Summertime! An actual real one...

...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...

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...

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...

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...

...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...

...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)

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...

...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...

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...

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!

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!

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...

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)

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...

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 :-).