This is more of a test post to make sure everything is up and running. I can’t be arsed with the trouble of posting a countdown pic today. Especially after the beef I had yesterday. Imagine that display below, but showing “12″… impossible, innit.

Today, I will be filling myself full of steak.

(EDIT, before I’ve even published the original post….) Looks like the issues are still ongoing.

That sounds healthy. If the site disappears off the face of the interweb, you’ll know why.

With the help of Google Maps, I’d chosen the location. I remember Ste, from Employment Palace, telling me there was a nice walk in Guisborough, which isn’t too far away. Despite being out the night before, I awoke, fresh as a slightly decaying daisy, reeking of alcohol and vindaloo, complete with an occasional burp which tasted of Jagerbomb. Joy.

Anyway, prior to Gary picking me up, I headed of to Lidl, to pick up some water for the trip. Let me just say that I got as far as the petrol station… in fact I’ll let my Facebook status tell the story…

Andrew D isn’t far wrong – I took a stash of bog roll in the camera bag, just in case!

Gary picked me up, and along with his dog Boris, we headed along the A19, A174, A172, A171, and just a smidgeon of the A173, we arrived. Once thing that was instantly noticeable compared to our other walks, is that spring had definitely sprung. The trees were starting to grow leaves, and the whole area had a much greener hue to it compared to the rest of the walks. The first photos were taken, when Gary discovered a small tunnel. Unfortunately, we didn’t get chance to emulate Jamie S’s epic troll photo as the tunnel was full of flies.

Immediately after this photo was taken, disaster happened. As I was putting the camera back in its bag, it left my grasp a little too soon, and went hurtling to the uneven, gravel-stone ground. Fucking hell. The crunch it made was enough to make me bring a little bit of sick up. “Oh well, the lens could do with an upgrade” was my instant thought. Imagine my surprise when I picked up the camera to find absolutely no damage to the lens glass, or the camera mechanics. Upon closer inspection, there’s a small chunk removed from the lens body, and a small scratch near the shutter button. That’s all. My luck for the month has now been used up.

The walk continued. It was all uphill, but it wasn’t as uphill as the challenge we were about to set ourselves. We reached a junction in the forest paths. While I took photos of daffodils again (oh, come on! they’re only out for a few weeks every year!), Gary looked through the trees, and noticed how close Roseberry Topping was. It was literally half a mile away.

Roseberry Topping is a place I will always hold dear. I’m going to ramble on here, and for that, I don’t apologize. It’s one of my favourite places on this planet. It was always visible when we went to places for days out such as Whitby. It’s the prominent focal point for the whole of Teesside. I seem to remember Cleveland County Council using it in their logo for a years, even though it’s technically in North Yorkshire. Anyway, as a child, being 11 years old, I always remember having a dream about it. being visible from Hartlepool. A few days later, on a walk home from school, I stopped dead in my tracks on the coast road. There it was. Roseberry Topping was indeed visible from Hartlepool. I couldn’t quite believe it.

In January 1992, Daddykins took me and him to climb it. This was 20 years ago, there was no path at the time. There’s a photo somewhere of me, climbing up the side of it, grabbing onto frost-covered ferns for dear life, as we attempted what seemed like the impossible.

Again, there are photos of me and Daddykins at the top of the hill – we made it up there without further incident or injury. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a clear day, so Hartlepool wasn’t visible. On the way home, to give you an idea of how long it was ago, I heard “Twilight Zone” by 2 Unlimited for the first time, and went home to play Bubble Bobble on my Commodore 64.

The next time I climbed it, was with Wayne, and his dad. By this time, it was the summer of 1995, and the pathway to the top had been laid. It was still a bitch to climb. Unfortunately, there’s no photographical document of this walk, but after we’d came back down, we went to see Judge Dredd at the Showcase… my one and only trip to this particular cinema.

Back to the present day, and I left you with me and Gary, stood in the middle of a forest, wondering which way to go. I’d already had a few miles in my legs by then, and I was reluctant to do the Roseberry Topping bit. Gary convinced me it was a good idea. I don’t know how he managed that.

At the bottom, I took a video. It’s pretty clear just how uncertain I was!

Oddly, I arrived at the top, and my exact thoughts were “Woah… was that it?” I think, the only difference between my previous trips up Roseberry Topping and this one, was the fact I’d notuched up 55 miles of walking in the previous month, and I had a bottle of water. I’d hazard a guess that they both helped.

I almost lost the contents of a testicle when I noticed I could see Hartlepool, and could easily make out Steetley Chimney with the naked eye. The image below is a cropped image, but the original can be found here

It would have been more prominent if the buildings attached to it weren’t demolished several years ago.

