10-30T13:43:00.006Z

Part One: Prologue. Sort of. Halloween Sunday, I suppose.

Part One of Sunday Bit.

Crappy halloween/bonfire night flavoured joke. What do bonfires (perhaps creepy bonfires with cauldrons and stuff on) and my halloween weekend have in common?

Answer? They both feature lots of kindling. Haha, hoho hehe etc.
Yep, after the astounding success of my most recent technological awesomeness, or getting a second free printer, I have now returned from the outside world to my cosy little lair, with yet another piece of sparkly technology. Don't panic though, I paid for this one. That's not to say that I should have paid for the last ones, no, they were gratis and therefore no payment was required :-).

At college, Jim (the one who fights with shrubberies) has gotten into the habit of bringing E-textbooks and other course materials to college to read on his shiny Kindle Keyboard. I instantly thought "Hey, something like that would be really useful for my course".

Of course, I've always used my ipod to read ebooks, but I fancied something with a bigger screen, something that wouldn't become impossible to read as soon as the sun came out, and the kindle seemed like an obvious choice, and so, digging into my miniscule overdraft, off I went into town to look for one.

I had quite a nice time, wandering around the bookshops, little gadget shops, expertly ducking and weaving around to avoid being emotionally blackmailed by the various "hello-sir-can-I-talk-to-you-for-a-minute-did-you-know-that-processed-food-is-radioactive-and-the-animals-don't-get-colour-tv-either-it-will-only-cost-you-10p-a-day-to-provide-chickens-with-sky-digital" folks.

Eventually, after ages of wandering around, I found my way to one of the larger department stores in town (its windows already filled with hanging snowflakes and christmassy scenes), where surely I'd be able to find one. And I found two.

Initially, I fancied one with a keyboard, but these things aren't really cheap, and I didn't really want to pay £40 extra for a keyboard. Instead, I bought this shiny little one. It seems to work fine, it looks great even when it's turned off, and it has 1.2Gb (which sounds like a miniscule amount until you remember that most ebooks take up anywhere from 100KB to a couple of MB a piece. Even the four largest ebooks I have, great big reference texts of 1100 pages plus, only take up 97Mb in total. Perhaps in time I may run out of space, but not for the forseeable future.
I even bought a nice leather wallet thingie to keep it in decent condition in my pocket. £6.50 on ebay :-). So yeah, it's sparkly, it's easy on the eyes (ever tried reading an ipod or an ipad display in direct sunlight? Whereas their LCDs become bright, glary and impossible to read, the rather cool E-ink display of the kindle absolutely and blatantly does not. If anything it's even easier to read the sharp contrasty display in bright sun). I'm glad I bought it.

I've done my mock exam for the end of semester 2 final exam, and the result was an encouraging 85.1%. Now I know what I need to read up on, the real exam should end with a higher score.
I hope so at least. We lost another student this week - having been off due to health issues, he has since decided that he has fallen too far behind to continue with the course. Shame.
Those of us that are staying the course though, are looking forward to our cool Christmas party thingie. We're predicting pizza, lots of lovely fireballs, cider, beer and whatnot, and lots of fun to be had.

Prologue Part 2 - Halloween. And Fireworks.

I'm not sure why, but Halloween seems to have turned into a weekend long thing. I don't mind, I like festivities. I was zooming about at work last night in the lovely autumn rain, and saw my first band of trick or treating folks attending a party. On the 29th! I suppose if you like beer on halloween parties, it makes sense to have it on a day that isn't the night before going to work first thing in the morning.

I'm expecting to see substantially more trick or treating folks out and about today, as the weather is better, and a few more folks might have put up their scary decorations.
I've got work in a couple of hours, I suppose I'll be able to find out for myself.

As for my ickle nephew, he has a cool bat costume, and he's also (now) got some cool glowstick thingies, and we're all looking forward to going out tomorrow, which I have off.

Unfortunately, I don't have bonfire night (the 5th) off. But it's not such a big problem. Since I'll be out and about all night, I'll get to see plenty of fireworks anyway.

So yeah, that's it for now. I've got some studying to do :-).

Hot CPUs, Cool Printers

2011-10-22T15:18:00.007+01:00

Part One: College Bit

Argh, typing without my wrist rest (it snapped off :-\) is really uncomfortable.

2 minutes later...

How embarrasing. My expensive shiny G19 keyboard's wrist rest is now stuck to it with blu-tack. Still, that's what you get if all the little clips snap off I suppose.

Well, things are once again proceeding apace at college, as the dreaded Semester 2 final exam is tiptoeing its way towards us at the rate of approximately 7 days each week, which has got more than a couple of people hot under the collar. In preparation, I've been busy cracking on with as many of the online curriculum modules as I could cope with.

10,400 words and an online exam (100%) later, I'm now thoroughly sick of reading about EIGRP, and looking forward to a couple of nice easy modules. The next one is an introduction to Link-State protocols, and then we apply what we learn there, to the one after, which teaches us about OSPF.

Of course, we've already summarised both chapters at college, so it's more a case of cementing our understanding, than it is a case of being introduced to new stuff. If we all pass, I imagine that we're going to be getting on with another end of semester exam. Hopefully Jim can avoid drunkenly getting into a fight with vegetation this time, as apparently when the bush beat him last time, he was injured.

We're already planning our college christmas party, and even ickle Jack (who has since left the course) has said he will come. We might even be able to get our tutor to turn up for a couple of drinks. So yeah.

Part Two: Christmas Bit

So it looks like I've got a busy Christmas calendar. Yep, lots of people still think it's too early for that sort of thing, however, friends tell me they've already arranged their work Christmas parties, pubs and restaurants are taking bookings for Christmas dinners, and advent calendars are already on sale in the shops (surely, the chocolate inside them must expire before you even open it?). I might get myself an advent calendar with chocolates this year, as I miss having one to open every morning heh. The lil dude tells me he has a Lego calendar (Star Wars lego maybe?) this year, which should be fun for him. Until either his or our dog eats the bits, which seems to have become the new natural end of the life cycle of the Lego piece, in our respective houses.

But yeah. So far, this year, my preliminary christmas calendar includes (in some semblance of an approximate order, and subject to weather):

*Trip to Winter Wonderland in London
*Trip to Gainsborough old Hall
*Trip to Kelham Island Christmas Fair Thingy (which we missed last year cos of the snow)
*Trip to Wentworth to look round their Christmas department
*Trip to Castleton to wander round (they have illuminated christmas trees lining the streets in winter)
*Trip to Christmas Concert type thing again.
*Solo trip to local christmassy supermarket to buy some Christmas necessities (shortbread, beer, mexicana cheese, etc. I'll probably need to get some medication of some type as well, as I generally have a cold around Xmas time)
*College Xmas Party
*Work Xmas Party (generally just a few drinks at a pub near work, or even closing early and drinking in the shop)
*Family shopping trip for Xmas food
*Xmas Day
*Boxing Day

There may be others in there as well, such as taking the ickle dude round the "Magical Christmas Kingdom".

But yeah, lots of stuff to be getting on with, but first, lots of studying and whatnot.

I still need to start buying presents.

Part Three: Technological Bit

Well, I've been settling into the routine with my shiny new computer, and apart from one or two blips, it's been working fine.
One blip occured the other night. See, because of a chipset incompatibility (I think), my cooler will only draw power from the motherboard 3 boots out of every 5. The other 2 times it will refuse to power on.

"Send the cooler back" you might say. Doesn't work, if one cooler will do it, the replacement will do it. It's an incompatibility, not a hardware failure.

Anyway, last weekend, I came back proceeded to put Need for Speed on, and spent a happy hour racing around, earning money, and generally beating all comers. At some point, I wondered what the cpu temp would be after an hour of gaming.
Finding the LCD Display to be dark, I realised that I'd effectively been racing an hour on passive cooling only!
Restarting the machine, I checked to make sure the cooler had come on, and it did straight away, shrieking overtemp warnings at me, and flashing a coolant temperature of 89C! Coolant temperature is generally lower than CPU core temp, so I have no IDEA what the cpu temp was at that time. (It turns out that the max working temp for my processor is 75C, and the CPU's emergency shutdown temp is 125C. In retrospect, I hadn't damaged the CPU, and hadn't really run the risk of damaging it, but it was still a scary moment).

I set the cooler to Extreme cooling mode, which pushed the fan and pump up to max rpms, and the coolant temp took maybe a minute or so to drop from 89c to 29c. That's a good cooler! Phew, what a scare.
I'll get a cable so I can connect the cooler directly to the PSU in future. Should stop this happening again.

Part Three And A Bit: New Technological Friend

As I am wont to do, on my lunch break, I wandered into the lab at college to see what was what. While there, I examined the scrap shelf to see if there was anything interesting. Was there? Of course not. A few defunct laptops stacked like house bricks, a huge box of loose parts which some 16 year old created from what was once a working computer, and a huge slab sided thing which looked like a broken fax machine, that had been there since february, and hadn't been thrown in a skip yet.
Out of idle curiosity (it had been there since I first started college, I wondered what it was), I cleared the stacked crap off it and pulled it off the shelf onto the workbench. It turned out to be one of those all in one scanner printer thingumies that seem popular these days.

"What is this? What's wrong with it? It's been on the shelf at least since february"
The tutor wandered over. "Nothing's wrong with it".
"Well, why is it on a shelf, it's just taking up space".
"Take it if you want it", he replies.

Umm. Wow. After establishing if he was being serious, I scooted around until I found the power brick for it. I plugged the device in and turned it on, at which point it immediately started doing a sort of POST, checking all its functions, and making various clicking and clunking noises. Hmm, not broken then.
Later in my lunch break, I continued to play with it, and had a closer look at it. It was a scanner, printer, fax and copier, all in one. Awesome, since my scanner doesn't want to work with Windows 7 any more.

I managed to get a lift to take the thing home, and spent the rest of the night playing with it. 4 ink cartridges, 3 of which were almost full, the scanner worked flawlessly, and the print quality was fantastic. Wow.

So yeah, for anyone who's remotely bothered, it's an HP L7580 all-in-one type thing, designed mainly for small businesses rather than homes, which explains why it is freaking huge (it weights 32 pounds and dwarfs my lil laser printer). It copies, faxes, scans up to 4800DPI and can spit out awesome quality colour prints to the tune of about 5 a minute (best quality photos) or 34 pages (decent quality text) a minute.
Since printing monochrome on a laser printer is a hell of a lot cheaper than printing in colour on an inkjet, I'm tempted to use the Laser printer for high volume stuff like college coursework, and use the inkjet for more colourful and intricate stuff, as well as photos. Also, it has an internal speaker so it makes happy little beep boop noises as you use it, heh. Oh, and it prints directly from memory card :-D.

Having a scanner that works is awesome, and at 1200dpi (which isn't even beginning to push the scanner's capabilities), this one can turn a DVD cover into a picture which if you printed it out at its new resolution would measure 4 and a half meters by three meters! So yeah. Very very happy.

I wonder at this point if I should come up with cute little names for my printers. Write your suggestions on a postcard, and then scan the postcard and email it to me at an undisclosed address :-).

Anyway, really running out of time now, got to get ready for work, so I'd best get busy :-).

Here is a shiny picture of my new printer dwarfing my cute ickle laser printer :-).

Weather Weirdness...

2011-10-08T14:29:00.015+01:00

Part One - Familyness:

...Yep, the nights are definitely drawing again, and the weather for the start of October has been weeeirrdd. A few weeks ago, the news reported that we should be expecting snow for the end of october. Amid the general cries of "oh no, not again", were one or two "I spose it's that time of year again then?"
So far, the snow hasn't materialised, but then we are only a little way through October. What has materialised though, is a rather unexpected, rather temporary but thoroughly enjoyable (apart from the night when you can't sleep) mini heatwave. Yep, even as late as early October, we had three or four of those "don't go outside you'll get sunburned" days.

All that seems to have come to a very definite cold and wet end though, as in the past couple of days, the temperature has dropped sharply, and the lovely sun has now been replaced with rainy rain. Fair enough, it's good for the plants I suppose.

At this point it occurse to me to wonder why I always seem fixated on the weather. I don't think it's a uniquely English thing, rahter, I suspect it's my way of pointing out (to our collective subconcious (do we have a collective subconcious? are we Borg? Perhaps I meant "Collective Sub-Conciouses-plural")) without labouring the point, that my favourite time of year is beginning to approach again. Which is awesome, actually, though I do now have to start buying Xmas pressies.

I lost out to my mum this year, this time she earned the "person who bought the first Christmas present of 2011" title. My ickle nephew for his part has been pointing at every other TV ad saying "I want that" heh. I have been giving some thought to getting him some of these, however, I have disturbing visions of him either wrapping them round his head, or whacking himself in the eye with them, or going a little crazy, kinda like this, so I'll make a decision under advisement, I think.

Before any of that stuff though, we have dun dun dunnnn, Halloween. I'm trying to get my mum to make a gold-edged blue cape/cloak thingie for my ickle nephew, so he can wear it with his Armouron and his blue Lightsaber, and all-in-all look way cooler than all the other kids. It might be an idea to attach a glowstick or two to him as well, as not only does it seem to have become fashionable, but it helps make him more visible at night as well.

(Actually, my parents have just come back from Toys'r'us with big bags of sweets for the kiddehs at halloween).

Part Two - Computeryness:

Well, it seems that my computer is now finally actually finished. I had a couple of little parts to put in it,but now they've arrived and seem to be working okay, I can crack on with reinstalling all the lovely shiny software and whatnot. The GPU means I can now run all games I have on insanely maximum graphics settings (apart from Xplane, amusingly, which I've had for years. Since it was designed to run across a network with the load being spread across multiple machines, turning the settings as high as they would go still resulted in 4-6 frames a second. But then I suppose I was being slightly daft :P. Big gap here because pictures mess the formatting up!

The other clever bit that arrived seems to be working quite nicely in reducing my program load times, but cos of its capacity limitations I haven't installed a great deal to it at the minute.
I've managed to carry over some of my software from the old install, so stuff like X-plane (all 80Gb of it!) thankfully doesn't need reinstalling (I'm keeping it on an "old fashioned" drive though).
I haven't yet finished configuring all thefeatures that windows is supposed to use to support SSDs, but apparently I can expect several small performance increases as and when I figure out how to enable said features, by arsing about in registry.

I've had a few problems with the system refusing to boot at all, the drives would spin up, the fans would spin, and then noooothiiing would happen. I think I've traced the problem to a standoff post which wasn't fitted properly (because it was crossthreaded), which could apparently have resulted in the motherboard not being grounded to the case properly.

As I mentioned in my last entry, the coolit ECO cooler that I was using was diagnosed as faulty by Coolit. In the end, I sent the cooler back to them, and they sent me a shiny new Coolit Vantage, which aside from looking awesome, is also very quiet, and works very well. Major thumbs up to coolit for their awesome customer service.

Now I have another teeny problem, which is that the motherboard only gives power to the CPU cooler 3 boots out of every 5. Apparently I can get round this by connecting the cooler to the PSU instead, as it's the cooler, not the mobo, that controls the cooler fan speed. The whole issue may be something to do with a partial incompatibility rather than a hardware failure, as it's a common problem on most gigabyte boards also.
But yeah. To summarise: Computer now finished, now working, not perfect, but almost :-).

Part Three - Meal Stuffs:

A while ago I made a really crappy job of creating some pasta sauce, which for some reason my mum really loved. I suggested that I'd be happy to try again and cook some pasta for the family, and so they went and bought loads of stuff with which to make a meal.
And would you know, it actually turned out really well. The sauce was lovely, the pasta was just right, and the garlic bread was incredible. Even the table looked nice. A nice time was had by all.

I mention this fleetingly, as it looks like me cooking might become a regular thing :-). I've been asked to do the pasta again actually, so I'm pretty pleased with that.

So yeah, quite a pleasant occasion.

Here are some picatures, as is traditional. I will no doubt be on again going on about my ickle nephew's halloween experiences. I believe he's going to some halloween event or other. Looks fun!

Ciao! Better start buying those presents ;-).

Sheets of rain and other liquid cooling...

2011-09-13T16:30:00.016+01:00

Well, the weather seens to have turned very quickly. With Autumn having waited all summer for the chance to do its thing, now it's here it's definitely making its presence felt. The sky is all shades from the light "can't really be bothered" grey, to the very dark "I'd better get inside" grey. There's also a lovely patch of blue, of course, and while the rain has temporarily stopped completely, a couple of minutes ago, I was watching rain come down in sheets onto my neighbour's garage (everywhere else as well, but I was watching my neighbour's garage) where the wind blasted them from the roof against the neighbour's house wall. So yeah, summer seems to have had its chance.

Well, five minutes later and that temporary storm seems to have ended. It's all bright sunshine again.

Sooo, yeah.
A few days ago, wednesday or perhaps thursday, at 9:19PM, my computer, having been put in its new case, and fully assembled, booted into Windows for the first time, making it the first official (non testing) time this new computer has booted up. Yay, happy 0th birthday, computer. At this point I'd like to thank my big bro for generously donating many of the components now sitting inside the PC. In the end I used a donated motherboard and power supply (and cpu cooler - see below), new RAM, CPU and Case, and a GPU that I already owned.

I finally managed to grab a Coolit ECO ALC and install it, and for a short time it worked great. Now the pump is making a weird droning noise.
The seller is very apologetic and has promised a refund if that is what I wish, however, I went to check with the manufacturers whether the noise was a symptom of something serious (i.e. possible pump failure) or something beningn (possible trapped air bubble), first. No point going to the trouble of replacing it if it's just something that's going to go away.
The manufacturer for their part have suggested that the pump may be faulty and have "opened a support case". I'm not sure what that means but I guess it will all become clear. If coolit resolve the issue it might just be a case of replacing the defective ECO ALC with a working one. If on the other hand I have to deal with the seller and get a refund, I suppose I can always take the money from the refund and put it towards a shiny Corsair H80 (also made by coolit).

Time will tell. I've gone back to air cooling for a while until it all gets sorted out. I would say that CPU temps are unchanged, but I actually have no way of telling, since Speedfan seems to be a complete mess that doesn't seem to have a clue what it's doing. At least I don't have to worry about the pump exploding and splashing coolant all over my system anymore.

So, what else have I been doing? Well, I've been studying lots, and taking online exams and whatnot. I've also been playing lots of games with all the settings turned up to high, which is always fun.

I've also started looking online for gifts to buy for the end of year present festival that shall not be named yet. Yes, QVC's Endofyearpresentfestivalthatshallnotbenamedyet In July was quite well received by my mum (who loves Endofyearpresentfestivalthatshallnotbenamedyet) and I've heard on the internet that some stores are already stocking Xmas (oops there I go) stuff, including the local store which now stocks 2 varieties of mince pies (If you don't know what they are then go to your specialist food store (I've just had a quick look and they seem really hard to find in the US, which is a shame because they're really nice).

So yeah, I've got a few ideas for things to buy people, but we'll have to see what happens between now and then :-).

Apropos of nothing, I have been spending a hell of a lot of time listening to this album. I'd never heard of the band until a friend recommended them, though I think they're rather good :-).

As an aside, reading about mince pies on that site has lead me to read some more of it, and it seems to be perfect for my sense of humour. Here you go, for all you overseas folks who wondered what weird and awesome things we eat. There's some stuff on there that even i've never heard of.

I leave ye with some pickatures of various computer related things that I have been doing recently :-). Heh, or at least I will try to. The tabling seemed to work out okay this time round :-).

Have fun, I've got loads of revision to do. Meh.

We Have Liftoff... (New computer begins shakedown)...

2011-09-01T23:21:00.004+01:00

It's official. As of a couple of seconds past 11pm, a little over 20 minutes ago, my new computer just booted into Windows for the first time.

I'm at the initial "sodding about" phase at the moment, and there's a lot of work to be done. Loads of applications, software, games etc to install, loads of drivers to be added, settings to be changed etc, and all of it is going to wait until my bro has salvaged what data he needs from the rather shiny and lovely primary SATA drive he has promised me.

At the moment, the machine is in a temporary case, using an IDE hard drive from one machine, an IDE CD drive from another, the tower case from a third and a spare cooling fan from a fourth. I suppose you could say I'm temporarily loaning a racehorse the legs from another animal, to see if it can run :-).

Once I get the SATA drive, I'll start from scratch and reinstall everything, and here's why:

The Motherboard I am using uses only one IDE channel, which is fair enough. I mean it's not the 80s anymore, right? The downside is that since I only have two SATA drives, one of which is too small to use as a primary, and the other of which has already been designated a secondary, I have to use two PATA devices on the same channel at the same time, which apparently causes bottlenecking on the PATA bus.

Not only that, but where sata cables are sleek, slim and curvy, IDE "ribbons" are bulky, crumply, ugly, and, let's just face it, they look really bad and attract dust like a magnet. They're difficult to fold around corners of the case, difficult to route round things, and they act like a great big long electronic tarpaulin strung from one side of your case to the other to obstruct air flow.
So the sooner the SATA drive (which uses sleek slim cables) is in there, the better.

Speaking of air flow, my new computer is happily "hooing" (that's the noise it makes, seriously, it's a quiet "Hooooooooo" sound (at 100% RPM and silent at anything less than about 60%) to itself, as I try to see how low I can get the core temp to go.
Considering that the side of the case is off, and the fact that aside from an 80mm fan I balanced on one of the aforementioned IDE cables to cool the chipset (and the PSU fan which has its own job to do), the solitary 120mm fan of my new and sparkly Coolit ECO ALC cooler is the only fan in the case, it is doing a damn good job of holding my CPU at a steady 32 degrees C. The Zalman air cooler in my other (this) computer can only manage 36c, and that's in a cool case surrounded by other fans, on a CPU that is slower by some 400Mhz. Okay, 4 degrees isn't a big difference, but both machines are effectively idling, and apparently it's under heavy load that the ECO struts its stuff.

Of course, my new rig isn't ready to strut its stuff yet. It doesn't have DirectX installed, and it is currently packing a lowly 256mb Geforce 7600GT in its digital pants. A card which would probably not suffice for hardcore gaming these days, even if it weren't damaged, which it is. Having suffered a hefty dose of heat damage a while back, any black screen is now liberally dotted with pretty red, green and blue pixels. I'll replace the 7600 with my GTX260 when I move the machine to its permanent home in the lovely new case I've bought.

Amusingly, the little 50mm (maybe?) fan of the gpu is making far, far noise than the ECO's 120. In fact, since I haven't installed any drivers other than the default, it was only four minutes after the computer booted to desktop for the first time that it lost its bluescreen virginity, with some kind of Nvidia driver error that is apparently popular among later versions of Windows. I don't expect this error to be a problem once the latest drivers are installed of course.

So yeah. I'm not doing anything hugely in depth, but it'd be nice to remember the very first time that my computer went online.

Ciao!

Excuse the dreadful mess, the case is my "It's the only spare case that will take 120mm fans" case.
The camera is my "I'm sorry I've lost my tripod mounting plate" camera.

When the day of the big build comes I will borrow a tripod if needs be and take some better pics :-).

Is this an Autumn I see before me?

2011-08-27T15:13:00.004+01:00

I dunno, let me check.
No it's not. But I suspect that as summer occasionally appears early for 24 hours at a time in April, Autumn probably does much the same thing. Last night for example. Very cloudy and quite rainy, for most of the night actually.
And today, weirdly seems to be one of those Autumnal bright-sunshine/cold-breeze days, where the shadows are 10 degrees cooler than the light. I like days like this. They bring back happy memories, though I'm not sure what of. More a memory of a general sensation of happiness perhaps. Not sure why. Oh well.

So yes, computing.Well, my new case arrived a short time ago and I wasted no time in putting my system into it. It feels like a different computer, which is bizarre because the only thing that's changed is the case. But that's not going to be the case for long :-).

I've been on the receiving end of remarkable amounts of generosity from various people actually, where computer hardware is concerned. I guess college was coming up to the end of its budgetary year or something, and wanted to spend what little money they had left so they weren't under-budget, as at one point in the lab they had piles of stuff in what has since become known as "freebie corner".

Among the items which I claimed (I was given first dibs) were a trio of Cisco wireless access points, which I figured would come in useful for my CCNA (though I suspect they might need power over Ethernet which may be a small issue because I might not be able to power them!), an old (it had gone beige!) but fully functioning monochrome laser printer, and a shiny, mint-condition (but apparently obsolete and incompatible with windows 7) 600dpi flatbed CIS Scanner.
Having told my colleages of the bounty available in the lab, they came along and took the two remaining scanners, and I traded one of my wireless access points with a friend in return for a load of goodwill and a clear conscience (I don't need three of them anyway)*.

The laser printer worked flawlessly, and even works over USB so I don't need to sod about with serial cables and whatnot. The scanner on the other hand came with zero windows 7 support, with the manufacturers and Microsoft insisting that the scanner was incompatible with windows 7. It looks like the manufacturers just gave up on the scanner and its owners altogether.
Fortunately, other owners of the scanners weren't so willing to be left high and dry, and eventually with their help I was actually able to get the scanner working properly. Here is an incredible picture to prove it, courtesy of my ickle nephew:

I think he's coming on as an artist - he's certainly good when it comes to attention to detail. So yeah, the scanner now works, which I'm pleased about. I'm pretty happy with the laser printer as well, as it prints pretty fast, and 1200dpi printouts look pretty cool.
The only downside is that it's gone slightly beige, which is a bit annoying, but hey, it didn't cost me anything so I have no moral authority to complain whatsoever hehe. I'm still wondering how I might get it slightly less beige though. Maybe some oven cleanery stuff would work, I don't know. I'm not sure I want to risk destroying the printer to find out, heh.

