Undergone some changes today. Had my haircut nice and short for the summer, and got my ear pierced. Well, why not?

Did a charity collection at Tesco this afternoon in aid of Kent Air Ambulance. I think it went well - I seemed to have a lot of young single Mums contribute (just coincidence, I'm sure)....

Found a completely free email server written in C# and available with source. This is going to be a huge help when developing the email part of DeVolution!

Arse monkeys!

I finally finished putting the new PC together, but nothing happened when I plugged in the mains and hit the power switch. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Probably end up pulling it all apart and starting again some time this weekend. Me and hardware just don't get on. I'm more of a bits 'n' bytes person than a pliers 'n' wires one.......

Blogger's main page seems to have some probs this afternoon - maybe it will be fixed by the time you read this!

Anyway, got a new DVD drive unit for the little box, and a screwdriver set so that I can actually fit stuff! All I need to do now is find that pesky hard-disk - I know its around here somewhere

Much fun to be had last night, as my Mini ITX case and motherboard arrived (as did the memory for it), so I spent some time building it. But my screwdriver was somewhat lacking so I can;t undo the drive mount screws - and I lost the hard disk that I was gonna put in there too. Still not sure how I am going to fit a 5.25in DVD drive, 3.5in floppy drive, and a 3.5in hard disk all in that tiny little box, but everyone else manages, so I'm sure I can. Might sacrifice the floppy disk drive (who uses floppies these days anyway?) in favour of the hard disk. I can always pick up a cheap USB floppy drive if I really need to.

Spent the whole of last night doing boring admin type things - dealing with email, sorting out address book, filling out forms. Boring stuff but has to be done. Can't wait for the weekend, although it looks to be quite busy, with a charity collection to do on Saturday and a barbecue at Becca's on Sunday.

Ok, so I spent a bit more on a Mini-ITX case and motherboard, and a bit of memory for it. So I lied about stopping buying things.... :-P

I'm sure the novelty will wear off eventually, but for now, being able to put entries into my blog from any room in the house is my new favourite trick :-)

I really must stop buying things! Just got a headphone adapter for my Gameboy. Oh well, I suppose it will stop the sound from annoying my fellow commuters on the train now. Last day at Dan's today - gotta go tonight cos I got work in the morning. :-( Tried unsuccessfully to get some ancient network cards to work on Dan's PC so that we could transfer files from my laptop, but XP just looked at them as if they were caveman technology - needless to say they didn't work.

Well, I got my network thingy, and a gamepad for my laptop too :-) Dan got a new DVD-ROM drive, so I've been helping him make it region-free and sorting out some DVD-Ripping tools for him too. Aren't I nice?

At Dan's this weekend - had a nice evening watching scary movies and drinking, today we're off to PC World to buy me some new geek toys! Hopefully I can get a wireless network to wired Ethernet bridge. :-)

Ultimate indignity - headless zombie rabbit gets parking ticket only a day later

First see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3047267.stm
then http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/3051447.stm

[Coutesy of the wonderful NTK again]

Its Friday, its payday, its time to go to the pub! Nice little trip to the Wetherspoons in Leicester Square. Well you have to, don't you? :-)

My life, as defined by power supplies

Packed a bag for going away this weekend and started to realise just how many gadgets I am building up. One weekend consists of :-

Laptop
Gameboy
Gameboy Flash Programmer
Mobile Phone

each with their own charger. I have a little viper's nest of cables netsling in amongst my clean underwear in my packed bags now.....

Did some more work on my NullableTypes project for Luka tonight on the train. Currently setting up TopologiLinux on my desktop machine to play with, since it co-exists with Windows so well. Run out of beer, but its payday tomorrow and I will be away at Dan's this weekend, so there'll be much beer consumption to be done over the next three days methinks....

Ok, I fixed it. I'm not messing with the templates any more....

Dammit, I seem to have broken Blogger - the Archive stuff brings up an error. Grrrr

'Twas the day before payday, and not a penny did stir in my wallet......

Yup, broke again, so Pot Noodle for lunch again :-)

Oh, and a nice Matrix toy I found last night

Got a complaint that the blog hasn't been updated today! The cheek of it! Also got accused of stealing his SlimFast too!

Still playing with my programmable cartridge for the GameBoy - got a Windows-like user interface on it yesterday, called PogoShell - makes life a bit easier.

