For those of you who see me as a bit of a miser, someone who would drop a penny and have it hit me on the back of the head, you’d be surprised to learn that I’ve spent a “considerable” amount of money over the last couple of days. Plans were made a couple of weeks ago, by Dick Brown, to go out on the lash on Thursday, 3rd March. This involved also getting me some new clobber. I’m not the most fashionable of people. If it’s not folded up on a shelf in Matalan / Primark, I just don’t bother with it. I’m too old to be “trendy”. Mr. Brown offered to meet me the day before, and offer me his infinite wisdom when it comes to all things fashion…

I could hardly wait. Jamie S came to the rescue, and announced that he was going to the Metro Centre with another one of my “work colleagues”, Davvi, and that we were more than happy to tag along. I think my exact words were “Woohoo!”

Everything was arranged, including the times to get picked up, even down to the budget I was willing to spend. I had a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Brown was going to drop out, so I dropped some bait on Twitter after I’d gotten in from work…

Waiting for @thedickbrown a.k.a. Gok Brown to work his designer magic. 6:29 AM Mar 2nd via web

Sure enough, when it came to getting picked up at approximately 1PM, I was broken the ‘bad’ news, that he had indeed dropped out….

On a scale of 1-10, @thedickbrown is a pussy. 1:12 PM Mar 2nd via TweetDeck

I’d like to say I was surprised. I really wasn’t. That means, there were three of us left. Me, Jamie S and Davvi. Therefore, we left Hartlepool, sans Barney-Rubble-With-A-Beard, and headed up the A19/A1 to the CENTRE OF METROS!

So, there we were. In the North East’s largest shopping centre, ready to buy clothes for the night out of awseomeness arranged by Dick Brown. Where was our first stop? Yes, you’re entirely correct – a record shop named “That’s Entertainment”. And I’ll tell you something, it’s absolutely superb. It’s where all of the old CDs go to die. Nowhere else on this planet has a shelf full of “The Awards 1989″. I’m quite sure it’s the first time I’ve ever walked into a shop and almost lost the entire contents of a testicle. Needless to say I spent ~£25, and walked out with a bag of CDs that would weigh me down for the rest of the day. I didn’t even touch the DVD section.

The time I spent in there was disputed. Jamie S claims I spent an hour in there. I reckon it was shorter, as I would have spent a hell of a lot more.

The clothes shopping began, and I entered shops I normally wouldn’t dream of going into. The reason for this, was every pricetag appeared to be 10 times more than I was willing to pay. Take the jeans for example. Maybe I’m missing a trick, or just not getting the joke, but why buy “distressed” jeans? As in the ones purposely ripped / faded? The more I try to get my head around it, the more I think that they’re so scruffy, I couldn’t even wear them to work. Why would I want to spend £80 on them? I’ve got jeans that I wouldn’t even leave out for the poly-bag

An amusing episode occured in Foot Locker. Jamie S saw some shoes. They weren’t bad to be honest. Black and yellow “Penguin” things. He goes off to the counter… and after a hell of a lot of rummaging, it turned out they only had the left shoe in stock. Oh, my *sides*. I must admit, that’s happened to me before in shoe shops, but it still remains a mystery how / why it can happen.

After many hours of shopping, all three of us were hungry and dehydrated. Unfortunately, my suggestion of heading to the indian restaurant (which I didn’t know existed, until I smelt it, and instantly lost the contents of my other testicle) was rejected, meaning we had to go to a “normal” place. I’d heard good things about Frankie + Benny’s, as in nice food. Unfortunately, nobody told me about the price.

The beer was £3.10 a glass. I’m not sure if this is a record for what I’d paid, but I wasn’t too bothered. You’re in the middle of a shopping centre. I just wanted my throat wetting. The cost of the starters / main course were reasonable, I suppose, but the mistake *I* made was when the waiter asked… “Would you like some onion rings?” The room fell silent. I’m sure there were people gesturing me to say ‘no’ on other tables, but I must have interpreted it as a bout of wind. Surely they were complimental. I can’t think of anything cheaper to make. Yes, I ordered the onion rings. Some guy, three tables away just shook his head. The look of disappointment on the other two’s faces made me think instantly that something had gone south.

The meal came. I went for the steak, medium, well-done. It arrived, and it was delicious. The onion rings weren’t far behind. there were literally 7 of them. Davvi had one, and found them too spicy. I must admit, after one bite, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately, the bill was next, after we’d gorged ourselves.

I’m not too bothered about everything else, however, the onion rings were… £3.55. No, I’m not shitting you. Three pounds, fifty-five pence. For 7. OK, they were the best onion rings I’d ever had, but that’s not the point. They must have saw me coming. (insert ejaculation joke here).