Finally, the rebuilding of my computer received a huge boost earlier this week when my bro brought over most of an entire system that he had been using before he went over to the dark side. I'm ordering some new shiny bits from ebay, and in the next week or two I hope to rebuild my machine completely. The only thing left in it that's in it now will be the optical drive (one on the "new" machine doesn't work) and the secondary storage drive (which has all my documents on).

Once my bro brings over the sata drive he's combing through for any useful left-over bits, I am going to use it as my primary drive, and I can crack on with reinstalling everything to the new machine, which should be quite a lot of fun. So yeah.

Oh, and as for the spider, I ended up running out of the local shop carrying one of our old friends in my hands, to stop the spider from freaking out/being squished by the hordes of local kids that hang around outside the local shop for no good reason.
Said spider was then dumped around the corner out of sight and last seen wandering indignantly (but 3-dimensionally) off. I then wandered back in and paid for my shopping, as if nothing had happened hehe.
So yeah, revising for exams, rescuing spiders and planning new computers. It's been a fun week :-).

Some pickatures.

*Said friend is apparently keeping the still-unused wireless access point in a box in his cellar, having found out to his disappointment that while on a very superficial level, his wireless internet dongle and a wireless access point could be said to work along the same incredibly broad lines, he would not be able to substitute one for the other, and in fact the wireless access point would be of no use to him whatsoever.

A Frantic Disposition...

2011-08-22T22:57:00.006+01:00

23:03 Monday 22nd August - 34 and a half hours before turning up for the exam...

This is just a little placekeeper that another - two or three day older - version of me is going to write an addition to in two or three days time.

Hi older me, I hope you passed the super mega important exam on wednesday.

Yes folks, I'm frantically revising for a very important exam, and to say I'm nervous is an understatement.
Actually it's not.

I am nervous, but I am also quietly confident. It is very very very important that I pass this exam, but I've done the practice test (which is apparently harder) and scored 15% higher than the pass mark, so hopefully I'll have something to celebrate on wednesday. If I do celebrate on wednesday, I may not write an addition to this after all. I might be too busy consuming alcoholic beverages and listening to music. Who can say?

If all goes well I'll get back to you on the thursday, with a hangover, some computer related stuff, and a story about a spider :-).

Wish me luck!

UPDATE: 19:01, the following day. 14 and a half hours before turning up for the exam...

I just finished my second attempt of the practice exam after two nights and a day of revision.
It's not very often I throw my hands in the air and scream "YES, HAHAHAHA!!" at the top of my voice, but after a mock exam score of 98.1%, I have probably crossed the line to "loudly confident", heh.
Still nervous though. But hey, let's see how it goes.

PART TWO - 15:08, 26th August...

Well, the day eventually crept up on me, and off I went. We spent most of the morning going over the questions in the practice test that a lot of people found difficult. After a quick break, we started all working together on one particularly problematic problem that - although I got right in the test exam - was a source of concern for me.

A short time later, we went through who wanted to do the exam that day, and who wanted to leave it until the day after.
Surprisingly only one of us decided to leave it until the day after, and the rest of us cracked on with it.

A cursory initial look over the questions revealed that despite assurances to the contrary, the real exam would be much harder than the practice test. But now I'd said I'd do t, it was a timed exam and I couldn't sit feeling sorry for myself. I ended up really struggling with a couple. You know how it is, the revision materials prepare you to answer any one of a thousand questions, and you just have to hope that the 50 they ask are among the ones you've prepared for.

Fortunately, quite a lot of the ones I got right are indeed ones that I'd studied in the days leading up to the exam, and although I was stumped by a couple of questions for a while and even had a couple of "What is this I don't even?" questions that continued to infuriate me all the way to the end of the exam.

A minute before the timed end of the exam I figured that the two remaining questions that I had guessed answers for had got me for the past hour and a half and wouldn't be solved with a last minute flash of inspiration, so I submitted the exam and resigned myself to the inevitable score that didn't reflect how hard I'd studied over the past couple of days.

Except I guess it did, because I got 90%. A healthy pass :-). So that's okay then. The stuff about the spider will have to wait :P.

Beer Madness

2011-08-07T01:13:00.008+01:00

PART 1 - THE START (WHAT ELSE?)

So, Jack's birthday went pretty well. The day before the "do", our tutor says "oh by the way, tomorrow is a catching-up day where you all get together, sit around, read dilbert comics and complain at how unreasonable customers can be".
Actually he didn't, but now he's getting to know us as a class, I have a feeling that's what he will say in future.

PART 1A - BACKGROUNDY BIT OF KNOWLEDGE

You see, as part of our course, alongside our CCNA, we have another couple of, well, sub courses if you like, that we have to do as well.
The problem is, to actually do the coursework for these sub-courses, we need to demonstrate things like; "Using screenshots where appropriate, demonstrate the ability to search for, find, download and rename a software patch". Yes, really. On wednesday we were learning the intricacies of Manchester/Phase Encoding, and on the thursday we progressed to the lofty heights of "and then I clicked on 'rename' on the menu and here is a screenshot to prove it".
I would actually say that correctly creating, editing, saving and inserting a screenshot into a word document requires more skill than renaming a downloaded file, but hey.

Further to this, we don't actually have download privileges at college, so we can't demonstrate anything except our failure to l334 h4x a firewall. So instead of getting on with our sub-course courseworkyness, when the CCNA tutor isn't CCNA tutoring us, we sit around, read dilbert, and moan about bad experiences with customers.

Except this time we didn't. Being thursday, we set off to one of the local pubs.
And there we stayed, having a wide variety of interesting drinks including (for me) beer, cider, corvoisier (brandy), and a rather stunning cocktail called a fireball.

50ml of finest cinnamon whisky in a pint glass, topped up with apple juice. The result is an alcoholic drink that tastes (and smells) like raw liquid Christmas :-).

So the night turned out quite well. Lots of alcohol was consumed, lots of pizza was eaten (mine was liberally covered in the hottest chilli sauce I have ever tasted - alcohol seemed to take the edge off the discomfort, and while I don't like hot food, you'll do anything to impress your mates after 4 hours of drinking - so while I was sat there with my hot pizza grinning like a cheshire cat, the other guys were backing away from the table to stop the chilli fumes corroding their drinks glasses), and no one got into trouble despite the fact that one of the elders of our party made the mistake of turning up with an empty stomach after very little sleep, and quickly became the most intoxicated person I've seen outside of a cop show as a result.
To stop him from drunkenly losing them, other members of the party went home with his watch/mobile phone/sunglasses/backpack/expensive multitool/mountain bike, and apparently the poor dude woke up in absolute panic the day after wondering where all his stuff was.
He has it all back now and has promised not to drink on an empty stomach again :-).

PART TWO, OTHER STUFF...

So the course is coming on quite well, though I'd be lying if I said that anyone was finding it easy. I do however, seem to be coping quite well and have already got the practical part of the end of semester exam down to a fine art.

I had wanted this entry to be longer, but I've left it hanging in mid air for so long that I've forgotten most of what I wanted to write about, so busy have I been with college work (no really).

Hopefully, the next entry will include more computery type stuff :-). Let's see how things go hey.

Shuttles, Bikes and Climbing Frames...

2011-07-21T23:21:00.004+01:00

PART ONE: BIKEY STUFF

I would yawn, but I'm not that sleepy.

I'm tired, yes, extremely physically tired, my legs, arms and lower back ache from 3 hours of cycling up, down, around, across, over, between, and well, I'm sure you get the idea.
See, one of the things that I like about my job, is that when people are in a nice mood, they give me lovely gifts of money or tips.
These tips go in a Jar (a plastic bag actually), until they accumulate enough to represent a decent amount of money.

Back at the start of the year, or even as late as the end of last year, you may have seen me mention that I was saving up for a new bike, one with suspension, that didn't jiggle me about so much when it came to kerbs and suchlike. But for whatever reason, no sooner would I start saving, than some personal financial crisis would appear and devour my money. Whether college fees or bus fare or whatever, despite the generous and substantial help from my parents, money seems to have been really tight for the past few months.
It's only recently that I've started to have a disposable income again.

Eventually, the tips built up to the right amount, and after weeks of agonising, I chose and ordered a new bike to replace my cool but slightly rusty (with finnicky gears that didn't work properly) and kinda uncomfortable other bike, with something more suited to my style of riding.
I ride on the pavement a fair bit, but I also enjoy riding dirt tracks and whathave you, and so the various potholes, kerbs, tree roots, protuding stones etc made a ride without suspension kinda tough on some sensitive areas.
So I ordered a spangly shiny new one, with suspension, and also with a cool paintjob, and lovely disc brakes instead of standard v brakes.
And today, after putting it together, I went on a lovely zoom around.
After hurting my naughty parts, I carefully rode home, put it together again with a larger spanner, and went on another zoom around, a few hours in length, cycling around all these weird little woodland paths that I've always been curious about.

PART TWO: NEPHEW-Y STUFF

As for the ickle guy, well I managed to see a poster in the local store advertising an Emergency Services Open Day. As the name suggests, lots of police, ambulances and firetrucks in attendance, lots of fun activities for all the family etc, and I even got to sit in the driving seat of a Police 4X4 (It looked like that <--- one, but not a model) which was cool. The fire fighters were doing demonstrations of fighting fires, the drugs dog was doing a demonstration of searching for drugs, morris dancers were doing impressions of dancers, and the speed camera dudes were trying to convince everyone not to hate them. We saw some awesome birds of prey, some cute rabbits, some strange chickens and rather skinny ducks, the biggest horses that I have ever seen, and 1001 dogs. My mum helpfully got me some helpful information about securing my possessions with the police, which she then helpfully tucked away somewhere where I can't get it.
Whereas my sister seems to throw stuff away if she can't immediately justify keeping it, my mum just seems to hide stuff away if she can't immediately justify not doing so. And since she's a compulsive hide-stuff-away-er, the end results of her interactions with items of property are depressingly similar and predictable. Oh well.

Last week, I took the ickle guy to the a park in another part of town. The area was lucky enough to have some money ploughed into it, (which is ironic given that the area's main block of flats is about to be ploughed into rubble), and as it has only been up a short time, the new park is therefore in decent condition, the local kids not having had enough time to smash the stuff up yet.
They have a couple of slides, a weird cross between a swing and, well, a round thing. It's like a huge dinnerplate attached to a swing, and you sit in it and swing.
They also have a rather terrifyingly tall climbing frame with a slide at the top. This thing is huge. I could climb off the roof of our extension onto it with little trouble.
It is made, instead of rungs, of very taut nylon ropes cunningly arranged so as to be a complete devil to climb. Never mind worrying about falling onto the ground, when I was up there I worried just as much about falling from one part of the construction onto another. Shame - I could have climbed to the top and had a nice view of my nephew being weird.

Or I could if I didn't hate heights, which is why while my nephew was busy climbing like a little climbing spider monkey, I was relaxing in the swinging thing, while keeping a careful eye on him :-).
But again, he seemed to like it. He made a new friend, who gave him a muffin for some reason, and I had a nice time walking him round the little alleyways and suchlike.

OTHER STUFF

That's it really. College has been proceeding apace, with the lessons getting harder and harder, we spend the days examining incrementally smaller and smaller parts of the curriculum, trying to nail out the facts in some semblance of order, before moving onto the next mind-warping revelation.
Today, we did subnetting. Next week we will do it as well, and possibly the week after. It's a confuzzling (and yet kinda awesome and clever and interesting) topic. The occasional giddy rush of fulfilment when the pieces suddenly snap into place, makes the grinding through the facts and texts worth it, I think :-).
Today, we also watched the shuttle land, live. I asked the tutor to let me watch it as a favour (the student computers don't have flash), and to my surprise, a crowd gathered pretty quickly, all evidently keen to watch Atlantis land for the last time. And land she did, without incident thankfully. While she goes on display at Kennedy, NASA and other organisations promise that they are working hard to deliver her replacement.

And that's about it really. Next week should be fun. I've booked 2 days off, so we can take the youngest member of our class out to the pub for his 18th birthday. There are about 8 of us going, and Jack (the kid) insists - get this - that he has things to do, the day after [his 18th birthday celebration!]. How irresponsible is that! He should just cancel those activities, instead of performing them with a huge hangover.
We did all agree not to get him too drunk however, as one of us would have to put him up for the night, and no one wants a sickeningly drunk kid falling around their house.

Of course, how reasoned and sensible we are about it after several beers, remains to be seen. Given the fact that the last time we went for "a quick pint", and that the more we drank, the more drinking more seemed like an awesome idea, I think someone is going to have to show extraordinary presence of mind to make sure, at half 11 at night, that ickle Jack doesn't get left to sleep in a skip somewhere, as is traditional birthday celebration activity, apparently.

But hey. Let's see.

And now, that this is over, I'm going to backup some stuff, and then sod off to bed.
I seem to have become more sleepy in the past few minutes. Very tired actually. I will have to have an early night to ensure I have enough energy to zoom around on my bike again tomorrow.

Byeee.

End of an era...

2011-07-08T16:25:00.002+01:00

T minus 1:08.
Yep, I'm sitting here with my dad on a what has turned out to be a very rainy day, watching what is officially the last ever launch of the Space Shuttle, and I have to admit, I think it's a sad occasion. The thing has worked pretty damn well for the past 30 years, it and seems a shame to get rid of the shuttle, especially as there's no immediate replacemen for her. As I said to my dad, it's like the retirement of Concorde all over again.

(Launch countdown is paused at 31 seconds, while they check if something or other has retracted properly).
*Countdown resumes, less than 20 seconds to go*

And the engines have started...

And up she goes. The final liftoff of the space shuttle.
An amazing piece of kit, the Shuttle, I've got, somewhere, a huge framed photo of it that my neighbour brought me back from the space center when I was a little kid, so yeah, it's sad for me to know it's her last flight.

16:31 And the boosters have seperated.

Still on her way up, and apparently she's gonna be up there for 12 days.
But yeah,, she's been off the pad for about 5 minutes, and the shuttle's high enough for the curvature of the earth to be pretty visible

16:38 And the tank has just seperated.

Aaaand, the news has moved on to the news of the world scandal.

So yeah, I'm gonna get ready for work and suchlike, but I figured I should take time out to watch Atlantis go up one last time. Call me sentimental, I don't care.

Have fun, all :-).

Summertime! An actual real one...

2011-06-26T14:40:00.006+01:00

...Always the way isn't it. You can read a news article two or three times the night before, and when you actually try to find the bloody thing, it's nowhere to be found.

(BING, Formula one is just finishing, 14:43 GMT. No prizes for guessing who wins).

Ah, here it is :-).

Yep, the weather, while not great, has at least avoided being downright crappy recently. Yesterday was actually quite nice, but today, wow. I went outside (as I am wont do do when not interfaced with my computer), and wow, would you believe it, it's one of those "get in the shade because you'll get sunburned otherwise and by the way don't touch anything made of metal or else you'll burn yourself" days.

However I need to adjust the (presently non-existent) brakes on my mountain bike so that isn't really an option for me.

However, on a completely unrelated note, I have found all 219 (including spares) of my ickle magnets that I did get for my brifday, a short while ago. So that's also good.

So yeah, what have I been up to in the past week? Well, not a whole lot.
Working, eating, sleeping, college, running out of money, drinking almost-but-not-quite ice cold cider (difficult when our fridge has stopped working), and lots of 3d stuff.

My level 2 college course has officially finished, which is a relief in one way and a shame in another as I can't really pillage the parts bin for free processors and stuff anymore :P. But hey.

Later this summer I'm hoping to upgrade my computer quite nicely, replacing the motherboard, cpu and ram at the same time. Bizarrely, DDR2 ram seems more expensive than DDR3, which is quite annoying.

But yeah, that's about it really, not a whole lot to report after a week, but I figured the weather was worth commenting on :-).

Here are some shiny shots of my 3d stuff that I've been messing around with. It's been a weird one this one because I've been spending loads of time messing around with textures - probably just as much as I've been spending on the modelling.

But yeah, there we go. I'm off to tighten the brakes on my bike :-).

EPILOGUE: 27th June

Well, it's official, it's summer. How can I tell? Well, the air has that traditional summer smell (a combination of garden fire smoke and the it's-about-to-rain smell). Apparently we're due for some thunder, and it has been trying to rain for the past hour or so.

One part of summer is getting moths flying into my room, attracted by the light. One such creature came in yesterday, and had to be released outside :-). I mention it because it's the biggest moth I've ever seen, and quite an attractive creature it was, too :-).

Apparently, Swallowtailed Moths are quite common, but somehow, they're only seen rarely. I suppose I should feel priveliged that one decided to fly into this very room, hehe.
Anyway, here are the pickatures :-).

Much Ado about Nothing...

2011-06-19T15:20:00.008+01:00

Yes, for someone who tends to lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle, I seem to spend a lot of it worrying that I'm running out of time to do things.

My level 2 college course has just about come to an end, and while half of my portfolio work has been marked as accomplishing about 85% of what is needed to pass the course, The other half (that I'm confident will accomplish the other 15% quite handsomely) hasn't yet been marked. So I'm dangling around a little.

Work seems to be picking up too, and the tips are stacking up reasonably well. You can imagine how it is; some nights you make £10, other nights you make nothing whatsoever. There's no way to predict how you'll do, and the weather (including severe snow) seems to have no bearing on it whatsoever.

Earlier this month, my mum decided that we were going to Ripon again. Well we've been there before, but this time we sort of went without the intention of actually going anywhere, which was a bit strange.

As with last time, where we went to Fountains Abbey, we once again popped into the Warehouse for an awesome salad. Now of this salad I remember writing last time:

"This thing was fantastic - I didn't wanna take a photo cos people would have looked at me weird, but it was easily the best salad I've ever had".

Well I took a photo this time :P. I had a quiche salad with a cheese and tomato quiche, and lots of fresh TEGH, with lemon which was quite nice (I bought a lemon when I got back, but it made my tea taste like lemsip), and the meal was fantastic.

Besides the only other family in the place had one guy that was taking photos out of the window and stuff.

So yeah. After wandering aimlessly around Ripon for a while, we went down to Knaresborough, for a quick wander round. I had to giggle because it seemed at the time that the town centers of both towns look pretty similar.

Knaresborough was a pretty nice place too though, nice and scenic and lots of hills and suchlike. They even had a beer and spirits type place near (go to the knaresborough street view and pan left. The place is "Beer Ritz" next to Blind Jack's) the town center that sold mead. Now I've always wanted to try mead, because apparently it was quite popular back in the day, but for some reason the smallest bottle you can get it about the size of a large bottle of wine, and sells for about £13.

Now at the moment, £13 is a little too much to spend on something I may or may not like, so I'll stick to beer for the time being.

But yeah. That's about it for now. I've got work at 5:15 and I'm sure I'll have a whale of a time zooming here there and everywhere, but hey you never know, I might think of something to write about when I get back.

Before I go for now however, this guy's "Pachelbel Rant" has been doing the rounds recently. Now I suspect I'm probably the last out of 100 million squillion to come across it, but if you've not already seen it, have a look. It made me giggle :-).

Scoot-ays, Tiredness, and Cake...

2011-05-26T14:25:00.006+01:00

14:26 Thursday: Eek, I'm tired.

Yep, another bumper week at college, where I've been able to have plenty of fun zooming around with computers and whatnot. More on this later.

In 20 minutes or so I have to zoom down to Pizza hut to have a little riding assessment, so that they can make sure I can be trusted to ride a scooter without mowing down hordes of people. Hopefully I'll be doing this little assessment thing on one of their two stroke scooters (that I'm used to) instead of their new spangly four-stroke ones (that I'm not).

Actually, I suppose I'd best get moving. I'm due down there at three!
More later!

21:53: Minor excuse making and teeny update...

Right, um, I'm back, and have been so for a while.
However, I'm absolutely incredibly tired, so I'm going to have an early night soon and I'll probably pick this up tomorrow :-).

16:59: Saturday...

Ahem. Well, a solid day's sleep, and a solid night's sleep later, and I don't actually feel any less tired.
So yeah, the ride.
I turned up at work to notice that the riding instructor was conspicuous by his absence. Half an hour later and I was in a severely bad mood. It seems that this place say they'll call me, don't call me, ask me to come down to meet someone, and then when I get there, there's no one there.

After a short time of being in a nasty mood though, in walks the riding instructor, having turned up on his rather lovely and shiny bike. A short chat and whatnot later, and off I go one one of the shiny new (<1000 miles) 2011 plate four-stroke scoots. Time to try something new I guess. Off for a couple of hours of riding.

And would you know, despite the scooter's miserable lack of power (artificially restricted to exactly 30mph, whether uphill or down), I had quite a nice time. The scooter's engine, while tiny, provided sufficient uh, [I don't want to say "grunt" or "power" because that implies that the engine has some amount of performance] uh, force to ride happily up hills in the bottom end of the rev range. The engine idled happily without threatening to cut out, like the two-stroke bikes do, and the automatic transmission had enough finesse to allow me to ride at much less than walking pace, without being jerked backwards or forwards. So yes, an absolutely puny 50cc engine, but quite a pleasant and relaxing ride, nevertheless.

Halfway through, we stopped at a local bike dealers, where I saw one bike I'd quite like to buy (£3,200), and one that, though weird-looking (or perhaps because it was weird looking), I'd really like to buy because it looks fun (£5,500). Of course, that sort of thing will have to wait a year or so.

A quick ride back, and I got all my paperwork signed. Out of 30 road-riding-competency criteria, I scored an A in 25, and a B in 5, so I guess I haven't forgotten too much in my time on two feet.

OTHER STUFF:

So what else has been going on? Well, not a lot. The financial tide of unstoppable brokeness is beginning to recede, and I'm no longer hugely overdrawn which is a big plus. My dad's on the mend from his rather worrying time in hospital, though we'll be keeping an eye on him for the duration just to be on the safe side. The dog continues to be cute and playful, and her behavior might actually be beginning to calm down. Time will tell as far as that's concerned I guess.

College is proceeding pretty much as expected, and I'm learning some fun stuff.

TECHY BIT (that's not really funny unless you're techy so I'll make it small so you don't have to read it if you're not interested)

At college, we're now using the systems there to create virtual servers and clients, so we can practice setting servers up and getting the two systems talking to each other. This week, as with last week, we've been focusing on DHCP servers, so we've been setting a DHCP server up (with a static IP), and using it to assign a dynamic IP address to the client.

Of course, when we set the virtual machines up, we have to configure them to "Host Only", so they don't attempt to interact with anything except other virtual machines.

Except, one guy didn't set his DHCP server to host only, he left it at the default setting, which allows the virtual machines to interact with physical machines across the network.

As a result, this guy's virtual DHCP server went onto the college network and started assigning dynamic IP addresses to any college PCs that asked for one, which produced a certain amount of mirth.
Oh well, I suppose you had to be there. Ahem...

SO YEAH:

That's about it really. I haven't been to Manchester for aaages, though apparently I am due to go with Nick soon, as there's some new (to us) big stuff operating there now.

And that's about it. Having spent a while playing F1 2010, I seem to have become into it enough to actually sit and watch it on the TV. An amusing side effect of playing is that as I watch the cars race round I can now go "ohh yeah, I know that track". The next one up is Monaco, which is a favourite of mine. Especially since I have a shiny souvenir from there, which my lovely brother and wife (his wife not mine) brought me back. I also have a rather loony looking Bull to go with it.

Other than that, I've been looking after the dog, looking after my ickle nephew, so he can play walking legs, castlevania, and watch his favourite show, and sitting around, hoping that we'll have a really hot summer.

So yeah :-). Here's a picture of my not-so-small puppy.
And another, to show you how lazy she can be :-).

Money Money Money...

2011-05-07T22:55:00.006+01:00

PART ONE: DEPRESSING FINANCIAL BIT

I don't have any. Money, that is.

Yep, those were the original lyrics until someone pointed out that they didn't rhyme. Either that, or it's my financial situation in a nutshell.

Argh, I suppose I should explain why I have been putting off writing this one for a while.

Over the past few months, my financial circumstances have gone from bad to worse. Predictably, it started when I left the Army. I lived on my savings for a while, and as these dwindled, I then went to claim unemployment benefit while I searched for a new job. During this time, the lovely people at the job center suggested that I go on a course or two to improve my employment prospects. So I did. New start and all that lot. Of course, when I told the guys at the job center that I was now on a course, their response (in summary) was "If you're on a course you can't be looking for a job (therefore you get no money, haha sucker, you fail etc)". And I've basically been bouncing about ever since looking for another job, trying to carry on with my courses, and trying to get on with life without having one of those "Arrgh sod it I'm pissed off!!!" moments.

A few "Arrgh sod it I'm pissed off!!!" moments, lots of hassle, and plenty of help later, and I'm on the very verge of being able to support myself again. Yep folks, I seem to have finally succeeded in getting my old pizza scoot-ay riding job back. Hopefully this will be the last time I apply for a job there, as when I finish my courses, I may be qualified to apply for other jobs in other industries.
But hey, now I can concentrate on my courses now.

PART TWO: MY COURSE(S)

Yeah, courses plural. I remember a while ago talking about going on Cisco's CCNA course in a sort of weird abstract way, expecting it to be something that I could look forward to in the medium-term future. Well, apparently not. For some reason, the lads on the City and Guilds Level 2 course (the ones that signed up for it anyway), myself included, have now been started on the City and Guilds Level 3 course.
Now the guys at the college seem to be cramming as much as possible into the course, so while it's officially a City and Guilds course, the courses I am now on (including the other one) actually include:

Cisco CCNA (minus final exam which has to be taken at an official examination center) - four seperate certificates for each semester and a fifth for passing the exam, which results in an official CCNA qualification.
Windows Server 2008 (minus final exam also, same as above), which then leads to either MCP or MCITP qualification.
City and Guilds Level 2 Diploma in ICT Professional Competence
City and Guilds Level 3 Diploma in ICT Professional Competence
Cisco I.T. Essentials
Customer Care Level 3 (a vague name for a course, hey?!)

