Well, I have been summonsed by Glen Adrian of Obscureinternet (change your avatar, ffs!) to write a detailed review of my 30th birthday. I’ll start from the day, because it was a much better and more exciting day, for you see, I went bowling!

The first part of the day was spent watching stuff that had been collected on the Sky+. this involved several episodes of Countdown. Unfortunately, there wasn’t going to be a lot happening in the early part of this particular day, as the car was in the garage after it snapped a spring or something, thanks to the state of one of the local roads.

Onto the night, then. Plans had been made with most of the people from work to attend the bowling alley on Brenda Road. It was the first time I’d been bowling since November 2005

I arrived at approximately 7:30, to find that the place was absolutely packed, but I was the only one there out of the proposed group. Oh, great. Things start going through my mind, like “Am I on my own? Is anyone else turning up?” I decided to wait outside, just in case anyone was going to ring my mobile. It was noisy inside.

Thankfully, the cars did indeed start pulling up, and before long, we had a group of about 16 of us. Unfortunately, Tuesday is apparently semi-pro night, so we had to wait until about 9 before we got a game. The price was £3 for the hour. It closed at 10, so we’d just got in. It was at this point, I began to fling my camera around in the hope to catch some epic shots. Unfortunately, this failed miserably, though I did think Matt got a good strike here:-

Unfortunately after I got home and checked the video, he hit the rail first. So technically, it didn’t count.

I finished last, as you can probably gather, though I did manage a strike. I might have to start going there, if I can find someone to go along with. there’s no point playing on your own.

After the bowling, we made our way to Lloyds, in Church Square. And yes, I really did wear this shirt…

Some random barfly stated that I looked like Timmy Mallet. Out of all the times I’ve worn that shirt, it’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to a compliment. Unfortunatelty, there’s a button fallen off it, so that’ll give me an excuse to never, ever wear it in public again. Awww.

After sharing a jug of some odd drink bought by Matt (possibly to celebrate his non-strike), it was time for everyone to begin departing. Some people had work in the morning, and some people wanted to attend the Indian. Guess which category I fell into.

So, the initial group of 16 had dwindled down to 4, and we headed off to the Dilshad for a load of grub.

As usual, the meal was delicious, and just as we were finishing, the clock struck midnight. Yup, I was now 30 years old. Daddykins sent me a text.

The second person to wish me happy birthday was Wayne, at an impressive 2 minutes past midnight, though obviously I didn’t get it until I got home. His email made me quickly realise how much of my life had disappeared…

“You are now twice as old as you were when we had our first talk on CB”.

He was right. The CB days were now half my life ago!

The 4 of us finished our meals, and headed off home in our respective taxis, and a good night was had by all. Well, certainly by me, at least, and I made my way up the long, winding gravel driveway of Mercuryvapour Towers at 1:13.

And now, onto the day itself. It started off early, around 5AM. This was mainly because I could feel the vindaloo on the move, and it was only a matter of time before it was indaloo (actually, alloverdaloo would be a better description). So, I was wide awake after only 4 hours sleep, and with an arse like the flag of Japan. I logged onto Facebook, and watched the happy birthday messages scroll past. Thanks to all of you who left a message, and for those who tried to talk to me, Facebook Chat is being a tart at the moment, and although I can see who sent me a message, I can’t actually see it. I’ve gone back to an earlier release of Firefox. That might help it.

Anyway, the morning consisted of my usual “Woo! I’m off work!” ritual – lie on the sofa and watch “Homes Under The Hammer”, followed by “to Buy or Not To Buy”, then “Cash In The Attic” (as long as Jenny Sodding Bond isn’t presenting it), followed by “Bargain Hunt”. Andy The Iridium Fan popped round during the preceedings, and dropped off my birthday card. He stayed for a few hours, and was amazed to find that he also liked amplifying the ends of songs just to get every last note out of them. An “interest” of mine which I thought nobody else shared. A bit like streetlights. He also helped me dispose of the large boxes that Beastbits2 had came in.

ATIF stayed for 3 hours, 22 minutes and 45 seconds, and after that I began watching some more stuff that had accumulated on the Sky+. I was absolutely knackered, as I’d only managed a couple of hours sleep, and decided to go to bed “for an hour”. This was at 4PM. Next thing I know, it’s 10PM. I must have been more knackered than I thought. The day was finished off with the obligatory “few cans”, and I headed off to bed some time around 4ish.

