All Entries In Bloggage Category
It's been over 2 months since I actually posted a proper entry to the blog. Whilst I've blogged about the World Cup and linked to a number of trailers, I haven't actually written a post about myself or similar for a while now.
At the start of June it seemed extremely likely that by mid-July I would be out of work. However, a dip into some funds that we had available has enabled the centre to fund my position up until Friday 10th September 2010. We've been doing some work on trying to secure further funding but it's likely that we won't have anything in place by then. I'm hoping we can get a positive response from Lloyds TSB but I have a feeling that I'm going to be out of work for acouple of months. If September 10th comes and I do have to leave then I intend to continue to volunteer at least 1 day a week and hope to secure funding to get a full-time job back. Whilst talking about work we have arranged a day trip to Mabie Farm Park for later in the month. There's going to be 70 of us going in total; about 20-25 adults and the rest will be children. Should be a really fun day out.
After upgrading from Sky+ to Sky HD in the back room I decided to take advantage of the spare connection on the LNB and replaced my normal Sky Digital box in the front room with the Sky+ box that I had replaced in the back room. Nice and easy job. One quick call to Sky and the viewing card was paired up with the box.
The middle of June saw my godson have his first Holy Communion. Whilst I'm an atheist I realize how important such an event is for him and took my place in the congregation to support him; although I made a point of not looking at, or singing any of the hymns, The buffet/party afterwards was quite enjoyable.
In the land of technology I am now the happy owner of a networked HP 4700 Colour Laserjet printer and have upgraded the optical drive in my PC to an LG BluRay writer; which happens to come with a blue activity led. The leds on my PC are all blue, my keyboard is backlit in blue, the mouse has blue led piping, the usb clock has blue leds and the power led on the monitor is also blue. I've also just ordered a new 40" Toshiba LCD TV with Freeview HD which will be going in the back room, replacing a 37" Toshiba LCD TV which is going in the front room to repace a 32" Sharp CRT TV; which I'm giving to one of my sisters. HTC were nice enough to roll out a FroYo (Android 2.2) based update for the Desire; which I managed to upgrade to without any hassles. I just continue to be blown away by how good the Desire really is; and it also makes phone calls...
In terms of movies, over the last 2 months I have watched Kung Fu Hustle, Inglorious Basterds, Whiteout, The Losers, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Solomon Kane, Tromeo and Juliet, Transformers, Soldier, Gabriel and The A-Team; twice. I've enjoyed each to some degree or other. I still need to get around to watching films such as Sherlock Holmes, Book Of Eli, Predators, The Road and about a dozen or so others...
I've increased the number of methods that people can now use to log into and comment on my blog. They now include Movable Type Native, OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox, Google, Yahoo!, AIM, WordPress.com, TypePad and Facebook.
Comments will continue to be moderated, apart from the few people that I've already pre-approved.
It's been yet another month without any sort of post. So, I have a feeling that monthly updates may turn out to be the way forward.
Anyway, April saw the return of Doctor Who to our screens for a fifth series since the relaunch. Or, if you're counting from the very start, that'll be 31 now. I thought the first episode was a bit weak but there's been a few good episodes since. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series, and the return of the Silurians in a couple of episodes time; one of the few aliens from the original series that had me cowering behind the sofa as a kid.
At work, we had the kids in daily over the Easter period and on the Wednesday of the second week we took 23 of them to go and see How To Train Your Dragon. It was a lot of fun and the kids thoroughly enjoyed it.
I sorted out a total of 5 PCs in April and everything must be working fine because nobody has called me back with further problems. Talking of PCs, we took delivery of 9 new PCs at work this month. 6 for the IT suite upstairs, 2 for the office and a new server to manage them all. They're lots quicker than the old ones; although they still chug a bit with the accounts spreadsheets.
At home I've replaced the NetGear DG834G router that I'd been using for the last few years with a brand new Linksys WAG320N. I have also finally purchased a BluRay player and some films to watch on it. Might now have to buy myself a proper HD TV. Although; the monitor I bought in March is big enough to double up in that capacity.
Manchester United crashed out of the Champions League, Peterborough United got relegated from the Championship and it's looking more than likely that Chelsea may just snatch the Premier League title. A couple of dodgy decisions have given them the impetus bur if I'm really truthful then Manchester United have performed poorly in games they should have won and have lost games they should never have lost. Dimitar Berbatov has been missing for long periods of the season but I think they'ved relied too heavily on Wayne Rooney at times since the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo. Sir Alex Ferguson needs to spend on a number of areas in the summer; with right-back, central-midfield and wide-left being key areas. Another world-class forward wouldn't go amiss either.