So that's a rather boggling six seperate certificates I'm studying for at the minute! If I get every certificate on offer, and there's no pressing reason why I wouldn't, I'd be at least vaguely qualified to start looking for jobs in the IT sector. In addition, [Our tutor tells us that] the IT Essentials course includes about 80% of the course material that is required study for the CompTIA+ exam, which is potentially an extra (and valuable) qualification I can get.

So I seem to be moving rather rapidly in a new direction.
As for my technical skills, they're coming on pretty well too. I can disassemble a PC down to its screws, and reassemble it in less time than it takes to watch an episode of star trek (about 45 minutes without adverts) and it always works afterwards.

In addition, and rather awesomely, my college tutor now seems to have gotten into the habit of bringing broken computers into class and saying "Hey andy, have a look at this" (not because he can't fix it himself (because otherwise he wouldn't be a tutor!), but because he has other stuff to do, and apparently I "can be trusted to do it properly" (!)).

Ahem, I've gone all red now.

But I'm pleased to have found something that I seem naturally good at. I make the odd mistake like everyone I guess, but by and large I'm enthusiastic and cheerful, I like to think I do a thorough, neat and tidy job, and everything I do is written up and put in shiny plastic wallets, to go in my portfolio, which is beginning to fill out nicely, considering that we have another 8 weeks to go on the course.

My only quirk is that I attach value to everything. "An old 2.8ghz pentium 4 processor? someone will want that!" Eager to clear out their stock of "worthless" stuff, the dudes at college have given me everything from old hard drives to unwanted LCDs, which has resulted in my new nickname "Magpie". Apparently magpies are unable to resist collecting shiny things. It makes everyone giggle, me included, so hey. And at the end of the day, selling stuff that was going to go in the bin has three advantages.

Someone who needs a working part gets one.
I could always do with the extra money.
It's a huge shame to bin something that still works - this way it gets diverted to a new user instead of the landfill.

And all that aside, College still benefit from the freed-up space. So hey :-).

I'm now at college three days a week, which is pretty cool, and when I actually start work (monday, I believe) I'll be working two/three days a week also, so my time gets divided pretty evenly between the two. As I've said before too, there's a lot of hands on "doing" stuff, as well as theory, which I think is awesome. We spent most of thursday morning installing Server 2008 and configuring our machines to act as DHCP Servers, and learning about default gateways and subnetting, so it's fun and educational at the same time which is pretty cool.

I grip my wooden (well, wobblywood (it's like monkey metal, it's a new word I've invented for wood of unknown provenance)) desk when I say, "things might be beginning to look up for me".

PART THREE: OTHER STUFF

One thing about being incredibly broke is that I've had to find other ways of enjoying myself without spending money. Now this hasn't turned out to be as hard as it sounds, and I've been spending some time in town before/after college walking round the winter gardens/local galleries etc looking at cool things/interesting and weird plants. Also, I've been spending plenty of time with the family, especially my ickle nephew who seems to enjoy going to the park to take his remote control boat for a spin. I think I'm going to have to get one at some point as they look pretty cool, and they're certainly not as easy to damage as RC helicopters.

My ickle nephew continues to love playing Walking Legs (UT3), and seems to enjoy watching me play Silent Hunter 4 as well, so it's all good fun.

So yeah. Things were substantially crappy at one point, and while I'm still terminally short of cash at the moment, things might start to begin looking up in the near future.

here's hoping eh?

EPILOGUE: ADDED AS AN EXTRA, AFTERWARDS...

I never did say why it had been such a long time since my last Blog entry. Well, with all this various unpleasant financial stuff happening to me, I've been stressing about how I'm going to pay for things, how I'm going to pay bills etc etc, and just been having a generally unpleasant and stressy time of it all. I didn't want to dwell on it, as that would have made me more stressed and stuff. Now the crappy bit is (hopefully) on the wane, I can write about it in detail without getting hugely worried and depressed and whatnot :-).

Here are some shiny pictures. One is my ickle nephew's boat, the other is our secret clay mine. For good measure I'll throw in a nice picture of two doves that seem to enjoy staring through my window every summer.

Have fun!

Oops...

2011-03-24T00:09:00.005Z

...Yikes, the longer I leave this, the more stuff I have to write to catch up with things.

Yep, it's been a month to the day (more or less (which completely defeats the object of saying "to the day". Oh well)) since I last posted anything up, however, inbetween the big bits of nothing that have been happening, other various events and things were experienced, and so I shall try to remember some to write about.

Hmm. Current affairs. Bloody hell. Coalition warplanes flying over Libya, the Libyan airforce now in tatters, consisting entirely of half a dozen trainee pilots with a handful of rubber bands to twang between them, Gadaffi running off into the middle of the desert with 40/50 however many virgins (isn't he supposed to wait until after death for all that lot?), and he still pops up out of his burning hole in the ground every few days with his megaphone, to proclaim "We are winning ze var!" before ducking back underground to deplete his supply of (either blind, or very rich, by now) virgins.
Still, it'll give your average student activist something to protest about, which is good. Activists are easier to identify as assholes when they're visibly protesting about something.

In other news, the past week or two have been filled with news stories about tsunamis and earthquakes and exploding nuclear reactors, all happening, completely unfairly, to the same country at the same time.
Yep, things aren't all that great in Japan. Let's hope the folks get back on their feet sooner rather than later.

Ever remember when you were little, and you thought that the future was this golden thing full of awesomeness and light and fun?

Sooooo...

In computer land, things are going pretty well.

I went to college one day and asked if I could borrow a surplus motherboard to use in a test rig I was building at the time. of course, being a dell motherbouard, it only fits in Dell systems. So to use the board I had to borrow everything attached to it.

Before I knew it, I was lugging a 15 kilo Dell tower PC through the rather pleasant studenty part of town.

"OMG No wai!" I hear you cry, no, I did not get given a fully working system.
The tutor's rather liberal interpretation of recycling and sales policy seemed to go along the lines of:

"We shouldn't give working systems away. We can give scrap away. If that computer is fully complete, minus a power supply, it's classed as not working. Therefore take it home and put a power supply in it".

Which was done.

In the past few weeks I've now upgraded every bit of the computer that I can upgrade, and it's not a bad little system. If only I could figure out what to do with a completely functioning but completely surplus computer.

I guess it's fun to take to bits and reassemble every now and again. Either way, I managed to turn a halfhearted arsing around 10 minutes fitting a power supply, into a full-blown in-depth 7 and a half hour reconditioning the system completely, rebuilding it from the ground up, and writing up in great detail, all my work in the process.

Look. See? Shiny! I was pretty pleased with the way that it turned out, and it seems to have been almost universally complimented on its content and layout. Both my tutors had a little chat with each other and then with me, after agreeing that I should consider looking into a carreer as a technical documentation writer.
I'll think about that maybe, but at the minute my priority is getting on with this course. I'm also going to see if I can get my name on the waiting list for the course subsequent to this one, which again, is two certificates, each worth £££.

Finance wise, I'm now broke. I have no source of income whatsoever. The job center have decided that since I'm studying on a (2 day a week) part time course, I'm not looking for a job, and therefore am not eligible for financial support. But all the terms and conditions I signed up to at the start still apply as long as I'm on their books.

In actual fact, I am still looking for a job, and tomorrow I intend to explain to these lovely people that if I'm not eligible for financial support anyway, they can shove their terms and conditions where the sun doesn't shine.
I'm not going to word it like that obviously, cos I'm a nice person.

But yes, at the minute, my income comes solely from scavenging spare parts from broken systems and selling them on the eBays. Difficult when my spare stuff comes from only one source, and of course I'm careful not to monopolise the scrap pile - other people want extra bits too. So hey.

In other news, We've all been spending a lot of time with my nephew, in fact it was his birthday not long after the last blog entry. Off we went to laser quest, and we had 2 awesome games of running around, zapping each other with lasers, and generally having lots of fun.

I got the awesome score, coming in first place, with an extra bonus for "stupendous accuracy", which was 12%. Okay I spose, considering that ammo conservation doesn't apply, and especially considering that the average accuracy is 6%.

The second round, I came in 8th out of 9. Even my ickle nephew beat me heh.
I'm not sure what went wrong there. Whether it was cos everyone ganged up on me, whether I wasn't able to use mobility to great effect (in the first game everyone else was walking round slowly while I was ninja-ing all around the mezzanine (heh!), which we decided we weren't going to include in the play area for the second game), or whether I was simply unlucky, I dunno. It was good fun either way.

Later on, we had a beautiful spring day, so my nephew got suited up in his finest Armouron armour and off we went to the park for some questing. This basically consisted of him running around fighting trees while I stood close to make sure he didn't do anything dangerous or whatever. A nice time was had by all.
Later on, his parents brought his remote control boat around, and we spent an hour or two sailing round the lake...

WE INTERRUPT YOUR PROGRAMMING...

Bugger I have (what is probably the first of many over the summer) a huge moth in my room. A grand moth even. I shall call him Tarkin.
BRB getting moth out of room.
There. Now Grand Moth Tarkin is sat on my window waving his little antennae in gratitude.

So yeah.

...

My sister brought her PC monitor round so I could use it to set up her computer which I was getting ready for her, and for a short and kinda cool time, I actually had two PCs working at the same time in my room, which was fun. The whole place looked a bit like a workshop at times, I have to admit. But it was cool. I spent the evening at her house the other day setting the computer up and getting it all working together, and it works like a treat.

So yeah. To summarise:

I got more free computer stuff.
The weather is turning nice.
I am rotten stinking stoning stinking broke and selling my possessions to stay afloat.

Here is a picture of my cute little CPU collection. I haven't included the AMD X2 64 in there because my computer needs it to function.
I was going to put in another bunch of pictures, but they're just more computery ones of computers in various stages of disassembly :-).

Oh well, have fun. I'll try to report in when stuff gets interesting :-).

EDIT: There was a post following on from this entitled "Heads up".
I've deleted it because it's a load of rubbish :-).

I'm getting dizzy...

2011-02-24T15:43:00.004Z

...the number of times I've been on a roll this week!

But first, february.

PART ONE: FEBRUARY

Well, so far this month we've had rain, frost, very cold biting winds, and snow, all topped off with today, which is actually a lovely spring day.

Everyone is doing stuff outside, whether packing caravans, cleaning cars, taking their dogs for a walk, taking their kids to the park etc. The birds are singing, the ducks are quacking, the sun is beaming down on everything, the grass is green, the water is wet, even some flowers are starting to come out, adding a splash of colour (to compete with the frequent splashes of muddy puddles) to the local park.
And in addition to it all, the local kids have been attending the "Sheffield Parks and Countryside Rangers' Minibeast Safari".

And, with a loud buzzing of wings, I think the first wasp/bee of the year has just flown into my room! Seems to have buzzed off now (They're a bugger to get out of the house again, since I refuse to kill them, the only solution is to kinda guide them through the house to the nearest open window).

Anyway, the safari. I can't remember the poster word for word, but it gave the local kids (the little ones who are interested in such things - the older ones are interested in getting drunk and fighting each other, obviously) the opportunity to wander around the woods and grass in the park, finding stuff like centipedes and spiders and millipedes and oligochaeta etc, and look at them with magnifying glasses and things, and even "help the rangers set up 'minibeast hotels' for them". Which presumably took the form of plastic containers with leaves and twigs and stuff for the creatures to crawl around in and eat and stuff. The kids were also invited to draw pictures or make models of their favourite minibeasts.
The rangers had set up a little marquee with tables and stuff in the park, and there were plenty of kids wandering around with butterfly nets and bits of paper and everything, and to say that we had an inch of snow a week ago, watching everyone out in the sunshine enjoying themselves made me smile. For my part, I was bimbling around on my (very muddy, but it works just fine) bike, and generally being cheerful. The air seems to have that odd slightly spicy peaty smell that it tends to have on lovely spring days like this, so it's all nice and seasonal.

I would have taken my ickle nephew to the safari, but he's with his parents and my mum on a trip to the coast. Not to worry, I've got some cool birthday presents for him for this weekend :-).

PART TWO: COMPUTERYNESS

Well, things have been proceeding apace at College (depending on who I talk to, where I go seems to change. To friends, it's College, to close friends it's Skool, to Americans it's Tech College etc etc, Tech College sounds best I spose. Maybe I should start calling it that). We've been storming through the modules to the tune of one or two a week, and so far my lowest end-of-module-test score was 91%. I could be doing better, but not much. With two test scores at 100% and two over 96%, I'm not doing too badly.

One of the awesome things that I love about my course is that it's hands-on. The last one was all theory, which I hated, so I left. This one actually puts theory into practice, and putting together machines properly and getting everything just right, is starting to become a source of personal pride for me; as an example, while I was installing an OS on a system yesterday, I spent the free time removing blanking plates off nonfunctioning computers, fitting them to mine, and making the machine physically look as good and as appealing as possible :-).
The note on the bottom of the spec sheet that I taped to the case, warned "Do NOT disassemble. I spent ages making this box look leet". I think Tech college would probably be the only place in the city where everyone got the joke.
It got a better laugh than I expected actually!

One awesome side-benefit of studying there is that as I've already mentioned, due to whatever agreement they have with whoever supplies them with their systems, they don't seem too hung-up on donating bits to needy people, i.e. students who ask for them nicely. This week, I came home with an Intel Celeron 2.4 CPU, a special blanking plate for the back of my computer, and a 40gb 2.5" laptop hard drive.

The Celeron came in useful for my side project...

PART THREE: SIDE PROJECT

Back in the good old days you see, before I built the lovely shiny computer that I'm using at the minute, I used one that I bought from PC world. A sparkly shiny silver and white Packard Bell that at the time was a pretty cool machine. It had a Celeron 1.8 processor and 256mb of ram.

Of course, when I built my new computer, it went up in the loft, saved from the bin only by my stubborn habit of keeping things with sentimental value. And there, it stayed, on its side, in the cold loft, for the next 5 years.

Of course, I figured that I may as well get some hands on skills in my own time, so down it came. Initially I was just going to take it to bits for the hell of it, but partway through I figured it'd be just as much fun to see if I could get it working again.

I started by stripping the computer down to its last screw, to a completely bare chassis. Every part was cleaned of dust, including the CPU fan and heatsink which were fairly icky, and every part was carefully put back together. I found an old hard drive in a plastic bag, in the drive bay, and figured I'd fit it properly and use it as a primary drive.

And what do you know, the computer works. It runs windows just fine, even a couple of older games with its cute little ATI Radeon 9000 graphics card (which at the time cost me about £120, and now costs £6.50!!! Talk about depreciation!!!).

I started getting a bit carried away, upgrading the computer's RAM, taking it from 256 to 1024MB, and I replaced the old 1.8 Celeron with the aforementioned 2.4.

And it still works! In fact, it now officially works better than it ever did. I'm hoping to pass it onto my sister :-).

So there we go!

Here are some shiny pickatures.

Peripheral Vision (also, Happy Birthday To Meee)

2011-02-17T19:41:00.008Z

Also, Happy 250th Blog Post :-).

Yep, it's me again. I mean it's my blog, come on, who else would it be?

Well, as you can see, I'm kinda running dangerously low on space on my desk. Even at the best of times it's always been a bit of a squeeze, and my lovely shiny briffday present (the wheel) means that if I want to chat AND race at the same time, I have to lean over to use my keyboard. Bad ergonomics.

How long this situation continues however, is of course, ever open to debate: My desk might have been reasonably solidly built when it was new, but years and years of continual daily use (14,600 hours in the past 5 years, at a rough guess) means that the desk is held together more with wood filler and rawlplugs, than with screws and dowels. Three sets of runners are knackered on it, so the pullout shelf, the drawer, and one of the CD trays all do their best to dump their contents on the floor if I'm not careful. Not to worry, I want to rebuild it sometime this year anyway. This is another "I'll do it when...(I have some money)" project that sits on my mental "I'll do it when..." shelf, next to the big shiny new computer that I haven't yet started saving up for.

But yes, the wheel. It's a thrustmaster Ferrari GT, and taking into account the gift voucher I used to pay for part of it, plus the money I was given to buy it, and the loyalty card points I got for buying it, it cost me -£19. It seems that "the best things in life are free" only applies to other people while for me, I actually get paid to take them. Which brings me neatly around to my course.

Yep, I've now finished week 2 of the course, and while tuesday's "theory/revision" lesson consisted entirely of 4 hours of revision and end-of-module-test taking (I have access to all the course materials including the ability to take the tests at home, so theoretically I could do the first of the two courses that I'm on without ever setting foot in a classroom), the practical on wednesday was much more interesting.
Again, the day started with doing a clean-sweep of some systems and installing an OS on them so they could be resold, but the lesson was much more hardware oriented. Having been expecting to be sitting watching progress bars all day, I was pleasantly surprised by the end of the day to have swapped out a malfunctioning DVD drive, as well as installing two CPU assemblies, and about half a dozen sticks of RAM.

Highlights of that lesson included one of our new classmates (the 17yo kid, Liam, seems to be wavering as to whether he's really bothered about the course at all) opening a system up, and finding the CPU sat loose on the motherboard, and the heat sink rattling around in one of the drive bays (!), a second new dude's system beeping at him and refusing to boot, but only until I opened it up and put a stick of RAM in there (everyone starts somewhere, I know, but even I find it funny when someone puts a computer with no PSU on the workbench, and then complains that he can't find where to plug the power lead), and weirdly, a malfunctioning CD drive that the first dude fixed, turned out to have a coin rattling about inside the mechanism!

The second set of highlights was cooler though, since we restore these machines to factory spec, things like firewire/usb cards, graphics cards, and sound cards, tend to be taken out and given to the students, on the basis that "the computers cost us nothing, why not spread the love?" or something like that.
I set off home on wednesday with a new (to me) fairly old, (but very shiny and much better than the on-board realtec sound chip I was using) Sound Blaster Audigy ZS Platinum sound card, as well as a front-mounted USB/SATA/Firewire/Audio/SD/CF Card reader all-in-one thingumabob. Like this, but better.

Aside from some driver issues with the sound card (now fixed, mostly) and the fact that the card reader doesn't like SDHC cards, (I just plug the card into a USB adaptor and plug that into the reader), they're both now happily sitting in the computer doing stuff.

As for my wheel and pedals, They come in very handy when playing one of my favourite driving games. I didn't realise quite how handy until I plugged them in for the first time. Let's just say that using a wheel instead of the keyboard has made a slight difference to my lap times, heh.

And finally, we come to my birthday. Yep, I never writing this thing in order, but hey. My sister was the first to come bearing yummy gifts, including a box of yummy sweets from my ickle nephew, a huge pack of yummy pork crunch just like my Christmas one, and a cardboard thingie with lots of yummy beef jerky on it. Now someone (Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, I can't remember) commented on the fact that they print lovely ladies on the cardboard backdrop, to inspire customers to keep buying peanuts/beef jerky etc on the off chance they might eventually get a look at a cardboard nipple. I'd always considered it unlikely that the women on any of these backdrops had nipples on display because pubs were, well, still public places. Nevertheless, after eating 7 of the packets, the woman was more er, exposed so I had a quick look.
There are no nipples. See, I was right. Though to look, there may well have been not only nipples, but full blown boobs, if her arms and hair weren't in the way. But using that logic, any woman walking on the street could be said to be showing her private parts off, her modesty protected only by clothing (!).
What was I talking about? I don't know. But the beef jerky is yummy.

From my mum and dad, I got a signed (from my mum and dad?) book, "Healthy Family Recipes". This was due to me expressing enjoyment of cooking, and a wish to cook more often (I really AM turning into my father's son. That or I'm just getting domesticated). I'm loathe to admit it lest I sound like I'm 46 instead of 26, but some of the recipes in there actually look really yummy. Provided I don't burn them like I burned my last attempt at cooking a family meal.

After lots of hinting and outright asking on my part, and after playing an awesome game of UT3 where I got an epic score (see pic), I went to the lovely local restaurant, where I had not one but two of their lovely milkshakes, followed by a couple of pints of very slightly flavoured golden fizzy water called Becks. At this point I was presented with a lovely magnetic gift from my Brother and his wife, a set of 216 (I still have all 216 of them, despite struggling to retreive 6 that got stuck - literally - down the back of my radiator (EDIT: I now have 211. Bugger!!!)) spherical magnets.
So far, I have learned to make several interesting shapes with them. I can make: A line, a strip, a square, a hexagon, a triangle and a tube :-). I can also make a long chain of them and wear them around my neck, which is probably fun. They're quite annoyingly fun to play with. Annoying because they encourage you to play with them for half an hour at a time when you should be doing other stuff.

We were sat at a table, where I had some balloons tied to my chair to mark me out to everyone, and I was handed a rather elaborate and colourful balloon hat to wear, to add to the festivity.

I had nachos, of course, because TGI's only serves the best nachos, cooked in-house I believe instead of the other places that seem to cheet (haha see what I did there? :P) and use doritos. After my burger and just before I was able to escape, I was cornered against the table and had a song sung to me wishing me happy birthday, which raised a lot of cheering and clapping from a (possibly drunk) work's party on the next table.
In leiu of a birthday cake (I just realised! I didn't get a cake this year!!!!) I was then presented with a bowl of yummy ice cream with chocolate bits in, and strangely, a fork to eat it with, heh.

After getting home, I hastily completed the TGI satisfaction survey (I promised the staff member I'd do it, as she seemed very friendly and she mentioned she could get a bottle of champagne if we said we liked our service - I'm a sucker for people being nice to me heh), which apparently entitles her to a bottle of champagne, and me to some free nachos.
I then went and drank my traditional birthday alcohol before having a very late night.

And now I think I'm off to do the same. Might hit the roads again later :-).

Have fun folks!

Back to School...

2011-02-09T22:08:00.002Z

...Well...

Sorry for the long pause.
I got them trapped in a lift door.

Ahem, so, what has happened in my life in the past 3 or so weeks?

Weeelll, I've slept a lot. Drank a lot. Drank lots of TEGH (which is my secret special drink), and up until recently, that has been the sum of my activities, in their entirity.

For the past two days though, I've been wandering round a technology college, carrying notepads full of weird acronyms and terms like "Parity", "EEPROM", ESD, DDR3 and NTFS. Yep, as the title suggests, I seem to be transitioning from "unemployed bum" to "Trainee ICT Technician (and I receive some kind of Cisco accredited certification as well apparently - 2 certificates for the price of one!)", which as I understand it, is a fairly good springboard to more specific and specialised jobs in the IT/ICT sector.

My course is broken into two bits, the Cisco bit, which seems to cover everything from "A computer is an electrical device capable of performing calculations based on a set of instructions" to things like, lemme see... (I've got access to the course material at home, thanks to the intermernets)... "Advanced Networks", "Advanced Security" etc etc, which is done in the classroom, and the Other bit which we started to get into today, which is done in the "lab", which so far (it's only day 2 so it's not going to be advanced straight away), seems to consist of wiping everything off old (well, celeron 1.4) machines, reformatting and doing a clean OS install (plus updating the drivers and installing basic software etc), prior to sending them to being sold on.
As time goes on apparently we will progress into diagnosing faults, fixing them, and eventually be building systems from scratch.
Mixed in with this are various modules on customer relations/plain speaking (no, really! Technobabble is more likely to annoy than to inform apparently), health and safety in the workplace (never attempt to work on a CRT monitor, and never never ever do so while attached to it with an antistatic wrist strap - the majority of it is common sense really). So it seems to be a pretty thorough course.

The college itself is a decent enough place, all new carpets, white walls, glass and steel. Nice and air conditioned (ah, not so good when you're working in the lab), full of vending machines which liberally but expensively distribute drinks that you are allowed to drink in the lab/classroom "Use your common sense, if you spill it, what are you going to damage, other than the carpet? Nothing? Go ahead then", and right in the middle of town, 5 minutes walk from the most incredible sandwich shop I've ever been to (£3.50 will get you a super deluxe joyful chicken burger the size of a lava lamp, seriously).
The atmosphere is relaxed "If you need to leave early, or come in later than usual, or if you want to go and get a drink or whatever, that's fine, you can come and go", and the tutors seem to place great emphasis on what we want to get out of the course "If there is something you want included that isn't included, let us know and we'll do our best to include it").
There are only five of us in the class, and we range from one bloke in his 50s who wants a change of carreer, to our class clown, a 17 year old kid, who seems to come out with the strangest utterances at the weirdest moments. But hey, to say we've only been studying there for two days, we seem to get on pretty well together both with each other, and the tutors, and will generally hang out with each other at lunchtime or whatever, so yeah, it's definitely better than sitting on my ass alone at home.
Considerably better.

And when time comes to go home, I wander some more around the studenty part of town (I don't go there to wander around, our college is kinda in the middle of it), and the peace gardens and see the waterfalls and shiny/huge new buildings and whathaveyou, and I seem to have decided that Sheffield is an awesome place to study. Or to be a student.
I study, but I don't know if that makes me a student. I don't get student discount or anything heh.

Still, I think I'm onto something good :-).

The Great Mediocrity...

2011-01-14T21:02:00.004Z

I've never been too fond of this time of year.

Gone are the lovely colourful Christmas illuminations, the sense of cheer, merryment and excitement. Gone is the snow, the sledging, the happy anticipation, and gone are the trifle, Quiches and turkey. In their place we have the cold and wet mediocrity that is the first few weeks of the new year. And worse, my birthday next month, so I have the lovely opportunity to get some socks and a reminder that I'm getting older still, and the things I should be doing as a young man, are the things I'm going to end up getting weird stares for doing in my forties.

But it's not all doom and gloom, no. Things come along, things progress. My rather fruitless search for a job that isn't working at McDonalds or at a call center isn't one of them, but on the other hand I have been referred to one of the local education authorities, with a view to enrolling on a rather interesting course that involves what I've been up to earlier, that is, tearing a computer to bits and putting it back together.

