Archive for October, 2003
Saddened by the news on Gordon’s blog about the passing of a well loved dog, I thought I’d perform some karmic balancing with news that my own wee dog has found a boyfriend. Sadie met a boy whippet yesterday and they got on very well. So well in fact that she has been promised some of his sperm. Who says romance is dead?
Last night she sat curled up in her dog-bed scribbling love letters onto the back of a box of pedigree chum. I fully expect my phone-bill to go through the roof.
Aaah, the joys of parenthood. No, wait - grandparenthood. Actually, I don’t like this analogy any more, let’s change the subject.
It’s strange how moving from the city to the countryside can affect your view of things. In Glasgow, I never spoke to my neighbours much at all. Last night however I was hapilly shouting ‘hello’s and ‘how are you’s over the fence to the old lady next door. I even offered to take her bin out for her - an offer that she politely declined, defining her view of me as the patronising bastard next door. Oh, it makes me feel all neighbourly, it really does.
Ten cool things about moving from Glasgow to outside Glasgow, as just made up by me…
- You can see the stars much more clearly.
- You get really cool mist coming over the hills in the morning.
- Walking through a field in the pitch dark, being able to see the whole of Glasgow lit up on the horizon, and nothing else.
- There’s cows and shit like that.
- There’s a waterfall across the road.
- I get to hit things with hammers and do DIY and stuff.
- In a shed.
- It’s oh so quiet.
- The dog can shit in the back garden, and I don’t even have to put my shoes on.
- Trees.
October 16th, 2003
Phew. That was painless. Almost all of the DynoFoo server has been moved over and its code tweaked to suit its new surroundings. Ybiia is now running on a lovely shiny new server, and has had a spring clean. Please remove your shoes.
It all went a little too smoothly to be honest, and a couple of minor niggles have already had to be ironed out so if you spot anything that looks odd, then please let me know. This new server has a slighlty different Perl/PHP setup and some code runs slightly differently. That’ll teach me to write non-portable code.
Enough geek-talk.
Last night’s odd dream featured me in a very old but pretty house with a beautiful garden. I was playing a kind of
laser tag game where I was in the house scattering red laser blasts into the garden where girl-bands would run around shooting back at me. The Spice Girls were there, along with Girls Aloud and S-Club 7 (Who, for the purposes of the dream, were composed of girls).
Whenever they were hit enough times by the laser shots, they would disappear. No-one seemed to be getting concerned about this and they all seemed very happy. Then I woke up.
October 16th, 2003
A lovely relaxing weekend was had doing relatively little. We went to the The Commplex in Leith where top Glasgow band Brown Eye Superfly were previewing their forthcoming first single ‘Evil Baby’ and album ‘Any Other Way’, and fantastically good they were sounding too. Check out their website for more info and mp3 samplers. 
Oh, and Five Storeys High and Eskimo sounded fantastic too.
October 13th, 2003
Well after we’ve moved house, I thought I might as well move homepage too - to a new host. Ho ho, the wit.
The process of shifting the tons of files and a rather heavy looking database over to a shiny new server is pretty daunting to be honest but I’ve started now so I guess I’ll have to finish. It’ll be a while before the changes take hold, so there will be no immediate interruption of service.
In the meantime, you can laugh at me trying to dump and load an enormous database using only phpMyAdmin. If anyone knows of any better solutions to the problem of moving the contents of a MySQL database, please let me know.
October 10th, 2003
Sadie, bless her little doggie heart has not settled very well into the new house at all. She always looks like a paranoid wreck on the verge of tears anyway, (Often to her advantage) but she’s been hiding away in her bed lately refusing to come out. Personally I think it’s because we haven’t bought a sofa yet and the poor mutt overheard the missus saying that when we do - no dogs will be allowed to sit on it.
She’s also learned a new trick - how to open the cupboard door in the kitchen. Coincidentally the same cupboard that we like to put the dog-food into. A six kilo bag of dog food would want me to curl up in bed looking depressed too. Little bitch.
To make matters worse for her, we’ve responded to her other problem - increased barking - by giving her an anti-bark collar; freshly fitted this morning.
The idea is that when she barks it lets out a long beep to teach her that barking is wrong. It’s a little sensitive at the moment, so it’s also teaching her that running up/down the stairs, shaking when wet and running into things is wrong. As is eating, sitting next to a TV or radio or standing in the proximity of someone who is either chopping vegetables or talking.
I’ll have to adjust it some time before we end up with a dog who just stares at the wall, unwilling to move from fear of the beep.