I didn’t mention that I did actually find some decent clothes in this whole trip. I also found a new jacket, and £3 Primark plimmies to top off the look. It can’t have all been expensive…

Something that happened before I went to Blackpool was the installation of an “upgraded facility”. Regular viewers will remember that Mercuryvapour Towers boasts two toilets, however, the downstairs bog has been pretty much out of order since the 90s. It “worked”, but had to be flushed by the use of a bucket, as the cistern had completely gave in, and had to be sealed off. Fast forward to Winter 2011, and swollen pipes.

Now, as you can gather, the mention of toilets and swollen pipes usually means that I’ve had a rather vicious vindaloo the previous evening. Fortunately, this was not the case, however, the destruction was equally as bad, causing an entire toilet to be “written off”. The previously sealed pipes delivering water to the cistern froze, and split, causing a water leak, all over the concrete floor of the toilet, meaning the off-shot was little more than a large rectangular puddle. Grrr.

Several attempts were made to stem the flow of Hydrogen Dioxide, sadly, none of them came to fruition, and before you could say “Noah’s Ark”, Daddykins was on the phone booking a plumber. I assumed he was just going to get someone out to repair the broken pipe. This wasn’t the case, however, as he’d also ordered a new toilet to be fitted. Hurrah! I’d hinted that an extra working bog would be beneficial, after the “Lidl” incident several months ago. If you don’t know what this is, think yourselves lucky, all I’ll say is that “backups are important”…

I suppose you’d want to see what it looks like….

I’m not going to excuse the colour of the walls, or the flaking paint. This “room” has been unused since the mid 1990s. Repainting the walls and laying a carpet in there would be completely pointless. The only reason I’ve posted the photo is to show ‘Chad’, our resident troll (who oddly maintains silence in any blog post I mention him in), that the spirit of the Bangermobile is still alive and kicking.

Either way, I wasn’t around for the bog fitting. I had just finished work, and therefore went to bed. I do know, however, the plumber got soaked suring the fitting, as the main water valve couldn’t be turned off for whatever reason.

It cost a lot less than I was expecting, and now we have two shitters. This is good news, should we ever expect guests. I can stink out the off-shot as much as I like. Nobody would ever want to go into the back garden!

I was generating some thumbnails for the gallery, when all of a sudden, it became unresponsive. The power light was on, nothing else was. A sure sign of overheating. I removed the power cable, powered it back on, and watched the CPU fan. It went at about 3RPM whilst making some ongodly scratching sound. It was dead. I’m awaiting a replacement heatsink/fan from the good folks at ebuyer. I’m a bit upset that my attempts to temorarily move the server software to another machine resulted in failure. That might be one thing I sort before I bring the whole thing back online. The server software is a bit of a mess!

Right, moving on. I’ve really not got much that I can type about. Most of the time when I’ve been in the house, has been playing some of the games that Steam have had on offer over the past couple of weeks. Therefore, not that anyone cares, but here’s a quick run down of some of the shit I’ve purchased…

Peggle Complete Pack 6.99 GBP

Yeah, Peggle.

I originally discovered this at work, when it was downloaded as a demo on the works PS3. I played it until I completed it, which took me all of 10 minutes, as the PS3 demo is very short. It was available for the PSP too, and after Kris at work purchased it, it became a bit of an urban legend after he posted this on facebook…

… with “Peggle on the toilet” becoming a short-lived catchphrase for those who also liked the game.

The “Peggle” phenomenon wore off, until the recent sale on Steam, where I purchased both versions of Peggle (original and “Nights”), then posted this on FB…

Admittedly, I have yet to take my laptop into the toilet and enjoy a nice steamy peggle, but at least the opportunity is there…

Puzzle Kingdoms 0.80 GBP

80p well spent. Saying that, the game doesn’t need a storyline. Expect me to know the puzzles are going to get harder as I play though the game. Like Peggle, this game works on my laptop.

Super Laser Racer 0.75 GBP

Glad this was only 75p, because this wasn’t 75p well spent. I don’t enjoy this game at all, despite some of the music coming from the Amiga music legend that is Bjorn Lynne. The music is by far the best part, as the gameplay is incredibly basic.

Shatter 1.75 GBP

Talking about good music, the soundtrack to this one is jizz-tastic. The game iself is simply Arkanoid on acid (or, Batty on acid for those who remember this awesome Spectrum game). It’s very easy, however, with extra lives being thrown out at regular opportunities. But, back to the music. I love it. The soundtrack is apparently available for almost 10 times the cost I paid for the game. As much as I love it, I’ll not bother.