Yep, my faithful computer doesn't have a speck of dust inside it at the minute, and seems to be purring along very happily. I spent half an hour with an air blower removing dust bunnies, dust sharks, and dust dinosaurs from ridiculously constricted intake grilles, and generally sorting the airflow out. And yet...

Well, I've been "promoted" on a website I frequent. 20 posts was all it took to be awarded an award (what else) and recognition for "outstanding contribution" apparently, in the form of 3d meshes and objects, which cheered me up. Yes, it seems that my years of arsing around with 3d modelling are finally producing tangible results, both in the form of meshes that people are now using in their work and incorporating into actual content for games, and in the form of recognition as a very good 3d modeller.
So that's good, that's cheered me up. The only downside is that producing this content is time consuming, and takes effort, both from the computer and from me. So much effort in fact, that on some of my larger projects, the software is now crashing, citing "out of memory" errors.

Having asked around, it seems that my system (dual core 2.8ghz processor and 3gb of ram) while mostly adequate for my purposes, is woefully inadequate for the latest software's most powerful functions, which historically relied upon network rendering, rather than single machine rendering. Unfortunately, with my motherboard supporting an absolute maximum of 4gb of physical ram, it seems a new computer may be in order sometime before the end of this year. Especially if I'm going to be producing models as something other than a form of self amusement.

As with the system I'm now using, I made the mistake of going to overclockers, where I have once again seen lots of shiny stuff that I would like to buy. Having acknowledged that my computer is rather noisy, I am giving thought to some form of water cooling, or at the very least, buying a "quiet" case.

So yes, I've been happily rendering things, making my computer work hard, drinking loads of TEGH (a nickname that if you don't understand I'm not going to explain it to you), searching for a job, trying to get information on a course (difficult when the sods won't email me back at all never mind "within 2 working days"), and generally saying "Yes, life ground to a halt at the end of 2010 as it does every christmas season, now it's time to start it again".

Things are going okay so far, they could certainly be worse :-).

Now all I need is more pork crunch, cos I've run out! I saved the bag though, so I can refill it and use it as my perpetual pork crunch supply.

And now I'm off to tidy up and sit about and whatnot. Hope you all had a happy new year's day :-).

2011 Incoming...

2010-12-31T22:23:00.007Z

22:29 Yep, not a blog entry, just a marker of the terrifyingly inexorable passage of time.

So what's happened in 2010? Well, plenty of stuff as you've probably read. Lots of it good, lots of it bad, and lots of it fondly remembered with a rosy-hued drunken haze.

As time counts down to 2011, what have I been up to? Well, tidying up mostly, helping my nephew find the latest in a long line of missing bits of lego, and drinking surprising quantities of Earl Grey, even though it gives me a headache. I think I'm acquiring a taste for it.

Soon I'm going to stick Knightmare on, and watch that with my lovable nephew (he likes it cos it has dungeons and stuff in, I like it cos I used to like it when I was tiny), eating delicious pork crunch that my brother did get me (it's become a miniature tradition - watch Knightmare with pork crunch).

22:42: Well, my ickle nephew is demanding my attention, so I'm going to stick Knightmare on, drink nice cold cider, nice hot tea, and listening to the fireworks.

Back later, maybe. If not, see you next year. I won't be going anywhere in the meantime :-).

23:55 Right: Off downstairs with the family. See you next year!

Christmas Day 2010!

2010-12-25T01:07:00.005Z

01:07: So I'm sitting here in a nice fresh clean bed with delicious Xmas beer, watching Dilbert on my iPod, relaxing and generally being cheerful. The only way things could be better is if I wasn't full of cold, but even that seems to be receding.
Ahh, I bet the lil dude is having a hard time sleeping hehe. I'm gonna sleep soon, but for now, I'm happy just to chill out.

08:57: Well, after a couple of false starts, I've finally been shouted awake, as the family have started arriving.
For my part I've downed a couple of flu plus, and I'm hoping they'll stave off this rather annoying headache of mine, for the rest of what is hopefully going to be a lovely day filled with cool gadgets, gizmos, and happy family members :-).
Now, to get dressed...

12:56: Well, that's all the pressies done with. I'll go into more detail soon cos I'm kinda busy enjoying a nice family Christmas at the minute. I've got plenty of cool stuff to go on about which I'll do later.
Looks like we're getting ready for dinner so I'd best get on with that.

21:10: Well, the day is finally beginning to wind down.
Sooo, what happened?

Well, from the me point of view, I got some really cool stuff. One of the first presents I opened, appeared to be something like a large sweater or some other item of superfluous clothing, only to turn into a humongous and very cool multipack of pork crunch, made of only the best win and caek. Or something like that.

I also got a really shiny 72mm polariser, which is pretty awesome.

One other gift that definitely got my attention this year, was a lovely cheerful happy little gift for all those lovable scamps with a sense of humour, an electric shock pen.
Basically, it's a rather cheerful device that's disguised as a pen, and when some fool presses down on the clicker, it gives them an electric shock.
Now I'm generally reluctant to have anything to do with electric shocks, but nonetheless, I reasoned, to have the moral authority to subject other (admittedly unwilling and uninformed) people to its various voltages, I should at least be aware of what the device itself did. So I picked up the pen, and pressed the clicker, expecting something like a mild/moderate tingle.

The effect, much to my surprise, felt more like being thumped in the shoulder really really hard. The shock travelled from my hand, up my wrist, up to my shoulder, before travelling down my left-hand side, and disappearing sideways up the tent pole. 20 minutes later I was still feeling the after effects.

I also got some other cool stuff, including a Game gift-certificate-card thingie which will get me £20 off Formula 1 2010, Toblerone, Terry's Chocolate Orange, some very amusing books (indeed one was so good, I received two copies of it!), and some truly sensationally coloured socks, that I have admitted I might one day wear, provided I wear a second pair of socks on top. Also included was plenty of smelly stuff which is always good cos I've been running out.

I also got some awesomely comfortable new slippers, and an awesomely awesome new bath robe dressing gown thing (cos both of the old ones were falling to bits) which cheered me up too. I also got a lovely football shirt from my sister :-).

But yeah, christmas this year really is the christmas of identical presents: My mum and my bro both got Monopoly Revolution, and my mum and I got three copies of "A simples life" between us.
But it's all good fun.

We had dinner after a while, which was incredibly yummy, and the soup was excellent as always. The day was really nice all in all, so yeah.

I have to admit to being more than a little sleepy though, which is why this whole thing might read as being a little vague or whatever. I didn't sleep particularly well this morning - something I hope to rectify later tonight. So yeah, sorry the whole entry is a bit perfunctory, I've been busy all day in one sense or another and now I'm sitting here more or less too tired to do anything.
I think I'll have a lovely bottle of Hoegaarden, and some yummy Pork Crunch! I think I can stretch to wearing a paper hat at the same time :-).

In the meantime, here are some nice pickatures. I'll prolly elaborate on this more after I've had some sleep. Hope you all had a good christmas :-).

Christmas Eve!

2010-12-24T06:01:00.012Z

06:02: Well, after waking up for the final time, ending a period of sleep that was not so much broken as shattered (It was like this: Sleep, wake up, roll over, cough violently, sleep again - repeat ad infinitum), I've finally decided to get out of bed so that we can get the next part of Christmas to a start :-). I admit, I feel better than I thought I would.
I'm still not sure which supermarket we're going to (generic boring one vs christmassy one that looks like a castle) but I guess I'll find out soon.
After we get back, I've got all my bedclothes to wash, 4 final pressies to wrap, and I need to take the lil guy to see Father Christmas, give him his special Christmas surprise, and put him to bed :-).

But that's a good 15 or so hours away.
Ciao for now :-).

06:13: My nephew's cutest Christmas-ism of the day: "If you open all of the windows on your advent calendar early, is it Christmas before Christmas?" Hehe, cute.

10:09: Well, we went to the "supermarket that looks like a castle" which was a pleasant surprise; that part of Christmas had looked to be under threat for a while until I pointed out how much my nephew loves going. Of course, I'm a great stickler for tradition too.

The lil dude went up and down the travelators, and we had a fairly cheerful time buying yummy tastyness and whatnot. I even managed to find some "buenos" (lil chocolate bars) for the lil guy, and, figuring that a nice huge drink of very cold orange juice might help my poorly throat, I went and got some of that too.

We disappeared afterwards into the cafe for a bit of a sit and some toast, before heading home.

I've not been in long, just got back from delivering the Christmas cards :-). Now I'm going to have a nice nap.

16:00: Shouting comes from downstairs "Don't get another quiche!"
Yep, my mum has produced, as is traditional, a load of lovely quiches filled with the traditional lovely christmas gloop, which seems to include mushrooms, bacon and possibly onion. And as usual, people seem to be eating them more or less as they come out of the oven. She definitely makes good quiches, my mum.

Well, I managed to have a nice sleep, and got pretty relaxed laying about watching Dilbert on my ipod and generally recovering from my Christmas cold, thanks to some rather clever (and expensive!) stuff.

Later on - not much later on, actually (!), we've got to take the lil' guy to see Father Christmas on his sleigh, and after that, he's going to spend the might at his dad's, which gives me the opportunity to tidy my room, put clean bedding on my bed, wrap those last couple of presents (now the 2 missing ones have finally arrived!), and have a nice bath. After I've done that, I think I'll relax with my nice Christmas beer, a couple of mince pies, and my nice chilli chocolate that I bought at Gainsborough.
And maybe a quiche or two. More to follow :-).

16:45: Well, there are about half a dozen people in the queue to see Father Christmas. We're getting changed to go down now.

17:22: Well, the queue expanded pretty quickly, with people queueing almost all the way to the entrance to the park. It didn't take too long for my nephew to get to the front of it though, and once there, he was given a lovely mini fudge bar.
On the way back we exchanged Xmas pleasantries with our neighbours.

The way things are going, Rudolph isn't going to be the only one with a red nose this year. I hope this medicine works as advertised heh.

Well, onto more Christmassy things.

20:55: Well, the uncle and cousin have just disappeared after coming round to catch up on old times. Nice to see em, as their visit is always part of Christmas.
I've got a few pressies to wrap up, then I'm gonna make my bed, have a nice bath, and relax with my nice Christmassy beer, a couple of mince pies, and maybe a nice ice cream. At some point, I need to get the presents down from the loft too. But hey, it's all falling into place.

23:47: Well, the pressies are down from the loft. They've all been sorted into their awesome christmassy paper bag things, and we've worked out a kind of seating arrangement for tomorrow's festivities. All that's left for me to do now, is to make my bed with nice clean sheets, and to have a lovely bath.
And drink my lovely Christmas beer, of course. I'll have an ice cream with it. I'll skip the quiches though, had five already and it's not even Christmas Day yet.

Christmassy Goings-On...

2010-12-23T11:14:00.005Z

Well, as a result of the traditional Christmas Cold, which at least one of our family must have at Christmas, I abandoned last night's Christmas beering and had an early night instead.
After waking up about 3714 times during the night, I was finally roused from my (not that long, actually) sleep, by my mum blasting very loud Christmas music around the house.

Looking out of the window, the first thing I see is a lovely load of Christmassy snow! Snoe! Snow! Sneau etc etc, yep, it's back again just in time for christmas, mum is hard at work downstairs assembling various quiches, dad is in his office doing whatever he does in there, my ickle nephew is in his room surrounded by Lego, and I'm sat here considering going to the shops for some nice ice creams for my throat.

Apart from the three sat on top of my wardrobe, all the presents have been wrapped (even though two of them have yet to arrive :-\), and are chilling out in lovely festive present bags in the loft waiting for Father Christmas to arrange them in the living room. We did the Christmas Pudding last night, and it's merrilly simmering away in the big huge cauldrony thingie that only ever gets used to do the Christmas Pudding :-).

Part Two: Yesterday Was Nice

Yesterday had to attend an appointment in a building that was part of the "Supermarket that looks like a castle" complex (which I would link to but wiki is being crap again), which seems to be my ickle nephew's favourite supermarket. After said appointment, I had a little wander round inside the place, bought a few essential things (like cheese and nuts), and had a cheerful time.

See, we only go in that particular supermarket at Christmas, and so through years of doing this, visiting on a cold Christmas Eve morning seems to be as much a part of the Christmas experience as any other part, so there I was, cheerfully wandering round, listening to the beeps of the checkouts as people did their Christmas shopping, and to the cheerful Christmassy brass band, playing traditional Christmas tunes (as they always do there, over Christmas), and I have to admit, it definitely cheered me up.

The Human mind is weird like that.

Last night, we finally got the house nice and clean, and the very last little bits of the decorations went up. Now the house looks wonderful.

And now, I think I'm off to lay on my bed and try to feel ill and cheerful at the same time, if that's possible.
Talk soon!

16:55: Yep, in 24 hours, assuming the snow holds off, Father Christmas will be round on his sleigh to distrubute small fun-sized confectionery to happy and excited kids :-).
Also, my final two missing Christmas Presents have finally turned up in the mail. Great stuff!!

21:44: Well, I'm retiring to my bed fairly early, for three reasons. One, I feel a bit crappy still. Two, I have to be up at 6 tomorrow to go to do our traditional Christms Eve shopping, and three, I can't wait until Christmas day :-).
Ciao!

Extra-ness (the sign goes up)

2010-12-15T02:43:00.020Z

I'll be honest, I wasn't really planning on writing another entry right now, but hey, here we go. It's only a short one, mind.

Yep, the sign that indicates Santa's imminent return to these parts upon his Toyota Hilux-driven sleigh, is merrily tethered to the lamp-post, gently soaking up the lovely december rain.
Yeah, halfway through december, a week or so after snow brought the country to a halt, and it's piddling down with rain, and there's no snow or ice to be seen.

But not for long apparently, yep, we're told that we're due some incredibubbly heavy snow later this week, which apparently will take us all the way through to Christmas. Which is a bit of a bugger, because half of my Xmas shopping remains to be done, and some presents that I HAVE ordered, have yet to arrive.

I finally caved into the christmas spirit and bought the ickle dude a bigger submarine to go with his ickle submarine. Admittedly this was my plan all along (no, really!), and it goes with the even bigger submarine I strongly hope his dad has bought him.

So um.

Well, the majority of the Christmas lights are up, the tree is standing proudly and shinily (although slightly leaningly) in the living room, and we have only uh, four more sets of lights to put up. The first in the hall, now that my mum has bizarrely and unilaterally changed the entire layout of the Christmas illumations in the hall... Er, the retina-burningly bright neon blue lights that seem to have become all the rage in the past ten years, that need to go up in the living room, some lovely good old fashioned bulb lights that need to be wrapped around the tinsel on top of the wall unit (30 metres of lights around a 12 metre rope of tinsel, not impossible but bloody difficult to arrange!), and the lovely shiny colourful stars that go in the front window.

But still, there's plenty of time to get it done, and we hope to have the house all decorated and finished for this Friday. Which is the weekend before Christmas eve.

One week to go, more or less!
What the heck! Where did this come from?! Christmas has always been a far away thing and it's skipped "approaching" and "nearly here", going straight to "RIGHT NOW!"

Still, assuming there are no major ballsups, I should be ready in time.

I leave you with some cheerful tunes from an artist I have recently discovered (and by that I mean some dude credited them for the music in one of his youtube vids and I thought "I like that", and seemed to find quite a lot more of their stuff on the interwebs. 1 (angry), 2 (dramatically eerie), 3 (cheerfully awesome).

PS: Bloody hell, you know what?
I think Blogger might have finally got the hang of tables! [Hahaha, I just reviewed the entry - it's still as clueless as ever hehe].

PS PS: Something I feel I should mention, assuming any readers (assuming I have readers) out there have ickle kids, my nephew got a rather wonderful and personal video message from Santa Claus himself.
I wasn't lucky enough to see him the first time he saw it, but apparently no one has ever seen him so wide-eyed with excitement before. I suppose for a six year old to receive a personal message from Father Christmas, must be akin to some kind of religious experience.

Here is the link, go here, make your own. I hope it makes your kids' Christmas like it seems to be helping to make the lil dude's, here.

I guess I'll be in touch before the big day. Merry Christmas all the same :-).

Super PS: I also ordered a new sound egg a few days ago. It arrived in the post today.
It's nice to have awesome sound back, since the bastards at Bassingbourn blew up my old one by playing it too loud, the arses.

Turbo PS: (This was a normal paragraph until I dared blogger to let me put it in a logical order).
And here are the aforementioned pickatures. In no particular or logical order whatsoever. Among them are my nephew's awesome supper, the awesome shiny snapperons I ordered the lil dude, the shiny cool book I got my mum from amazon, a few pretty snow pictures, the lil party we had together after his original christmas party was cancelled, and a rather pleasing picture of a rather angry looking sky.

Down come the Decorations...

2010-12-06T15:00:00.012Z

15:00 I'm in a rush and didn't want to sit about for ages thinking of a cool title.
Well, I've just put the hatch back on the loft, having got all our shiny and sparkly christmas decorations down. And so far, with the exception of mine(!), they all seem to be working quite happily.

Why am I in a rush? Because I've lost my bank card. Yep, I went to the shops with it a few days ago in huge piles of snow, bought something (A ham and cheese sandwich and a can of monster lo-carb, if you're curious), and didn't come back with it. So now every time I want to buy something, I have to walk to the bank and take some money out at the counter. Which is tantamount to a load of old crappiness, actually.

Once that's done, I've got to make sense of these weird christmas decorations, decide how I'm going to wrap up the Armouron Snapperons that have just arrived thanks to the beleaguered postman who apparently nearly/actually fell on his butt thanks to huge amounts of Ice earlier, and I've got to tidy up the place too. And find bulbs for my non-working candle arch. Bugger!

17:48: Right, I'm back now. Actually I've been back a good hour or so, helping my dad put away a truly sensational (£305!) amount of shopping, including various goodies such as all the ingredients for the yummy Christmas Pudding. My sis has also come over to visit which is nice.

I had a rather cheerful wander through the park to the bank, where I took out just enough to buy something to guzzle, something to munch, and something chocolatey for bedtime. I also had occasion to nearly fall on my ass in front of a group of schoolkids, and had just enough time - between going from walking upright, to being a flurry of arms and legs, to being upright again - and them bursting out giggling hysterically, to put on a very confuzzled face, and shrug.

Yep, there's plenty of ice out there, inches thick in places, and where before it was lovely and snowy with 6, 8 or even 10 or 12 inches of deliciously snowy snow, it's now just bitterly cold, and every solid surface is covered in a layer of glasslike ice. I even took the opportunity to fall on my bum on the way back home, walking down a path down a hill through the park, the universe decided I'd benefit from a closer look at the ground.
I landed with a hugely satisfying crunch on my backpack (filled with super noodles (mild curry and southern fried chicken flavour)), and once up again, hurried to a bench to check that the two pressure vessels I was carrying (containing a volatile flammable liquid!), hadn't ruptured.
Fortunately they hadn't and they are now in the back garden, in the snow and ice, cooling down nicely :-).

And the Christmas decorations?
Ah well, turns out my mum's workplace is being inspected by its governing authority tomorrow, (basically an audit of employee competence and whatnot) so after the epic struggle of getting the decorations out of the sodding loft, the majority of them aren't going up tonight after all. Or tomorrow. Not unless I do them myself, which is one option I suppose.

So now I'm just sitting about, I may well try to put my own lights up. What I am going to do, which would be a bit cheeky if we weren't putting "ours" up another day, is to take a functioning lightbulb from the big candle arch, and substitute it for a nonfunctioning lightbulb from my little one. So at least we can get one room set up today :-).

So I think I may get on with that now (18:15).
Ciao!

18:20: Okay, the little candle arch doesn't have any defunct bulbs, what it does seem to have is a loose connection. Nothing the occasional gentle tap won't fix :-).

20:02: Well, after 56 minutes (I timed it - putting up lights always felt like it took forever so I wanted to see for myself hehe) of arsing about, my nephew attended the Grand-Turning-On-Of-The-Christmas-Lights and got to press the button (on my remote control plug sockets) himself :-). So now here I am sitting about in my nice sparkly christmassy room.
Having had a word with the lil guy's dad, it seems perfectly possible that we (the royal we, meaning him) may well be able to get the lil dude Spikes after all. That way the lil dude can pick and choose how to customise his awesome armour.

On a completely unrelated note, you may have noticed that blog entries about either the Kelham Island Christmas Fair or the local Christmas Concert [are noticable by their abscence], because both have in fact, been cancelled, due to the weather.
Yep, too much of a good thing (snow), really does leave one wanting less, it is a bit of a disappointment as both are generally cheerful and happy family occasions, but hey, at least we've had plenty of awesome snow to keep us occupied instead.

Not to worry though, now the roads are usable again, the various Xmas pressies I've bought should start arriving :-).

For now, I'm going to tidy my room, and have a nice relaxed night.
I'll post some pictures soon :-).

Whiteout!

2010-11-30T22:44:00.005Z

Or Yellowout, I guess. Good old sodium lamps.

Yeah, the weather in the past few days, has been vaguely disappointing verging on absolutely nuts. As reports of heavy snow bringing the country to a halt filled the news, I sat in my bedroom looking out on a street covered in half-melted slush, and rooftops dripping with water from melted frost, wondering what the big deal was.

But oh, no more folks. Nope. Nopers.
The weather has been pretty cold, though getting warmer (in part due to the presence of huge snow clouds over our heads I spose), and even while 12 hour old facebook status updates spoke gleefully of snow that never quite appeared, my ickle nephew and I looked to the skies. For different reasons.

See, the lil dude was due to go on a school trip today to one of the local football stadiums ("stadia" sounds crap) for a christmas party of some kind. He'd been watching the skies with apprehension, fearing, quite rightly that the snow would stop him from being able to attend.
For my part, I looked at the clouds cheerfully, because I love snow. Always have, ever since I was ickle. And even as I saw the snow coming down in huge falls of snow (what else?), I kinda felt sorry for the lil dude, but was awesomely cheerful to be able to look forward to the home version of a snow day.

However, all was not lost, as we had a contingency plan.
Today, my icke nephew went to school, only to reappear an hour later, with the news that the place was closed. Not to worry. We spent a day in the awesomely snowy park, where I built the most beautiful, smooth, and almost, but not quite, completely not round at all snowball about the size of a soccer ball. This snowball is currently sitting in the back garden, with a tiny tennis-ball sized "head" on top of it and a couple of sticks forlornly but heartwarmingly poking out of it.
I spose after all this snow it's not so spherical anymore. Cone-shaped would be a good guess.

As with last year, the ickle dude finally decided enough was enough and complaining of cold feet, we went home to have our "emergency party".
Yup, in leiu of a real party, we went up to the local store and bought all manner of tasty goodies, and had an impromptu substute party at our house.

The rest of the evening was taken up with him watching me drive Argos trucks around on UK Truck Simulator, pretending we were driving Christmas Presents about. The snow picked up about the same time.

Wandering to the shop for christmas essentials, alone, in the snow, was a kinda weird experience. Save for the odd set of hour old footprints, their outlines softened by the dirt - ahem, now softened by snow, the place was completely silent, no people, no cars, and the snow only increased in intensity.
I got back with some general grocery type stuff, and have since been sitting inside watching a snowstorm rage outside that goes from being merely "heavy" to full-blown "insane".

And so end the last minutes of November. Heavy snowfall, awesomely christmassy weather. Even the car drivers (who I have affectionately dubbed "carfags") driving up and down the road no longer leave dirty great tyre marks, no, the snow just crunches under their tyres.
Awesome stuff :-).

A Cold Snap: Take Three... (Real Gainsborough)

2010-11-28T20:10:00.009Z

Well, I eventually got tired of watching the snow and decided that I'd see what the results were in the morning.
I was woken up at half 7 in the morning by my mum telling me that it had been snowing (really?) and that we had better set off early just to be on the safe side. I'd managed to write our traditional christmas music album to CD the night before, so after a cup of tea etc, we grabbed that and headed out to the car.
As it turned out, despite the inch and a half of snow, troad conditions weren't really a problem, and we made our way to a local petrol station, where I reinflated the car's tyres (always me that does it, never the car's owner, ever) while my mum got us a couple of sausage sandwiches.

A quick drive round the houses (well, round Wentworth) and we eventually passed over the M18 and into the countryside, noting that some public buildings in Maltby already had Christmas lights up. A nice drive through a couple of towns later, and we arrived in Gainsborough, fnding a parking spot first time!

Instead of going straight to the hall, we spent some time walking around the market and shops etc, where my mum found an art shop. Being a big creative-type person, my mum had to go in, and I went along with it, finding some nice jars of coloured glitter/sand to make abstract photos of.

Eventually though, we wandered round the mostly-still-undisturbed snow to go round the Hall. Again, we met some familiar faces, bought some nice stuff, and as always, sat down in the great kitchen next to the fire, with mince pie and a huge (compared to last year's!) drink of fruit punch stuff.

Eventually we left, and wandered around the town again visiting the various shops, where I picked up some all-important pork crunch, as well as a cool lil' cartoon bedspread for the lil' dude to sleep under at Christmas time/Xmas eve, depending on arrangements for who's coming over and when, and whatnot. I also bought two inexpensive but "luxury" (funny how words like "Luxury" and "Professional" are used to denote products that generally aren't luxurious, and usually aren't useful for professionals, isn't it) hollow-fibre bed pillows, in a nice bulky plastic bag, which I vaguely considered using to bat annoying shoppers out of the way, to upgrade my cool bed, turning it into an awesome bed.