Finally, I ended March expecting to get a new car just after the Easter weekend. However, it turns out that Citroen UK wouldn't have any available until August. I ended up going to East Road Garage in Egremont and ordering a Ford C-Max instead. On Friday April 30th I took delivery of a 1.8 Diesel Zetec version and am very happy with it. Citroen's loss is Ford's gain.
I've only just realised that I went the whole of March without making a blog entry; and it's not as if I didn't do anything in March. At the back end of February I started to have problems with my monitor. My 22" Compaq monitor died on me and I loaned my 21" IBM monitor back off my Dad, only for it to die less than a week later. I then grabbed my old 19" Belinea out of storage only for it to display a wobble all round the screen, making it totally unusable. A nice couple in Keswick offered me a 19" iiyama via FreeCycle which worked brilliantly. I have since purchased myself a new iiyama ProLite E2607WS-1 26" LCD TFT monitor and passed the 19" onto my Dad.
My OU Maths course is going reasonably well, completed my first main TMA after having to have 2 cracks at 1 of the questions and a score of 97 was totally unexpected. However, I have yet to make a start on the Astronomy short course that I'm also supposed to be doing.
In the middle of March I discovered that Jeff Dunham is playing some dates in the UK. However, attempts to purchase tickets have failed. None of his UK shows appear to be sold out; Ticketmaster still lets you try and buy tickets but can't even buy 1 ticket for any show. However, their companion GetMeIn site is offering tickets for various gigs but I'm not paying £140+ for a ticket with a face value of £33 or so. Ticketmaster had problems recently with tickets for Bruce Springsteen.
The middle of March also saw me ordering our new car; a Citroën Grand C4 Picasso. However, problems with the adaptions we've ordered meant that the order wasn't corrently processed until the end of March. We still don't have a delivery date.
The latest upgrade of MT appears to have broken date-based archives. Category archives still work and a bug-fix should be included in the next upgrade.
January 2009 started off with the BBC announcing Matt Smith as the newest incarnation of Doctor Who. I finished the final book of Terry Goodkind's Sword Of Truth series. It had an interesting twist at the end but I've read very little since and am now starting to miss reading. I also did a wee bit of baking with Chrissy and spent a fair bit of January feeling various levels of under the weather. I also spent the best part of a full day looking at a friend's PC. January saw the deaths of Ron Asheton, Patrick McGoohan and Tony Hart. January also saw me preparing to start the 2 Open University courses that I had decided to study.
February was rather a quiet month and about the only thing I did of note was attend a tutorial in Carlisle for one of my two OU courses.
March started off with the death of Paul Harvey, a voice from my youth... To be honest, little else of note occurred in March; other than receiving my first TMA (tutor-marked assignment) back.
I spent a couple of days in Folkestone at the start of April. I had taken a couple of friends down to Norfolk for a boating holiday and since I was already down country took the opportunity to visit Alastair. I sold my old laptop to Tricia as a result of getting a new one myself. April saw the death of one of the fathers of D&D; Dave Arneson.
May started off with a potential health scare for myself; although it ended up just being a muscle strain. My studies continued and I went to the cinema to watch 'Star Trek'; definitely one of the stand-out movies of the year. May ended with Manchester United coming up short against FC Barcelona in the UEFA Champiopns League final.
June started off with the sad news of the death of one of my favourite authors; David Eddings. I attended the count for the European Elections and June ended with the shock news that Cristiano Ronaldo would be moving to Real Madrid.
Mid-July saw me take my old faithful system out of service and replace it with a brand new, self-built, system.
August and September were rather quiet months and saw the start of the new football season. I also revisited the problem of spam email and managed to come up with a valid and workable solution.
October saw me start a work placement with Northside Community Centre. It's a position I have enjoyed and there is a hope that something more permanent can be arranged. The end of october saw me in Glasgow for a Paradise Lost gig. It was a very enjoyable evening.
November started off with Saxon/Anvil and Biffy Clyro gigs. I also upgraded my PC from Windows Vista Ultimate x64 to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and upgraded Dad's PC from Windows XP Professional to Windows 7 Professional x64. However, the really big news from November was the extremely heavy rainfall that fell in Cumbria and resulted in the Cocker and Derwent bursting their banks and severely flooding Cockermouth. Workington Bridge, referred to as Calva Bridge by the media was badly damaged and closed as a result. Navvies footbridge was swept away. New Bridge, referred to as Northside Bridge by the media, was destroyed with the death of PC Bill Barker. A temporary footbridge, named in honour of PC Barker, has since opened and the local council have announced that they hope to have a temporary 2-way road bridge up by late spring. Work can then start on replacing New Bridge. Workington Bridge is a listed structure so discussions will need to take place to decide what happens next.