Alison calling me from Cyprus tonight - can't wait to talk to her!

Ooh! Found a BASIC development system for my GameBoy Advance! Check out Dragon BASIC

Not much on my mind right now. I feel like a complete blank. I've just been staying at home not getting anything done. I've pretty much been doing nothing.

Apathetic blog entry scripts - this blog stuff just get easier! :-P

Working a little later than usual tonight to get some software released. I hope the trains aren't all stuffed up again tonight, cos its Alison's last night before her holiday and I would kinda like to call her when I get home.

Also would be nice to have some time to (finally) get my GameBoy flasher working and get some games on it. :-)

Have set the wheels in motion at work to see if we can contribute from our Picture Library to the ARKive Project - lets hope we can help out....

Nmap featured in The Matrix Reloaded

MPAA | DVD Frequently Asked Questions

CSS is the copy protection system adopted by the motion picture industry and consumer electronics manufacturers to provide security to copyrighted content of DVDs and to prevent unauthorized copying of that content. CSS is akin to the lock on your house

Hmmm....anyone mind if I change the locks on my house for more security then? :-P

Piracy doesn't pay....or does it?

My attempt to download a not-quite-legal version of Matrix Reloaded finished last night. Howver, it would seem that the MPAA and its kin had the last laugh, as the file turned out not to be the Matrix Reloaded.

Instead it was 3 hours of Swedish porn.

Not a complete waste of time then..... :-D

[and no, I'm not making a weblink for the words Swedish porn up there!]

Infected with too much advertising? Give yourself a quick checkover with the TotL.net Human Virus Scanner

Found a site with Lots of cool GameBoy accessories - w00t!

Yay! Got my linker setup today. Trouble is, it works off the parallel port of the PC so I will have to wait until I get home and can hook it up to my desktop machine, since the laptop doesn't have a parallel port. Grrrr

Also managed to get a copy of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix - and I'm not saying how. :-P

Well, there goes another weekend. Got a bunch of gameboy games and an emulator to play with on my laptop, cos I've only got the one game for my real GameBoy so far. Hours of endless fun!

Alison is off on holiday Weds, so this was our last weekend together before she goes. I'm sure gonna miss her. Still, no use moping around, so I'm off to Dan's for the long weekend next weekend. Much beer and silliness to be had! Woohoo!

I'm having a great weekend here - even having my tea made for me while I put another entry in my weblog :-) Dan, sadly, isn't having a good weekend, since he has rain outside, and thanks to a broken pipe, rain inside too.....

Not much to say today cos I've had a headache all day. :-( Alison is due any minute with headache tablets, which should help. Dunno if we'll go out tonight or not now. Might add something more here later if I'm feeling better.

NASA are apparently designing an unmanned aircraft that will roam over the surface of Mars gathering pictures and data. Nice idea. But is it absolutely necessary for it to be painted with an American Flag motif? What's next? Mars - ©2003 The Goverment of the United States of America

Everybody is a font it would seem....
What Font Are You? (Standard Fonts) - Quizilla

Ok, for all those of you that have been to my page here and not yet realised, the bold orange things like this bit here are links that you can click on!

Hope that clears that one up....

URL targeting those who "cut down trees, wear high heels, suspendies, and a bra"?: http://www.lumbermansexchange.com/

(courtest of NTK)

Mrs. Irene Graham of Thorpe Avenue, Boscombe, delighted the audience with her reminiscence of the German prisoner of war who was sent each week to do her garden. He was repatriated at the end of 1945, she recalled. "He'd always seemed a nice friendly chap, but when the crocuses came up in the middle of our lawn in February 1946, they spelt out "Heil Hitler".
(Bournemouth Evening Echo)

Well as you can see, I've done a big redesign of this page. Blogger still has problems correctly FTPing the image files from a template to your site, so I had to fix them all manually. Also the blog template broke the parent HTML cos it was inlined into a table cell. Anyway, I moved the menu into the template and made the blog page the top page now, so everything looks ok and all the toys are still on the menu (without the cute little icons I made for them but they don;t really fit the new layout now anyway)

Still gotta think about getting a new home for all this stuff for when my UKShells expires. I might be brave and host the site on my own machine at home - I just hope my firewall does what it is supposed to and keeps the nasties out.....