Eventually, we left Gainsborough and proceeded to the next stop on our little travel plan, Tickhill Garden Center, which as always, had a nice Christmas department (complete with 2 "dead" (until I put them back upright) illuminated reindeer) with various christmas lights and whatnot. I noted with annoyance and a tiny smidge of amusement, that rather than go and buy a real Christmas CD, this place was playing a horrible mixture of crappy cover versions (no doubt by obscure "who he?" artists), of songs that themselves weren't particularly festive. But no matter, I managed to get a cool pressie for my dad, and my mum bought some terribly bad (but quite inexpensive) chocolate/walnut praline thingies.
So there we were, driving round the countryside, listening to our nice Christmas CD, eating chocolate digestive biscuits, pork crunch, and crappy walnut chocolates.

Now remember I mentioned that my ickle nephew had become fascinated with a certain product he saw on TV, "this year's must-have toy for kids" apparently, well, I'd been searching online to find it cheapest, and discovered that while most places wanted £30/35 for it, good old awesome Toys'R'Us only wanted £25 for it.
Of course they also wanted £5 delivery, so we figured we'd drive there and save me £5. After a quick search, we managed to find the armour, "Reduced: Was £25, now £14.98". For a £35 product, wahey! So it was very quickly bought.
Realising also that the lil dude desperately wanted some shiny golden bits to stick on it (well, shiny silver bits - see below - , but we weren't given a choice (!)), and Toys'R'Us didn't have the accessory sets in stock, we drove even closer to home to pop into Argos, which did have them. However, bizarrely, you paid for an accessory set, and you didn't get to choose which one of the three you were given. Which is a shame cos out of Spikes (you don't get the gold things on the bottom), Flames, and Wings, I reckon Wings is (at least as far as the shoulder spines and shield spikes are concerned) probably the least good of the three.
On the other hand, the gold goes with the blue a lot better than silver would have, and the helmet crest looks awesome. The shield doesn't look that bad, so maybe it's just personal preference. My nephew was very definite about wanting Spikes, but later admitted he didn't really mind which set he got as long as he got a set.

The armour itself looks pretty cool (I had a peek before wrapping it all up), and is made, as you can see, of one million and one pieces of some sort of plastic foam, all joined together by special plastic clips called snapperons. The snapperons that join the majority of the armour are shiny black, but the box also points out with great enthusiasm that included with the set, are two "free" silver ones. Silver or Gold snapperons are available to purchase seperately, and I'm toying with the idea of getting some, purely to make his armour look even cooler. By and large though, the stuff looks extremely well designed, and to be honest, I wish I was 6 again just so I could get my own set, heh.
I have, as I mentioned, been spending most of today sitting on my awesomely upgraded bed, supervising my nephew, eating pork crunch, and wrapping Christmas presents (6 wrapped so far), and surfing for yet more presents. I didn't get the little guy a sword, mostly because no one who knows him trusts him not to run round hitting people/animals with it. Instead I was/am considering getting him this, on the strict condition that I will keep hold of the arrows for him, and he is to only ever use it in the park :-).

That's about it really. What's left of the snow is slowly turning to frozen puddles, the roads, while mostly snow-free are now covered in patches of glass-like pearlescent ice, and it is still, regardless of the insanely bright and surprisingly warm winter sunshine, brutally hand-burningly cold. It's quite cloudy tonight, as well as hugely cold, so hopefully tomorrow morning will see at least a few inches of fresh snow.

In the meantime, I'm going to sit about, look forward to sleeping on my awesome bed (now with 6 pillows!), daydream about Christmas, surf for presents, and look for food. I would have bolted this entry onto the bottom of the earlier one, but I was so sleepy yesterday that I really wasn't in the mood to do a big writeup, and instead just wanted to make up and try out my awesome upgraded bed :-).

Here are some shiny pictures :-). It was nice to go on a Christmas outing with snow on the ground, for once :-).

Mini Epilogue Bit (22:56):

Well, having done more reading online, it seems that I should really buy extra snapperons to attach the extra bits to the armour. So I have done - the lil' dude now has two addon packs of 6 gold snapperons to make his armour look even cooler :-).

A Cold Snap: Take Two... (Gainsborough!)

2010-11-27T00:03:00.002Z

Part One: The Night Before (Hopefully)

Well, as we speak, or rather, as I type, the snow outside my window is falling quite happily. About time too, every other bugger has got theirs. Now we have too :-).

Today (Friday) I woke at the uncharacteristically early time of 7:30, that's AM, not PM :-). I was going to rall over and go back to sleep but once I'd checked the news, read my emails etc etc, it was 9am and time to get up anyway.

So, what have I been up to? Spending 2 and a half hours going through my ickle nephew's lego, handful by handful, sorting out the broken lego, the new lego, the old lego, and the non-lego, of which there was a surprising amount.

I found a fair amount of "lost" playmobil, and oddly, about a dozen dice of curious polyhedral variety, which I suspect may be long-lost relics of my older brother's hobbies.

Non Sequitur:

Yikes, it is actually snowing pretty heavily now - I do hope we can get to Gainsborough "tomorrow", I've been looking forward to it for ages!

And now back to your regular programming:

Later in the afternoon my third Xmas present arrived, I ordered my fourth, and my ickle nephew turned up. We spent the evening relaxing, I played Walking Legs, he watched Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom, and after a few biscuits and an awesome supper, he went to bed to watch The Santa Clause 2.

As for me, I'm going to pop outside for a while to watch the snow come down personally, as opposed to watching it through a window, then I'm probably going to sleep fitfully, worrying about whether or not we will be able to get to tomorrow's lovely Christmas Market.

The awesomely snowy snow seems (rubbish, seemed, seemed!, snow's like that!) to be getting lighter, except now it's not, it's getting heavier!
Oh well, we might be able to go to Gainsborough on sunday.

Ciao for now, folks!

Yikes! Earlier than last year!

2010-11-24T20:42:00.006Z

Apparently...

...our region has its first "Snowww/snoeee" or whatever I called it last year. Okay, so at the minute it's kinda meandering downwards in a vaguely snow-like fashion, and sort of disappearing either before or immediately after touching the ground (Hard to do anything else I suppose), but I reckon if it's as cold overnight tonight as it was overnight last night, we'll have a few centimetres in the morning.

Now this could be a good thing AND a bad thing. A good thing because I love snow, and so does my ickle nephew, and bad, because as with last year, if it messes up transport, getting Christmas supplies in place could be a little difficult. Akward because I still have my entire christmas list - minus three presents - to buy.

My nephew's christmas list seems to be as long as it's ever been, in fact I think this one might even be longer than last years'. I have a few really cool ideas for things he might like, based on his fascinated and amazed reaction to an advert that popped up on some kid's cartoon channel (talk about targeted advertising!) a few days ago. Second opinions I've asked for seem to vary from "Looks expensive" to "looks amazing" and "Noooo it's encouraging him to fight". Huh, yeah, and taking him to karate lessons, letting him watch movies like spiderman (1,2 AND 3) and letting him watch Ben 10 which is all ABOUT fighting, didn't introduce him to the idea of fighting?

Besides, the beauty of this one is the red and the blue guys are on the same team, as part of the concept, so it's not like he's gonna find someone suited in red and start hammering the hell out of him. Not only is the armour really cool, but you can bolt extra bits on, kinda like a wearable version of X-mods I suppose. He made sure it went on his christmas list as soon as the advert was finished, and if I'm honest, I think the concept is so cool I'm happy to oblige. I was thinking about a NERF (pic is not nerf but a decent copy) gun to go with it, but the idea of every surface in the house including the dog's face, covered in those foam darts, kinda put me off.

So yeah, it makes a change from more soft toys/action figures/lego (not that there's anything wrong with lego, I've got him some remember :-)), and whatnot. I'm still figuring out what to buy other people. I kinda have an idea of a couple of things for my brother and another idea for my dad, but Nanodots are bloody expensive for what they are, AND the dog might try to eat them, so I don't know.

On another equally awesome note, my bro has now returned my lenses to me, which is kinda cool as my super ultimate camera bag of power now looks really shiny and sparkly.

As far as pressies are concerned, all helpful ideas are appreciated at this point. For now, I'm off to watch the "snow", which at the minute, is more like frozen fog than real snow - maybe that'll change overnight :-). We'll see.

EPILOGUE-BIT

Our snow never materialised. Everyone else has got theirs, all we've got is snow clouds. Meh, it's always the way of things. Oh well, maybe over the next couple of weeks we'll get some. Just enough to make everything fun without stopping me being able to buy Xmas pressies would be nice :-).

London Trip: "The Rain in Spain ..."

2010-11-22T01:03:00.005Z

Is apparently not as cold as the Snow we're expecting at the end of this (*checks clock*), yes, this week. Now if last year's winter was anything to go by, we may well be in for some slippety slidy fun over the next couple of months. Already parts of the country are covered in snow, and snow is predicted to fall over the next couple of days over an area of the pennines, a mere 20 miles from here or so, before the white stuff reaches us (hopefully) on thursday/friday.

And as the runup (or countdown - maybe the two will meet in the middle in some sort of tinsel and turkey explosion) to Christmas goes, I've been kinda caught out by the very space-time continuum in which we live, itself. It's often commented on that as something approaches, the distance to it seems to decrease at a speed out of proportion to your speed of approach. Basically, christmas has spent most of the year being a far-off abstract concept, and now it seems to have a stark, colourfully-lit snow-crunchingly real reality to it, and all of a sudden it seems to be rushing up on us with not that many days to go.

Part One: Winter Wonderland

And of course, yesterday (Saturday is yesterday as far as I'm concerned as despite the fact that we're 84 minutes into Monday, I haven't been to bed yet, therefore it's still Sunday) we found ourselves on the coach on our way down to London. I sat cheerily for 3 and a half hours in front of two rugby fans who spent the trip discussing the match, alcohol, and the combination of the two, while merrily swigging cans of [what smelled like] cider. Still, they seemed quite friendly, so no problem there at all.
3 and a half hours managed to disappear pretty quickly, and we got off outside Marble Arch in London to find that in comparison to 2008, which was fairly wet and crappy, the weather, while cold, was overcast but clear, and without rain. And off we went, to Winter Wonderland, in Hyde Park. The German/European Christmas market thing that seems to be there each year. The place as we entered seemed to be fairly quiet, but it sure as heck didn't last, quickly becoming absolutely full of tourists from all over the world, judging by the accents. The place was packed with people. And the cameras!
See, I'd been hesitating whether or not to take the D90 to London, lest it get nicked by some light fingered loony who needs his drugs more than I need my camera, and yet while I walked around, I saw at least four or five D90s, one with a shiny 50 1.4 on it, a couple with the cool little 18-105 like the ones I just sold, and one dude who had the same lens as me :-). Other guys walked around with various canons of weird and wonderful descriptions, and one dude was even walking around with a D3.

There were a huge variety of market stalls, selling many various variations on a theme of European cuisine, mulled wine, Christmas decorations, Christmas gifts, all sorts of lovely and festive stuff, including, and I think this is awesome, instant snow. My experience with instant snow is limited to 60 seconds of playing with it, but the upshot of it is, it's soft, it's cold, it's fluffy, and it feels like real snow. It's really cool stuff. My mum bought some for my ickle nephew so he can get into trouble for sodding up the carpet or something. When my mum mentioned that I couldn't have any cos the dog would eat it, the guy selling it explained that it was non-toxic and that she'd just "swell up" (complete with mime of a dog swelling up) a little.

Now about halfway down, among the stalls selling stuff like beautiful hand carved knicknacks, hand-made jigsaw puzzles, hand-painted pictures, hand-shot photography, hand-blown glass, hand-burning candles, hand-eaten food etc etc, next to a set of tables laid out in an X shape, is a "cabin" with a sort of grill suspended over a pit of "coals", atop which sit about 10 of each variety of sausage, tended by two cheerful German guys.
The sausages are Frankfurters (I think), Bratwurst, and Krakauer. "Mit" or Ohne (aha!) Sauerkraut.
I don't know what the German guys are called or whether they come with sauerkraut or not.
However.
I had a Krakauer (which regardless of its name seemed to be a spicy Bratwurst), in a proper roll of crunchy bread, such as you'd get with soup (which made a huge change for someone sadly accustomed to fluffy tasteless crappy poke-a-hole-right-through-it-with-your-finger crappy hot-dog rolls) as well as both Ketchup and German Mustard, and folks, it was the best Wurst in the world. So good in fact that after finishing my first while wandering around the market, I went and got another, which the guy cheerfully observed, should "keep you going until January". Nice guy, cheerful service. We like that.

Small Personal Recommendation
(It's not very often I advertise stuff on here, but this really was a lovely christmassy place to go which I enjoyed thoroughly, and it'd be nice if someone read this, went to visit, and ended up also enjoying it as a result :-)).

Now on the off chance that any of you are actually going to London before Christmas, Winter Wonderland [official website] is in Hyde Park, visible from more or less anywhere in the park (just look for the huge observation wheel (not the London Eye, which is nowhere near Hyde Park! (Though you can see either wheel from the other on a clear day)), on the side of the park closest to the Albert Memorial. Entry is free.
The German Hotdog place is about halfway down a big "street" of cabins past the "Bavarian Village" building and the ice rink, next to a set of tables in an X shape, within sight of (in front of, more or less) the Talking Moose. £4 for a hotdog might seem a bit steep, but these are big hotdogs and they taste awesome.

Ah yes, the Talking Moose.
For some reason, in the park, is an animatronic Moose's head mounted to the entrance to "Santa's Grotto". Now I forget the name of this Moose, but he's very talkative, and though he admits to being "a bit of a womaniser" (eh?), his intentions seem good, as he sings cheerful Christmas songs, and dispenses useful advice such as "Enjoy your day" and "Don't drink and drive".

Also in the huge lineup of stalls, is a lovely one crewed by two pleasant and friendly women, selling Austrian cheese, and something called "Speck". This stuff appears to be cured, spiced, smoked bacon, and smells absolutely awesome. It tastes very strongly like pepperami and is the chewiest thing this side of genuine fudge, which they also sell at the market.
It's also pretty expensive, being £5 for a chunk 4cm wide.

I think that we had a really great time at Winter Wonderland this year, and having rushed through it in 2008 due to the truly crappy weather, we were well rewarded this year for being able to take our time and enjoy it this time round. As I say above, highly recommended, great fun :-).

Part Two: Harrods

A short walk later past the lake (where my mum got harassed by a curious swan, and I got a few shots of squirrels that were so used to people that they'd scamper right up to your feet), we ended up at Harrods.

Harrods was a strange experience this time round. People say that perception defines reality as much as it is defined by it, and for some reason, the stuffy stuck-up atmosphere that I thought I noticed last time round, just wasn't there this time. Maybe it was because we'd taken our time getting there, having had a great time along the way, instead of hurrying there to get out of the rain that gave us a fresh look on the place, I dunno. This wasn't Harrods, the preserve of the rich, famous, talentless and pointless wastes of space that earn their living from being related to someone famous, or for doing 90 minutes work every other week, this was the "Everything for everyone" store filled with families, parents and kids, looking for something cool for Christmas.
The staff seemed pleasant and fun-loving enough with one member of staff in the toy department cheerfully flying an RC "gunship" in circles around his own (and a customer's) head, as a cheerful woman demonstrated some kind of art and craft set to a bunch of excited kids, as a father and his son (presumably) happily tossed a hoverdisk across the room to each other.
Walking further through the toy department, past a family of huge stuffed animals (a 6ft long plush hippopototamus for example), we passed through the Electronics department, past an £18,000 audio system, that looked quite shiny, but convinced me that I'm really not enough of an audiophile to need one, and some very sparkly and rather large HD TVs, to the Photography department, where I ogled a few lenses including the 80-400 (autofocus far too slow for my purposes), the 300mm 2.8 (Fixed length, not much use for anything really, why do people use these again?), and the exquisite 200mm Micro and the 80-200VR (both awesome but far out of my budget at this point). The guys seemed fairly knowledgable and friendly and made me feel not quite as unwelcome as I felt last time round heh.

My mum had to sit down to rest her tired legs though, and walking past a huge lemon citrine that looked as if it weighed a good 30 kilograms (and at £35,000, if it landed on your feet, the pain from your feet wouldn't be the half of it!), and we wound up at a rather upmarket cafe restaurant thing where a bottle of Sprite cost £3.50 (£1.65 in our local shop), but came with a glass, which, after emptying, I kept happily filled up with a litre bottle of water I had concealed in my jumper pocket.

Eventually though, we made our way out of that place, and got a taxi to Covent Garden, which despite the name is a fairly big market made up of two bits - one, a pair of sort of fairly nice covered mini-malls, and the other a fairly crappy formica-and-linoleum style indoor market. We bought a few things from there, and thankfully, didn't stay that long. Not to slur Covent Garden, which has been famous for centuries, but I don't do indoor markets, and I don't do crowds. It did have a Games Workshop though, and a huge Apple Store, as well as a rather amusingly named food place called Cafe Chutney, which had a nice Christmas tree outside.

Part Three: London Eye

A short walk through Charing Cross later, past a Canadian themed pub, an Australian themed shop, a TGI Friday themed restaurant, and a Law Enforcement themed Charing-Cross-Police-Station (more or less opposite my mum's old flat from when she was ickle like me), we caught a taxi to the London Eye (no we didn't. Not officially anyway. Officially we went to McDonalds).

While I wasn't there, I was careful not to take a few photos, we didn't hurry in and buy some tickets, and we didn't join the queue to board the Eye.
While queuing, I also didn't notice that for some weird reason, one of the pods had been stripped down to its metal frame, completely devoid of windows, ceiling and floor. Argh enough of this it's confusing me.

We got on the pod, and had a rather pleasant half-hour "flight" (as they call it) around the wheel. My calmest one to date, given that I'm terrified of heights, and that the wheel is 135 metres/442 feet high. My first trip around, I practically refused to look at anything other than the floor or ceiling for half the trip. I think if you don't like heights, the best way to think of it is that you're in a stationary room, and the only thing changing is the view :-).

Of course, the odd time when someone moved and the pod shifted very slightly (but slightly perceptibly) from side to side, or when I spent too much time taking photos of the distant ground, my mind started going wappy and I had to look at the horizon for a while to get my bearings, heh.

The flight ended soon enough, and off we went, to get a taxi back to the coach station.

Part Four: Home and other stuff

What's to say, the coach journey seemed uneventful enough. Eventually, fell asleep, waking up every now and again to find that not only had I gained a horrific pain in my neck, but that the clock had advanced by another 40-60 minutes, and before you knew it, the coach driver was announcing to the sleepy coachful of passengers (at a volume so loud I bet the local pedestrians on the pavement heard it) that we'd arrived in Chesterfield (about 30 minutes away from our destination) and would those who wanted to get off please hurry up and sod off.

We got back to our station soon enough, and wandered through the nearby streets, to an awesome parking lot with those roller shutter doors you see on Need for Speed games. A short detour via KFC later, and we were home. Job jobbed, as they say.
So there ends a very nice and very christmassy trip out.

So else has been happening?

My lens cup finally, FINALLY arrived after about 6 weeks of waiting for it. Is it as good as I'd hoped? Er, yes. It's shiny, it's a cup. The thing has lost a little of its novelty value, but it's still a cool gadget.
I've also managed to buy a third christmas pressie today, so that should arrive before long with some luck.

We've got a busy few weeks, christmas-wise, ahead of us. Next week is the trip to Gainsborough, which I'm really looking forward to, and the week after that is both the Kelham Island show, and the Christmas Concert that my mum has promised to take me to. The week after that, the christmas decorations go up. So yeah, things are definitely getting festive :-).

Here are some pictures I took that I thought you'd enjoy :-).

There was some weird on my page!) .

The Window And The Weather

2010-11-15T21:36:00.005Z

What do you think to my latest photo of weirdness? Abstract enough for you?
Heh, actually I never intended this to be an abstract photo. This is in fact, my bedroom window.
More specifically, it's my bedroom window after we paid the window cleaner (generally known as the "window smearer" for obvious reasons) £3 to make our windows shiny and transparent.
Yeah I don't know what's been dissolved in the more or less constant rain we've had recently, but whatever it is has deposited on my window in great big blurry messes, and the rain that followed did little to wash it off. We've had a brief period of wet crappyness. Or crappy wetness. Whichever.

Bonfire night passed without incident, and I did indeed stay in the house without venturing forth to find sources of shiny fireworkiness. The day afterwards though, My ickle nephew, his dad, and I, went to one of the local pubs to watch a fireworks display there.
Surprisingly the display went on for well over an hour, and we found our very own pub bench to relax at while watching it, so we all had a pretty enjoyable day there.

After buying my D90, I managed to list the spare lens on ebay, where it fetched me £175. Not too bad, and gave me the extra cash I needed to snap up another one of those "Should be £530, is £330 for some unknown reason" offers that I have a habit of finding every now and again. I managed to satisfy another one of those short term goals that I keep setting myself, and before long I had the ickle 18-105's big brother winging its way towards my house. It's since arrived and it seems pretty shiny, so hey, now I've got a lens that takes 72mm filters, which is handy cos I've asked for one for Xmas.

Ahh, christmas, christmas, yep, even the shops are playing christmas songs now, and there are plenty of Xmas decorations up around the town. I've since started writing my christmas list, and (including items that people already aware of), it goes something like this (In no particular order*):

1.Lumiquest Promax flash bouncer/diffuser kit
2. Hoya 77mm Circular Polariser** (or 72 if already purr-chased :-))
3. Tiffen 77mm Graduated Neutral Density Filter
4. 12 Pack Sanyo Eneloop Rechargable Batteries
5. Formula One 2010 PC Game

*This is a wish list, yeah? I accept that some of the items on here are quite expensive and I'd be very surprised (though very pleasantly so) if I got them all :-)

**There seems to be some confuzzlement on my part about which size I need - When choosing lens filters, it's always best to choose the size that will fit your largest lens. In my case, my 11-16 takes 77mm filters. Now you shouldn't use polarisers outside on super-wide lenses because you get banding effects across the sky, so I asked for the next size down to fit my 18-200 which is 72mm. But it's occured to me that I might want to use the polariser on the 11-16 inside, or where the sky isn't visible. So I originally said 72mm, I'm now saying 77mm, but I'll happily accept and be cheerful with a 72mm if 77 is no longer an option.
My fault for being easily confuzzled and things :-).

For my part, I bought my first Christmas pressie today. Yep, stepping out into the incredible cold (we've gone from rain to frost in a couple of days!) I caught a bus into the wonderfully sunny town in which I live, and spent a fair while walking around the shops and suchlike. I had a little play with an iPad (which still seems too expensive for the relatively small size (Have they really just taken an iPod touch, given it a bigger screen, and doubled the price? Cos it seems like it to me!!), stared in amazement at a macbook air, (I've seen thicker slices of melba toast!), and fiddled in confuzzled bemusement with a dinky and cute Nikon D3100 (half the buttons are missing), before wandering down to the toy section where I bought my ickle nephew's pressie.
Yep, the lil dude certainly seems to love his lego and his playmobil, and since I bought that little "underwater world" for him,e he's really become struck on the idea of underwater civilisations and suchlike. Which is cool cos it makes it easy for me to buy him presents. So yeah. Christmas has suddenly gone from being miles away, to being "It's almost here", and I'm sorta left looking for ways to buy people the lovely and awesome pressies they deserve. I've got a few present ideas for other people too, you see :-).
But they'll not find out what they are on here, nope, they'll have to wait and see, hehe :-).

Right, I'm off to play Sacrifice of Angels - it's a very good game :-). Have Fun.

Explosions and stuff...

2010-11-05T17:07:00.003Z

Only a short one, since while my parents do have a habit of springing "let's go out somewhere" things on me, they generally don't do it during the rain and cold of November.

Yep, here we are, November the 5th and the dreary rain, today being just the latest in a week or so of rainy evenings, is doing little to affect people's cheerful willingness to pay lots of money on exploding things, and even as the rain comes down, the fireworks go up :-).

For my part, I'm just sitting inside in the warm, watching the fireworks through my window, eating yummy chocolate cereal bites and weird golfball sized jam doughnut things, so yeah. For now, that seems to be about as exciting as tonight's gonna get.

But hey, I'm not complaining, my nephew is no doubt off to see some fireworks somewhere, and as long as he's happy, I'm happy :-).

Ciao.

Five minutes later: Actually no, this entry is too short, so let me have a mini rant.

I've noticed, first through displays on shop shelves, and secondly through the more irritating medium of television advertisements, a sort of bizarrely pretentious attempt by catfood manufacturers to imbue domestic cats with aristocratic personalities. A rough (and largely ficticious) example would be:

"Rufus is a cat of taste and discerning distinction. He stalks the hunting grounds of the house looking for his favourite food, new furballs food. Replete with delicious chunks of line-caught yellowfin tuna, and lavishly tasty jelly, Rufus knows that his heart can be satisfied".
While some badly overacting narrator talks us through the story of Rufus and his quest for luxurious food, the director has several shots of an incredibly rare and expensive pedigree cat from some obscure breed or other, usually with blue eyes and frequently in slow motion, stalking across a moodily-lit but extremely tidy house.

Here is a badly recorded but very amusing example of such an advert.

If I could insert sounds into text, I would, at this point, insert the sound of a needle being pulled off a record. But I can't, so there. I'm sure you're familiar with the "ZZZZZZZP" sound I have in mind.

Now, I'm sorry, I don't dislike cats, my sister has two of them afterall, but the fact remains that your average housecat would be just as happy dragging a dead bird through the catflap into the kitchen and tucking in, as it would be eating food that we've created for it because it's what we'd like to eat if we were cats.