December was a very busy month at work. The community centre became a crisis centre for the local community and a number of vital services were hosted from there. We had a decent amount of snowfall the week before Christmas; which stuck around on the ground until Boxing Day. Christmas itself seemed rather quiet. Finally, I received confirmation of my 2009 course results. I passed both M150 and T175 and will start MST121 and S197 in the New Year.
Music and TV has been a fairly decent year and if I had to give a list of my top 5 films I've watched in 2009, they would be: Star Trek, District 9, Red Cliff, Zombieland and Lesbian Vampire Killers. Other films that I have watched and enjoyed this year; in no partcular order and including cinema, DVD and TV showings include: Transporter 3, Twilight, Watchmen, The Spirit, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Downloading Nancy, Push, Terminator Salvation, Angels & Demons, Transformers Revenge Of The Fallen, Ice Age 3, The Taking Of Pelham 123, Surrogates, The Wrestler and Megashark vs Giant Octopus; absolutely awful but brilliant because of it.
January 2008 saw the death of Tasha, my canine companion for just over 17 years. Her kidneys and liver started to fail and rather than letting her suffer the vet put her to sleep. Almost a year later and I still feel sad. January also saw some minor tweaking to the blog and a late Christmas Party for the SASRA FRP & Wargames Club. We're doing the same again this year. There's an LRP booked at the venue for the Friday night and we will hold our party on the Saturday night. If the LRP doesn't go ahead we will also be having a LAN party. I was diagnosed with high blood pressure in January and prescribed medication for it. I also had the toenails removed from both big toes and then proceeded to stub them about 15-20 times before they were fully healed. The world of entertainment saw the death of Heath Ledger and the release of the first of a series of proposed Dragonlance animated films. Gaming saw Microsoft giving away the XBox Live Arcade game Undertow away for free in recompense for the problems users had suffered over the festive period in 2007.
February 2008 saw the 50th anniversary of the Munich Air Disaster when 23 of the 44 people on board British European Airways Flight 609 died during its third attempt to takeoff from a slush-covered runway at the Munich-Riem airport in Munich, Germany. I won an iPod Nano, coutesy of Dom Ramsey at MoneyBlogger. I purchased, and completed, Crackdown for the XBox 360. I attended, and enjoyed, a Lord Of The Rings marathon. My network printer died but I managed to find a replacement for what could best be described as next-to-nothing.
March started off with the annual SASRA FRP & Wargames Club 24 hour event; which, incidentally, we're not running this year. The 2008 event was a lot of fun. However, it was very tiring. March also saw the first of a whole raft of PC problems that needed sorted for various members of my family and friends. I've pretty much lost count of the number of times I've ended up reinstalling PCs over the years. One of my favourite musicians of the 1990s; Jeff Healey, passed away in March. As did D&D pioneer Ernest Gary Gygax and sci-fi author Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE. John Hewer, who portrayed Captain Birdseye, also passed away. March saw me install Ubuntu, for testing purposes, onto my laptop. Sky followed up their successful adaptation of Hogfather with another success; The Colour Of Magic. Going Postal is apparently next in line. March also saw the release of The Byron Review.
April saw the fifth anniversary of this blog and the end of the first part my Ratkin story. However, the month started off with myself in a foul mood, with a huge, pounding headache. Luckily, an early night and some peace and quiet soon sorted that out. April saw the rlease of Ikaruga onto XBox Live Arcade. However, I still need to get round to purchasing it. April also finally saw the release of the Optimus Maximus keyboard. The Hardy Heron release of Ubuntu found it's way into the wild in April and Microsoft released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.
May saw the dressings come off my toes for the last time. The football season came to an end with Manchester United being crowned the champions of both England and Europe. Petra joined the family in May; she's an American Bulldog. Dad got some bad news in May; he would need to have his other leg amputated.
June started off with me putting together a new PC for Colin. I also spent a fair portion of the month playing GTA IV. The Boston Celtics became NBA champions for the first time in 22 years and Spain won UEFA 2008. June also saw the 500th entry on this blog.
