Category: Personal

Rants

I’ve got quite a few posts to put up but really have to get a few moans out of the way first – think of it as cleansing.

  • Plusnet. Although I’ve moved to Freedom2Surf that doesn’t take place until the 6th of October so I still need to suffer. Not only is the Usenet speed slow during the day as well, but they are wanting users to vote for them in the PC Pro 2005 awards. Cheeky bards. What’s worse is that they can e-mail all their users about voting for them and how they could win prizes yet they can’t e-mail them to say that their pricing is changed or their accounts are totally different from when they signed up. Apparently there is a communications opt out checkbox hidden in the terms and conditions but nobody mentioned that the checkbox had been added and unless you visit the forums you won’t know it’s there or how to opt out.
  • Why does the new Apple Nano in black come with white headphones. Just looks daft. I guess it’s so the adverts still work.
  • In the same vain – why did the black PSP come with white headphones and white adaptor. It looked cheap Mr Sony and was white because of the iPod.
  • The Xbox 360 – 2 different versions of the hardware is impacting on how games are being developed and what features are added. See this article for more info. Fools.
  • Rangers are mince. Watched the game yesterday (for free on Freeview – nice) and they were woeful. Lucky it wasn’t a heavier defeat. Bring on Inter!!
  • It’s a holiday weekend. Off Monday & Tuesday. The weathers crap and I’ve got work from the office to do. Bah.
  • Why does plaster soak up so much paint. Even though I put two coats of sealer on it’s still soaking up the paint. Oh well – time to put on another coat.

And relax…

Down South

Cutting the cakeHad a quick trip down to Peterborough and Scunthorpe. Nice time had by all and coincided with Hamid’s 32nd birthday. Doesn’t time fly when your getting old. Good to catch up with everyone and I managed to avoid my usual trick of ordering an overpriced gadget that I didn’t really need. Although since then Shakeel has ordered a laptop so I’ve kept up my part of the bargain and ordered a new monitor. Now if only someone could ship it to me before the weekend. Swine’s.

 

A decade has passed…

…since I graduated from Uni. A lot has happened in the last 10 years but strangely some things are still the same. Have things turned out as I expected – feck no. But things could have been a whole lot worse so I guess I should be relatively happy with my lot.

The graduations at Glasgow Uni are pretty cool (well I thought so). Bute Hall, quadrangles, nice weather, loads of folk dressed up all made for quite a special day. Photo’s can be found here (although they’ll be moving to a Flickr account soon). We haven’t aged one bit, or put on any weight. Ricky’s take on things here.

Gutted

Picked up the kitten on Friday. She was a handful and not very friendly – lots of spitting and just unhappy. By Saturday she had really brightened up and was friendly, eating and drinking and getting use to her new home. It was then I realised that I was sneezing quite a bit, my throat was sore and my eyes running. I spent a couple of hours away form the kitten and then went back for another play – same again. Crap – I was allergic to her.

We were both gutted and the allergic reaction to her only got worse. I couldn’t believe it – I’ve always been around cats and pets and never suffered before. We took the decision to take her back to the cat protection league this morning before we got too attached. Although we only had her for two days it was still heart breaking. Hopefully she’ll find a new home quickly as she was a lovely wee cat.

Bombing

Tragic. Appalling. On the face of it so easy to do as well. Plenty of news and proper content elsewhere – visit Binary Bonsai for links to good news sources. While the mobile network was down in London and news reports sketchy, blogs were the most up to date and quickest way of finding out what was happening, and from my point of view conveyed the fear that had gripped people far better than any other news site.

Meow

Great news – we’ve got a new cat. When I say we’ve got, we don’t pick her up for another 3 weeks and when I say cat I really mean kitten. She’s only 4 weeks old and the Cat Protection League keep the young kittens for a period of time to make sure they are healthy and OK to be housed.
kitten_1
I snapped a picture as she played with another kitten – she’s going to be a handful but it will be nice to have a wee pet around the house again.

 

Getting Organised

I’ve found myself getting more and more disorganised. Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s getting lazy and letting things pile up, maybe it’s something else entirely. Whatever the reason action is required.

First step – e-mail. I’ve always struggled to get an organised inbox at home and especially at work due to the volume of mail. Home is easier as there’s less of it and I can keep as much as I like – no nasty disk quota’s. Work is a different beast. 25 Meg inbox, 2 gig archive and still running NT. I find mail gets ‘lost’ as I flit from one task to the next. I used to run rules to push mail into folders but this took time to keep up to date and some mail didn’t have a rule so defeating the purpose. I struggle to find mail thats somewhere between my inbox and archive. I’ve now followed some advice from the guy that runs 43 Folders and made over my Inbox. This now forces me to manage mail and act accordingly. At home it works a treat with Outlook 2003 as I can add a count to each folder and see exactly what’s still to do. I’ve installed MSN Desktop Search as I’ve found that to be the best desktop search tool – it suits my needs and allows me to find what I need quickly and accurately. I would do the same at work but I’m 4 weeks away from an XP upgrade – until then I’m stuck on NT.

Task management was next on the list. I’ve standardised a list of categories for home and work and I’m managing to make use of my Tungsten again using Keysuite which keeps Outlook talking to the Palm nicely. This has not been going to well so a bit more discipline is required. Once work upgrade takes place I can get a cheap usb sync cable for the Palm. Joy.

Finally I’ve ordered the Getting Things Done book from good old Amazon. I don’t intend to follow everything it recommends religiously but I’m sure it will give me good pointers that I can adapt for myself. Hopefully this time next year I’ll have remembered Lewis birthday before the day rather than after.

Royal Mail

In the last few years I’ve never really had a problem with the Royal Mail. Sure some things took a while to deliver and it was a pain having to pick up parcels from the depot (the joys of Amazon) but I can live with that. Even one delivery a day didn’t bother me – leaving at 7AM for work meant I never get morning mail – it was always a 5PM event for me.

However the last few days have been….frustrating.

Continue reading “Royal Mail”

It’s been one year…

…since I picked up the keys for the new house. This has been the quickest year of my life so far but also one of the most enjoyable. The move has been a real change of life for us and looking back I wish I had done it sooner.

Since moving I’ve done some gardening, some more DIY and also become far more relaxed at home as we no longer need to worry about neighbours, drunks and people being sick over the car. Looking ahead I’ve got some goals I want to achieve by end of year 2…decorate hall (it’s massive, well for me anyway), fill in some cracks on the outside walls, organize garage, develop garden some more and at the tail end of this year or start of next year it will be double glazing time hopefully. Can’t wait 🙂