FlatOut Ultimate Carnage (ROW) 1.70 GBP

I loved the Burnout franchise on the original Xbox. This game appears to be an xbox game , converted to PC, simply so they could show off some odd ragdoll physics engine that the manufacturers wanted to sell. Each level contains several thousand objects that can be knocked flying, though you do have to raise one eyebrow when a fence you make contact with can go the same distance as a water tank. The ragdoll physics enginemakes you raise another eyebrow as several mini-games cause you to fire the driver out of the car windscreen and control the flailing corpse in such tasks as hitting a wire mesh fence as high as you can, knock down as many skittles as you can, and skim the dead body across a swimming pool as if you’re skimming a stone across a pond.

The music is an absolute abomination, presumably from several shit indie bands. I think there’s about 5 tracks, all sound exactly the same as the last. You apparently can’t change the music. After the sale, this has gone back up to £16.99. Despite all of this, I have enjoyed playing it, but it’s not even woth close to full price. Wait until it comes back on a sale.

EDIT (SEVERAL WEEKS LATER): Good news everyone! Turns out you can delete all of the music files – just browse to…

\steamapps\common\flatout ultimate carnage\data\music

and you can delete all of the files in there. You’ll still get the game of which tune is meant to be playing, but obviously, you get no music! Oddly, the files are simple .ogg files, so I was hoping it might support custom .ogg files, but after creating a couple, it didn’t seem to recognise them. This game is also infinitely more enjoyable with a gamepad.

You can return to looking now.

Oh, OK. For those who didn’t see it on facebook…

That is all.

Notice how the car in the shot appears to be skewed. That’s because some cheaper cameras, like the one in my phone, don’t take a photo immediately you click the button, they instead “scan” the image and actually take a photo one line of pixels at a time over a few milliseconds, meaning that if you (or the object you’re taking a photo of) are moving, then the image can become oddly distorted like that.

One thing I mentioned to include in my previous post, but… erm, forgot, is that my Canon A480 camera doesn’t have any trace of this “rolling shutter” phenomenon. I’m sure you’re looking at the screen, wondering what the hell I’m on about. Here’s an interesting article which I’m sure I’ve linked to before.

That is all.

Both of my regular viewers can’t have failed to ntice that I’ve been blogging more and more about the slow demise of my trusty little Acer camera – the pocket-sized photomaker that has travelled with me everywhere in the last 5 or so years.

After much umming and ahhing, I decided to upgrade to a Canon Pwershot A480 (and thanks to regular commeter Marko for spotting it £20 cheaper than what I was originally going to pay).

It was reserved from the Argos website Wednesday night, and picked up on Thursday morning, and it was a lot easier than I imagined. I’ve stayed away from Argos for buying stuff, mainly because I didn’t like their “check-in” system – I’ve been there in the past to buy something, only to find when I got there, it was out of stock. Obviously, this has happened with many other things, in many other stores over the years, but it seems a lot more of a piss-take when you visit a shop, type the product you want into a computer, only to find that “Computer Says No”…

I was happy to find that they have some type of “reserve” option on their site, so you can reserve items, visit the local store and then pay for the item when you get there. Many places probably do this, but it’s the first time I’ve ever used such a system. As much as I love technology, I absolutely despise “self service” checkouts, to the point where I refuse to use them.

I arrived, just after 9AM to find that the shop was empty, meaning that I was able to… *shudder*… use the “self service” checkout, pay for it via a card, pick it up and walk out in under a minute. The trip to the town was probably the quickest I’ve had, with only a stop off at Home Bargains to pick up some cheap cans of coke, before I headed to the bus stop.

It’s the first time I’ve bought a camera from an actual shop, so to celebrate this fact, I wanted to make a video of its arrival.

I’m all for a bit of bandwagon jumping, so I thought it would be a bit interesting to create an “unboxing” video. Normally, these are for expensive “Squee! I got one!” products like a new version of the applezPhone or the uPad, but as I don’t actually have one to unbox, you’ll have to make do with a “Cheaply priced camera from Argos”…

I do apologise for the fart. I don’t really.

I’m pretty impressed with the camera so far, even though I’ve not had chance to make use of it properly. Thursday was the first day back to work for me, so although I’ve had a little play, I’ve not looked at it properly. The first image taken was this…

… which was taken during the recording of the unboxing video. I’m not going to create a gallery about my test shots like I did with the Acer, instead I’m going to leave that up to Flickr. Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t write a bit of a review about it.

One thing I already love about the video is the macro mode, it’s certainly impressive. This close-up of a hawthorn flower should show you what I mean…

Obviously, the 500px version there isn’t up to much. Click it, view it as original, etc. It’s stunning. The detail of the droplets, small cobwebs, etc, is something that my full-size Canon can’t accomplish with its stock lens. The other macro photos in that set also show off the strength of the camera.

