Let’s recap over the last few days, as they’ve been memorable.

On Tuesday, I started doing the front garden again. It was an absolute mess. Thanks to the lovely summer we haven’t had, I’d not had chance to cut the grass, so it was almost knee height. So, out comes the lawnmover. There’s something satisfying on seeing the grass disappear, and come out from underneath the lawnmower as green mush. Or, maybe that’s just me.

Next step was the privet. Now, this was a state. Much worse than the grass. Basically, it’s not been cut for about 2 months, as the neighbour borrowed the hedge cutter, and blew it up. That was nice.

So, it’s just been left to grow wild. I had once attempted to start cutting it with shears a couple of weeks ago. I got about an inch across before I realised it was a fruitless excersise and abandoned it, planning to go to Focus later that day and just buy a new hedge trimmer. This obviously hadn’t been done.

So, after making another tiny bit of progress across the hedge with the shears, I totally gave up, dragged Daddykins into the car, off we went to Focus. The only sole purpose for him being there was the 10% discount card he carries. We made our way to the hedge trimmer section and picked up THE BEAST. Bright green, bright yellow cable, blade approximately 2 feet long. This’ll do for me!

Off we went to the till, picking up a pair of sweeping brooms on the way. I flashed my credit card at the lovely young lady on the counter, while Daddykins flashed his discount card. By this time, however, the rain was lashing down, I had no chance of being able to do it today, so the beast of a machine would have to lie dormant for another day.

On the way back, I went to Nettos, had a good old chinwag with Elaine, who now works there, after giving Employment Palace the old heave-ho several months back. Off we went home, and I got prepared to go out for the night. The rain was still bouncing off the rain at this point. The day took a turn for the worse, as I suddenly realised that my wallet had vanished. I’d last had it when in Nettos. GAH! Luckily, I’d got cashback, so I still had some funds for the night, but I was obviously a bit concerned over my missing moolah holder.

Eventually, I had to leave, otherwise I’d have never got out. I left Daddykins looking for it for me. He’s nice like that.

While I was stood at the bus stop, my mobile rings. The wallet had been located, it was in my room, under my chair. Thank god for that. It was the first time my wallet had been missing for a long period since 14th March 2004

Anyhoo, that cheered me up, and I went to the club for a couple of games of snooker, and while the rain fell out of the sky at an alarming rate, I continued to pot balls at a strangely accurate rate.

Chris reunited me with my wallet, as he’d seen Daddykins downstairs in the bar. Several hours later, I returned home, and went to bed, as Wednesday was the delivery date of my camera. Hurrah!

I awoke early. This was nothing to do with the camera, but in fact my guts churning excess acid, probably down to the alcohol, and half a packet of beef slices I’d consumed before going to bed. Well, I say bed, I chose to sleep on the sofa, as my bed was filled with various computer parts, and I was too lazy (read drunk) to clear it off. Actually, there was another reason. I’d need to be near the door so I could answer it with enthusiasm should the delivery turn up early, instead of fighting my way into clothes as I headed down the stairs.

Obviously, thanks to that excess acid, I was awake and up early anyway, so it turned out I didn’t need to sleep on the sofa after all.

I started on some maintenance to the gallery DB, that killed an hour or so. It was 9AM, and the weather was looking quite decent. This obviously meant that it was time to attack the flea market, as is always the tradition on a Wednesday, assuming I’m not working, and the weather looks OK.

Now, when I go to the flea market, I’m always in a world of my own, as I have my music playing through earphones. I made a little pact with myself, similar to what I did with the Bruce Hornsby record. Anyway, I said to myself, that if I was ever listening to a song, and it appeared in the collection of records / CDs I was browsing at the time, then I’d buy it.

In all of the times I’ve been down the flea market with music playing, it’s never once happened. This time, it happened twice. Maybe I’ve just had obscure music playing in the past.

Just as the opening drum beat of “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones started, I pulled out a CD entitled “The Sounds of the Suburbs”, and indeed,Teenage Kicks was on there. Therefore I bought it… it only cost me 50p. I’ve wanted this CD for ages anyway, as the cover contains a nice image of a concrete lamp post. I remember seeing it advertised way back in 1992.

I was flicking through a box of singles, whilst listening to “68 Guns” by the Alarm. Guess what appeared in the pile? Yes, that very song. I couldn’t go back on my “word” so bought it, along with another pile of records. Due to the current state of my computer equipment, I’ve played neither the CD or record, but more on that later.

I also bought some clothes pegs while I was there. I bet you really wanted to know that too.

At this point, I entered the town centre itself. Normally my first purchase would be the corned beef pasty from Greggs, but they have put their prices up again. From 73p, to 75p. Considering they have 3 stores in the shopping centre alone, they obviously can do without my trade, so I thought I’d take my business to one of the alternate bakeries.

This was a big mistake.

I bought some sausage rolls. I thought I’d get them in bulk, and take a couple home for my dad. This was a big mistake, as they were rank. Firstly, all 4 sausage rolls got put into the same bag, which instantly turned translucent from the grease. This meant it would be impossible for me to eat just one in the “half in the bag” tradition, without the other ones falling out.