Jason at work is doing a blog too! Shame he's using Notes to do it ;-P

Ooh, I want a GP32 handheld console

Found a fix for the BlogThis tool - now I can blog from any page! Yay!

Oversleep central here! Considering I have to leave the house for work in the morning at 6:30am, I woke up at 6:25am. Panic! Feeling distinctly under the weather today, but hopefully that will pass later in the day. Big scary meeting this afternoon, and I'm only vaguely aware as to what its all about. Oh well, guess I'll find out soon enough.....

Very tired this morning due to being addicted to Crash Bandicoot XS on my GameBoy. Sigh...

Isn't a shame when people are forced to choose between their girlfriend/boyfriend and a friend. It is possible to have a relationship and friends you know! I'm just glad that relationship won out in this case ;-)

Found a guide to building your own Dalek today - will come in useful for our Venetian Fete entry, which has a Doctor Who theme

oooh the new toy is nice! Battery life is more than enough (10 hours with backlight, 18 hours without), and I'm getting a a writeable cartridge and linking kit from someone, so I can have a go at programming it. All I need now is to find an Atari Emulator for it....

Just bought a Gameboy Advance SP for whiling away the hours on that horrible commute to and from London that I do every day. I'll let you know how good it is after its had its 3 hour battery charge.....

Halfway point of the week, and I am sooo tired. Steak night was good last night, but didn't get home until around 12:30am this morning. Fell asleep on the train but kept being woken up by some girl sat next to me, who nudged me awake every time I started snoring....

More Wetherspoons fun tonight as we check out their Steak Night. Still the cheapest place to eat in town without resorting to tacky American fast-food outlets staffed by spotty teenagers with attitude problems.....

Tuesday, wrote Mr Kipling, and a demo today of our project at work to the bosses. Panic set in around 9am, escalated around 10am, and descended down into resignation to fate by 11am. All went well on the surface of things, and I think we did ok.

Bit of shopping at lunchtime for clothes, nothing too bank-breaking, and now settling down with pie.

Found a fantastic website last night that is dedicated to helping people install Linux on my make and model of laptop. Woohoo!

Monday morning is brought to you in association with sausage, bacon, hash browns, beans and a mug of tea.

Well another wonderful weekend over with - they go too fast. Good company, good food and a few beers make all the difference though (that explains the lack of entries in here recently then!).

Discovered that the linux error is due to a file called dilnetpc.c. A dig around on google shows that this is for supporting some specialist motherboard, which I don't even have. So I just need to figure out a way to tell the kernal "I don't want this stuff anyway"....

Quick break for spaghetti bolognese and a beer, and then back to it, while also simultaneously installing Windows on another machine, and sending text messages to my girlfriend. Is there no end to my talents? :-P

The end of another long week at work (well, it seemed long. It was actually only a 4 day week) and a weekend to begin! Beer's by my side and pizza gonna be ordered soon. I've been trying to recompile my Linux kernel today to get some ACPI support for my laptop. What a nightmare that is. I got so far, and then I get error messages. Ok, so now what do I do?

Also got a Windows 2000 Professional installation to do for someone....

Guess who's in OS hell this weekend? :-P

Last night's curry night was really good - curry, rice, poppadoms, nan bread and a beer all for just £4.75 (about $7.20). Had a few beers and a double Jack Daniels, hence a bit of a wee headache this morning :-P

Alison was perfect, as always. Can't wait til the weekend now!

Curry night at Wetherspoons with Alison tonight - woohoo! Been looking forward to this all week :-)

Ok, I solved the shaving problem by having a proper shave with hot towels and an open razor at Trumpers in Mayfair. They've been shaving people since 1875, so I guess they might know what they are doing by now. Cost way too much money just to have a shave, but just like the L'Oreal people say..."I'm worth it"

:-)

Tough decisions this morning - I overslept and had to choose between ironing or shaving (only had time for one or the other).

I chose ironing - its less likely to make my face bleed. :-P

Ok, it just took me 4 hours to get home from London (for those reading this that don't know, its supposed to take 2 hrs and thats too long in my book already). As you can see from the timestamp on this entry, its late (or early if you wanna be pedantic about it) and I'm going to bed.

Stupid @!*%ing train company!