I couldn’t actually believe it was happening. A DIY project between me, Daddykins, several pencils and a hacksaw. Things were bound to go horribly wrong.

I’ll be honest. the only thing that went wrong was the laptop. I’d set it up, with the webcam, to take a timelapse of the goings on from the comfort of my window. Unfortunately, the camera gave up the ghost after about an hour.

Between 3PM and 7PM, we had successfully constructed a door.

Please excuse how I look. I was knackered (Daddykins did the measurements, I did all of the manual labour), but that is a complete door. I’ve not felt pride like that for a long time, and I’ve not enjoyed actually doing anything like that for a good few years.

Amazingly, the door survived the night, and the next day came the completion of the door frame. I got to use the mallet (and a screwdriver) to knock out the old rotten wood. The job didn’t last long, as the wood was considerably more rotten than it looked. So were the nails. Rusty, rusty nails.

I avoided the tetanous-needing nails, and moved onto the woodstain. I have never had a good relationship with paintbrushes, as anyone who has seen the Mercuryvapour Office Space can testify. I gave up painiting the doors in this particular room the moment I realised I couldn’t actually reach the top of the door without needing a chair. For six years, this painting project has remained incomplete, and considering the fumes from the gloss paint turns my chest into some kind of pulmonary alveolus graveyard. Luckily, the fumes from this soupy-looking product didn’t bother me. In fact, it looked a bit too much like a can of tomato soup…

I managed to complete the task, with minimal damage to my clothes, and the door was properly stained. This, unfortunately, gave me another chance to pose in front of the camera

There are so many things wrong with this picture. My awful pose was worse than the last one (though my man-tits are less prominent), I’m wearing a baseball cap (I never wear headgear as a rule, but I really didn’t fancy an incinerated scalp), and you can see the partial mess I’d left behind. At least the door was an impressive shade of “red”. Well, saying that, my neck was redder, but you’re not seeing a photo of that.

2010-05-18 11:34:10: Started walk

After going to bed at 7, and waking up at 9:30, thanks to Daddykins on his rig, and me not turning my speakers off, I thought I’d get up and make use of the day. I demolished some oven chips whilst watching Homes Under the Hammer. The sun was cracking the pavements, so I thought I’d walk off the chips, along with the night before’s kebab wrap.

As you can probably gather, I left the house at that time, and headed along the coast road and up “Hart Road” towards Hart Village.

2010-05-18 12:09:10: Mmm, farmy

This tweet referred to the overpowering stench of shit that filled the patch between Clavering and Hart Village. It was a hot spring day, and the smell of some nearby horses wafted around the place.

Oddly, this was my last tweet of the walk. Instead, I had to work out where I was going to go once I’d reached Hart Village. I could head home, or I could risk crossing three lanes of traffic, and head off to photograph the nearby turbines. Despite them being there for many years now, I’d never actually been near them.

Thanks to Google Streetview, I knew that the journey would be pretty uneventful, except for the afore-mentioned road crossing. I headed up the road that would take me towards the turbine, only to be infiltrated by the locals….

Next stop was the road I feared. I almost felt like King Canute, as when I got to the road, it was entirely empty, and I could quite happily stroll across the carriageway without fear of getting squashed.

I was happy to find that when I got there, the field the turbine was in, was growing oil seed rape, meaning that it gave everything a lovely yellow colour…

The walk back seemed to take for ever. I’d slightly misjudged just how far it was from Mercuryvapour Towers. Turns out, it’s a 5-mile round trip. I think I can safely say I neutralised those chips.

The rest of the day was spent in bed after watching some telly. Daddykins commented about repairing “the door”. For anyone lucky enough to have received a guided tour around Mercuryvapour Towers, you’ll know that the “games room” has had its back door hanging off for several years after a storm snapped it in half. I’d be interested to see if this would come to fruition.

2010-05-19 09:06:28: Off to the flea market. There is a strong smell of rapeseed in the air.

Well, I can’t keep away from the flea market, as much as I try. After waking up stupidly early on Wednesday (5AM), I headed off to the market of fleas. I’d spent the previoous hours changing the music on my phone. I realised, mere minutes into the walk, however, that I should have avoided “Now 40″, as my ears bled along to the sound of Steps.

The walk took me along the scenic vistas of Raby Road, along York Road, and then to the flea market. CDs were purchased, so were records. I couldn’t help myself. I have bought some cheese in the past, but this is pure, ripe Stilton of the highest order…

It cost me 50p, and to be honest, after playing it, I like it a lot more than I thought I was going to. Clare Torry is (only) known for Pink Floyd’s track “Great Gig in the Sky”. Apparently, everyone who purchased her album from Amazon bought it on the strength of that Pink Floyd track.