So, that was the story of my first full day of being into my 4th decade. Not bad going considering I wasn’t actually going to blog about it. And now, I’m off to take photos of a pothole, or I might wait until the chippy is open, and kill two birds with one stone. Pothole photography and chips. Being 30 is AWESOME.

Technorati Tags: atif, Birthday, bowling, curry, email, phone, sms, telly, text, vindaloo, wayne

This time of year seems to come around too quickly. It is mere hours until this blog enters its ninth year, and as you’ve probably realised over these years, it’s also the time of year when I post the least. This is a combination of being insanely busy at Employment Palace, and the fact that nothing ever seems to happen in October. Ever.

But, it’s November now, and exactly a month before the conclusion of the “Before I’m 30″ section of the site. Ugh. Something did happen a couple of weeks ago, which I personally couldn’t believe, and it happened in Asda… I started blogging about it, but didn’t finish it, because I was so filled with rage, that if I’d have gone any further with it, I’d have smashed something…

I’ve truly had it with Asda. Today was the last straw, and I shall never step foot through the doors of their sorry organisation as long as I draw breath.

“Well, I’m not going to serve him either because I know he’s going to give them to you”…

That’s where I stopped typing! Needless to say, I walked out without the beer, and . Quite unbelievably, for anyone who knows me, I have stayed out of Asda since that incident, and now, I can’t see any reason to ever go back.

There WAS one reason. It was the only place I knew which stocked “Tymbark”. Now, I’ll not be surprised if you’ve never heard of it, as it’s Polish. That’s Polish, as in, it originates from Poland, and not the cleaning product. My dietary habits, no matter how bad they are, have yet to see me consuming Mr. Sheen. It is a fantastic blend of cherry and apple juice, which was stocked in Asda’s “Ethnic” aisle.

Whilst in Tesco the other day, I was delighted to find that they also stocked the very same product! Therefore, I officially have no reason to ever stagger through the doors of Asda again!

Right. Erm, that’s the first thing. I’ve actually forgotten the reason why I was going to write this post.

Technorati Tags: asda, fruit juice, knocked back, tesco, tymbark

Well, it’s under three months until the fateful day, and with the previous few months being totally shocking, I thought I’d give you an update on how I’m doing with them. OK, that’s a bit of a lie, Chad posted a comment on the previous posting, and although I normally take post post suggestions with a touch of “What do you think I am? A performing seal?”, I realise I’ve not actually updated that part of the site since January. So, in order to kill some time before this morning’s flea market festivities, I thought I’d give both of my readers a quick update on what is happening with it.

So far, being 29 has been positively shit, with major things happening such as my dad’s heart attack (which I shall refer to as “the incident” from now on). Anyway, enough of that, on with the update and you’ll see what I mean. Maybe.

Sooo, in the order they’re posted on the above page…

1. Pass my driving test

I have had this on the back burner for some time now, as there is absolutely no way I could afford to run a car. the price of fuel, tax and insurance keeps going up and up. Not to mention the cost of the lessons. I found out last night just how expensive they’ve become.

However, following the incident, this is something that I am having to seriously consider.

2. Get a new job.

In this economic climate, I’m actually happy I’ve got a job.

3. Cut down on drink

Epic fail.

4. Save money

Thanks to the abandonment of the 2009 holiday, I’ve managed to actually save some money. So, go me.

5. Finish projects I’ve started, but never finished.

As I mentioned on the “Before I’m 30″ page itself, I’m not too sure what I meant by that. I believe I may have been referring to things such as cataloguing records, CDs, and their ultimate conversion to MP3. This is still ongoing. The Paris video is still incomplete, however, thanks to the problems I’ve been having with Beastbits.

6. Throw some shit out.

As of yet, I’ve not been in the situation where I’ve felt like I need a proper clear-out. It’s hard to say what triggers my occasional bouts of life laundry, where a load of personal belongings end up in the wheelie bin, but it just hasn’t happened recently.

Instead of throwing shit out, I’ve actually started to become organised. This can be seen in my record/CD catalogue thing. A few years ago, I would have never dreamt of doing such a thing.

