Ending in 3, 2, 1…

I’m going to close this thing down. I’ve nothing to say about anything. I’ve no enthusiasm for this, which is evident from the lack of and content of posts,  or much else for that matter.

Not wired up

One of my laptops started breaking its wireless connection recently eventually giving no connection at all. I fiddled. I fiddled some more into the very wee hours. Updated it’s Windows driver, all sorts. Tried it  in Linux, same story. Router seemed okay and everything worked fine on a wired connection. Must be the internal wireless card then. Fuck. Expensive to send for repair so I’ll check it out myself. Much internet searching later I found a disassembly manual for the laptop online and found a couple of sources for an identical replacement internal wireless card ( I know a wireless dongle would have done but aesthetically and practically it would have grated with me). Tonight, just about to order it up and the damn thing starts working perfectly again. Fuckers. That’s what they are. Computers are illogical, cantankerous, fickle, selfish bastards.

All in favour…

If I had one day left on this earth I think I’d try to find a few minutes in it to do the country a favour and shoot this waste of oxygen in the head. As I’m not planning to die in the next 24 hours though I propose what I think is the next best solution. Can we cancel her next operation and just let the stupid fuck eat herself to death. It seems the most cost effective solution and as the greedy fuck just wants to keep stuffing her fat face with chocolate (“not feeling emotionally right to eat an apple”…. WHAT?) she’s clearly a lost cause and the wrong person to be spending my taxes on.

All in favour say “aye”.

In a whirl

About a week ago I narrowly missed a small tornado that swept across the 528 Beeline Expressway in Florida. Just prior to that I came down with something that may have been swine flu. Just before I flew home I got stuck in a conversation with someone who thought Billy Graham was a “great man”. America is a dangerous place.

Firefox 3.5 final is released

Firefox 3.5 is now available. The Mozilla website will have official links later today and your browser will update automatically over the next few days. But if you can’t, or don’t want to,  wait then follow these links to Softpaedia who have linked to the Mozilla download mirrors for Windows, Mac and Linux versions.

I tried a beta version a few months ago. Let me know what you think.

Yesterday’s news

I imagine this will leave me a lot more devastated than you, and I don’t mean to diminish your sense of loss or much appreciated sympathy. My life will be different from this day on, no doubt about it. But it’ll definitely have a bigger impact on me than it will on you.  I’ve hardly been able to eat since it happened, probably won’t be able to eat properly for days.

Yep, it’s not everyday you lose a tooth.

Marks out of 10

I see Manuel’s been moonlighting. All that cycling into work. Secret’s out.

Firefox 3.1beta

Fuck me, it’s fast. Looking forward to the full release (which I think is going to be called Firefox  3.5).

All but 1 of my add-ons work with it too. Nice.

Get it here.

Me

To complicate my life, lest it be at risk form being uncomplicated, I’m studying for more job related exams. Got one under my belt last year. Another 4 I want to do. There was a short period in my life when I found studying relatively easy. No so now. I have the ability to concentrate for about 5 minutes at a time when a dozen or so years ago it was a couple of hours. I could get through, digest, take notes on and understand about 50 typed A4 pages pages a day. Takes a week to do that now, or longer. An exam beckons next week.  I should be ready to start some sample questions mid Saturday and sqeeze in 8/10 hours before the exam. After that I’m taking a book break for the summer. I need me time. Lots and lots of me time.

Kylie

Do you remember Kylie? Do you remember what she looked like? Wasn’t like this was it?

What’s wrong with aging? What’s wrong with lines?

Mmmm, tasty

Ever rented a place? Not a holiday place, a semi-permanent place. Perhaps somewhere nice like a small detached house near the centre of town yet, at the same time, nicely secluded, peaceful, quiet? Warm, clean, freshly decorated. New kitchen, new bathroom , new floors, freshly decorated. Reasonable rent. Dare I say reasonable landlord?

