Oddly, it seems that a few people who know me have once again initiated an interest on online chess site “Red Hot Pawn”.

It is a site that has, for me, remained unvisited since about 2006. I think I mentioned it a lot in here, even going so far as to having a little link to my profile.

Richard “Don’t Go there” Rice started a game off with me, seemingly out of the blue, shortly followed by Dan. This also allowed me to find an old game I’d started with JT, and had totally forgotten about. This particular game started in 2006, and I’d hazard a guess to say that at three years old, it’s one of the longest chess games to actually take place on that site.

I can’t find any way of ordering the current games by start date or ID number, so I can’t say whether it is or not.

I also challenged Coatesy to a game (he’s winning 3-0 in the series), but all of his details including date of birth and blood group have probably changed since I last spoke to him…

Why trumpet? Why not?

So, as mentioned yesterday, it is almost time for the 2009 Hartlepool CockDockfest. I have just finished yet another nightshift, so before I toddle off to the land of Nod, I might as well give you a rundown on what I’ve been doing over the last 20 minutes or so.

Well, firstly I left work, and returned home in a taxi accompanied by Dick Brown (who never updates his website even though he claims it’s the best thing ever). He was to be dropped off at his end of town, and I was to be dropped off outside the large, wrought iron gates protecting Mercuryvapour Towers from rogues, vagabonds, and those annoying little shits that slap those plastic “collection bags” through your ‘letterbocks’

Anyway, as we were coasting along quietly, Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It is” came on the radio. With a quality piece of comedy timing, we both looked at each other, and said the word “Tupac”. It’s a long running joke between the night shift, that every song in the world ever was composed and recorded by Tupac at some point. You really had to be there, I suppose.

After DB got dropped off, we headed back home, and I witnessed my very first known sighting of a Thorn Gamma 1, right here in sunny old Hartlepool. Whee! Actually, Andrew sent me some pictures of it the other week, but with Beastbits running hotter than two naked nuns having a jelly fight, I’ve not been able to process the images properly.

I return home to find that I have “created life”. You may remember the marigold plant I planted the other week, well, good news, it’s sprouted its first flower!

It’s taken me almost 30 years to achieve something, and unfortunately, the thing that I’ve achieved is simply a front garden that doesn’t suck as much as it once did.

I’m off to bed for a couple of hours. A long day is ahead of me.

Right, OK. I know it’s been a while. A good three weeks since my last actual “real” posting, and the first since my move to the new server.

So, you’re probably all gasping to hear what type of exciting shenannegans I’ve gotten up to within that time? The answer? None. Definitely nothing worth blogging about anyway. I’ve not even been motivated enough to type up any “filler” posts. And, as for going out photographing stuff, well, the camera hasn’t been past the front gates of Mercuryvapour Towers in sebveral weeks. I took loads of photos of the daffodils that managed to grow in the front garden this year (we got six!), but once you’ve seen one photo of them, you’ve seen them all. I’ll just let them sit there until the memory card starts to lose its data, or (much, much) more likely, that I accidentally format it (or delete all of the photos from it) while drunk.

Hmm, I appear to be having a bit of a bracket thing going on today. ((((((((Hnnnnngh, that’s better)))))))).

The only thing remotely exciting that’s happened is that we have a new initiate to the family. No, I’m not pregnant, but over the last few weeks, there’s been (what I assume) a blackbird roosting in the wash house. Now, you may be remember, for those who watched my vlogs, what I once filmed an entire episode in the wash house. Behind the camera is a large book case fastened to the wall. I was originally planning to use it for parts of my streetlighting collection, but before I had to have chance to move all of the tat that had accumulated on there, I found this…

Yes, that was the begining of a birds nest. Over the coming days, I kept sticking my head around the door to see if the nest had gotten any bigger. Indeed it had, and imagine my surprise when I stuck my head around the door on Saturday night, to see the bird sat on the nest keeping the eggs warm, totally unphased by my prescence.

Unfortunately, the friendliness between ourselves and the bird came to an abrupt end, when she got locked out of the wash house on Sunday night, as the wash house door became shut while the bird was absent. Obviously, it has to be left slightly open so it can go out and feed. Daddykins tried to blame me, until I pointed out that I’d been at work for most of Sunday, and certainly won’t have been anywhere in the vicinity. The cheek!

Either way, once the door was eventually reopened, the bird frantically flew in, and ended up in the house. Daddykins had to grab it and take it out of the house. I don’t think it’d have enjoyed it much.

He said that since he’d done that, the bird hadn’t been back to the nest, but when I went out of the back, it was there, though it flew out as soon as I went anywhere in the vacinity. At least it returned to the nest.