October 9th, 2003
I can’t believe I didn’t check before we moved. It seems that Castle Beveridge is exactly dead-on the maximum distance away from the phone exchange for ADSL and BT can’t say for sure wether or not it will work on our phone line.
Please don’t make me dust off my 56k modem. Pleeease…
October 8th, 2003
Apparently Derren Brown’s TV magic-stunt where he put a live, loaded gun to his head and pulled the trigger was a trick.
Personally, I’m shocked and appalled. I also heard a rumour claiming that when Debbie was sawn in half by Paul Daniels - the box she was put in was fake too. These unscrupulous magicians will stop at nothing to pull the wool over our eyes.
October 7th, 2003
It’s about time I dumped some links out of my interesting links queue, which is getting quite long…
A bug in Google? Results 1 - 1 of about 60,800.
Who needs Photoshop when MS Paint comes free?
A study on feline reactions to bearded men.
Lots of interesting Java and Flash toys to play with at Flong.
Visit the museum of techno, home of the collection of badboy kickdrums.
Pages of indecipherable bullshit at the Plain English Society.
How to be a human beatbox.
Witness the man who made his own giant robot costume.
Save money shaving your beard by buying womens razors, but in a manly way.
An interview with a search engine.
A flash guide to Electronic Music.
My miserable life - a compendium of suffering.
Bible sex stories.
Proof that the signature strip on your credit card doesn’t matter a damn.
That should keep you busy for a while. I don’t want to see you again until tea-time.
October 7th, 2003
At bloody last, that’s us in the new house, and after a weekend of moving the contents of boxes around (After plenty of removals help from family and friends) we’ve somehow still got a house full of boxes. Never mind, it’s just great to be in my own bed once again.
Castle Beveridge is in need of a few tins of paint though, but that’ll have to wait.
The important thing is that we’ve discovered that the local chippy, Chinese and Indian take-aways are all placed next to each other at the top of the street. Chippy wasn’t so good, Chinese is above average and Indian review still to come.
In a strange twist of fate, we’ve employed the previous occupant as a dog walker. He’ll be coming round each lunchtime to take mutt for a run around the local fields. I kinda feel sorry for him in a way because it means he’ll get to witness the destruction of his carefully decorated kitchen which he spend 20 years putting together before moving out; a pain that most people need never experience.
The return of my old bed means that the strange dreams have stopped altogether. Mind you, the first night was disturbed by a nightmare involving the bloody death of my afore-mentioned dog. It was only after the visions had woken me up, that I realised that the dog was lying in the bed sleeping, but whimpering loudly at her own nightmare which was probably what made me have my own. Spooky.
October 6th, 2003
I’m distraught. I’ve lost my bag. Not just any bag, but my favourite bag of all time ever. It’s the only bag that I’ve ever called my favourite bag.
Nine years ago, I needed to buy a bag. I went to Argos where I bought some random backpack. There was some flaw with it, so I took it back and Argos let me change it for another one. I decided on a different bag - it was a ‘head’ bag that was so designed that the opening was too small for a standard A4 binder, so I took it back again and bought another, more expensive bag. The bag was broken.
The opening of the bag was torn and freyed, but despite this I couldn’t be arsed going back again so I kept it, and you know what? That bag served me for nine whole years. It performed the task of a bag to perfection and has been with me to well over ten different countries. The freying got slightly worse, but it never impeded its function as a bag.
It has been lost, found, vandalised, customised, filled with bad smelling things and it kept on going all these years being the best bag in the world.
And now I’ve lost it.
That bag served me so well, and yet I didn’t give it a passing thought as I got of the train some time this week and left it behind. I can’t even remember what day it was that I lost it, such is my dreadful betrayal of that faithful little Nike bag.
The little bald man in the lost property office today was completely oblivious to my clearly apparent sorrow. In fact if you want to know the truth I got the distinct impression that he was very unhappy with the whole lost-property side of his job. He worked in the left-luggage room, and the left-luggage sign on the door was quite big. I think that perhaps the small lost property sign tacked on underneath was something that he regarded with bitter resentment.
I left the lost-property room with a feeling that the matter was far from resolved. If you have been on the East-Kilbride to Glasgow train in the past week and have seen an old, but faithful looking black Nike bag with purple highlights on the straps, then get in touch. Please. Don’t make me go on TV and do one of those tearful pleas on the six-o’clock news. I don’t think my family could take it.
October 3rd, 2003
Next Posts
Previous Posts