I'm tired of this patronising supercilious kind of advertising that takes its product far too seriously. I'm sorry, selling food, however "luxurious" it is, doesn't justify a 55 second long food porn [link is not pornographic] video written by some cat fetishist with a thing for "duck terrine in gravy". "9 out of ten cats prefer whiskas". Prefer it to what? Going hungry? I'd prefer eating whiskas cat food to going hungry too.
And why all this emphasis on "luxurious" and "exquisite" ingredients? Who are they trying to convince, you or your cat? Cats can't understand English, they don't come because you tell them to, they come because their little feline stomachs are rumbling and they know you have the key to the food cupboard.

Cats don't care about "luxurious duck terrine produced in the south of France, with real meat jelly", or "Deliciously indulgent salmon", they care about food. Any food, even small dead mammals are preferable to going hungry.

The advertising isn't there to sell the food to the cats, it's there to sell it to you. If I was a cat, every time the advert came on I'd either giggle to myself and wander off to mutilate the local wildlife, or roll my eyes - if cats can roll their eyes. In fact they probably can't roll their eyes - if they could they'd do it all the time.

Now I've gone off at various tangents but the bottom line seems to be that cats don't care about expensive cat food, certainly not as much as the expensive cat food companies care about expensive cat food. Marks and Spencer had us enthralled for ages with their "deliciously indulgent" food porn advertisements, but do companies like Mars and Nestle (No, really, one makes Whiskas catfood, the other owns Purina which makes catfood in Canada) really have a need to convince you to take their products so ridiculously seriously that nothing else is good enough for your lovely family pet?

It's patronising, it's supercilious and it's annoying. And if I was a cat, I'd be too busy tucking into the blackbird I'd just decapitated to care about "Luxurious Jelly". Luxurious Jelly? How luxurious is it? Would you eat it?

It's cat food. It's food for cats. If you own a cat, you're going to buy cat food anyway. But for the advertisements to lie to you and say that your cat is far too aristocratic and discerning to eat any other food, is just an annoying lie. And to make so much effort in trying to perpetuate this myth of the "discerning ladylike feline" is just wasting everybody's time.

Well, for now I'll stick to just groaning and changing channel every time one of these annoying adverts comes on in a commercial break. Hopefully my deliciously indulgent rant (complete with meat jelly?) has amused a couple of people. At the very least it's made me feel better.

So there :-).

Spooky goings on

2010-10-31T17:03:00.003Z

Well, it's started early. Just gone 5pm and I've just seen the first little ones wandering around with their rubber bats, wizards' staffs, spellbooks and pet dragons.
Okay maybe not rubber bats. Still.

Yep, for my part I'm sitting inside waiting for my ickle nephew to come back home so that I can take him out to get him lots of yummy sweets, treats, and other things that rhyme with that.
Already, we've (just) had our first visitors, (make that second group of visitors as of 17:13) and I'm feeling pretty cheerful (or should that be "fearful?" Mwahahaha).

My dad's doing a good job of keeping visitors filled up with tasty treats, I'm sitting about playing with my cameras, and drinking a terrible cup of coffee to try to get over the aftereffects of the halloween/wedding/new camera celebratory drink and meal last night.

Yep, the D90 is now mine, and a very shiny piece of electronic equipment it is too.

AND, my ickle nephew has just turned up, so I'll carry this on later :-).

5 Hours later: Well, didn't the little guy do well :-). He turned up with his cute little devil costume, complete with a tridenty pitchforky type thing and a clever little bag on a stick for storing his sweet treats in.
Just before I took him out, I noticed that it was throwing it down. I initially suggested that I was going to wait until it had stopped. In retrospect it's a good thing that I didn't, as the rain continued for the next 30 or 40 minutes. Oh, it bucketed it down, and we were practically the only group out there, both very wet indeed. Eventually the rain stopped though, which made our time more pleasant. I didn't go dressed up, I was there in more of a supervisory/keeping him company capacity, but nevertheless one kind person did give me my own personal bag of Milky Way Magic Stars, hehe!
We visited loads of houses, and as his sweet-bag-on-a-stick got heavier and heavier, it started bending the stick, which was really just thick wire. After helpfully bending it into a carrying handle and hooking it onto the other side of his sweet bag, normal service was resumed.

So yeah, the little fella got loads and LOADS of sweets, the sweet bag thing was almost full. He ended up with 8 packets of maltesers (which he was on a quest to collect), which he thought was fantastic.

Anyway.

Yep, I finally got my hands on my D90, and what can I say. It's a beautiful piece of kit, nice and shiny and sparkly, and the image quality on the high resolution screen on the back is so perfect it it's almost three dimensional. Seriously, the screen is that awesome, it makes even bad pictures look great!

So yeah. I'm quite cheerful. Yay :-).

I hope my bloody coffee cup turns up. Grr. I'm still waiting for that thing!

Christmas Cakes!

2010-10-27T20:01:00.004+01:00

Yep, we've not even got to Halloween yet, and I've already got 5 minutes of "christmas 2010 videos" saved on my camera. For today you see, (and yesterday I spose) we prepared...

The Christmas Cake! Dun Dun Dunnn. Yep, apparently you have to let the fruit soak overnight in brandy to give it some flavour, and then you have to let the cake soak in er, cake, for about 8 weeks, to, well, give it some more flavour.
Fair enough. After a while of preparing it and shoving it in the oven, I had to cycle down to the next town to post a couple of parcels for ebay, which was nice and pleasant.
It would have been more pleasant if I hadn't have run into a pothole and gone over more or less on my face, but hey the only thing I hurt was my price and even the bike bent back into shape pretty easily so it was only a minor blip on an otherwise good day.

So yeah, I've started thinking what pressies to buy for people, my mum has started watching christmas movies, and my nephew has started circling stuff he wants in his very own copy of the Argos catalogue. Finances are becoming a bit of a stretch at the minute, as the money that goes out, goes out BEFORE other money comes in, so even though there's a fair bit of money going in both directions, I find myself fairly skint from time to time. Not to worry though, I will sort myself out through the magic of eBay :-).

Finally though, it seems my nephew's parents HAVE bought him a costume and some other stuff, so I'm looking forward to taking the lil guy around trick-or-treating on Sunday night, at which time I should have recovered from my buying-a-new-camera celebration hangover. I can give him the sweets and stuff I've got for him too, then :-).

Well, more to come on sunday I spose.

UPDATE 20:27 (sounds like a computer game or something): Well, after hearing a few fireworks in the past few days, I've just looked out of the window to see the first fireworks I've seen this year (not counting the early hours of January the first, obviously). Nothing major, sort of exploding roman candle thingies.

This reminds me to look forward to a miniature fireworks party type thing that my sister is having around Bonfire Night. I like this time of year, all festive and celebration-y :-).

Coffee, Cameras and Cresso...

2010-10-24T18:02:00.006+01:00

20:21, the previous night:

Well, my nephew certainly likes his dens. Yep, after a short time of pleading, he's convinced me to build him another den in his bedroom. I've always been good at building them, and this one is no exception. Not too big, but it has a "light strip" where the bedroom light shines through the "ceiling" so he can play on his GBA, which seems to be serving as a surrogate DS at the moment. He can even sit on his little piano seat to play, which is cool as it leaves me more floor space to stretch my legs.
Actually scratch that, I've just tried it and nearly knocked the thing down on the top of us.

Present Day: Dun Dun Dunn...

I've never had writer's block before. Or whatever this thing is that seems quite similar to writer's block.
I'm sat here staring at the screen trying to figure out what to commit to paper, so to speak, and the words simply will not enter my mind. Maybe I'm distracted, I dunno. I've been sat here staring into space for 15 minutes.

And if it is writer's block, it's not actually true that I've never had it before (see Ink and Incability, september 2009), so maybe it's just a seasonal thing, I dunno.
Still at least it's given me an opening.

So, what's going on? Well, I'm still waiting for my coffee cup to come.
Yes, I bought a coffee cup. Quite a shiny and cool coffee cup. Me being the camera fanatic that I am, I saw this rather fetching replica of a Nikon lens, that serves as a coffee cup. They're supposed to be quite sparkly, turning the zoom ring extends the coffee cup just like a real lens, and the level of details is supposed to be very good. So despite the £15 price I decided I had to go and have one, so I've got one on the way. Unfortunately since it's coming from Hong Kong, I've "had one on the way" for the past 20 days, and it still hasn't turned up. Irritating since something else from HK that I ordered at the same time arrived 2 days later. Oh well, can't win em all.

Now, I've been looking at getting a second camera body, for a couple of reasons. There are various practical reasons, but the most important of which is that I'm a sucker for a good deal, particularly when it's something I wanted before someone offered me the deal.

The market, or the "high street" as it's affectionately referred to by hmm, let's call them "morons", selling the items would probably sell them seperately. So you have an undisclosed camera body retailing for £579.99-£729.99 (such an insane difference in price depending on where you go! We'll go with the cheaper prices). So yeah. £579.99. The lens that it comes with? Hmm let's go with the shop selling it for £209.99. Then it comes with a battery grip at £104.50 and 2 batteries at £20 a piece. Then it comes with a clever wrist strap thing at £45, and a lens filter at £35. Yikes, all you wanted was a camera and before you know it you've spent £1014.48. [Edit, 1st November: £1229.92 in total if your luck is sucky enough that you end up going to the most expensive places...]

Fortunately for me, my good old mate Nick wants to er, dedicate himself to his D2h, and in an effort to raise some cash, is letting me have the whole lot for £500! Not a small amount of money to spend, but a pretty damn good deal all the same! The awesome thing (and the understanding) is that, I dno't need the 18-105 that comes with the D90 - I've already got one :). So Instead of paying £450 for the camera and battery grip, I'm paying £50 extra for the lens, so I can sell it for £150-200 and reduce the kick in the wallet from the camera. Clever stuff :-).

Not much happening other than that I suppose, though with halloween coming up, my ickle nephew is lamenting the fact that he won't be going out trick or treating. Apparently nobody can be bothered to get him a costume :(.

Oh well, I'm sure we'll have tpo sort something out, at least sweets-wise. I'll be more open to the question once he's stopped acting up.

Concerns and Cutbacks

2010-10-08T14:41:00.002+01:00

How do, folksies...

Well, I've been putting it off for over a week, I suppose I had best get it over with.

On the advice of the training staff at the training regiment, I have left army training. I am therefore no longer a training, or paid, member of HM Armed Forces.

What happened?
Well, it seems that my little episode on the top of the hill (the one where I collapsed and threw up everywhere - remember that one?) dented my confidence a little bit. Instead of looking forward to PT sessions, I warily looked across at them on the horizon in the same way that a kid would view a dentist's appointment with apprehension.

Unfortunately, that's not a healthy attitude to have in training for the Army, which as you can imagine has a habit of being physically demanding. The more PT we had, the more stressed I got.
At one point, I went down to the med centre complaining of stomach cramps, vomiting, chills etc etc, wanting to know what I had caught or whatever. All the tests came back normal, leaving one conclusion: Stress.

I'm not sure what to think of it now, I felt crappy, I hadn't eaten for a couple of days, token attempts at eating had resulted in me being unable to keep down whatever I had eaten (I'm trying to be subtle, believe me), I had stomach cramp, and I was basically too busy feeling ill to really concentrate on what I needed to do.

After my collapse on the run, the training staff had noticed me becoming more withdrawn and nervous leading up to, and during PT sessions. Of course I put 100% effort in, because I didn't want to let either myself down or my teammates down, but they could see that I really didn't want to be in phys, and was stressing about it. This coupled with the fact that I had been sent to Physiotherapy for a shin problem (where it was found I also have a knee problem (it never rains, it pours! (Hey it's that nested sentences thing again!))) raised questions about my ability to complete training without injuring myself (accidentally, that is).

So after a couple of informal conversations along the lines of "How are you liking it?" "I'm not, sir, I wish I was", the training staff decided the best thing for me - mentally as well as physically, I guess, would be to send me home.
I didn't know this - the first I knew about any decision having actually being made is when the sergeant casually slips into conversation "You're de-kitting tomorrow", which kinda threw me: One minute the powers that be knew I wasn't 100% happy but was still getting through it all, the next minute they'd decided that home was the place for me, for now.

But, a couple of days later, I'd said goodbye to all the friends (and all the annoying sods) I'd come to know over the past 7 weeks, and had been moved into a holding platoon on the edge of the camp where no one had to look at us, us dirty civvies-to-be preparing for a return to civilian life and whatnot.
Still, a very sedentary 6 days later, and I was stood on the platform at the train station with all my stuff, ready to come home. Three hours later, I walked through the front door of my house for the first time in 7 and a half weeks. The Army's gates had closed behind me.

But not permanently...

You see, it seems that even though I wasn't really enjoying the training, and was struggling to cope a bit at times, it was decided that (and noted in my official report that) this was due to stress, brought on by an aversion to physical training, itself brought on by me keeling over on that big sodding hill.
"Go home, work on your Phys, if you can smash your phys, you're sorted" advised one of the corporals. So they've left the door open for me, I've been discharged as unfit for army service, with a recommendation to return in two years. Granted, in 2 years I'll be 27, but two of us there were 25, one was 27, one was 30 and one was 32. So I woudn't be pushing the age limits, if I did return. "Don't stress about the 'unfit'" said another corporal. "You're not a bad recruit, it only means you're physically unfit NOW. Go home, sort your phys out, come back, and you'll be way ahead of everyone else cos you've already done half of it".

So here I am, sat at home, at my computer. The rest of the lads are finishing up their range week. I'm glad to be back home, it's good to be back.

Importantly though, looking back on my time at the ATR, I look back on it as a good experience. There were crap times and tempers got frayed at some points during the nearly-2-months I was there, but all in all, it was a very good experience, and I'm proud to have done it.

Will I go back? I don't know. That depends what happens in the next two years. I've only been back 10 days, I want to get my head together before I decide what happens next.
What I don't want to do is settle into my old routine. Time to start looking for opportunities to do things differently maybe. Some 3D work in the near future has already come up, let's see how that pans out.

Now I've got a nice awesome Cresso with my mate Nick to look forward to. I hear he may have an offer for me. Let's see how that works out too :-).

Ciao.

Like home, and yet not...

2010-09-12T12:54:00.004+01:00

"And that", said the corporal, "is how you move under fire, carrying a weapon".

He looks around expectantly. "Any questions?"

Silence.

Without warning, the corporal tears off towards a nearby hill.

"THEN LETS GOOOOOOOO!"

We all chase after him, and as we approach the bottom of the hill, gunfire rings out from the woods skirting its edge. A smoke grenade is already sat by the side of the track, disgorging its contents, and as the soldiers in front dive onto their belt buckles and start crawling, the smoke obscures them from view. Another burst of full auto, and the remainder of the lads drop onto their stomachs and start crawling up the path, through the smoke. All that I can hear from the other side, is coughing from the lads crawling through the smoke, small-arms fire, the lads grunting with the effort of dragging themselves and their kit up the hill, and the ever present corporals shouting encouragement.

After an excruciating and exhausting crawl right up to the top of the hill, through the smoke, we start monkey running - that is, moving quickly on your knees and fists - faster than a leopard crawl, but you present a bigger target. Finally we reach the top of a large slope, which we have to roll down. So I do. With my kit smashing into my back, my arms tense trying to both protect my weapon from hitting the ground, and protect my face from the muzzle or sights, I roll down and down the hill. Over rocks, through brambles, and losing my sense of direction, I end up off the track that the first lads had flattened down. Still, I reach the bottom.

I stand up a little unsteadily, dripping with sweat, feeling a little weak and fairly dizzy. I'm flanked by a paid of corporals, both keeping a firm grip on each of my shoulders to stop me falling down.

"Well done, good effort! Now I want to hear you, all the way back to the rest of the squad".

I look and see them in the distance.

Knowing what to do, I summon up my remaining energy and sprint across the scrubby field, while screaming the angriest most triumphant and loudest war cry I've ever screamed. I reach the other lads, and more-or-less collapse in a pile, struggling to get my breathing back, to take my weapon off, and to take on some water.

One of the other lads is sat up, his back and head supported by two of his mates, with one of the training staff helping loosen his jacket. Seems the heat and effort got someone else today - three someones in fact - and it wasn't me.

PART ONE: THE EXERCISE

Yep folks, as you may have guessed, this week we've been on a field ex. Nothing special, just a lot of learning how to soldier in the field, instead of learning how to soldier in the classroom. Living outside, training outside, generally getting grazed, cut, knocked, bruised, battered, rained on, cold, wet and muddy. And shouted at quite a lot.

In addition to the lesson above, we learned a fair variety of other things. One of the more, um, interesting I suppose, was bayonet fighting.

Now if you don't know, a bayonet is that big metal stabby thing that fits on the end of a rifle, so when you run out of ammo, you can still stab someone with the front end and it will hurt quite a bit. It's about ten inches long, made of steel, pointy at one end, and is generally only nice when it's being used as a logo. Bayonets aren't generally designed for anything other than going out and making someone's day really miserable. But hey.

Of course, to look someone in the eyes and stab him with a big pointy bit of metal requires, hmm, a certain bit of aggression. So before the lesson, we were duly motivated. "Grenade Training". March along as normal, and all of the sudden one of the staff would shout "grenade". Jump on the ground, and crawl in the direction you were heading. He'd shout that it was safe, and we'd get back up and carry on jogging.

We did this for maybe 800 meters, from one training area to the other, diving maybe 30 times in total. At the end, we were pretty pissed off, having crawled/jogged up another bloody big hill and down the other side.

We get onto the bayonet range. The staff are supposed to wind you up during this lesson just to make you more aggressive, so we're not surprised when our beloved corporals suddenly turn into a bunch of shouty nasty bastards.

BUGGER:

To be continued, fire alarm has gone off back at the block and I need to go there for a roll call! Laters!

FIVE MINUTES LATER: Right. The entirity of one of the new sections of lads that has moved into our block was busy ironing. Nothing wrong with this, except they were doing it with the windows closed. Ten irons all producing steam and no ventilation makes for a sauna like environment, and smoke alarms generally don't like sauna like environments. Still, at least all my kit is safe.

"You've got 20 seconds to get some water down you". 21 seconds pass. "Too slow! Fecking follow me!" So we chase the corporals round the side of the practice range, up a hill, across the top and down the other side. Same old drill - whistle blow, we leap onto the floor and crawl. Whistle blows again, we jump up and carry on running. Through the course of the lesson, we do this 10 or so times, and the whistle blows decrease in time apart, so no sooner were we down, than we had to get up again.

After a couple of hours, we get taken to the testing area. Speakers in the trees playing dramatic war music and the sound of gunfire (yes really!) to make the place a little more atmospheric.

We pair off, one is the trainee, one is the aggressor, whos job it is to motivate the trainee, loudly and emphatically.

My first run round is the aggressor. I wasn't sure what was expected of me, but I settle into it pretty fast, and as my mate runs round stabbing the targets, I'm there screaming in his ear: "MOVE! FCUKING MOVE! FCUKING MOVE! STAB THE FCUKING BASTARD! KILL THE FCUKING BASTARD! HE'S TRYING TO KILL YOU!!"

My turn as the trainee comes, and the corporal motions us forward and tells us to take a knee (kneel down).

"Right" he says calmly. Then he grabs me and yanks me towards him, and starts screaming in my face: "YOU ARE IN AFGHANISTAN, OUT THERE ARE A LOAD OF BASTARDS THAT ARE TRYING TO FCUKING KILL YOU!DON'T LET THEM! YOU KILL THEM FIRST!!! DO YOU UNDERSTAND" "YES CORPORAL!!"I scream."DO YOU FCUKING UNDERSTAND!?" "YES CORPORAL" I scream even loader. "Show me your war face!" After three hours of being screamed at, I'm in a pretty warry mood myself. With my nose almost touching his, I angrily scream at the corporal's face. "Right, good! Get going!!"

So I run round the 2 minute circuit with my mate screaming in my ear, bayonetting everything resembling a target. Following me is a guy with a video camera, who has been hanging round for a while, apparently filming the whole thing for a DVD the army is making. Cool stuff.

Finally we're all done and we get 20 minutes to sit down, drink water, and recover. A short night-ex later and we're back in the block, where we've been since, cleaning stuff and generally settling back down.

PART TWO: THE NEW LADS

Now apparently, one of the platoons was disbanded and has had its lads distributed throughout the other platoons. We've got one new section of lads. Unfortunately, we've also got their section commander. While I don't know a lot about this corporal,. he is famed for giving out AGAIs (military charges, kinda like speeding tickets without the fine, that usually end up in you getting a bollocking or extra work duty or both) at the drop of a hat. I suspect that the low morale problem that caused the other platoon to lose so many recruits that it was disbanded may now be affecting our platoon, as they say, the contagion has been transmitted to a new host.

Still, we've not had much contact with this corporal yet, hopefully that won't change. Regardless, there is now a definite atmosphere of tension in the platoon, and a lot of people are getting their feathers ruffled. With each passing week more and more potential soldiers are getting disaffected and leaving training. I wonder if I will yet be one of them. Time will tell.

Various goings on. Week 1 to 4.

2010-08-28T19:18:00.002+01:00

PART ONE: STUFF

Okay, almost to week 4.

And yes, this is a very abridged version. I'm in the NAAFI (armed forces recreational center) and I have other stuff to get done back in my room.

After a traditional and rather upsetting tearful goodbye at the train station, the train journey was uneventful enough and after a couple of short hours, I found myself at ATR Bassingbourn, meeting the first of a load of new friends.

Over the course of the week I grew to know these people vaguely well, and as you can imagine, as time went on, these relationships improved. Eight new friends. Cool.

Towards the end of us initially getting settled into our accomodation, in walks a young lad, looking a bit lost, and nervous. He's bunked up opposite me so since we're practically going to be bunkmates, may as well get to know each other.

Name of Paul, 18 years old, from Perth in Scotland, a lively sense of humour and a bit of a temper. Still, we were getting on at this point so that didn't seem much of an issue for me.

Week one was filled with little more than getting to know the camp, our instructors, each other, and having death by powerpoint inflicted on us by various people, for many hours.

At the end though, we were taken off for a little camping trip in the woods, army style. Having constructed our shelters and got to know each other a little better, we were gratified when the heavens opened and the Cambridgeshire Ocean tried to come back down to earth. Time to put our shelters to the test. Paul and I, as we shared one end of the room, were bashad (living in a basha - a type of tent) up together, and had become pretty good friends at this point.
Did our bashas keep us dry, warm, and keep the water out? Well, yes they did actually. Unfortunately, the pair in the basha next to us had staked one of their pegs under the edge of ours, and as a result, all the water running off our poncho - the sheet making up the roof of the basha - ran into their basha.
Still, shouldn't have pitched up that close to us. The idiots.

Week two was where the paperwork drifted off, and we started getting into the swing of things. Loads of incredibly interminable rifle lessons, and after two weeks, the "restaurant" breakfasts, (for me) a sausage, a hash brown, scrambled eggs, baked beans, and a bowl of bran flakes - EVERY BREAKFAST - started becoming incredibly boring. The dinner and tea menus have enough variety, but breakfasts were something to be tolerated, not enjoyed.

My relationship with my friends had improved and we were all getting on well as a team at this point. Kind of important given the work concerned.

PART TWO: "HAVING A BIT OF A WOBBLE"

Week three brought with it a strenuous run over very hilly terrain, over grassy fields and through woods, no less hilly, and thick with roots.
I ran myself ragged, partly not to let my mates down, and partly because I had some of the Army's finest yelling at me in both ears.
I fell down, I got up. I carried on running.

I don't remember much after that, apparently I fell down again, and did not get up.
Rather amusingly, as one instructor was arranging care/first aid for me, the other who seemed not to be needed, was apparently throwing grass at my recumbent form, repeating "man up".
I don't find that unprofessional or wrong, the way it was explained to me makes it simply sound funny.

I remember being brought back slumped over the seat in a land rover, while mates including one of the corporals (who is one of the coolest guys I've ever met, incidentally) tried to keep me awake, checking whether I knew what my name was (I got it right, eventually), and before long, I got carried bodily through the air by three of my mates, onto an examination table in the med center.

Hmm. Loony blood pressure (92-50), very high temperature, sweating profusely, and hyperventilating. Not a very pleasant way to do things.
Eventually and after a perceivably long time, I started "recovering", but just to be on the safe side, I was carted off in an ambulance to the local civilian hospital about 15 miles away.

A stay overnight in the hospital between the worst snorer in the world, and a dear old gentleman who "seem to have lost my products" on a regular basis. A few checks in the morning, and after a BK meal thoughtfully provided by the orderly officer, back to camp into the med center where I was to stay for two nights.
Compared to the lifestyle I had become accustomed to, the med center routine was so sedate as to be almost like my home routine. Late to rise, early to bed, and very little to do except play with my ipod and watch tv. And get better, apparently.

On the second day I was allowed to visit my mates back in our room, where I was very upset to learn that Paul, what passed for my best friend here, had finally had enough, thrown a wobbly, and had reached a mutual agreement with the army that he was going home, to be a soldier no longer. This really threw me, and my mood darkened considerably over the night. I'd been having doubts of my own and I approached a couple of the staff for guidance as to whether I should stay or leave. Their job, they reminded me in a kind but definite manner, was to advise, not to make the decision. Hmm, better luck next time.

Eventually I was discharged from the med center, with a reminder to return the following monday. The provisional prognosis is heat exhaustion coupled with/arising from dehydration. Characterised by low blood pressure, Tachycardia, hyperventilation/profuse sweating and collapse.

What fun. Still, at least I didn't have to run the whole thing, nor did I have to show myself "correctly dressed" at 8 that night, after being told my boots were not shiny enough (yes really).

PART THREE: GO KARTING

Today, however, has been absolutely awesome. A nice sedentary day, we marched to the drill square (during which I (having been declared sick) was told to "Keep five metres behind the men, or they will become infected by your weakness" - which made everyone including myself giggle. I didn't take this personally, exactly the same has been said to other sickies on other occasions, and is meant as much as a joke as an instruction) to get onto the coach.