We reached the top, and made contact with an elderly couple who had also made it to the top. Apparently, they make the trip to Roseberry Topping every hear for his birthday. He was 83, and she was 80. Bloody hell. If I look a day older than them when I’m their age, then these walks have done their job. They walk all over the local area, and even gave me a couple of ideas for future walks. As they were about to leave, they asked me to take a photo for them on their camera. They were even apologetic over it. I hope I convinced them that I really, really didn’t mind at all!

OK, so there needs to be some evidence that we made it up there, hence the title of this posting. Glen posted the “pics or it didn’t happen” comment, on my previous posting, as he knows for a fact, I don’t go anywhere these days without some type of digital picture recording device

So, there’s me cared for… as for Gary and Boris… You’d think they were waiting from a lift from a nearby plane…

Something visible from the top of Roseberry Topping is a structure. I have no idea what it is, or what its purpose is…

It was enough of a mystery for me to want to go down and investigate it. Thankfully, Roseberry Topping has several paths leading from its top to its base, and one of them leads you along this path. In fact, it’s the main path to continue if you don’t fancy attempting the big hill. Along the way, we found, of all things, a discarded lightbulb. Gary suggested that it would be a good idea to move it from the beaten path, to somewhere a little more safer. Although a perfectly acceptable idea, it meant that I ended up carrying it for about half a mile before dispensing it in the afore-mentioned little buildong…

Neither the walk over there, nor the photos clear up the mystery of this strange little building in the middle of nowhere. It’s either a folly, or some type of hunter’s refuge from years ago, if things suddenly turned shite.

The three of us (including the dog) didn’t fancy going back the way we came, as we’d have to complete the bottom third of Roseberry topping again, therefore we took a chance, and headed through what we think was private land. There were no signposts, and the gates were opened by hand, so if the landowner happens to view the endomondo link at the end of this post, and notices we trespassed, I’m sure the lord’s prayer has something about forgiving trespassing ‘n’ shit. I didn’t eat any of your crops, though if you get a ladybird infestation, this could be the reason why…

It’s rare enough in 2011, to see ladybirds. It’s even rarer to actually see them “doing it”. Therefore, this video should be considered ultra rare I would have considered doing a voiceover / soundtrack featuring 70′s porno music, but as we were probably on private land, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.

We rejoined a path. Thankfully, it was the correct one. It led us back through the forest, and after a detour following an obstacle course which we both avoided, we arrived back at the car park.

It seems a perfect opportunity to post the Endomondo link, therefore…

Does the link work?

If it doesn’t, I’m not going to apologise, it’s not my fault. I can’t change the privacy on my walks at the moment, because whatever scripting they’re using to show the buttons, has died, so I can’t change my default view. Whoops. Gary’s calculation also left something be be desired. I’m not sure why, but it showed us in several fields. My link is much more accurate, yet I have no idea why. There’s an obvious alien invasion about to take place.

The last paragraph in this post saw me ripped off, and it was entirely my own fault. On the way home from the walk, we pulled into a Tesco service station. I was already feeling the pain from the walk, and after noticing it sold beer, picked some up. After all, it would have saved me walking down to the offy in agony. I’d headed to the till with the following:-

4x Stella, 568ml @ 4.39
4x Stella, 440ml @ 4.99

There was other stuff I’d purchased, but that was the fucker. How did I not notice I’d picked up two different sets of volume, and prices? The receipt will forever be a testament of what a cock I really am…

If you’ve commented on the site before, your comment will appear automatically as you’ll avoid the spam queue, but if you’re a new commentor, or you reside in Japan, there might be a slight delay on the comment getting to where it’s supposed to.

I’m also receiving emails from every single spam comment, and there seems to be quite a backlog… I’m receiving them from spam comments I deleted yesterday. Gaaaaaaaaah!

UPDATE: Looks as if the issue has rectified itself. Its fix appeared to coincide with a small amount of server downtime, and an announcement from 34sp stating they were “experiencing network issues”. The spam filter is back to normal, and the shite is once again going to the correct place, and my email inbox no longer looks like someone’s hit it with a spam hammer.

I’m in another one of those ruts too, and although I’ve cancelled any immediate plans to shut down the blog, I’m a little disheartened with the new version of Akisment, the spam filter. It’s now showing *every* comment posted to the site. Previously, it would just discard the obvious spam ones. Now it shows them, and I can see just how many of the viewers are spambots. I’d say less than 5% of the hits to the site (or the blog at least) are genuine humans. The rest are spambots and search engines.

Should I be concerned over this? Is it worth my time? I’ve never claimed to do this for any type of popularity or fame, I just like to air my guts through the meaning of blog, therefore I shouldn’t really care about stats, etc. As long as both of my readers are still there, I’m not too bothered.