2010-05-19 09:48:51: On bus home. Flea market poor

On the way home, Daddykins texted me asking if I had my keys. Without a single hint of sarcasm (that was sarcasm, if you couldn’t tell), I replied “Yes. Let me know if you still want to attempt door this afternoon”. Imagine my shock and horror as, at 1PM, we actually went on the search for some wood. Or, at least, some material that a door could be constructed of.

Imagine my horror when these materials were actually purchased…

We were about to attempt DIY on a scale never attemped before in the ground of Mercuryvapour Towers…

EDIT: Fixed webcam photo as it was broked.

While I remember on, unfortunately, it’s bad news for the webcam on this site, I’m afraid. You may remember that it used to catalogue my entire life for many years. Unfortunately, since I have now upgraded to Windows 7, my Logitech Quickcam 4000 simply will not function on it, which means even though it’s not actually done so for many years, it’s never going to return. And considering that I rarely use this site now for anything remotely “recent”, I can’t see me investing in a Windows 7 compatible model. It’s a bit of a shame. I always trusted Logitech and their “futureproofing”. Unfortunately, it seems that I was wrong to do so. I can’t even get the driver to begin installation, although I did get the “setup” screen by changing a command in the setup.ini file.

While I’m geeking about computers, I might as well make a mention of the newest hard drive in my 1TB commection. I have 4 drives at 1TB. 2 internal ones in daily use, and 2 external ones to back up the internal ones. Buying a new drive was an easy decision for me to make, especially as someone I know lost pretty much his entire life when his hard drive died in his laptop. The trip to Maplin also involved the first trip to the store formally known as the Euro Trade Warehouse, now called usave. Those of you who followed the blog before the mass purge earlier this year will remember some of the classic things that has been purchased by the Percivals, such as the radio toilet roll holder…

You’ll not be surprised to find this still gets regular use, as a toilet roll holder, clock, and radio when somebody is in the bath. Altogether, this was a worthwhile purchase, and one that we have had for over 6 years now. This means, however, that the plastic’s started to turn yellow, which means it doesn’t look as fresh as it once did…

Anyway, back to the other days’ Euro Trade Warehouse usave purchases. I didn’t get that much, to be honest. Instead of coming out with a black binbag full of tat, I came out with a few huge crates to store my tat in, for you see, next week will see the 2010 edition of “Life Laundry”, where I go through the stuff which I’ve hoarded over the years, and bin as much of it as humanly possible. I’ve got plenty of stuff to chose from, and after only an hour at it, I already had a load of stuff landfill-bound. There’s also the fun prospect of actually cataloguing what I’ve got, and which box it’s in for future reference, should I actually need any of it again.

One thing I did avoid buying in Euro Trade Warehouse usave, were these “specialist” knives…

Oh, and while I remember, yes, yes, I know I haven’t updated much. That beast of a thing called “a life” is keeping me away from the computer. You may find I’m a little silent on everything at the moment, even flickr. In fact, that image you see above is only the 6th image (5th photo) I’ve published on there in 2010. In fact, let me know you a little league table of what I’ve done over the years. Here’s a quick rundown on previous years stats…

Jan/Feb 2007, 176 photos.
Jan/Feb 2008, 612.
Jan/Feb 2009, 68.
Jan/Feb 2010, 5.

I blame the weather, I really do.

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.

After an absolute shocker of a day on Monday, I returned home, full of the joys of death, expecting for it not to arrive. The day had gone so wrongbefore then, that I wouldn’t bet on smethng like that not happening. OK, that sentence is barely english, but that’s the best you’re going to get.

Apologies if there are any missing letters in this post. I have just invested in a new wireless keyboard, which actually doesn’t seem to be very good at being wireless.

So, anyway. The morning. I was home, and decided to watch the grand prix I’d recorded from Sunday. I’d done a great job at keeping away from finding the result, meaning that I was able towatch a pre-recorded race and not know who’ won. That doesn’t happen very often.

I tidied a bit, and ate 2 packets of Asda’s Onion bhajis. They’re nice, but I seem to have got into the habit of overcooking them, meaning that I spend more time picking the black bits off than I do actually eating them. During the tidying, a large white van reversed up the long, sweeping gravel driveway leading towards Mercuryvapour Towers.

The delivery guy disappeared into the back of the van, and emerged clutching a large, square box, wrapped in plastic.