If your oven broke down on a Saturday and this caused you great distress did he go out and buy a new one on Sunday and fit it himself? Did you ever ask your landlord to give you first refusal, because you liked the house so much, should he want to sell? Did he keep his word?

After all this would you hmmm and haaa for months, stalling a decision, safe in the knowledge your landlord was conscious of not wanting to throw you out with your partner and stepchild (who weren’t part of the original deal) and make you homeless in the run up to Christmas?

When you did choose not to take up your requested offer and moved on to somewhere else would you leave forgetting to tell the landlord about the broken sink in the bathroom (which you’d hidden under a roll of kitchen towels)? When your landlord discovered this and asked you to replace it would you begrudgedly have a new sink delivered but see it as his responsibility to fit it and throw a major wobbly fit when asked to pay for making good and leave the place in something close to the condition you found it?

If you can answer yes to all these questions then you can only be one person and I will have much, much bigger revenge you cheap, nasty piece of shit and your two-faced girlfriend. But not for a few months. And it will be big and it will be served stone cold. And it will come at you from so many directions you won’t know who it’s coming from or why. But it will cost you much, MUCH more than an odd-job plumber would have. So, enjoy your new place.

Ah, I feel alive again. Nothing like a good old grudge and a bit of revenge plotting to warm the cockles, eh?

Room 903

Thanks. Thanks for having a fucking party at 2.15am  and waking me up when I’d done my best to drink enough wine to induce a comfortable coma. Thanks also  for managing to keep me awake for the next 2 hours as various of your number spent the next 2 hours getting locked out of your room due to your mate falling asleep every time you went out to get ice/more drink/visit other rooms. I particularly enjoyed the knocking and rattling of the door for 10 minutes (twice). Still, I did manage to get a teensie, weensie bit more sleep before my alarm went off at 7.15. I was debating whether to rudely awake you by ringing your room number over and over. I changed my mind, however, when I heard your alarm and early morning call repeatedly going off without being answered.  Sometimes the best  revenge comes from doing nothing. Hope your day went well.

Nuclear

It’s home made pizza tonight for dinner. Why should you care? Well, a word of warning. You see, I made the dough from scratch. It was a bit of an experiment, I never (completely) follow instructions. Always a tweak, a twist.  Can’t resist. Ingredients, blah, blah blah….. I’ll just add some course wholemeal flour in. It’ll make it a nice earthy sort of colour. Rustic. Yeah,  that’s it. Yeast, two sachets, don’t want a frisbee. Better to have a nice puffed up pizza like Dominos, or a cushion. Yeah.

So, the dough got rested for 24 hours, a smidge longer than the 2 hours recommended. Even putting it in the bottom of the fridge hasn’t really arrested it’s expansion. It’s now parked in the garage coming to terms with it’s wholemeal acne and deciding whether to take over the rest of the house. It seems to have attained critical mass. I’m pretty sure than no matter how much I lop off  it it’s rate of growth will more than compensate. It’s gone nuclear.

Cause and effect

Lifted from here…

According to new scientific research, it’s not various mental conditions that affect our sleep and make people tired all the time, but vice versa. That is to say, too little sleep or agitated rest can easily trigger “malfunctions” as far as brain health goes, and may open the way to the development of some serious affections. Also, sleep deprivation can cause people to act in ways that can mislead doctors in believing that they are mentally ill.

There is also good news revealed in the study, in that people suffering from some mental conditions can cure them by simply regulating their lifestyles and sleeping sufficient amounts of time every night. On the other hand, the bad news is that many individuals may be taking psychoactive drugs that might be doing very little to help their conditions. Furthermore, these types of medication may actually be making things worse, by acting on parts of the brain that are not ill or otherwise affected, but simply fatigued to the point where they cannot function properly.