July saw an official announcement from Blizzard that Diablo III was in development. I sat down to start watching Dexter in July and am now hooked. It's such a brilliantly written series, full of such dark humour. July also saw me start dietting; a process I would continue to revisit throughout the rest of the year. I also managed to catch up with Chrissy in July; and have spent a fair portion of the year since then with her, Geoff and the kids. My kid sister, Catherine, spent some time in hospital. I also spent some time in July helping Mark redevelop his Manchester United website. A group of freinds and I went to see The Dark Knight in July. Heath Ledger should get a posthumous Oscar for his performance as The Joker. We also saw You Don't Mess With The Zohan; a brilliant comedy starring Adam Sandler.
August started off with me chopping off my long hair. Other than the Olympics the only other thing of note for August was visiting Alastair and his family in Folkestone. However, I discovered a week or so later that he and his wife of 13 years were splitting up.
September saw Dad having his other leg amputated. Whilst he was still in hospital I made some Flapjack; enjoyed by everybody who tasted it. I sold my HP Compaq laptop to my sister-in-law and purchased myself a new Dell Studio 1535. However, I am planning to sell that sometime in the next month or so and replace it with a Dell Studio 1735.
October saw me having to reinstall my PC; the first time in almost a year. The previous time was due to an upgrade. I'm planning on upgrading again in about a month or so and will need to reinstall again. October ended with a Halloween jaunt to Rheged and Keswick with Chrissy and her kids.
November started with the sound disappearing from my PC. Adding a soundcard solved the problem. Chrissy's five-year-old daughter won a poetry recital. I renewed my web hosting agrrement with Compila. I spent some time babysitting Chrissy's kids whilst she was in London. I turned 39. Barack Obama was elected as the next president of the USA.
December started with me feeling ill and forgetting my wallet when filling up the car. Chrissy's daughter's Christmas play was a lot of fun. Manchester United were crowned World Club Champions. The run up to Christmas saw me back and forth to the shops but Christmas itself was a lot of fun. I've done two lots of baking in the last couple of weeks and my Mince Pies, Jam Tarts and Scones have gone done a real treat. I caught up with a couple of old friends and finally, I rounded out 2008 by having a few glasses of Jack Daniels whilst nattering to a couple of friends.
I have recently upgraded MT to the latest version and have also taken the opportunity to finally enable Comment Registration. Previously, you had to have either an existing Movable Type account or else use an OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox or TypeKey account to comment. If you didn't have one of those accounts then you couldn't log in and comment. However, you can now also register here on the blog itself to comment.
I recently received an email from my webhost stating that my hosting was due for renewal in a little under 3 weeks time; Sunday 30th November to be precise. Anyway, the last couple of times it came up for renewal I had a look around before deciding whether to renew or transfer to another company. However, this time I have been more than happy with the service that Compila have provided that I haven't bothered looking around. I decided just to renew and it has cost me just under £45 for a further 2 years of hosting. An added bonus of staying with Compila is that they will renew my domain registration for free.
I finally managed to get pagination figured out. It was the .htaccess file and how it was trying to address the MT plugin directory to dynamically build the paginated pages on the fly. Anyway, you can now browse backwards through the blog without having to use the archives.
The release of version 4.21 of Movable Type in mid-August slipped by me without notice. However, logging in earlier to update some blogroll links I noticed the announcement in the control panel. A quick visit and download later and the install has gone fine. I have now upgraded from the personal version of MT 4.12 to the professional version of MT 4.21.
This is the second version of this entry. The first was a rather cool Star Wars type scroller. However, Lucas has requested that it be taken down due to infringing on their properties.
Anyway, after just over 5 years this is the 500th entry and there have been over 350 comments in total. If the current posting cycle is maintained then entry 1000 will appear sometime in mid-late 2009.
This blog was officially launched five years ago today.
In those five years I've made over 400 entries and received over 300 comments. Topics I've covered include my job, my health, my relationship with my ex-girlfriend, my roleplaying experiences, my music tastes and the gigs I've attended; including Download festivals, my tv tastes, the movies I've seen, the games I've enjoyed, tech that I've thought worthy of note, websites that I've come across, Manchester United and other sporting topics that interest me.
For about the first year of the blog's life I used zShaped as the backend before moving over to using Movable Type in 2004. I've also changed hosts twice. I originally started with Fasthosts and then moved to Easily before settling in December 2006 with Compila.
The main reasons for going with a dedicated host rather than using an ISPs provided space were:
- If I moved ISP I wouldn't need to worry about having to upload the website and database to somewhere else.
- It was also a case that ISPs didn't provide the sort of php, perl and SQL support that I needed.