Excitedly, I rushed to the door…

“Is this… mercy vapour towers?”
I reply. “It’s pronounced MERCURY VAPOUR. You know, as in the type of lightbulb?”
He looked at me quizically, before handing me the package, and shoving one of those delivery recorder things in my face

“Sign this”.

Reluctantly, I signed. Tsk. Some fuckers will stop at nothing for an autograph.

So, there I had it. My first dartboard in 16 years. Lovely. I unwrapped the package, and was presented with… er, a dartboard. And some darts, which I’d also ordered seeing as my previous ones had gone walkabout.

I could hardly contain my excitement, as I stood it up on the sofa, and began throwing the afore-mentioned sharp objects at it. Obviously, the back of the sofa is not the exact professional height for a dartboard, so I guess you can’t be surprised to learn that the first dart to leave my hand missed the board entirely, and ended up sticking out of the sofa. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

I was also considering using the excuse “Well, that’s because the last time I played Darts was in the Queens. With Coatesy. When he missed my epic final “Round The Clock” shot. Which still haunts me to this day”.

Er, anyway. Within the hour, the board was set up in my prime location, the off-shot.

Unfortunately, I’d misjudged just how small the wash house door is, so the board is a little lower (by about an inch or so) than the tournament standard of 5′ 8″ from bull to floor, and considering the majority of my shots are more than a foot from their intended target, I doubt this is going to cause a problem.

You may also notice that in the picture, the board is “upside down”. This isn’t an error. It just seemed to sit better on its holder that way.

The bull was christened on 11th May 2009, at 11:40AM…

Thrilling stuff.

Some other stuff happened in the day, such as the delivery of a telly, but by mid-afternoon, all I wanted to do was sleep. Throwing 24-gram bits of metal at a circular contraption made from painted sisal fibre, complete with steel inserts, manufactured in Kenya, marketed by a company based in Bridgend, becomes tiring after a while.

Now, you might be wondering why I’ve been sat in front of the telly, typing this into the website, when I should be in the off-shot playing the game I so dearly love… the answer is that I’ve actually managed to break one of the darts already! How good is that? I think that’s a new record for breaking stuff immediately, unless you count the time I bought “Mrs Jones” by Counting Crows, from Ebay, and accidentally rolled over the CD with my chair about 4 hours after receiving it…

Back to the damaged dart, it appears I sheared one of the threads on the “stem” of the dart, (the bit holding the flight) meaning that when you throw it, it now simply flops about, usually falling to the floor when the dart hits the board. Gutted.

Therefore, I’d just like to have an official whinge….

“Winmau, why did you include only one set of stems and flights in your darts? You clearly know just how flimsy these parts are, and that your product (or in my case, two products, darts and board) is useless without them. I remember buying a set of darts from you about 10 years ago, and was happy to find at least two sets of stems and about six sets of flights?”

I might officially complain. I probably won’t. I’ve ordered 10 sets of stems and 10 sets of flights from ebay, and they should be coming this morning, meaning that you won’t have to put up with my whinging.

IN OTHER NEWS, I… er… am struggling to think of anything else that’s happened over the last few days. I did go for another works night out on Wednesday. Somehow, for the past 11 years of being able to legally drink, I’d totally missed “The Clarry” as a place to drink. I can’t believe this was possible. Especially as we were shortly in the prescense of an Internet celebrity. Yes, Divvy Sharon walked past our group and asked where the toilets were.

After one in there, we headed about 2 doors away, to the Jacksons Arms, which has an awesome jukebox. Wednesday was the very first ever time I’d played “The Way it Is” by Bruce Hornsby And the Range on a jukebox. It felt odd watching people going about their business playing darts, etc. whilst listening to songs I wanted to hear.

I returned home, and hammered the dartboard for a bit longer, despite my handicapped dart causing all sorts of problems. Now, all of this talk of darts reminded me that back in 1998, I’d created a spreadsheet that would allow me to calculate a game of “501″, so I could play by myself (oo-er). It was a simple affair, which was created in order to give me a little bit of raw data to learn spreadsheets a little more.

I was amazed to find that I still had it, and that I’d been using Open Office (back then, it was called Star Office) since 1998. I was even happier to find it still actually worked. I’d have expected a 10-year-old file in an obscure format to be unreadable these days. Thankfully not! Since its creation on 11th November 1998, I’ve amassed a total of 60,523 points on it.

What’s surprised me more is just how quickly my brain works the figures out. I could go into the whole reason why I have to do the sums manually at the moment (no room for the laptop being the main reason) but I’d only be boring you with statistics in an otherwise utterly thrilling blog post.