This “is very frightening. Wouldn’t you think that it would be important for us as a society to understand whether 3 per cent, 5 per cent or 50 per cent of people diagnosed with psychiatric problems are simply suffering from sleep abnormalities?” psychologist Matt Walker, from the University of California in Berkeley, asks. It’s crucially important then, he adds, that researchers further look into this issue in order to realize exactly to what extent sleep influences mental health, and just how many people suffer from actual disorders, as opposed to those who are just utterly tired and sleep deprived.

As an example, the researcher notes, individuals affected by depression are approximately five times more likely  to experience difficulties while breathing in their sleep than others. This means that less oxygen reaches the brain, which is basically starved to the point where “errors” occur. Similarly, somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of children and teenagers suffering from the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) experience sleep disorders, as opposed to just 7 percent of their healthy peers, who are not diagnosed with the condition.

“It was just so easy to say about a patient, well, he’s depressed or schizophrenic, of course he’s not sleeping well – and never to ask whether there could be a causal relationship the other way,” Harvard University sleep researcher Robert Stickgold comments, and adds that a thorough reassessment of psychological procedures is in order, considering the new facts.

Moral of the story? Sleep well.

Install Linux Mint 6 alongside XP/Vista on your PC

For Windows users (XP, Vista etc) I thoroughly recommend trying out one of the newest flavours of Linux, Linux Mint 6. I’ve been a fan of Linux Mint for a while now and find I can use it practically out of the box, so to speak. In fact the install takes a lot less time than a windows install yet practically all the software I need is there from the outset instead of me having to install CD after CD. Even adding some peripherals, like printers, is now even easier than with a Windows based system as the software will detect your printer and take it through an install wizard where it configures the correct drivers. You won’t even need the software CD that came with your printer. Same for wireless network cards. Like most Linux operating system distributions it comes packed with Open Source (free or donate) software equivalent to Windows applications including full office suite, instant messenger, mail client etc, media player and much, much more. And of course it’s much less likely to fall foul to the ever increasing malware out there predominantly aimed at Windows based PCs.

Best of all though is the fact that you can now very simply install it side by side on your XP or Vista machine without it overwriting anything and have access to all your files and folders you currently have access to. When installed at boot you get asked which operating system you want to use, Windows or Linux Mint. If you don’t want to keep Linux Mint you can just uninstall it without affecting your Windows installation by removing it in your XP/Vista control panel. Painless.

Linux Mint constantly informs you of all security and software upgrades and a slick upgrade process means all your software, not just your operating system as with a Windows based machine, is updated to the latest stable version automatically. The newest Mint operating system is also upgraded (free or donate) every 6 months or so. You read that right. Every 6 months. It’s constantly being updated and improved. Install it on as many PCs as you want.

Don’t take my word for it. Download it (Main Edition). Install it. Try it. You’ve nothing to lose.

Biggest number you can think of

Driving my 5 yr old chip of the block home today she chirped up and asked if everyone in Gotham City moved house how many removal vans it would take to do it. Now part of me is happy she is applying her tiny Nick Jr obsessed mind to constructing mathematical puzzles. The other part of me is disturbed that she seems to have inherited from me a need to worry about and consider things that have no bearing on anybody, let alone a five yr old. So it’ll come as no surprise that I instinctively blurted out

“On the same day?”

“Yes, dad. 500. 500 dad, that’s how many lorries you’d need for movin’.”

“Weeeeell, 300,000 people, hmmmm, that’d be roughly 75,000 households, maybe 100,000, one lorry per household,  I think it might need about……”

“560 dad.”

as if I don’t have enough to deal with

God knows why I’m doing this. Actually, I have a plan. And you might be part of it.

99 words

New Year Dis-Honours list

The Queen releases a New Year’s Honours list today. I’m not on it, again. Being the bigger man, however, I have decided to come up with my own alternative New Year’s Dis-Honours list, not that I’m the sort to bear a grudge or anything.

Awarded M.H.O.s (Muppet of the Highest Order)

Britney Spears – for believing that we’re so stupid we really do think she’s actually singing live. The Matrix mic would suit you better working in a call centre love. In fact, I’d start to get some practice in now. Oh, and stop showing your scabby flange.