From April '03 until April '07 I made 191 entries. This is entry 227 in the year since then and 193 of those have been made since the start of January this year. I never officially announced an intention to blog as regularly as I have in the last 4 months but the fact that I lost my job kind of motivated me and has given me more free time. Sometimes it's been hard to find anything to blog about and I've just ended up posting links to sites that I've discovered and enjoyed. At other times I've had loads of things to talk about at various times of the day and ended up posting 3 or 4 entries in a day.
The next milestone is 500 entries and then in 2 years time; 12th April 2010, it will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of the domain. You never know, I may, by then, be celebrating 1000 entries.
I've recently made a couple of minor tweaks to the blog:
- Category archives now display all the entries in a category rather than just the last 20 entries.
- The links and blogroll navigation on the left now uses a cascading menu rather than displaying a huge, long list.
After being afflicted by a serious case of wanderlust in the past it would appear that my good friend, Mondrak, has finally settled upon a home on the web. His email address hasn't changed in at least six months; okay, it's more than a year, but people who know him will know how often we used to receive emails saying he'd changed his email address. He's also moved his blog over to WordPress.
There's an updated link on the left if you're interested.
I have reimplemented one of the features that I used to have on the site; namely the Snap Shots™ preview. The way that this was originally set up, prior to the upgrade to MT4, was that you could hover on any link on the site and it would preview the page the link was connected to. Now, since they have upgraded their system, you can selectively alter the way that this works.
I've enabled it on the external links in the main body of the site and disabled it completely in both sidebars and the footer. Additionally, rather than the preview being available on the entire link it is just available on the little icon that appears after the text of the link. Hopefully, this shouldn't distract too much and gives visitors the chance to see what I'm linking to before clicking on the link.
I've spent a good couple of hours tweaking a lot of the backend of the blog. A lot of the tweaks just involved updating plugins and are just to help tighten up and streamline the way Movable Type manages itself and will not be visible or noticeable by the site visitors.
The only really visible frontend change is the addition of author and commentator images. I did have a go at trying to get pagination working to allow browsing backwards through the entries but couldn't get it to display past the first page. I'll have another look at it when I have more time and try again. In the interim, the archives pages will have to suffice.
Although I was fairly content with the minimalistic look of the blog since upgrading to MT4 I felt it lacked something. Therefore, I spent long periods of last night playing with various styles until I found one that I was relatively happy with.
After a wee bit of further tweaking, including adding a local header image, I think I've come up with a personalised version that I'm happy with. Other than potential slight tweaks in the future I'm sticking with the new look.
I've also incorporated an updated "About Me" page to bring that inline with the rest of the site's overall design.
If you're logged in and you get an error about requiring registration just log back out and then log back in. This should solve the problem. There is also the possibilty that some MT3.x cookies may be persisting. These are not compatible with MT4. Might be an idea to check what cookies you have referencing bowch.co.uk and deleting them.
After it had originally appeared that the move to MT4 had gone fine it transpires that the commenting system has broken.
I've had reports of people trying to post, only to receive an error stating that registration is required.
Could people try and post comments on this entry.
Please drop me an email at bowchuk(AT)googlemail(DOT)com if you can't post.
After upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type I decided to shuffle things about.
All the blog links are still on the left but all other links, including links to pages still on the site are now on the right.
I've also added a calendar for the current month and expanded the monthly archives to show all months rather than just the last 12.
Upgraded to the latest version of MovableType.
Whilst I was at it I thought the text on the blog was a bit on the small side so tweaked it to be a bit bigger.
I think it looks a bit better.
Had some problems with a virus popping up on here a couple of times over the last couple of days. I've played safe and deleted all the entries since it started showing up.
Hopefully, things are now sorted...
I will be moving to a new web host in the next couple of days. This means the site will probably be down for a day or two at least. I might even change a thing or two. See you on the other side...
Just upgraded to MT 3.2 and what a pain in the neck it was to do.
Been rather busy the last month and a half; especially with the end of the financial year. Lot's of preperation work for the year-end audit; and I got a pay rise and promotion. Although promotion is probably a misnomer; it's just a change in Pay Grade.
Well, not totally anyway. Just reshuffled the existing content in to a slightly different format.
I have had reports of problems recently whilst attempting to post a comment to my blog. Could everybody try and post a comment to this and if unsuccesful, mail me.
Took the plunge and decided to move my Blog from the old zShaped format I was using, which was rather basic to say the least, to Movable Type, which has options for comments etc...
For a while now I've thought that my blog could do with some design work to it.
Well, got bullied in to creating a Blog by Mojo, who didn't want to be the only person adjudged to be daft by his friends and peers. Hey, anything to help my insecure Southern friend...
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