Fifteen minutes later and we arrive at the Go Kart track.
Now I've never been into go karting, for some reason it has never really appealed to me. But having not only not had to pay to go, but also actually being paid to go (technically on duty 24/7 you see), was what swung it for me.

My first go in a go cart? Yes. Wearing the traditional overalls and helmet, I swung myself down into the low slung vehicle.

The ride started like a bumper car, slow and sedate, but as the motor picked up speed, so did the kart, until I was touching 30mph. Now 30, with your arse 6 inches off the floor, is thrillingly fast, and I'd not got halfway round the indoor circuit (which in addition to a nice long straight, featured both a chicane and a few demanding hairpins) before I was grinning like a kid on his favourite fairground ride. I wasn't alone in this, everyone went together, officers, sergeants, corporals and recruits alike. Later, I began throwing the cart around a little bit, slamming the steering from side to side, shifting my weight around in the seat (taking a sharp corner at 25, your body [weight] is surprisingly difficult to keep centered in the seat) gritting my teeth, stamping on the brakes and accelerator, the ride became a full body workout. I perfected most of the racing lines, managed to crash twice (one time, a guy also clipped my right-rear and spun me into the barrier) got overtaken a few times and (woo!) managed to keep a train of 4 or 5 karts firmly behind me for the whole time I was out there.

Lots of video was shot, lots of people were shouted at (2 sections comprised of 10 lads each disqualified in their entirity due to bad behaviour (dangerous driving etc)), including the captain (who got a 1 minute pit penalty for speeding in the pit lane (I think), a leiutenant who got a firm talking to (for some unidentified reason) and a corporal who got disqualified for crashing into one of the other drivers. The awesome thing was because we all had helmets on it was difficult to identify our troop members. One of the people I kept behind me might have been one of the corporals, my sergeant or even the captain himself. Going back into the real world was the great equaliser, and it was nice to be "human" again.

We left in joint 7th place, out of 9 which wasn't good, but this wasn't really the point as we'd all had an absolutely amazingly awesome time. Having spoken to some of my section members, we have agreed that after week 7 (the point at which we are permitted to leave camp unescorted), it might be an idea for a few of us to get a taxi down there on the weekend and spend a few hours razzing round the track.

So yeah. Weird week, it started very badly, and ended on an absolutely amazing high.

We've been given the best part of the weekend off too, which is a rare, and very cool occurance. Which I'm now off to enjoy.

So all the best folks, sorry I haven't been around much, marching to march, boots to polish, etc.

See ya for now!

Farewell! For now!

2010-08-08T02:12:00.002+01:00

Yikes, I spent ages and ages working towards this day, now it's arrived it's not entirely as I'd expected.

Yes, folks, I'm finally off to basic training. I'm partly nervous, and quite excited. I'm looking forward to meeting new challenges, and making new friends. Going new places, and having new experiences.

Unfortunately and as I have found out to my cost, my sentimental side which has never failed to make its presence felt, means that I am much closer to my family than I had thought. Rather than the start of something new, moving away feels more like the end of the world. Today's been quite an emotional day.

But, as I've always said, life has a habit of finding equilibrium, and things will just return to a new state of "normal". I'll get used to it. Besides, I'm back up in seven weeks, and I should be able to see my parents in less than that. And I'm told I should almost certainly be here for christmas, possibly for the annual trip to Gainsborough too, and with my new-found wages, that's definitely something to look forward to, onwards and upwards as they say.

But still, I can't help feeling like today is something bad instead of something good.
Time will tell I guess, I'll remain hopeful. I've already promised everyone that I will be in cnotact as much as possible, and that includes this blog. I'll update as and when, but it won't have skipped my mind either way.

See you soon, I hope :-).

Whitby...

2010-08-07T02:02:00.009+01:00

With my time living with my family on a permenant basis rapidly coming to a close, my mum and I have been taking advantageo f the excuse to spend quality time together. My dad for his part never really spends much time with anyone, but does seem to be being more civil with me with one or two exceptions.

So I woke up a couple of days ago, after only a short period of sleep, and off my mum and I go. She won't tell me where we're going initially, so it's a bit of a mystery. For old time's sake, we go past my old workplace, before going up past the crappy falling-down flat where I used to live.
It's still crappy and falling down, just so you know :-).

Eventually we pull into a Little Chef for some breakfast, where we have a lovely Full English breakfast (which I surprised my mum with, by eating it in its entirity - except the mushroom), which was really tasty.

Off we go and my mum reveals we're off to Whitby. Now I hadn't had much sleep so its at this point that I start feeling tired, so as we go further across Yorkshire, I try to resist the urge to fall asleep, with varying amounts of success. The weather's a little grim, changing from cloudy to raining and back again several times.

We disappear over hills, up and down various steep gradients over the North York moors, through the village where they film Heartbeat. As expected, the place was crawling with tourists and Heartbeat fans from countries all over the world, including dozens of Japanese tourists, who allegedly take photos of everything, including the roads, the sheep (many of which seem to be suicidal as they like to play chicken - aha ha aha etc with the cars) and even each other. Eventually though, my mum says she can sea the see (?) and before long, we're in Whitby.
Looking for a place to park. Which takes aaages.

Eventually we find somewhere to park and I have a look around.
The weather is grey but not cold, the place seems pretty busy, so off we go.

Now Whitby isn't a flat place. There's a lot of hills and cliffs, and we come to the top of some of the cliffs overlooking the city.

Now, a phobia is defined as an "irrational fear". I'm not certain that an instinctive terror of heights counts as irrational fear, or an inbuilt survival mechanism that stood the evolutionary test of time. Either way, I look beyond the waist high safety barrier, to three or four foot beyond where the scrub and plants end abruptly to see their leaves hanging out into empty air, masking what, from the top, looks like a terrifying sheer drop. I didn't want to touch the safety barrier - I didn't even want to go near it, so I just sort of hang around and watch a young Herring Gull squawking at me intently.

Eventually, we walk down what seems to be a huge flight of steps, going from the top of the cliffs to the bottom. The stairs are nice and wide, and not too steep, and there's a sturdy guardrail at the edge. But I still find it an uncomfortable task to have to walk down these very high stairs, looking - as walking down stairs requires you to - down to the bottom, which is a fair old distance away.

Eventually though we get to the bottom, where I look up and see that the cliff, while high, is neither as high as it looked from the top, or as sheer or vertical as I had expected. As I said to my mum at the time, from the top I didn't want to go to the edge. From the bottom, I felt I could happily climb it with equipment.

We wander round the town for a while, looking at various things, eating seafood (not me) and visiting various shops. We stop in the middle of the town for a drink (I had an "nicely layered" ice coffee with hazelnut syrup, which I immediately de-layered and drank happily) before moving on and continuing our tour.

We come to one of the two (four if you're picky, two if you're very picky (two are sea walls not piers)) piers, and as we walk along the sea wall, though the ground is level, the drop from where we were walking to the ground /water either side of the sea wall once again becomes quite disconcerting. Eventually though, we come to the pier itself, which is where I must admit, I had tremendous fun. In a sarcastic type way.

Well, here's a pic, which will save me a big long explanation. As you can see, that's a fair old drop. Yes, there's a sturdy wooden deck above the concrete, but what you can't see is that the deck was made of wooden beams, that had gaps between them of anything up to a couple of inches. The effect was that of walking above a large drop, on a semi-transparent uneven floor. To a dude like me who is averse to heights, it was pretty disconcerting. Eventually though, I make it to the end, passing others who have equally nervous expressions, whos efforts to avoid looking down are noticable. After ceremonially touching the railing at the farthest tip of the pier (to say "THERE I have reached the end!) I take a few photos while I'm at the end (conveniently forgetting to take any of the pier itself) to prove that I got there, and slowly, we head back.

I return to the end of the pier, and at the end see some steps leading downwards to the lower "deck". They're sheer and very steep, and not particularly inviting, but hey I bet I could get a few decent photos, so I very (!) carefully and slowly edge my way down the 19 scariest steps I've ever walked down. And lo and behold, I take a few photos, before almost equally slowly climbing up and returning to the more solid concrete walkway of the sea wall itself.

The weather's turned nice at this point, so we wander round having a great time, looking round more shops etc. The day was pretty much a nice day of enjoying the sun, taking photos, and generally enjoying each other's company, which is really what I think family is about. Weird words from me I suppose given how much I keep myself to myself, but hey.
I take plenty of photos many of which I'm pleased with.

Eventually, we head off back to the car, and on the way there I buy an obscenely priced ice cream (£1.90 for a normal ice cream cone!), and pop into a local shop to buy some stuff for my ickle nephew.
We leave with a toy Jellyfish (which he's taken home with him), a laser sword (which he broke into two bits a couple of days later) and three huge awesome glass gems which he seems to like, and which go well with his treasure chest.

We drive off, having had a very good day, down the coast to Bridlington. Bridlington is a place where I've been going since I was little and I still love to go there. Normally we make a big day of going, and we used to count down the days to our regular trips there as kids, so the somewhat off-the-cuff "Oh we'll go to Bridlington for our tea" takes me somewhat by surprise, but that surprise was very welcome.

Dusk has fallen and the lights are beginning to come on, and the place is pretty quiet. Still, doesn't stop me having the best battered-sausage and chips I've ever had (which is weird because various reviews of the restaurant indicate that other people found the food really bad) with batter that is both crispy, chewy, and full of flavour and the same time.

As the sky darkens and the streets go quiet, the lighthouse in the distance comes on, its light noiselessly flashing across the bay, making the place seem even quieter than before. I've always found the seaside a lonely place to be at dusk, not sure why.

Eventually though, enough is enough, and we head home as I try and play scrabble on my ipod. The weather worsens and the rain starts coming down. Eventually though we get to the Humber Bridge, (and its little toll booths with a light that to my delight, goes "Ding!" just like something out of a cartoon, as it changes from red to green) and cross it, before disappearing down other porly lit motorways, making our way back home.

After a long long drive, eventually and finally at long last, we arrive home, and despite our tiredness, manage to spend a good hour or two talking about how much we enjoyed the day.

And so there we are, an absolutely fantastic and very very enjoyable day out with my mum. One that I'l have fond memories of :).

Anyway, here are some shiny pickatures, including the "best" graffiti I've ever seen :-). Ciao.

Oaths, Towels and Barbecues...

2010-08-03T22:45:00.005+01:00

...Well, the 27th finally rolled round, and getting my shiny shoes and nice suit on, I went to the AFCO to swear my oath. Thanks to heavy traffic, I managed to get there about 5 minutes late, but no one seemed to notice.
Again, from the waiting room I was led "backstage" through various corridors and down little microstairs deep into what must have been the opposite side of the building. There, we had a couple of sergeants takling to us, answering any questions we might have, sorting out paperwork and whatnot...

Eventually the parents come in, followed by the Major, the senior recruiting officer for the area.
He talks for a while, explaining how proud we (8 of us were there that day) should be, how well we've done, and how we should take the opportunity that we've been given to get an awesome carreer etc etc, and gave us a short video presentation.

Afterwards, we were instructed to stand, and as one, swore the oath, making us all ceremonially at least (not legally - that happens when you sign the contract on the first day of training), the latest additions to the Army. A proud moment for me and my mum, who had gone along to witness the moment :-). The Major congratulated us, and emphasised that we should keep in touch with our families during training. Something I took to heart as despite my advancing years (ok, well, 25 - lots of the lads there will be 18 and 19, so yeah, advancing years), I'm a bugger for getting homesick.

I was given a certificate to commemorate the occasion, which I put in my clever black file thing that has my rail tickets in it (this will mean something to me in 10 years time maybe).

Afterwards, with something of a spring in my step (I don't know whether my mum had a spring in my step, but I did have a spring in my step) we wandered around for a while, shopping for various items that I'll need, not the least of which was a rather shiny (and oddly shaped) steam iron, as well as loads of shoe polish, brushes, clothes brush etc etc. We also had a nice. meal in one of the local citybargastroresturantypubthingie whatever the heck they're called these days (A nice pub serving nice food by day, a rowdy nightclub at night), where I had something or other. Err, Baconburger with curly fries and Jack Daniels sauce, as well as some sponge thing with chocolate sauce on it, as well as ice cream. We wandered around a bit more, buying other items, I saw one thing that I thought was really cool - a microfibre bath towel - lightweight, thin, but very warm and absorbent. Why do I care? Because it folds up into a tiny pouch and dries super quick, meaning it would be very practical for training. Unfortunately it was very expensive, so we left without one, and after a leisurely walk around, eventually set off home. Not before my mum bought me some writing paper and envelopes, though.

A few days later, ostensibly to make sure it was working and "burnt-in" properly, I set about ironing a T-shirt which went quite well. I learned that even new irons, even new irons with "anti-drip", can drip bloody hot water on your feet if you're not careful.
I also learned that using copious amounts of steam while ironing is no substitute for washing the garment in the first place, as it was a crumpled and smelly t shirt when I started, and a perfectly flat and smelly t shirt when I finished.
Oh well, can't win 'em all.

WORK

Rather oddly, it absolutely threw it down during the start of my last weekend at work, and I got thoroughly soaked. Not to worry though, as it was a nice enough shift and the tips weren't bad. Especially since one very lovely customer tipped me £4.50! The soon-to-be-outgoing manager at the time, was nice enough to grant me a large pizza, which I took the opportunity to pile high with toppings, turning it into an artery-clogging monster of a pizza (Quadruple cheese, triple pork, beef and ham, and pepperoni and red onion, topped with sage and onion stuffing and more cheese, all on top of a special 1/1 mix of salsa and spicy pizza sauce).

I turned up, a day later, to what was to be my final shift, and it proceeded well enough. Tips weren't too bad, not helped by me losing £2 in the till (robbing sods always try to cheat you out of your tips (They don't but they rarely pay attention to what goes in)), and off I went on my last delivery ever. Assuming I take 15 deliveries a shift, that works out at... Hmm. 2,280 deliveries since december 2008.
I took the opportunity, after completing the delivery, to go back to work the long way, looking at the clouds, the trees etc, riding my teeny and annoying but ultimately faithful and reliable scooter, back to the shops for the last time. And that's it, that's all she wrote. I don't work there any more.

BARBECUE/BARBACUE/WHATEVERCUE

The day after, we all went along to my sister's house for a cool barbacue, a nice opportunity for a family occasion, to see me off. There was plenty of yummy food (not including the quiche I took which was crappy), Sausage rolls, dangerously cooked burgers, traditional frozen-in-the-middle-but-burned-on-the-outside sausages.
Another interesting contraption was a "Home Draught" thingie, a giant 10 pint (nearly 6 litre) bottle, with a CO2 cartridge and a little lever/tap thing, the pair of which turning it from a giant bottle of beer, to a cute little "pour-your-own-draught-beer-straight-from-the-bottle" affair. Not sure how this differs from the traditional "pour-your-own-beer-straight-from-the-can" arrangement that I'm used to, but it seems a significant enough change to do so. I liked its novelty value, but unfortunately, the first jolt sent the CO2 out of suspension, and turned the tap into a high pressure beer-foam blasting device, suitable for creating a drink consisting of an inch of flat beer, and 5 inches of foam no top.

All said and done though, the barbacue was great. The weather was nice, the dog was playful, the food was great, the company was nice etc etc. It was a nice family occasion :-).

TOWEL

For some reason, my mum and dad went out during today, and returned to announce that they had a gift for me. Expecting something like a customised pencil or an embossed ruler (I'm a natural pessimist), I was very happy and surprised to be presented with one large-size microfibre towel. And the little thing is amazing. It's thin, light, it feels insubstantial but the spiel on the box promises me it won't be. The remainder of the day I've spent building a lego UFO for/with my nephew (vaguely time consuming), playing Walking Legs with my him (enjoyable), as well as trying to teach him to fly helicopters on X-plane (futile). So later I'm probably going to grab some supper and maybe have a bath so I can test out my new towel. Either way, I'm busybusybusy. Lots of stuff to do.

Here are some pics, got to go or else I'll get nothing done! Have fun folks :-).
EDIT: I'd upload more pics, but my computer is telling me that (amazingly!) it's out of memory. It's got 3Gb, how can it possibly be out of memory? Oh well.

EDIT EDIT: Public Clarification. My dearest big brother would like me to point out that he was responsible for bringing us back home the other day after my dad threw a wobbly. I didn't actually say how we got back, but now you know :-).

The truth about Cats and Frogs...

2010-07-26T01:10:00.004+01:00

So I've had a pretty cool day. Starting off with a lovely meal in the local pub with my rents, my sis and my ickle nephew, watching the F1 (Alonso won - apparently!), before going to see how my Grandad was doing. We stayed and chatted for a while before taking a tour of his now thriving herb/flower garden.
The tree he's always had growing there, is still growing. The flower beds are full, and the greenhouse is full of tomatoes. Bees buzzed about the place, and the lavender and rosemary were noticable by their fragrance.

Later on, I went off to work, nothing special whatsoever. The shift came, the shift went.

On the way home, I saw in the distance, a cat. A very attractive animal of indeterminate gender, completely white, except (I swear the world does this to mess with my) its tail, which was marked in bright bands of tan, brown and black.
I approached and the cat stared at me, before scooting off a few meters, miaowing reluctantly at me. As I beckoned the cat back to me (I like animals) I noticed that its attention was directed instead at a frog, almost at my feet without me realising it. Incredulously, I watched as the cat walked back to the frog, sniffed at it, and even pawed at it in that "what are you?" type way.
The frog remained stoic throughout and didn't move a millimeter. I bent down, as the cat darted off, to see that the frog was actually a real frog, and sure enough, yep, a real frog.

I then spent five or ten minutes trying to entice the cat away from the (dark green and black) frog who was evidently thinking "if I stay very still - (on the light grey tarmac - stupid amphibian) - the cat won't notice me", and the cat was having none of it. Eventually, I whipped a sheet of cardboard out of my bag and started literally bumping this frog in the butt with the cardboard to try to encourage it to hop away from this rather put out cat.

A guy walked past, walking his dogs. By way of explanation I offered something along the lines of "To my left is a cat, to my right is a frog, I want to stop the frog becoming catfood".

Or as they sing, "Kittehs to the left of me, froggehs to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with no fcuking help whatsoever actually". Eventually the dude turned back and came back this way, even as the cat tried to paw the silly amphibian again. As he approached, I managed to piss the frog off enough to make it jump up the 10 inch wall in front of it into the garden in front, onto a load of spikey flowers, where the cat followed it beyond my reach.

The bloke came over, and his dogs started growling at the cat, which instantly arched its back. I explained my valiant frog-saving efforts to the guy, before explaining "it's not my garden".
"Do what you have to, if the owners complain, I'll back you up". Heh, sounds so noble doesn't it.

Anyway, as the dogs growled at the cat and as the cat hissed at the dogs, I butted the frog on its butt till it gor thoroughly bored and hopped into some bushes in the middle of the garden, well out of the cat's reach.

Woo, go me!

Okay, so as my sister said "It's a frog!" Which apparently makes it not worth the effort, in her eyes anyway. But then we've got two goldfish who apparently don't qualify as "life" in her eyes either. So I'll take her morals with a bucket of salt, if it's all the same :-).

Frankly, I didn't want to see a living animal get turned into confetti, and in the event, the jumpy lil guy didn't. The cat left, pissed off, but not half as pissed off as the frog would have been in the cat's jaws. For all their fluffiness, they're evil little bastards, cats.

So hey, that's today's good deed. Summary: I saved a frog from a cat. Heh.

I spose you had to be there. Still, someone out there considers it effort well spent, even if he does have webbed fingers, green skin and big goggly eyes.

:-).

Shopping Trip!

2010-07-24T17:07:00.003+01:00

With myself!

Yes, after a bit of waiting (or perhaps own waiting) I finally got some paperwork from the Army confirming their acceptance of me, and my start date and suchlike.
I was called in yesterday to go through some paperwork with them, so after an incredibly bad night's sleep (friday: 9am-3pm, then 11pm until 2:30am on saturday - and then completely unable to sleep before eventually getting out of bed at 8:30am) along I went, signed a couple of things (that's basically all it was), and had the rest of the afternoon to myself, with a big packing list of things to take.

See, in addition to all the shouting and running around and climbing up trees etc etc, There is actually a lot of classroom work involved in training. With this in mind, I wrote down some of my packing list, and went round a tour of the local shops to get various items on it.

First stop? Breakfast, actually. Turning up in Mcdonalds nearly half an hour after they stopped breakfast, I asked nicely if they had any McMuffins (my favourite) left, and they did.
So I sat downstairs for a while eating my breakfast and reading through various paperwork and whatnot, and eventually set off out round town. After a fashion. You see, (and I didn't know this), 3 or 4 times a year, apparently, Sheffield has a continental market (which continent exactly? There were chinese noodles, polish cuisine, flowers from holland, coffee from italy, curries from india etc etc), and as a result, the entire pedestrianised shopping area was full from one side to the other, with market stalls sellinf a huge variety of fantastic and interesting and (in some cases) very nice smelling goods. Everything from African handmade art items, wood carvings etc etc, to Chinese noodles, Italian Gelato, North Korean paranoia, and German beer.
And one of those cool things we saw in london, a huge barbecue pan thing suspended over a fire. All this under the huge circular span of the Wheel of Sheffield, which as usual was rotating in its circular type way.

For some reason, maybe it was the lack of sleep, the strange and wonderful smells from the market, the fact I had money to spend, or the lovely weather, I was in a really good mood, and for some reason, this mood persisted throughout the day. I actually found myself smiling a lot, laughing at jokes I'd normally consider crappy, and seeing a couple of toy stalls, smiling at the idea of my lovable ickle nephew playing with some of them. I was in a mood to be very nice to people, a state of genuinely wishing the world well, and to be honest, whatever the reason for it, it was wonderful :-). I dunno maybe I breathed someone's drugs in accidentally or something.

Remembering the toy stall, I resolved to buy something for the ickle guy in my travels.

So I wandered round here there and everywhere, buying "masculine hygeine" products (extortionately priced razors/blades, shower gel, etc etc) and stationary stationery (the stationery didn't move about) like marker pens, nice gel pens and other cool stuff, for all the classroom lessons.

I wandered to one of the hardware stores and bought some padlocks. For some reason, all three padlocks (they were a 3 pack) take the same key, and each padlock came with two keys.
So I have three identical padlocks with six identical keys. Bizarre!
Now maybe because of the lack sleep or whatever, I found myself blissfully drifting round most of the day, walking right past stuff I wanted to buy, several times, while trying to find it.

I also came out with the comedic concern that if those six keys fitted my padlocks, I didn't want to buy them because maybe everyone else who bought those three-packs "from any other Wickes in the country" would be able to open mine with their keys.

Fortunately I realised my incredible stupidity before I left empty handed (the hardware store was a bugger to find), blinked, turned on my heel and with a sweet smile, marched back to the counter, padlocks in hand.

Eventually, after buying some hungry hippos for my nephew (who didn't get one because he was an absolute little sod!!!) yesterday, I returned home, and resisted the urge to sleep until about 10pm when I fell asleep during a documentary on sniper rifles.

Today, I woke up, having slept well, and went out with my parents to enjoy some time in the sun at the chip shop.
Unfortunately my dad got a strop on at "being excluded" from conversations between my mum and myself (twice he's butted in and twice he's politely but firmly been told to mind his own business) and drove home, leaving my mum and I at the chip shop.

Not to worry though because the weather was lovely, and the chips were amazingly good.
Deciding we were going to walk home, my mum send me to the shop opposite to buy some bottled water, and I laughed inwardly when I saw what greeted me.

Just inside the shop, the owner had a shelf, neatly filled up with various kinds of cider, White Lightning, White Dragon, White Cobra, White Viper, White Reticulated-bloody-python, Diamond Ice, Diamond Jack, Diamond White, more diamonds than a bloody jewellers. Oh, and Frosty Jack's.
Below this he had two shelves of Lambrini. All straight at the front of the shop, opposite the door.

Now for people outside the UK (the citizens of which would immediately find this amusing) who are wondering what is funny, all the brands above, some of which may or may not exist, are firmly thought of as, Hmm. Budget drinks. That is, Cheap drinks. Inexpensive but strong drinks, usually entirely made with synthetic ingredients (In the same way that a fast-food fizzy orange isn't made from oranges, I doubt any of those ciders have ever seen an apple) that can (and usually are) be bought by underage teens with their pocket money, thus allowing even impoverished teenagers to get drunk and go round smashing windows with hammers and whatnot, and generally keep the police busy.

It's nice to see just how keenly this shopkeeper follows the needs of the local community.
Well it made me smile anyway.

Here are some pickatures. Only one of them is visible at the moment, the others I forgot to upload, but here they are anyway. I wanted to get some of my puppy, at special request, but I'm afraid I have one of my last shifts at work in 40 minutes and must go!

Bye for now :-).

PART TWO: PUB MEAL

Sunday 25th:
Had a nice sleep, and went off to the pub to have a nice pub meal with the family.
Was quite nice for us to get together and a nice day was had by all.
Popped in to see grandad afterwards, and then had a bit of a cycle ride round the park.

Also took some more photos for Lexi :-). Our puppeh continues to be a cute and awesome and affectionate little girl :-).

Yikes, the rain! (or, "A Dog and a DS")

2010-07-13T22:00:00.005+01:00

Well summer didn't last long!
Isn't a year weird unit of time. Short enough that you can remember back over several (or tens of, depending on your ancientness) of them, but long enough that you can forget things. Things like, oh, whether it's sunny or whether it pours it down, in a particular type of year,

Yep apparently, July - the height of British summer, despite the fact that we've had 30+C days a few times already this year, is traditionally rainy. It rained yesterday, it rained this morning, in fact, it's rained all day. But since it's July, it's sort of a cool rain, not a nasty cold one. It's the yearly equivalent of a summer break, that is, a break from summer itself, with two or three weeks of wet weather.