Oh, and I was planning to use the ultimate excuse… “Which recycling box DO you put broken records into?”, as I have a subconscious feeling that the recent (well, several years ago now) switchover to a recycling scheme means that I’m less likely to throw stuff away as I don’t know which bin to put it in without risking a fine.

7. Lose weight / exercise more.

It’s hard to say if I’ve actually lost or gained weight as the batteries in the scales didn’t get put in until August. I’m under 14 stone, however, but I’d like that to go down further. I still walk pretty much everywhere I can.

8. Try new foods.

Thanks to the incident, this is something that does appear to be going quite well, in fact I’d say it’s going the best out of everything so far. Not so much trying new foods, but watching what I consume.

Post-incident worries now see me in Asda, studying the nutrition labels, meaning that my diet contains less shit than it did previously. That can only be good.

9. Find true love

Added as a bit of a joke, obviously. Love life and relationships is something I never post about on here. I made the mistake several years ago, and those who know me in real life know I don’t like to talk about it. Thefore blogging and “other stuff” is completely separate. If it makes me look like a loner, so be it.

10. Bake a loaf of bread

I think this was one of the half-baked (geddit?) ideas I came up with while bored out of my tiny mind at Employment Palace. Trust me, I did consider it shortly after placing the update. Honestly. I even went down the bakery aisle in Asda, a place which was foreign to me and downright scary. I added the price of the flour, yeast, water, baking tin, then thought “Fuck it, I’m off to get a Kingsmill”. Bread is in wide supply, so I have no reason to bake my own. Nine months after adding this to the list, I’ve decided I no longer have the inclination or interest to do this.

So, that’s your update. I’m off to bed.

Technorati Tags: before i'm 30, page, update

Well, in the past weeks, I’ve not been without computer problems, most of them I’ve fixed. I’ll talk about these first because I might as well get the boring shite out of the way first, and then we’ll get talking about… poo, or something. Or maybe not.

Anyway, yes, the past week since the wasp attack has been spent with me doing computery stuff, as I try to get rid of the few niggling bugs I’ve had with the machines I own. I’m happy to say that these fixes have been mostly successful

Firstly, I managed to get the mysql server running on scribcam.co.uk. I was getting a message that some of the system tables were corrupt, every time I tried to change any of the parameters, or create a database. This was likely because I’d upgraded the mysql software, but copied all of the data files from a (very) old version, including the system tables. It really didn’t like it. I’d forgotten that the majority of the mysql settings are actually stored in one of those data files. Whoops.

I left it chugging for a few weeks, as a few apps on the server relied on it. It got to a point though, where it was useless to me, as I couldn’t use it as a backup server. I had the idea of dumping the tables, reinstalling mysql, recreating the users and then reimporting them. It was all bound to go horribly wrong.

It didn’t, and within about 5 minutes, I was wondering why it had all gone so very, very smoothly. There is no answer. It just did. That was a bonus. I was expecting to fight with cryptic error messages and stuff I didn’t really understand. Didn’t happen.

Last night came the greatest challenge yet. You may, or may not know, that thanks to an absolute disaster with Windows XP, and my inability to perform a clean install of it on Beastbits, I have been using ubuntu as a substitute until I get a new machine, and I’m liking it.

Now, thanks to the many hardware problems Beastbits has, I decided it was not a good idea to keep all of my data and the OS itself on one drive, and decided to separate the two. Since I installed Ubuntu, there’s been a 250Gb drive used as the system drive, and data, and a 500Gb drive doing nothing, except holding inaccessible data. Last night, I made the decision that Windows was never going back on here, so I thought it would be nice to have my 500Gb drive as the data partition, and the 250Gb as the OS drive.

Sounds complicated enough, and sure it would kill an hour or 6.