I had to go to the poundshop and purchase something, just so I had a carrier bag to carry these home in.

With my sausage rolls slowly degrading, I hopped on the bus home, and returned back to Mercuryvapour Towers, clutching my belongings.

I got home, and inspected the sausage rolls. The bag was entirely translucent at this point, and the grease had seeped through into the base of the carrier bag. These were going to be… how you say… different?

I placed them on a plate, and took them into the living room. I had only taken one bite, when the doorbell rang. My camera was here! I’d only been in the house seven minutes! Suddenly, I’d lost all interest in the sausage rolls, and I headed to the door. I grabbed the box, signed for it, and unpacked everything, putting the battery on charge within minutes of it passing the threshold. I’d used one in the past, so I knew what to expect.

OK, so I had two hours to kill while the battery charge. Obviously I couldn’t really do much with it on a flat battery. This is where THE BEAST came into play. Yes, the hedge cutter I’d bought yesterday was going to have its first very public airing. Now, I was used to the old shitty thing we had previously. The old one had the cutting power of… something very blunt. I was expecting something similar from this one. I plugged it in, and off we went. Oh, my, it was like a knife through hot butter. The old one kept jamming at the single thought of a slightly tough twig. This one just ate them. It even came with the interesting smell of burning components! I assumed that this was because it was new, so didn’t really bother. It worked perfectly.

Unfortunately, as the summer is almost officially over, I’ll not get a chance to use it again until next spring. You’d better believe I’ll be counting down the days until I get to break out THE BEAST again. Anyone want their hedge cutting? Only joking.

Soo, after sweeping up the majority of the clippings, I head back into the house to check the status of my camera battery. Just as I approached it, the LED switched from red to green, meaning it was fully charged. Wooooooo! I abandoned the hedge clippings, and returned to the camera.

Daddykins assisted me a great deal, by managing to work out how the hell the neck strap goes on. Eventually, after working out how to fit the lens, I was all ready to go. I was a bit concerned about my memory card. Andrew D had bought a fast-speed one for his. I didn’t, hoping and praying that my range of memory cards would be suitable. Thankfully, I’m happy to report that they are, and all of the cards work fine with the camera, even the 32Mb Kodak MMC card (though it takes 10 times longer to do a low-level format than it does with the other larger cards)

The camera upgrade does mean one important thing. It means that after only 40 minutes of the battery being charged, I was able to take images such as this one…

The only thing I need to purchase now is a tripod. I tried taking some night shots without one, they were abysmal. I also need a remote.

Obviously, I’ll post updates in the next few days

Technorati Tags: canon, eos, flea market, new camera, photo, rank, sausage roll

… but the weather hasn’t.

Yesterday, I bought a hedge trimmer. Sorry, I mean a hedge mauler. It’s huge, comes complete with a yellow mains cable, and, as long as the weather keeps dry, will make a whole lot of difference to the garden.

My camera may also change.

Technorati Tags: garden, hedge trimmer

Well, it’s only a few days to go now until my holiday. It’s weird. It doesn’t feel like it! Anyway, I did my shopping, or at least part of it, in preparation for the big week in Paris.

This also included getting another “Holiday Shirt”. You may remember last year’s rather surprising effort. It looked like something growing out of a cannabis patch.

Unfortunately, I appear to have lost that shirt. It must have been thrown away in the great clothing purge of 2007. Secretly, I mourn its passing. Some of the best photos of me taken on holiday were taken with me in that shirt. In fact, the majority of photos were taken with me in that shirt, due to my accident with an entire bottle of Lynx shower gel. I’ll not be making that mistake again.

You’d think it it wasn’t possible to purchase a shirt as bad as that again. Think again…

Now that’s what I call a shit shirt. Expect to see me in it. A lot.

Technorati Tags: bright, crap, holiday, rubbish, shirt

Aftr the disappointment of my old laptop spontaneously combusting, I did indeed rush out, and hammer my credit card, and now have a shiny new laptop, to replace the posthumously named “Carrie”. It shall appear, on my nextwork as “Carrie-2″. Oh, how imaginitive. Of course, if you’ve visited my flickr, or are on my friends list, you’d know that…

The specs are much better than the original machine. AMD Turion, 2Gb RAM, 160Gb HDD and ATI Radeon X1200, presumably the laptop version.

We ended up rushing through to PC World on Tuesday, in order to pick one up. The model I originally opted for happened to be out of stock (typical), so I ended up getting one a little more expensive, but with better specs

Setting it up seemed to take for ever. Although it came “preinstalled”, it still took around an hour for Windows Vista to configure itself. It then took about another half an hour to manually reconfigure the look of Vista so it doesn’t look shiny.