Completely changing the subject, I’m still feeling a litle nauseous, as I have just had to clean the fridge out. Now, this is something that, as a male, I shouldn’t have to do, as it is a woman’s job (baiting for comments… done) , but when there’s a funky smell coming from the fridge, and there’s more out-of-date stuff in there than fresh stuff, it is time to investigate the cause of the exceedingly nasty niff.

After removing the (once green, now yellow-orange) apples from the fridge, and the smell still being present, it was time to investigate a little more. The bag of shortbread pastry mix, with a best before date of Jan 2007 was also ruled out of the equation as it was stil sealed. Suddenly, I looked under where the bag was laid…

BINGO! It turns out that some dairy product, possibly tinned milk, probably “fresh” milk (it was hard to tell), had leaked into one of the salad tray things, and was producing a pungent aroma that the world’s best cheese factories would have been proud of.

I was surprised at its consistency. It was the same colour and texture of scrambled egg. I removed the salad tray, and with the smell becoming stronger and my eyes beginning to sting, decided it was best to dispose of this in an open environment. I took the salad tray into the back garden and threw a bucket of water. I swear, I’m sure I saw the mucky mixture attempting to reform itself on the grass. I’m expecting a knock on the back door any second now, and a little voice asking me to put it back in the fridge, as it was too warm outside.

Next in the series, Jamie attempts to find out where the smell near the toilet is coming from… or maybe not.

Oddly, it’s still “up”, as it responds to pings, and some functionality such as being able to access the files, is working. The webserver itself is also up, as can be seen by the siles I hosted for Wayne the other day. I used that example because of the largeish video files hosted on there, which download perfectly.

It would appear that anything that takes the slightest bit of processing power, such as the webcam, is not working. The webcam, which normally takes a photo every 15 seconds, has taken six pictures since midnight (it’s now 3AM). PHP generated pages do not work, and I can’t connect to MySQL.

VNC doesn’t work either, so I can’t actually see what’s wrong with it. The machine doesn’t have a monitor connected. VNC takes at least 2-3 minutes to login or even ask for a password prompt. Eventually once it goes in, it just shows black, but the mouse pointer is there.

A morning of fun ensues. Sigh.

UPDATE:

It’s the morning. Predictably, I have the computer all set up on the desk, and guess what? It’s working like a charm. The annoying little bastard. I’m editing this particular post on said machine to prove it.

I rebooted it twice this morning. Each time, it worked for a short amount of time, maybe 10 seconds. I was able to open up VNC Viewer, and connect to it, but seconds later, the connection would hand, and I couldn’t reconnect.

I tried a few things which I thought may have been an issue. I restarted the web and database server, thinking that may have caused it to hang, as there’s a particularly large database on there at the moment. Nope. The webserver started instantly, and the database server was up in ~20 seconds.

Now that I have a monitor and keyboard connected, I might take this opportunity to overhaul it, reinstall later versions of the server software, etc. It depends whether I can get connected now that I know the machine is actually functioning as it should.

UPDATE THE SECOND

I’ve gone a bit further with the “upgrade” than originally planned. And I think I need counselling.

After installing the SATA drivers for this machine, I received messages that there was no SATA drive connected. How could this be? I heard it spin up. I couldn’t think of ANY reason why the drive wouldn’t be connected.

The SATA cable was dangling in front of the monitor, not plugged into the motherboard. I’m going senile.

UPDATE THE TURD

This is my last update on this post, and I can confirm a few things. Firstly, my senility thankfully wasn’t as bad as I made out. It turns out that even though the drive was disconnected from the motherboard, it didn’t actually power up anyway. The drive is fine, as I’d taken it from Beastbits. It was the only SATA drive I had to hand with a molex connector. I have yet to test whether it’s a fault with the drive as I just use the SATA power connector on here. It could explain why I had issues in the past with SATA drives on that machine, thinking it was just a Win2000 thing. I never actually thought to check to see if the machines were detected in the BIOS. Whoops.

Secondly, the machine is back up and running completely, and sadly, it’s one of those things which will never be solved. As expected, after its trip onto “the bench”, everything worked like a dream. I’ll just catalogue the bollocks I tried just in case it makes a difference.

Updated TightVNC server to the latest version. I doubt this helped, as the machine has been running for four years with the same version with no issue.

DROPped several backup databases, including one with a ~1Gb table in it. I doubt this was causing an actual problem, however, as I manually start the SQL server whever I reboot the machine. I can’t think of a reason why this would cause a problem during bootup.

Defragged. Come on, this never fixed anything, but I did it anyway. Expecially on a machine with 5Gb used out of 60Gb. Admittedly, this went down to 3.something after I dropped those databases.

Basically, I can only put it down to the fact that the machine wanted a change of scenery. There was no logical reason I can think of for its temporary failure.