EDIT: I’ve also installed the “festive” banners. You may remember these from last year. And the year before that! Maybe I’ll add some more, if I can be arsed.

It seems absolutely no time at all since I was sat at my old white desk, typing my first post into blogger.com (before it got hammered by google), commenting on the annoying sound of fireworks going off around me. Yet, so much has changed.

I can’t even remember the URL for the first incarnation of this blog. It was using one of those free hosting sites, and not a very good one at that. Eventually, I settled down at mercuryvapour.co.uk , and have been using the same hosting company since then.

Not that the hosting actually matters, because, obviously the most important thing when it comes to talking about the blog, is the shit that spews through my fingers, into the black, plastic contraption in front of me, then through the magic of TCP/IP, apache, mySQL, and wordrpress, ends up on your monitor. I must admit, it’s been an interesting 10 years. I’ve mentioned many times that there’s stuff I will not blog about. For those who remember the early days of the blog, you’ll know what they were. I may have still been in that relationship. I may not have been. I’ll never know. I don’t care.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a favourite post. I might as well write off the posts before Blogger implemented a comment system, or before I switched over to WordPress, because a lot of the time, it felt like I was talking to myself. OK, I know for the majority of time I DO talk to myself, but a little bit of feedback would have been nice.

I’ve just checked the archive, to find that the first comment was from c64glen, using his full name, on this post…

“New redesign”

That was 5 years ago, meaning I’ve only had 5 years to fully take on board your feedback. And by “take on board”, I mean ignore most of it. I have taken some of it on board, and my personal favourite has to be from Jonathan Sorrell, composer of the “You Bet” theme. It’s another post I’ve dragged out of the archives, and is available here. Check the comments.

On the other side of feedback, there’s been shit. Plenty of it. Mainly people who think that their opinion is more valid than anyone else’s on the internet. At the time of receiving such critiscism, I thought that the sea would rise and the sky go dark, and the sun would disappear, but the world just turns around the same, except that I’d been slightly less offended if it hadn’t happened.

My interests haven’t helped things. This is my blog. Should I be ashamed about street lighting and obscure TV themes? Of course not. If it wasn’t for a certain ‘deleted’ posting back in 2003, Andy The Iridium Fan would have no idea where I lived.

I’m going to bring this post to a close, as my mind’s wandering towards the shitty side of this blog….

Or I might just stick it on the “Can’t be arsed” pile.

Edit: From what I can gather, the server restarted about 6 hours ago and the stats table was goosed since then. The repair on the database took longer than expected, mainly due to the size of this stats table, but it appears to have survived with only a tiny amount of data being written off, certainly not enough to warrant restoring from a backup.

The site lives to fight another day! I bet you can’t wait for my next installation of shit music and lamp posts.

You may remember there’s been a section on the gallery of his photos for some time now. Unfortunately, it suffered from massive disorganization, and a whole load of low quality images. Therefore it was decided that the old images were to be removed, and replaced with ones collected over the past 18 months.

Here’s a sneaky peek at what it’s going to look like…

Currently, there’s about 1,500 images in there, but as there’s still a little bit of work to do, I’m not launching it until next year. Stay tuned!

I don’t currently have any invites, but if you’d like one and I know you, then leave a comment and I’ll sort one out if and when I get them.

Anyway, in response to Noscere’s post, I’m going to post some of the WordPress plugins I use, just so you know what goes on “behind the scenes”. Note that I won’t mention security related plugins here!

First up is Akismet. Nothing really much to say about this particular little utility. It saves me having to delete spam, and with just over 45,000 spam comments at the time of typing, it’s saved me some work!

Secondly, there’s iMax Width, and no, it’s nothing to do with the branch of cinema. It forces any image I post on here to a maximum width of 500 pixels. Normally, this is the case anyway, as most of the photos I post come from Flickr, which automatically have a width of 500, but I’ve seen on a couple of occasions, I’ve posted one of the bigger sizes, meaning that if this plugin wasn’t there, the page would look like shite. And what do you mean by “it does anyway”?

Next up is Stapress reloaded. When work stalled on the original Statpress plugin, several spin-offs were released. This is just one of them. I’m not sure if work has halted on this too. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still usable. Unfortunately, it seems that this is the number-one cause of slowness on the site, as the database size grows quickly.

And then, we have Twitter Tools. I must admit to still not fully understanding Twitter. Why would I want to limit myself to 140 characters to say something? And if I want to send someone a private message, I don’t want that 140 characters eaten in by whoever’s user name it is. I use it mainly for giving a quick twitter update, announcing a new blog post (which I’ll probably do with this one), and for quickly creating a bit.ly link, should I want to pass the link to someone else. I’m sure someone will give me a reason why twitter is so… erm, needed. Saying that, when a celebrity is reported to be dead, it’s the first place I look.