I’ll keep you updated on this, but you never know, there may be the… er, clattering of tiny beaks shortly.

You’ll all be glad to know that work has been one of the things, once again interfering with my life, and causing no end of chew. New systems that are infinitely less usable than the old ones, were at the forefront of my mind when I wrote “I have not felt this low for a long time.” on my twitter.

Narrowly avoiding a 13-page rant about work at the minute, I shall change the subject back to why I haven’t blogged. I think it finally hit home how pointless this blog really is a week or two back.

Chris had came round for the first time in what seemed like ages, which was always a welcome bonus. Mucky beer was consumed as always. He said he hasn’t read my website in months. Charming! He actually asked if I’d won on the Grand National! Taken aback, I pressed his face against the monitor and forced him to read the entire post until he knew it BETTER THAN THE BACK OF HIS HAND.

OK, I wasn’t quite as extreme as that. Actually, I hate telling someone to read my blog, especially when I could have just told him, but I was tired, and couldn’t be arsed to explain what was already stored on my site.

It made me realise the futility of it all, and it made me realise that if it isn’t interesting to my mates, then who is it interesting to? That one thought alone made me take blogging into stock, and whether it’s something I want to take any further, and just typing that previous sentence has filled my mind full of conflicting arguments.

(edit) This post became a bit of an extended rant about blogging in general, and isn’t really relevant, so has been removed for now. Instead, I shall use it another day when I’m less tired than what I am now.

That’s the sound of me making happy sounds, which should make a change from the black overtone which surrounded the second-from-last post. Oddly, when I wrote that post, I wasn’t actually depressed about anything, it just sort of drifted into a black hollow the more I typed.

I think I was mainly upset about the fact that JT, someone who I have worked with, and got to know as a good friend since I started at Employment Palace back in 2001, has moved onto the “other rotation”, which means he will work the days I’m off, and vice versa, and I will never work with him again.

Over the years, he has introduced me to some songs which have became my favourites. Songs which I will never have heard, if it wasn’t for his MP3 CD player being brought in every day, and the collection of obscure Finnish Gypsy Punk stuff he used to bring in. I’m thinking stuff such as the truly awesome “Pellonpekko” by Korpklaani I never thought I’d like a song that even subtly makes use of one of those twangy mouth-harp things.

And if it wasn’t for him, I would have never heard of the Dropkick Murphy’s, and I certainly wouldn’t have learned every single word to The Spicy McHaggis Jig

Um. Anyway, that’s what drove me to writing that depressing post.

Moving on, I’ve been keeping myself busy. You should all know that I’m a really anal bastard when it comes to backing up data. I can’t sleep at night if I know there’s a partition of my hard drive not backed up in some way. Lots of sleep has been lost due to the fact that I have NOT been able to do a backup of my C drive in full. That was, until I found Clonezilla.

On Friday morning, I did a blog post about it while I backed up my hard drive, but I never finished it it. So, in order to make this particular post look bigger than it really is, here it is. Beware of the sudden ending though… If backing up your hard drive isn’t really important, or you’re not interested, then just scroll past the italic. I know it’s badly written, I just don’t like to see big blocks of my text be discarded.

Hello. You join me at the beginning of another one of my “live” experiments, where I do something computery and then blog about it, in the vain hope that it sparks the interest of someone reading it, though that is of course, unlikely.

Now, in my situation, I know the disk was bad. The old power supply murdered it, so it was no surprise when I got bright-red errors from

Yes, folks.

That’s where it ended, but WHY did it end so abruptly?

It’s because I’d successfully backed up my C drive AND restored it to a new hard drive without ANY trouble at all, and all I wanted to do was play with it. Therefore, I shall have to give Clonezilla the highest possible “Meh, it worked for me” seal of approval. And for those of you who (wisely) skipped the text, welcome back to today.

If you live in the UK, you can’t have failed to notice that we actually received some snow. The slightest hint at the white stuff, and the whole bloody country goes into turmoil, even to the point where some memory sticks I’d ordered had been delayed. No, seriously.

[quote]
As a valued customer we are e-mailing you today to notify you that your recently placed order may be delayed due to the adverse weather conditions that are being experienced in most parts of the UK.
[/quote]

It did, however, allow me to take some purdy pictures…

In other news, the bathroom scales are fixed. I weighed less than the last time I checked, which is a bonus I suppose.

My “disks” database has grown in size since I last mentioned it. It has expanded onto its 8th folder, and currently contains information on 1,191 disks. I am shocked, that me, the master of mess, has been able to organize something something that just simply WORKS. It would be nice to get a simple search option for it, but that’s not a high priority, as it currently works perfectly.

Well , as I’ve typed this after coming off a nightshift, it’s safe to assume I’ll be in bed shortly.