Anyway, all that rubbish aside, yesterday, my sister turns up carrying an unknown puppy around. She's had experience in the past rehoming animals and this one was just the latest of her temporary wards. In she comes with the puppy, and it's an adorable lil creature, black and white, with a little nose, floppy ears and HUUUGE pleading eyes. Kinda like this.

Off I go to the shops with my nephew, to fetch some milk. When we get back, my mum says she has a surprise for me. When I ask what it is, she gestures to "our new dog". Yikes, didn't take long for my sister to find a new owner, but us? We've not had a dog for ages.
Still, my dad is retired and in another 10 years or so my mum will be the same, so I guess little-dog (as my nephew named her) will be good at keeping them company.

Also yesterday, my brother's wife/sister in law/whichever she prefers, gives my nephew her DS, which I thought was extraordinarily nice of her. My nephew had been DSless since some point in the indeterminate past where he left his own DS outside, on his garden trampoline, overnight as it rained heavily. Yeah, real good thinking, little fella. I'm amazed it didn't get nicked before it got wet, as the residents of my sister's old neighbourhood seemed to (in general) be a very light-fingered bunch. Still. He's delighted because now he can play on "his" DS with the games everyone's bought him, and better yet, he can play his favourite game boy advance games too. Though sadly, not his old game boy ones. Still, he's looking forward to playing "the indiana jones" game (Castlevania: Circle Of The Moon) on a backlit screen for once.

Not only do we have an awesome new doggy (who loves nothing more than chewing people's hands/feet, and weeing on the carpet), not only does the lil dude have a DS again, but, we've actually found his camera too!!

Okay, none of you guys knew anything about this - last time we went to twin lakes, he took his camera with him. It came back too, in fact I was even sure I'd seen it in the house afterwards, but it was nowhere to be seen, and we've turned his room upside down. However we found it earlier today, in his car, so now he has "his DS back" AND his camera back.
And we have a new doggy!

Finally, my nephew has already started going on about things he wants to put on his... ...list. That list, the list, you know? Where you ask for presents and stuff!!!
Yikes, it wasn't until October last year that he actually started thinking about what he wanted to put on his list.

We tidied his room together too earlier, and by that I mean I tidied it and he took toys I'd just put away out to play with them, while I put them back again.
Now, I have an odd habit when tidying, which I inherited off my mum. Don't ask her why or where it started but it's always been "the done way" in our family - or as my sister cruelly observes "just you and mum" - to listen to music traditionally listened to at the time of year where certain lists become quite important, while tidying. Which got me in a rather festive mood. In July. Which wasn't helped by me then becoming all festive and nostalgic and watching last year's home videos from that ol' festive time, which, you'll notice, I'm deliberately not naming, so no one can accuse me of talking about that while we're still in July.

So hey, in the meantime, the rain continues to come down, and the festive videos continue to get played. I'm gonna eat an angus burger later, and maybe have an early night.

Here are some sparkly pics in the meantime: (Well, one. I forgot what the second was and couldn't find the third!)

Yikes, the sun!

2010-07-10T01:13:00.004+01:00

Would you know, we're actually having a genuine summer here, complete with nice weather, hayfever and everything.
I guess it's important for me to emphasise to myself that we do in fact have summers, because last winter seemed to go on for ever. But then I guess winters always do.

So what's been happening? More of the same I guess. My nephew continues to swerve unpredictably between being awesome and cute, and being infuriatingly badly behaved, work continues to be as sociable as it's ever been, and I'm trundling through life quite happily, I suppose.

I did decide to throw a little bit of cash at my iPod though. Having bought all sorts of weird and wonderful ayapps, as well as organising loads of videos and suchlike to view here there and everywhere, I was a little put out when my faithful earphones finally stopped working a few weeks ago.
I was much more put out when the seller I bought the replacements off, first sent me some fakes, and then told me he'd send me a second pair after the first pair fell to bits.
I am still waiting for the second pair. Not that I care anymore, as I've made alternative plans.

Yep, after saving moneys and whatnot, I finally decided to buy some nice and shiny Klipsch Image S4i earphones, with shiny integrated remote control type thing, and I have to say that they sound absolutely awesome. £90 well spent (They're available for less, but last time I spent "for less" I got "less" and had to buy a second time).

I also bought a Zagg Invisible Shield to protect the ipod, and while fitting it was an absolute sweary swearword, it seems to be doing its job quite well. The protector hasn't got so much as a scratch on it, which makes a nice change because the cheap plastic ones I used to use, used to last a couple of weeks before needing replacement.

So hey, that's it, that's all, there is nothing going on in my life at the minute, apart from...

Yeah my sis, nephew and I finally went swimming again a few days ago, and it was nice to get back in the water. Afterwards, we went to a local chinese buffet type place, where I had a very good meal of all sorts of things, washed down with ice cream, various unidentified but tasty foodstuffs, and lots of toffee cheesecake. Not a bad night out. Must have more of them.

Now, let's see if this heatwave arrives. Today's supposed to be very hot. We'll have to see, hehehe...

PS: Don't mind my half-assed photo, I was in a rush.

The third and fourth days of summer (and cadbury world)...

2010-06-04T02:27:00.010+01:00

Yeah folks, they don't run consecutively. Until tuesday, the weather has been absolutely rubbish.

Well, with the changing weather, another trip to Twin Lakes was on the cards, and again and as usual, lots of fun was had. The dangly bungee rope trap thing is still roped off, but there were a few new attractions including a load of very loud lambs in the petting zoo, as well as a cute little simples (1 2) in the don't-pet-unless-you-want-to-lose-a-finger-zoo. As usual, lots of fun was had.

My nephew spent plenty of the journey there trying to guess what the various trucks on the motorway were carrying, as well as telling me that truck stops that you can use to get some sleep and to refill with diesel don't actually exist in real life, because "it's only a game" which was quite cute of him. He hasn't been on the truck game for a while, instead he's spent a lot of time zooming around in various cars that I made for him on Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Still, a fun day out for all. Again, plenty of time was spent running round, swinging, hiding, bouncing, siding, all sorts of interesting things. A quick meal and off we went again with the whole having fun thing.

A couple of days later, I got dragged along rather unwillingly (after having had no sleep whatsoever), to Cadbury World, what I originally took to be a dull and uninteresting visitors center at a grimy factory.

A fairly lengthy drive, and we drove in one side of Birmingham, and out the other. First impressions: Grimy, big, not very pleasant. But look closer and some bits of it are actually really nice, so I suppose it's like any major city in that it's got its nice bits and its crappy bits.

And as for Cadbury World itself, in reality, I'm pleased to say, it was a fantastic day out. The price of the ticket included plenty of chocolate which was handed out by nice staff, we got to see various bits of the factory with boxes of chocolate whizzing around on conveyor belts, and huge robots picking up the boxes and stacking them up and whatnot. Not only were there also little video presentations telling you about the history of the chocolate, but at one point there were practical demonstrations as well. As I said at the time, I'll certainly never look at a bar of chocolate the same way again, and Cadbury World seems to be a major PR winner for Cadbury's :-). There was a shop where you could buy souvenirs and stuff, including some of the biggest chocolate bars I'd ever seen, and some of the weirdest chocolate products I'd never seen.

Since we were in the area, we had a nice little drive to Stratford-on-Avon, a town which may be famous for being the birthplace and lifelong home (more or less, I think) of a certain Bill Shakespeare. We parked up, and like a pair of foreign tourists, got on one of those open-topped tour buses so we could take photos of various interesting parts of the town. Informative and amusing. Why amusing? Because the audio commentary kept skipping bits and replaying bits it had already played, so you had to listen carefully in order to not go home believing that William Shakespeare was in fact born in a local hotel.

At one point, through the beautiful and sunny Warwickshire countryside, wind (and tree pollen liberated by the numerous collisions with low-hanging branches - ouch my eyes!!!) blowing over us, and only the audio commentary and birdsong to listen to, I looked up to notice that there were not one but three gliders floating over the bus, which gave the whole thing a very surreal atmosphere. They glid (glide? glided? glidded? thanks eddie) silently over us for quite a while, before disappearing off behind the trees.

We got back and had a wander through the town itself, seeing street theater (some people in a small garden outside Shakespeare's house passionately performing the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene from Hamlet, some Living Statue people, and lots of very very old buildings, including one pub which had been "selling ale since 1594"(!).

Finally stopping off for something to eat, we went to a very pleasant pub (The Red Lion, Stratford (opposite a shop where they sell one of the biggest remote control planes I've ever seen)), where I had an awesome meal (chips and burger with bacon and BBQ sauce - very very good) and a nice beer.
At one point, my mum accidentally knocked what was left of the beer over, so the lovely staff kindly gave me a brand new one. Great result - 50% extra free :-).

A nice trip back, and getting home, I exchanged exhausted pleasantries with people before going to bed and having the first sleep I'd had in 28 hours.

In other news, I did eventually plump for a G19 keyboard, and to celebrate getting it, I also bought an awesome mousemat for £3.04 (RRP £18.99 apparently). The keyboard's awesome, changes colours (it's quite entertaining) and has a screen that I use (with some downloaded software) to display important system information, so while I'm sitting around on my computer, I can see what it's doing behind the scenes :-).

And that's about it. The weather's nice, I'm in a good mood, and now I'm off to have some more chocolate. Yay. I might go cycling tomorrow.

Here are some sparkly pictures (the first one is a composite).

The Second Day of Summer!

2010-05-22T22:48:00.004+01:00

Ever notice when people talk of things like Summer or Winter, they speak about them as if they were abstract concepts, rather than actual times of the year? I suppose that (in the UK at least), it's difficult to imagine something like summer while sitting the other side of the window from a rainstorm or gentle snowfall. That certainly wasn't helped by last year's almost complete absence of seasons. We had spring, spring, a little more spring, and then an absolutely frozen cold winter, if I remember correctly.
If I don't remember correctly, then it was probably just foggy or overcast all year.

Why is this relevant? Because instead of gradually flapping about and eventually appearing, summer seems to have hit us with a very definite thud this month. We've had a few "really nice, but the breeze is a bit cool" days in the past few weeks, but today was a "incredibly nice, the breeze is made of hot air!".

Well.

Yeah, today the heat has been midway between "great!" and stifling. I went out for 45 minutes for a quick cycle round, and managed (i think) to get myself sunburned again.

Later came another shift at work, out on the scooter in this summery heat, jacket open, wind through the t-shirt sort of thing. Not a lucrative shift, but it was good to see everyone about.

Tonight was the real eye opener though. Walking back home at 10pm, notice that even in a t-shirt, the breeze was warm. The moon was (is) bright, and everyone was still up.

From any of a couple of dozen garden parties came music, the sound of people cheering (football or playing xbox or something), people laughing, and the smell of beer, or perhaps a late barbacue. Every now and again some guy on a CD would passionately sing "ohhhOhhOhhhhh" (that's all I could make out) presumably as part of some song or other.

Through the woods, towards my house, yet more garden parties, beer, happy chatting, and carribean music. Lights were strung between tree branches, giving the whole place a party atmosphere (appropriate really).

Yeah, it looks like after getting sick of being kept waiting (remember the hailstorm a week or two back?!) summer has appeared with a show of force. This can only be a good thing.

Part Two: Keyboards

Yep, after two years of faithful service, my shiny, immaculate and 100% working Logitech G-15 V2 has failed, after having a drink accidentally dumped in it.
If you remember back, I bought it to replace my original Logitech G-15 V1, which also failed after having a drink dumped in it.
I've got some tips in the tips jar so maybe a G-19 is on the cards. I haven't decided.

Part Three: Bike Lessons!

My sister was good enough to bring my ickle nephew's bike round with her, so I could fix it up after some two legged rat on the nearby sinkhole estate wandered off with it and broke it.
With a little patience and a new brake cable, I managed to get the thing working again, fully okay, and my nephew was very excited.
Off we went to the park and took him for some practice. I can't say he took to it straight away, but over time he seems to be taking a greater interest in it, so who knows, maybe we'll be having bike rides with him in the park before long.

The park has been getting a fair bit of use by us, recently. We went for a little trek and discovered not only a tree growing on the edge of the stream that has roots like ladder-rungs (you can just climb straight up), but I found that the hill near the river was mostly made of good quality clay, and as I demonstrated to my nephew, you can make things out of clay.

The next hour or so was spent by digging clay out of the side of the hill so my nephew could make clay balls, literally just balls of clay. I put mine in a hollow under a nearby tree, neatly piled up, but hidden from plain sight. I'll go and check one day to see if they're still there. My nephew for his part became incredibly attatched to the three he had made, and decided he was going to take them home and paint them gold, so he could put them in his treasure box. Fair enough I suppose, so we went and got him some paint specially for the purpose.

Finally I figured I'd show off an awesome lil picture my nephew did for me. He's become something of a star wars fan recently, probably due to it being on cartoon network a lot.
My nephew came home from school one day and gave me a picture he'd spent ages on, drawing for me. I love it to bits. I've annotated it so it will make more sense (Notice the remains of the shot battledroid, to the left of R2, that I completely failed to point out. Haha my ickle nephew has great attention to detail when he wants to :D).

Ciao!

iPods and ipsos

2010-05-06T22:10:00.002+01:00

Well, this is a new experience.

Far from being slick and sleek, at first impression, blogging on here from an iPod seems to be a little fiddly. Not to worry though because it's certainly a new experience. It would be fantastic to be able to blog from anywhere where I can get a wifi signal.

iPod blogs will be a little different to my pc based ones. Less pictures, less hyperlinks, perhaps, because it seems a bit more fiddly than writing on my pc. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.

So what's going on? Well I'm in for a long night (as are many other people) because over here in the UK, it's election night.

Yep, the long awaited General Election, allegedly where we have an opportunity to shake the house of commons around a bit and see what crap falls out. The expectation is that the current Labour government will suffer heavy losses as their primary opponents, the Conservatives, fill the a large proportion of the still-warm and by then, very recently vacated of seats.

As you'd expect, the news stations are going nuts, featuring "LIVE"/"ALL NIGHT" etc etc coverage, complete with fancy graphics and one organisation even projecting a huge bar graph up the side of St Stephen's Tower (the tower that houses Big Ben (the name is given to the bell, not the tower), at the houses of parliament.

For my part, I've been out to vote. Who did I vote for? None of your business I'm afraid, hehe, elections work like that I'm afraid.
So now I'm watching the live coverage, an. Enjoying a badly chilled lukewarm beer.

Ciao for now, will update later maybe.

Picnics, Pork Pies, and Precipitation...

2010-05-04T01:56:00.003+01:00

It's been a boring couple of days. My early afternoon rises have been occuring later and later, creeping closer to evening every day, pushed by a lack of discipline preventing me from going to bed until I'd done absolutely everything I wanted to do in the day. Days of 12pm to 4am are not unusual for me, but hey, this is nothing new.

Today I got woken up after five hours or so of sleep. Do I want to go out for a picnic.
Of course, I don't want to go for a bloody picnic, I want to go back to bed. But, since my sis is coming over and bringing the dog, I thought I may as well get up and go along.

So we get on with the preperation for the picnic. Various containers are hunted for, and everything seems to go quite well. Eventually, it's time to go, so off we go.
Stopping for a while at one of the supermarkets, we eventually arrive at our picnic spot, a nice big stretch of moorland/cliffs, casually dotted with big sodding boulders, some the size of basketballs, others the size of trucks. The largest were the size of buildings - it's a nice enough place (53.319689,-1.622687) on google maps - I think that's our bunch of rocks right there.

Out come the blankets, out comes the food (including the yummy (for him I suppose!) dogfood so the dog can join in the picnic, and we sit down and have a nice old time eating yummy things.

Of course, we're eating happily for no more than five minutes, and my mum is the first to feel a raindrop, and slowly but steadily the rain increases, turns into hail, turns into a hailstorm.
In may, during a picnic.
Bloody hell.

Still, we cover the food up, hoping that the weather will blow over.
It doesn't, it gets much worse. The hail, fairly torrential now, and the lead-grey sky that surrounds us in all directions (well, generally up, rather than down, but still) convince me that it'd probably for the best if I pack some of the food away.

Eventually we beat a hasty retreat to the car, and have one of the few in-car picnics I've ever had. Oh well, we'll have to try again in the summer. The food was nice.

We get home and eventually I go back to sleep for a couple of hours, during which time I have an awesome dream about my awesome new car that I haven't bought yet, which is cruely curtailed by my evil, yet incredibly cute ickle nephew, who wants to show me a picture he's drawn specially for me :-).

Since then I've been finishing off the last of the picnic food and generally sitting about doing not-much.
So hey :-).

Brides, Bouquets, and Bikes...

2010-04-16T12:12:00.009+01:00

It's traditional at this point for me to start with something along the lines of "hmm, where to start", but any regular readers will already know the established pattern these little forays into what my best mate Nick calls "Squid (my nickname) world" follow; that is, the lack of any pattern whatsoever. I'm organising it with grandiose titles simply to give myself a set of mental boxes that I can easily shove the events of the last few weeks into...

Part One: Bike Stuff

So, the weather. Seems a good place to start, it's big, up there, in the sky, and affects all of us. And we've actually been having a varied and not-unpleasant time of it. The overcast days are still here, there and everywhere, but when the sun does pop through the clouds, it's extremely warm, almost sunburny warm.

After years of disrepair (the roof, not my neighbour), my neighbour decided to hack his old garage roof to pieces. Given that it was constructed mostly of sodden plywood, this was easily accomplished with a crowbar and a hammer, and after a couple of hours and clouds of dust, the entire thing more or less fell in (covering the items still left in the garage in a layer of wood chippings). Finding a snow shovel in there, I nicely and helpfully (it was a nice day that I was determined not to waste by staying indoors) helped clean up all the mess. Music was listened to, water was drank, and sunshine was collided with, and a good time was had by all. Especially the friendly neighbourhood robin (that's a real robin, not an American robin :P) who occasionally fluttered down to almost within arm's length, stared at my neighbour, casually picked up a spider (who I suppose wasn't having such a good time) and flew off.

While we're cleaning stuff out of the garage, I casually express interest in (what was at the time) a knackered scruffy old bike, covered in rust, dirty chain oil that had since turned to sludge, spiderwebs, leaves, and the ever present wood chippings. My neighbour points out that he was going to throw the thing in a skip, but given my awesome expertise at fixing broken things (hee, where's the modesty?!) I saw potential in it. A fairly offhand "you can have it if you want" later, and my net worth had increased by approximately one rusty mountain bike.
Of course, I spent the next couple of days on the floor, surrounded by socket sets, spanners, screwdrivers, parrafin (excellent at dissolving oil, and consequently an extremely good (if hazardous!) cleaning fluid), and various spraycans of lubricant and whatnot, and would you know, the bike cleaned up pretty well. £15 later, and thanks to ebay I had a new set of pedals, and a new seat (both of which were missing off the bike). The original water bottle was binned (it probably had a new form of life developing in it - I didn't look) and replaced with a new one. So now (apart from the minor problem that shifting from second to third gear on the front sprocket causes the chain to jump off the sprockets altogether - it needs adjusting apparently...) I now have a shiny and working mountain bike. With a kickstand. Yay!

Part Two: Manchester Stuff

Around the same time I also went out with Nick again to Manchester Airport for another day's shooting, which was a pretty good day out. Plenty of good photos were had, and I came away from that feeling pretty cheerful. I gather that they (the aviation viewing park) have since put their admission prices up from £7 to £12! So while we will be going to manchester again, I don't know if we will be going to the viewing park.
This in itself isn't such a bad thing, because while you can get close to the planes at the viewing park, the light comes from directly behind the aircraft, so the lighting isn't that great. Whereas on the other side of the runway, facing towards the terminal, the light is behind you, and the aircraft land much closer to on-top-of-your-head, so you get a better view.
Which one do you prefer? This, or this? (Neither image is mine)

So we'll have to see how that works out.

Part Three: Domestic Stuff

One thing my nephew and I have been spending a lot of time with recently, is playing "the truck game", that is "UK Truck simulator". You know the type, drive a truck, get paid, use the money to upgrade your truck, and ultimately buy other trucks and hire people to work for you. Sounds repetitive and boring but I have to admit it's actually pretty sodding addictive and surprisingly relaxing, and the graphics are very good. I've been playing it far more than I expected to be. My nephew continues to be cuddly and hyper, and occasionally infuriatingly annoying, but it's nice to have him around.
We've also been joined, recently by a slightly scruffy terrier-type dog, that goes by the name of Ollie. He seems far less hyper than Tess did, and I think therefore he'll be less hard work for my sis to look after :-). Not being a fan of scruffy type dogs, I wasn't initially struck on him, but he's settled down and seems quite cute and endearing, so I'm getting to like him.

Part Four: Wedding

Not last, and certainly not least, I've had occasion to go and do photography for a wedding recently. My gadget-loving brother and my fantastic (now) sister in law, have tied the knot in a happy and well-attended ceremony (full of super death DSLR Turbo XL cameras) and have now officially made our family slightly larger, which is good.

The reception was quite nice, lots of alkyhol was drunk, squillions of photos were taken (the bit where they posed for the photographers to cut the cake was amusing, I've seen film premiers on TV with less camera flash, and for about 15 seconds straight, the entire room was lit by the brilliant staccatto flashes of 20 or 30 cameras all discharging their bright-type shinyness at the happily married couple. I'm surprised they were able to see after all that.

The food was good, the party was good, and hopefully my Big bro and (possibly?) Big sis (?) liked their wedding photos, which were presented towards the end of the night.

I haven't done a full in-depth review of the wedding because well, it's their business really, but it was a nice happy occasion and I think it went well, and everyone concerned put a huge amount of work into it, especially my bro and (new) sister in law. My brother says he now wants to institute "games nights" at his house. I'm trying to persuade him to start hosting Khet tournaments, or maybe Star Wars Monopoly games, either one would be quite cool. It's about time we got together more often :-).

Part five: Ipod Stuff

Finally, my ipod continues to be awesome and shiny. I've downloaded more software for it than I expected to, some of which is actually quite good. Not much to say on this front, but the whole thing seems to be working out quite well. I've got all my stuff on it and still have 30+ Gb to play with, so I might stick some more of my DVDs on there.

So yeah, I'm sorry I've left it such a long time. As the weather seems to be improving, I've been spending a lot of time with my nephew in the park, with my mountain bike in the park, with the sun and clouds everywhere, and with my pillows and suchlike in my bed. Everything seems to be ticking along nicely, and hopefully, we're watching the start of a good summer.

Ciao!

The clock goes forward

2010-04-01T23:00:00.008+01:00

Stupid thing to say, really.

Clocks don't go "forward", they go "ring", others go "beep" , expensive ones go "tick-tock", and most go round in circles, but I've never seen one going "forward". However, as a result of arsing around with the clocks, I've lost an hour, not only in terms of lost drinking time, but in more literal terms, lost an hour sodding about reprogramming the... *counts*... 9 timepieces, or devices incorporating the above, in my room.

But we are apparently now in spring, which in England means that the wintery sunsets are slightly less wintery, the snow is now more sleet than anything else, and occasionally the sun is visible through the clouds. Elsewhere in the world, Formula One has started, which means it should be nicely in full swing when the weather improves.
When it improves here though is not really well known, as we leave winter and enter spring, the weather has of course become snowy again in places. The worst we've had so far is some hail and sleet, nothing serious, but the gorgeously warm sunny days, of which we've already had one so far, seem to be tantalisingly rare at the moment.

Not to worry though, as apart from my running, I seem to have spent most of my time indoors anyway. While indoors I've been doing lots of things, such as sleeping, resting, laying down, and surfing the internet, both on my pc and my iPod.

my iPod has seen heavy use. While I wasn't in the market for anything more than an mp3/video player, the iPod has not so much filled a gap, as filled it in, before expanding to fill new territories of awesomeness.

It became more awesome recently when I purchased two new bits for it. The first one is a tiny little thing that makes all the difference - I've got another plastic backing for it, this time in gorgeous deep lustrous metallic red. Okay so it's a piece of plastic, but that colour is just the sort of colour I'd want on my car. it's so metallic it's almost three dimensional.
Helps keep scratches/fingerprints off the back of the unit, too.

The second thing is even better, described by my nephew as "the Sound Egg", is a fantastic piece of kit. Having been put onto this by my brother, who I may have mentioned, loves his gadgets, I thought I'd have a look at one.
I've been skeptical about pocket speakers, because common sense dictates that the smaller a speaker, the tinnier and crappier its sound. And at less than 40mm wide (the speaker itself, not the housing), surely this speaker would sound like a dog whistle, right? Well, actually in the case of this little ball of win, that's far from the truth. Think about it, would I have asked a snotty rhetorical question if it wasn't?
There are quite a lot of places selling them at £30-£40 per unit, I was able to grab one for £13,99 plus £2.75 (superfast apparently) postage (£2.75 wasted because it still took four days to arrive), and it's safe to say that for £14 a pop I'd easily have another. I'm not going to do a full in depth review, but needless to say I think this thing is fantastic. It expands open like an accordion to give the speaker more space to do its stuff, resulting in much louder bass, and a much more powerful sound. The speaker's not tinny, it sounds absolutely fantastic.

So yeah.

Also, with easter upon us, my nephew seems happy to share his easter egg with me. I want to get one as well, there's a very nice one in the local shop, it's currently reduced from £12 (!!) and comes with some lovely looking chocolates. Yum, chocolate.
Also, my nephew made me a super cute easter basket, including a cute little fluffy chick and brightly coloured tissue paper. Cute of him.

Well, that's all for now I suppose, there's not been a lot happening. Still, at least the days are getting lighter now, helped in no small part by this whole moving clocks business.

I leave you with some pictures :-).