Mariah Carey – most of the above (excluding flange flashing) except a bigger crime in your case as you can actually sing. Mariah, just a snippet of information….only 3rd world dictators think it’s normal to instruct a flunky to hand pick 5 thousand petals and lay a path of them from your suite to the bath. Royalty doesn’t do it.

Heather Mills – how much charity work have you done this year then? And I mean apart from the £25million you raised yourself. On a positive note if you became permanently mute you’d instantly become 10 times more attractive, or as my mate would say, doable. Just saying.

Amy Winehouse – psy-cho-ther-apy. (Washing now and again wouldn’t hurt either).

Fuckwit husband of Amy Winehouse, Fielder-Civil whatever – I’m sending you a £100 megadose of the best brown around. Recommend taking it all at once. Bye.

Gordon Brown – “no more boom and bust” eh? How does a Labour chancellor manage to adopt a more pure version of monetarist policy than Margaret Thatcher? You have fucked this country for the next 5 years.  Thanks for that.

The D.U.P. – for continually producing the highest quality of small minded conservatives who are so far off the track they can’t even understand why the things their M.P.s says offend. Iris Robinson, Ian Paisley Jr,  spring immediately to mind.

Premier League managers – stop whining. And if you watch the replay you’ll see you were talking out your arse. (Martin O’Neill excepted).

I could go on……and on….and on.

Anyway, Happy new year to all visitors (including the aforementioned who will find their way here from the referral links).

Rollercoaster

Hoping all you peeps had a relaxing, quiet Christmas.  Me, not quite.  Even if you just had a run-of-the-mill boring one please let me assure you how privileged you have been.

My Christmases usually involve some drama, less self-induced these days than it used to be in the past. This year’s included….

• coming home pre-Christmas after a few days away laden with lurgy involving a full soak-the-bed fever each night for a week
• a 10pm Christmas eve throw-all-the-toys-out-of-the-pram meltdown by mother of 4 yr old leaving me to to do all Santa preparation because I wouldn’t get her presents out of her car. Exhausted and still very ill I got to bed around 3am just leaving sufficient time for a soak the bed sweat before dawn. Surely there are some circumstances where murder should be legal?
• 4 yr old’s mother taking her ” for 10 minutes” to visit friends on Christmas day. 2 hours later, when they haven’t returned and 7 calls to her mobile remain unanswered  I track them down by car and eventually take my daughter to visit her grandparents and aunt (her uncle having already left due to the delay). Ditto the comment regarding legal grounds for murder.
• I gave my 80 yr old father the gift of lurgy so he could enjoy his  Christmas too.
• spending days when I was supposed to be enjoying the holidays dealing with clients who couldn’t follow instruction or pick up the phone themselves (each of who knew well in advance I’d be on holiday)
• spending the last day and a half completing spreadsheets and the like because my boss sprung some unexpected ones on me immediately before going on holiday (and which had to be done in the time I’d allocated to do the normal reports).

I’ve supposedly been off for a week but can’t say I feel like I’ve had the benefit of it seeing as I’ve done work on 5 out of the 7 days and dealt with a headcase on the other 2.

If you can match or beat that I’d be interested to know.

Camels and donkeys

Recently I went to my daughter’s first school play. Everyone was given a part, though she wasn’t a headliner, but the teachers made sure everyone felt their bit was important and had them all learn all the songs from the show. She’s still singing them now.

She told me next year she wants to be a camel. They did have the best costumes and I suspect as she likes dressing up in her Scooby-Doo or reindeer outfit that she’s experiencing her first episode of costume envy.

Part of what  I enjoy most about her age is her mispronuciation of words which I’ve written about before. It really tickles me. Since the school play she’s seen fit to correct me twenty dozen times. Camels and donkeys have  hoobs.

I stand corrected.