Don't you just hate when people put links to news stories in their blogs, and when you click on it it expects you to register with some newspaper's website? Don't these people bother to check? We don't all subscribe to the New York Times you know! Yes Nick Denton I'm talking to you, and your link

Still can't find a template I really like - I might just play with CSS and make my own, if I ever get time.

Don't ya just hate people that don't charge their mobile phones on a regular basis. I send a message to my girlfriend's phone, and she says "sorry, run out of battery". Blah!

Another fun-filled day doing software builds at work. - I'm getting quicker at it now! Raided the chinese food place at lunchtime, cos I'm out late tonight (off to see X-Men 2 woo!) so I won't get a chance later.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Hello,

The manager change request for channel '#niceplace' was REJECTED for the following reason(s) :

CService will NOT perform this change.

Reason:
The manager-to-be and the current channel manager appears to be the same person.

Sorry.


The Undernet Channel Service.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

So all that time I was talking to myself?

Hmmm - these blogger templates need some work - it doesn't transfer images properly, and when you try to save a dot 1pixel high, its kinda hard.....

Never did get round to making dinner last night. Just snacked. Got an early night, and now I'm more tired than if I had a late night. How's that work?

Eep! Is that the time? I've still not cooked dinner yet...stupid blogs!

Doh! After all that messing about with other people's hard disks, I can;t get my machine to read one of my other hard disks that was in there and working in the first place!

[Ambles off to bounce the drive off Bill Gates' head]

Read some articles on blogging earlier - wow, people take this stuff way too seriously

Started the ball rolling on handing over control of NicePlace to Renee tonight. Looking at the logs from last night, she managed to get more people to come in the channel in one night than I did in the last 3 years. *sigh* Mind you, she always did manage to be surrounded by admirers on IRC. I'm not bitter about it though (despite that last comment!), I don't get much time to be on IRC these days.

It does mean that this page is gonna have to move to another of my websites soon though :-|

I really need to tidy up my hard disk on my laptop. I don't even have enough space on there to rip a DVD any more ;-)

Hmm - this is turning into a bit of a "new toys" day. ISO images seem to be spontaneously appearing on my hard disk

Just got all the tools needed to make one of those multi-bootable N-in-1 Windows CDs. Gonna be useful to back up other stuff too I reckon. I just want that Super Utilities 2003 CD now.....

Hmm - at this rate, I think its a good idea to turn archiving on..... :-P

Ack, back to work, having breakfast and getting bean sauce on the laptop keyboard....

Back to work today - I hate getting up so early in the morning, and I hate that train journey of over 2 hours :-(

Just reinstalled Windows XP for the umpteenth time. Makes it easier to mess with other peoples hard disks ;-)

Trying to rescue a couple of old hard disks for a friend without losing the data - I forgot how much of a pain in the ass swapping IDE cables around and trying to get machines to boot correctly was. Remind next time not to be such a helpful sort to people :-P

Another fun filled weekend of sleeping in all day. Went to a pub quiz Sunday night and won the "Tequila Round" section. Basically, whoever answered the most pop trivia questions right got a bottle of Tequila, which they had to finish completely before the answers were read out. I'm never drinking Tequila ever again! :-)

Stop blogging dammit, you're supposed to be finishing the work for NullableTypes

OK, so from reading around on the internet a bit, I'm supposed to write about stuff thats topical, political, or observational on the state of modern society....

So here's a frog for you

Hmmm, ok so I can access this just as well from my Linux box then :-)

Ok, more weblink stuff. Some of you may know that I'm developing a replacement for Microsoft Outlook. You can see the homepage of DeVolution where you'll find a couple of screenshots. Not much yet, but I'm working on it :-)

Anyone reading this that wants to see what I look like can go here with a Java-enabled browser

Ok ignore that - I didn't check the timezone settings on the config page :-)

Ack! I just noticed the time stamps on these things. Its certainly not the time that I wrote the entries. Must be the time at the Blogger server I guess.

Pah!

Yay! It works at last. The blogger guys might wanna look at the evil VBScript error they've got on their Edit Settings page though :-)

Anyways, I though I would make myself a little weblog to put all my crap in, rather than keep putting it in my SourceForge.net diary. Hopefully there will be something sort of semi useful to somebody somewhere in here, but hey, I can't guarantee it!

Toodlepip for now!

NiceGuyUK

Nothing here yet - just trying to get this thing set up