IMS_Blog

Signed sealed and delivered. Well, it was being said the toon needed a striker. Now it’s all confirmed we’ve got one of the best :-) If we can get him the ball we might even do alright.

York council recently delivered a leaflet explaining that ours is one of the 60000 houses to be affected by their new domestic rubbish policy. In brief this policy replaces the weekly, normal domestic rubbish collection (emptying of the “wheelie bin”) with fortnightly collections alternated with fortnightly collections of green garden refuse, in a specially supplied green wheelie bin. Here is why what may at first appear to be a fine decision to encourage less production of domestic rubbish is in fact an ill thought out pile of, well, rubbish.

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Should mention that I went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Saturday, mainly because Rachel wanted to see it. Turned out to be a lot more fun than I was expecting. And yes, it’s perfectly normal to want to wander around Toys R Us when you have over an hour to kill (bad timing on eating dinner there)—at least it got a Roly Mo for Libby.

If you’re a door to door salesman and you disturb me (and hey, learn to use doorbells rather than braying on the door) then don’t be surprised if I’m not too conducive to you. If I politely interrupt your speal to tell you I’m not interested (saving both our time) then don’t keep talking. If I then continually tell you I’m not interested in an increasingly impatient manner then don’t be surprised when I eventually shut the door on you to shut you up. That doesn’t give you the right to then call me an arsehole (yeh, you can hear through doors you know. And people upstairs with windows open can also hear). That will cause me to open the door again and call you a fucker or whatever else comes to mind you little shit (this guy was far too sure of himself with his big knotted tie and swanky attitude). If you start to walk aggressivly towards me its good you think very carefully about that. Just piss off.

Saddened to hear of the death of Mo Mowlam, former Northern Island secretary. One of the few people who were a politician who you’d actually want as a politician. We could do with more of her type.

This entry somewhat delayed by illness, from which I’ve just about recovered now—I hope. Anyway, I thought I’d mention the fun had a week and a bit ago when my mother was still in town. Having had a very nice dinner we met up again on the Thursday for the promised train ride. When the tickets were first booked we were told the Flying Scotsman wouldn’t be available that day and the trip would actually be behind the Green Arrow. However, the poor old Green Arrow was having some technical problems (to the extent that it was in the National Railway Museum’s works—I’m still blaming my mother for this ;-)—so we got the Flying Scotsman in the end.

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I was going to post about a few things but for the last several days I’ve been unwell. Beginning on Thursday last week when my mother came back to see the house and, supposedly, to get some food. She ended up looking after me as I had, to put it delicately, an attack of the trots (it’s nice to have my mother around ;-) ). That was brought under control but I still felt unwell. Indeed I still do, with a bit of a “tummy hurt”. Not a happy bunny.

To make things worse Rachel is actually not well either. She started complaining of strong abdominal pains, which became bad enough that I dragged her to the NHS walk-in centre. She got some strong painkillers and antibiotics and a doctors appointment for tomorrow (incidently, no thanks at all go to Drs Tams, Sweeney and Parry on Tang Hall Lane who on hearing she’d moved said she couldn’t be a patient any more and refused to see her. That’s hardly a duty of care to patients in my opinion, and is service bettered even by Pepe’s vets).

Anyway, more later, once I’ve recovered a bit more.

So, having finally got the whole dual boot thing working, I’ve barely been back into Windows. Linux is winning me over, it must be said. Of course this isn’t my first interaction with linux (or indeed unix) by a long way, but it is the first time I’ve actually had my own linux box and therefore such prolonged experience. So, as a newbie at owning, what am I liking after a couple of days?

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I’m a fan of the museum of hoaxes and Tibetan Dragons just sounds cool. The thing which got me is the fifth comment though. this is like those magic eye things from the 90’s. That’s like I’d say from the 80’s or 70’s. The 90’s is the time that’s “mine”. Makes me feel old (and no, I never could see those magic eyes either—I can just about see what they mean by dragons).

I want some and I want some now.

My mother is visiting York at the moment. That meant I got free dinner at Cafe Concerto (best deserts desserts I’ve had in York). Very nice. Looking forward to Thurdsday, when we get to ride the legend.

Edit: Desserts, desserts. I wasn’t trying to imply huge swathes of sand out the back or something…grrr…

Rachel reckons I qualify for geekdom because I wanted to watch the space shuttle land (welcome home Discovery). Mind she might be right. As the whole dual boot setup was finally completed at the weekend, I’ve been playing with linux. I haven’t done anything too technical with it really. I did however realise that the currently playing music bit of the blog front page wouldn’t be updating. Hmmm, I thought. Now my player of choice is AmaroK. That allows little scripts to be written. I found a script which did something like what I want, but not quite. Now normally I have a Winamp plugin send data to a PHP script, so if I thought I could probably get what I wanted. I’ve hacked that notifier script around and rebuilt the PHP stuff and things do seem to work. This is despite not exactly knowing any of the languages I was coding in. The only problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to get previously played songs but hey, it’s good enough.

A little while ago I noted Google didn’t do currency conversion, which they promptly fixed. Well, just in case they were listening (yeah, right), I’ve just tried time zone conversion (again in a pretty reflex way). No joy, so come on Google. “04:00 EST in BST” and the likes should work.

Right, we’re fully back up and running. Due to switching servers some posts were briefly lost from this blog. Well, this was actually caused by the laptop failure and the fact that I initially only rescued a backup which was about a month old. Typemover that backup was restored easily enough but it wasn’t until today that I got hold of the later back up and could restore the missing posts. The whole things back now anyway, so I can remove the under maintanence notice.

A couple of other things have also been fixed. There shouldn’t be a javascript popup everytime you post without having your details remembered now (just when you click “forget me”) and I’ve changed how the CSS does layout so things should be a little easier to read at smaller screen sizes (let me know if that’s broken anything).