This is one of those things that will bug me. It’s one of those annoying problems that surfaced for no reason, and will eventually resurface ONLY while I’m pissed. You know, the only reason this problem originally surfaced was because I rebooted the machine after 16 days uptime. OK, it’s not much for a server, but I reboot it every so often because Conquercam stops recording images after 42 days.

Nobody who reads this blog will have constructive feedback on this posting, or any logical ideas of what happened.

Well, as promised, I got up stupidly early to go and witness the opening of the new Lidl store. I awoke, at 7:30, with the sound of my mobile alarm walking me up. I can’t believe I actually bothered to set my alarm for something like this.

After slapping a manky t-shirt and trousers on, and stuffed my mouth full of chewing gum in a vain attempt to hide the stench of last night’s booze, I walked along the road to the Lidl. I’m surprised how quickly they threw it up. Well, not really, as the only bricks used in its contruction would appear to be the ones on the perimeter wall.

I was surprised to find there was a queue outside of approximately 20 people. There were a couple of photographers there, and some kiddies enternailer, who named himself “Magic Steve”. Now, I always say there’s nothing like originality, and that name is nothing like originality. He walked up and down the queue, clutching some type of stuffed animal he named Rocky.

It was a little too high-brow for me, so I just looked away Unfortunately, it means that for the rest of the day, I am going to have the various incarnations of the “Magical Trevor” swimming around my head.

Eventually, after a little announcement, some guy appeared, blabbed about something, and cut the cheesy red ribbon that had been haphazardly placed across the door.

Now, Marko, of #speccy, informed me that they stocked Cherry jaffa cakes. I can’t remember if I mentioned how much I loved them during my massive Paris review last year, but let me tell you, I love cherry jaffa cakes. Therefore, they were one of the first things to go into the trolley.

Now, at this point, I did my good deed for the day, and helped some random old woman get her deep fat fryer into the trolley. I was happy with the amount of stuff they had in there, they even had several different types of curry, which means I shall be attending more than once.

Of course, once I’d gotten home, the first thing I tried was the cherry jaffa cakes. Unfortunately, they are slightly different to the ones I had in Paris. They’re considerably smaller, and there’s less of the cherry filling. But the taste is there, albeit not as strong as the Paris ones.

I have yet to sample the curry. I shall try this at some point where I can string more than three words together. I don’t think I’ve fully woken up yet.

Interestingly, my little £4.99 phrase book doesn’t have the… um… “penis” equivalent…. The dictionary part goes from penicillin, to penknife Ironically, both of these, could cure an infection in the ol’ trouser equipment department, one in a slightly more brutal fashion than the other. So, just in case, does anyone know the german for “My little man is weeping stinky green tears”?

Actually, no, don’t bother.

Moooooooving on rather quickly, I’ll try to change the subject from my holibobs, despite the fact everything I currently think about returns to thinking about it….. sooo, streetlights, then.

Yes, I did witness the removal of some old streetlights not too far away from where I live…

Forgive my shocking ineptitude when it came to taking this image. I had my phone headset on threaded through my t-shirt, and it was just too short for me to hold it at a comfortable angle. The one to the right, on the other side of the road also got taken down.

Oh, yes, I also promised an update on the shirt. Yes, THE shirt. The night I took that picture, I wore it to the club, in the hope to get a reaction. It didn’t take long…. I think I counted about 14 seconds before some random guy, who I believe was called Brian, said something. He was sat in a chair behind me. I had just approached the bar, after entering the club during a particularly heavy rain shower….

Brian: “Is it raining outside??”
Me: “Yeah, just a bit…”
Brian: “I can see that, your cannabis leaves are growing”.

I’d have been rolling around on the floor if it hadn’t been for the fact I’d thought of exactly the same. In fact, in order to emphasise the fact, I was going to show that picture of the shirt next to a picture of a cannabis farm I’d found on Channel 4′s website. But, then they might have done me for copyright, so I never used it….

There’s method in my madness. This shirt is probably going to be the one I wear on the plane (back to the holidays again, sorry), and as I’ve never been in a plane before, I have no idea if I’m going to be airsick or not. But, if I AM airsick, and I miss the bag, it won’t show up on this shirt!

Anyway, this is more than likely going to be my last posting before the holiday. Play nice, feel free to leave comments, though they won’t be authorised until I get back. I intend to have the first internet-free week of my life since 1998.

EDIT: You know, in the previous post, I whinged about the 30p it cost to send a text message to Jth which he will never receive? The other day, my phone accidentally sent 15 blank MMS messages to Coatesy, again at 30p a pop. That’s going to cost me £4.50 when my bill comes in. You know what’s the killer? He didn’t receive any of them either. Grrrrr.