WordPress Database Backup is pretty much redundant to me, as since installation, I have other backup mechanisms in place. I don’t think I’ve used it in about 2 years. It’s infinitely slower than my other methods, and I only keep it in place for emergencies.

And if it isn’t our old friend, Google XML Sitemaps up next! (You can tell I’m really starting to struggle for introductions to these) which creates an XML sitemap readable by Google, presumably so it understands the site better. Or something.

Last up, because I can’t be bothered to do anymore, and I can already see Chad’s eyes glazing over is WP tags to Technorati, and is the reason there’s two sets of tags in here. I assumed it would help the blog get “noticed” (though I always seem to complain or get overly paranoid when it does get partially popular), and was installed after the “tags” feature was added to WordPress. I’m not sure if it provides any benefit anymore, as the plugin hasn’t been updated since the iron age, and the amount of hits I get from technorati is negligible, so I’m not even sure if it works anymore.

To answer the questions you weren’t thinking of, no I don’t use any type of cache plugin. It caused me headaches last year, and to think this blog generates any type of server load that would require cache usage, would simply be delusion on my part. The only time I’ve generated noticeable server load was when I posted that Jeremy Beadle had died about 2 years ago. It soon quietened down as soon as word started to spread across the interwebs. Obviously, with the introduction of the afore-mentioned twitter, I wonder how many people do the same as me, and just bypass Google altogether….

Right, that’s it for now. Hopefully, I’ll get my body in order shortly. I’m off work for the next few days.

UPDATE: And everything is now restored. Time to clear several gigabytes of backup files.

Gah. Sorry about the downtime for both of you who noticed it. It’s not often there’s downtime on one of the busiest times of the week. OK, I lie, I mean 2nd busiest times of the week… (You don’t really know how busy it gets on a Friday night do you? – Ed)

Er, no. Either way, there were probably some hits lost.

It all started at about 9:30. I went to make some changes to one of my wonderful databases, when it turned out I couldn’t connect. Odd.

Minutes later, the webhosts updated their status site with the following….

21.36: We are presently looking at an issue affecting
this server

Bimler, they were aware of the issue, and all I had to do now is sit back and wait for someone to flick the switch. Surely everything tech related is fixed by the old “turning it off and on again” routine.

I waited. And waited.

22:30: Engineers have now determined the cause of this fault
and are working to restore the system ASAP.
Services should be restored shortly.

That’s some fault if it took them 54 minutes to diagnose it. Still, shortly means shortly. I suppose all I had to do was sit here and twiddle my thumbs. Can’t be long now.

I waited. In my immense boredom, I watched two full episodes of “Scotland Tonight”, the Scottish 6PM News programme on ITV (or rather, STV). It was dire. In fact, half way through the second edition I promptly fell asleep at the computer desk.

I awoke to a full moon, shining through the stained glass windows of Mercuryvapour Towers, and a hopefully restored website.

00:25: Despite repeated attempts to restore the system, the
physical prohost1.34sp.com server cannot be correctly
accessed. We suspect a hardware related issue at this time.
As a result a standy box is now being brought online to
restore services. All data is stored on a highly redundant
central NAS system, so data is unaffected by the loss of
the orginal prohost1.34sp.com machine.

Well, it became clear that the “restored services” wasn’t going to be the case. Oddly, despite the fact the web / SQL access was kaput, email could still be received. This is quite ironic, seeing as the hosts don’t actually backup any email “free of charge”. Everything else is backed up every Wednesday.

Fearing the worst, this at least allowed me the opportunity to move the mailboxes to somewhere that never suffers any downtime at all – Gmail. Yes, yes, I know, I’m being facetious there, but that’s where the mail was moved to.

I fell asleep again.

This time I woke up at 3AM, and my lovely website responded to everything I threw at it. In fact, it had been like this for 90 minutes or so…

01:30: The server is now back online and all services
restored. No data has been affected as a result of this
fault.

And now, here you are, reading this website as if nothing ever happened. It’s made a hideous dent in my newly acquired pingdom status, however…

85.35%… I see.

It’s easy to tell how many images you have, both private and public (14,533 at the time of typing), but I still had to find out how much disk space was being used.

They use a third-party service called QOOP to allow you to do things such as print your photos out, back them to CD or DVD. After playing around with it, I found out exactly how much space I was taking up. Sit down for this, it’s a goody…

Final Backup Size: 39.67 gigabytes
Required Disks: 59 CDs or 10 DVDs

CD Backup media Price: $884.41
DVD Backup media Price: $199.90

This no doubt will have changed, as I’ve uploaded a few more pictures since then, about another 300Mb’s worth. Marvellous! Think I’ll run off another one of my own backups now.