You may have remembered my informative guide to Windows Vista back in February. I’m not quite sure whether my opinion has changed. Obviously, I’ve had the chance to use it a bit more in-depth now, but I don’t think there’s any great advantage over Windows XP SP2. As I mentioned earlier, I switched off as much of the processor-wasting eye candy as I could find, and this improved it greatly. I always believe that operating systems should be functional, and not try to be too pretty. Those split-seconds where windows fade in and out all add up, and as I’m no more than three weeks away from my 28th birthday, I don’t exactly have time to waste. (says he, who is up at 10AM, writing a blog entry)

The next step was to get rid of all of the installed crap. There was some photo uploader rubbish, which allowed you to turn photos into books… pointless. There was also a trial of Office, and Works. Both of them entirely useless, and uninstalled without opening them. I don’t know whether I’ll bother putting any type of office app on there, bit if I do, I’ll just stick with Open Office. It does anything I want from an office package.

Oh, and I managed to get all of the data from the old laptop, but not without a performance. On Monday night, I ordered a hard drive caddy from ebay. It arrived Wednesday morning. I was a little suspicious about the build quality of said device - there was absolutely no quality to the unit whatsoever. Flimsy metal construction, with a little bit of circuit board at one end. Still, it only had to last until I’d copied the important parts of the HDD over.

I was about to format it, when I realised it had totally omitted my old user directory, as, on this new system, I wasn’t the “owner”. This is obviously where all of the “important” stuff is kept, so I have to make sure this was copied over,. Somehow I’d managed to fight through the confusing and contradictory security errors to copy everything that was needed.

That’s a picture (noooo, really?) of it, connected up to the laptop. What can’t be seen is that it also takes 2 USB ports, one for power, and one for data. That blue LED is also stupidly bright.

What is it, and the current surge in popularity of the blue LED? Why is it, that almost every appliance since the PS2 needs to have at least one of them? They looked cool when they first came out, but now they’re just overused. Sigh. The DVD player downstairs has two blue LEDs, the laptop has about 6, both of my proper external hard drives have blue LEDs in them, my card reader has one just as bright,and equally as annoying, expecially in a dark room. Windowcam3 also has a blue LED case fan. Grrr. I don’t like them much anymore.

Oh, and on Tuesday night, the first houses in Raby Road and York Road erected their Xmas decorations. Not the same houses as last year, as they’re now boarded up, presumably awaiting demolition.

Well, I’m off to bed now, to catch some much needed Z’s before work in 9 hours.

Technorati Tags: blue LED, caddy, carrie, hard drives, laptop, new, pc world, raby road, vista, windows, xmas decorations

Well, OK, strictly the title isn’t true, it’s still in eistence but it is no longer in our possession. At approximately 14:31:19, on the 10th of Spetember 2007 (give for take a few seconds, after all, I did say approximately.), it was picked up by the dealership, and driven away, never to be witnessed ever again by my eyes…

This was my last view of it, as it disappears out of sight, behind the neighbours van. The red and white trade plates disappearing off into the distance, taking the rest of the car with it. Sob. It’s a sad day, I’m missing it already.

Now, of course, there’s the replacement, which hasn’t arrived yet, and haven’t even seen. We will get that later today. Hopefully.

Anyway. Enough about the car for now, despite the fact I’m excited about it.

This weekend, I have been mostly tidying. Yes, I’ve been through one of my phases where everything gets sorted, I end up filling the best part of a wheelie bin with rubbish, everything else goes into a box or bag. I suppose it’s because of the memory card incident the other night, which eventually turned up, but I also personally like to a little bit of “life laundry” now and then. I’m a hoarder, and anyone who’s been within Mercuryvapour Towers will know this. Life Laundry are those brief periods, where I think “do I really need any of this shit?” before getting rid of it, and slinging it in the wheelie bin. Something which was also needed was a good old desk tidy, was my desk…

You can actually use it now. You can put things down on it without having to search for it 30 seconds later, because a pile of something has toppled over. It is no longer a health hazard. The stale, sticky beer has been mopped / scraped up, and I no longer have coins stuck to the desk. All good.

Another bonus is that I found about £3 in loose change, both on the floor and on my desk. Some of which went to buying a Cornetto from Barbaras later in the day. Lovely.

Also, a little bit of computer talk too. I’ve cleared off my hard drive, and moved a load of stuff onto an external drive - these are things like unfinished “projects” - the masters of my vlogs, etc. will live on there for now on - things which take a lot of hard drive space, which could be used for better things. It’s also the first time I’ve moved the original “Queens Demolition” video file from my main hard drive since I recorded it 2 years ago. I think I can class that project as dead. Maybe I’ll edit it, split it up and put it on YouTube. There’s nothing like a good demolition to get the hits rolling in. The only person, however, who was really interested in seeing it was Wayne, and just, like before, he disappeared off the face of the earth in January, this time, probably for ever. It’s a sad way for something like that to end, but the whole thing smacked of inevitibility.

Um, that was a rather random, rambling change of subject. Just for a bit of funsies, I’ve hooked up both of my external drives, and I now have 909Gb accessible to this machine. That’s-a-spicy-meatball. If you ask me how much of it is backed up, however, I will turn away and whistle, or pretend I speak foreign, or something.

EDIT: The reason it was driven away, £100 trade-in for it. Just in case anyone queries why.

Technorati Tags: cavalier, clean, desk, old car, tidy, vauxhall