Again, this went oddly well, and I’ll explain in a very quick, shit, and probably incorrect way of doing this…

Mount drive and partition, in my case, this was /dev/sdb1 and mounted to /media/New olume
Check all data is backed up
Unmount drive (sudo umount /dev/sdb1)
Load gparted (sudo gparted)
FInd out gparted isn’t installed by default
“sudo apt-get install gparted”
load gparted again
Delete partitons
Create ext3 partition, and name it “Home”, just to complicate matters
Have beer and/or wank whilst drive builds itself
Wonder what happens, when drive doesn’t appear
Reboot
Watch with glee, as newly formatted drive is mounted to /media/Home
Cry in horror, as your normal user doesn’t have write permissions to the drive
Out comes Google.
“sudo chown -R username /dev/sdb1″
Watch with glee as drive becomes writable
“cp -a /home/* /media/Home” (I think)
Construct a small fort from CD cases. Learn to play the recorder. Sort your blood cells into alphabetical order. Basically, I had 133Gb of data to copy across. I’m trying to get across that this took an age.
With the help of spike1 from #speccy (which has now moved home, it used to be on Astrolink, it’s now on irc.coldfront.net ), run a check on the copied data by comparing file sizes
Burst into tears when you realise that there’s a 1Gb discrepancy between the original data and the copied data.
Breathe a sigh of release when you mounted /home/www during the copy procedure so you could move mirc across.
Confirm this with… er, a command I’ll enter later, as I don’t have it to hand, which creates the two directory listings, then compares them.
Edit /etc/fstab
Insert line “/dev/sda1 /home ext3 defaults 0 2″
Bonus step: login as root, remove the old /home directory. This isn’t necessary, as linux will automatically mount the new mountpoint over the top of the previous one. I did it for completeness, and because I’m a rebel, and also wanted to see how much space the OS itself used.
Reboot. Hope for the best. Actually, I don’t think you have to reboot, but I did.
Scream with joy when “df” reads something like the following:-

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             227G  3.9G  212G   2% /
/dev/sdb1             459G  127G  309G  30% /home

Feel a bit guilty when you realise there’s 212Gb free which you’ll probably never be able to use.

Well, that went on a bit longer than I expected it to. I forgot there were so many steps. Let’s move on quickly. Sooo, er… I happened to be walking around the confusing, brightly lit aisles of my local Tesco the other day, and noticed something new. Yes, there is now a rival of the humble Pot Noodle, in the form of something called “The Nation’s Best”, which are manufactured under the “Golden Wonder” brand.

Now, the first thing that struck me as odd is the use of the Golden Wonder brand, was for many years, they used to manufacture the original Pot Noodles.

As a self confessed slob, and a shit cook, Pot Noodles are a staple part of my diet. Well, at least when I’m at work they are. I was interested how these new noodles fared up to the old veteran of the lazy man’s cupboard.

No “convenience food” would be worth its salt (and most of them have plenty of that!) without a curry variety, and I’m pleased to say these also have one, in the form of “Chip Shop Curry”. Awesome. Noodles in a curry sauce, with raisins and apple.

The pots are slightly smaller than your average Pot Noodle. One bonus is that the lid of the pots is plastic, which means that it’s less likely to get punctured. If there’s one annoyance I have about the original Pot Noodles is the ability to burst the foil top, and the powder going everywhere, meaning that everything sharing the same bag also stinks of Pot Noodle, for weeks afterwards.. No problems like that with these!

So, I’ve talked enough about the packaging. What about the actual stuff itself? Well, to be honest, it seems a little devoid of ingredients. There’s the noodles, but where’s the dried out veg? Nowhere to be seen! At least when you eat the veg in a pot noodle, you can actually pretend that it’s doing you some good.

There are little bits of “apple”, and even though raisins were promised, upon initital inspection, these are few and far between. This is probably a bonus, as rehydrated raising tend to be one of the nastiest things that can ever be consumed. Except for sushi. (True fact: I only mentioned sushi there because I’m listening to the extended version of the 1992 hit “SuperMarioLand” which features the line “I’ve eaten sushi in Japan, but there ain’t no place like SuperMarioLand. Oh, and the thought of eating raw fish turns my stomach)

In conclusion, bring back Pot Rice.

Technorati Tags: computer, drive, error, fix, hdd, Linux, mysql, replace, supermarioland, tables, ubuntu

I’ve just noticed that the bag of crisps I’m thinking of munching on has the line “Made from real ingredients!” Well, that’s just dandy. I’m sure they taste a lot better than all the crisps I’ve eaten in the past made from imaginary ingredients.

Idiots.

Technorati Tags: crisps, walkers, what