Woo first post for the journal. This should be interesting so in the words of John McClane - "Yippekaiyay".

"What's this going to be?" you might be asking (I hope not because it's pretty obvious but nevertheless I shall explain. That's how cool I am :)

This journal is going to be a place for me to post little tidbits of text to give you mere mortals a glimpse into my life. This may or may not also involve some sort of turbo-charged carrot; we shall see.

Linking to random sites may also happen. Actually this is more likely than the advanced garden vegetable thing but there you are.

Been playing the new C&C: Generals for the best part of the day. It's pretty funky game from what I've played so far - anyone who's into Command & Conquer or would like to try it out I suggest you get hold of a copy.

In other news it seems that Opera Software have retaliated against Microsoft by releasing an updated version of their browser that screws up MSN.com. Nice to see all parties acting responsibly :)

Just tried out that thing below which just happens to be an AMD Athlon XP2700+. A very tasty chip I might add, damn shame that it's crapped really.

The strange PCB/esque thing stuck onto it is part of his fridge coolant system. Stops condensation or something.

My uncle gave it to me to try out since it was either his motherboard that's screwed or the CPU, I now think it's the CPU - PC wouldn't even get to the POST screen.

Six days until ADSL o/

For some anoying reason Linux hates my hard drive. Slackware, Red Hat 8 et al just don't want to recognise my swap drive which lives in the extended partition. Red Hat goes a bit better and says that my hard drive is corrupted or something. Works for me though.

I think tomorrow I'll move all my stuff off my second hard drive and use that for a reinstall of Red Hat. Might give XandrOS a bash, it's supposed to be pretty cool.

One more thing - the RIAA is possibly the /root of all that is bad.

Got rather too drunk last night I think. I fell asleep about 3am, woke up at 8am and I was still feeling drunk. So then I continued to sleep until 2pm. I feel ok now :)

I finally got Red Hat to install happily - I just had to move a partition off my second drive and make room for it to install. Running happily now even though it was a complete bitch to get the Nvidia drivers to install.

Five days until ADSL o/

Let me just say one thing - nobody gives a flying fuck what song you're listening to so stop spamming channels with crap that nobody cares about.

In other news it seems that China continues to be a bitch. You shouldn't try and oppress a population - on day they will revolt against you.

It seems as though Google buying what basically amounts to Blogger.com is recieving quite alot of attention. I really don't see the fuss, but many people are thinking that Google will make Blogs a worldwide smash hit thing. Or something.

A 'Blog' or 'weblog' for all you unimformed people is an online journal, much like this one. Apart from that I actually made mine myself and didn't use some scabby run-of-the-mill software app to do it all for me.

This doesn't make the scabby blogs any worse than mine, it just makes me better than people who use scabby blogging software. Of course I forgot to mention I was running a blog three years ago back in the bLife days on the bNetwork far before 'blogging' became maintream.

I have decided that Command & Conquer Generals is an absolute pig for memory usage. Even though I have double the amount of RAM recommended by the game I still find Windows thrashing the page file every so often.

It's nice to know that security on airports and crew/support staff is still nice and tight.

I must say life in the American school system for people like me must be complete hell, but this article by Paul Graham really gives you something to think about.

Maybe it's because I couldn't give less of a shit about most things that life isn't a living hell...

Phoenix Technologies, a company that has been making motherboard BIOS's for as long as I can remember has recently announced that their developing technologies that will allow you to run PC-like apps at a level deeper than the operating system. Seems like and interesting idea, and is something I've seen before but on a much smaller scale.

Obviously Mircrosoft is not amused since something like this could be developed into a product that makes their Media Centre PC model obsolete.

3Dlabs, a company that I thought didn't exist anymore, has announced a new high-end graphics board using the brand spanking new PCI Express bus.

PCI Express, which recently made it as a standard, is the next-generation PCI bus which is designed to replace both PCI and AGP in one fell swoop.

Why does Adobe Acrobat Reader not die when you kill the browser that spawned it. It happily just sits there eating about 22Mb of RAM, doing nothing. It wouldn't be too difficult for it to just check that the process that launched it has gone and that it shouldn't be there anymore.

But ooooooooooooh no >:(

I loaded up my browser, clikity-clicked onto my link to BBC News Online, and what do I find but a bastardized version to upset me. Oh well, something I'll have to get used to :(

OCAddiction have reviewed what they think is the best best graphics card money can buy. Good to see ATI holding the crown of graphics card king :)

Two days until ADSL o/

A 15 year old girl tracked down a script kiddy who used a trojan horse to steal credit card details from her home computer, and eventually got him arrested and convicted. Nice to see 'l337 hax0rs' get what they deserve.

According to The Register, NTL didn't give any warnings about the introduction of a download cap because the subscribers are too dumb to understand why it had to be done.

Great way to run a company - piss off the customers and then insult them a bit.

I wonder just how cheap are chips. Proper chip shop ones, none of that oven rubbish, or indeed American crisps. Hmm >_<

It's funny how people get so serious about playing CS. Me and Tang were just messing around, camping in the same spot for the entire map (as you do :p) and after we'd used this tactic a few times they all start saying horrible things. I think it was because it was working :proud:

Woke up this morning, my copy of the new Foo Fighters album is here. Had a quick scim through it and my first impression is that its a fairly good album, though a bit sloppy.

It is a sloppy album - it doesn't have a audible direction, it seems to just be a jumble of different songs all lumped together to form an album. A few good songs with the likes of 'Halo' and 'Come Back' and I do have a soft spot for 'Time Like These'.

Then again there are quite horrible tracks which seem like half-assed direction changes in their style.

I give One By One 4 stars. If I could.

No ADSL until Monday now :(

Just created a new MSN address which is nice. I went on a rampage with the contacts and deleted everything I didn't seem worthwhile - so now i've got about 30 contacts down from the original 120 or so. I think I'll be ruthless with this account and block/delete anyone I don't care for.

Yes I am a bastard :D

How is it that every time I go to have a crap there is only the tiniest bit of toilet roll left. THis isn't just every so often, it's every bloody time. I mean, how does whoever has been there before me use precisely the amount of paper to leave only a shred left :@

...when Red Hat annoys me. You see, Red Hat is a complete bitch when it comes to monitor refresh rates in the fact that it won't do anything other than 60hz, a refresh rate that happens to make your eyes burn after 5 or so minutes.

I tried everything, even manually overiding X's 'suto-choose' method of picking a refresh rate. So in the end I deleted X. Mmm....CLI fun. I then got annoyed so much that I deleted the Re Dat partitions. Wheee.

I'll get round to a reinstall once I've got ADSL :)

Going to sort out my college application form tomorrow, choose the courses, fill in the form, get it sent off, go to interview, get out of horrid depressing shitty pointless 6th form. Enjoy.

My last day of dialing up the internet... :)

Let me say something for all you Microsoft fanboys (e.g. #sub lads) - Microsoft is not a good company, they got so big not through healthy competition such as innovation, but through forcing manufacturers to use their products and not allow them to use competitors products.

This is not how business is supposed to be run, and that is why there was a long-winded anti-trust case brought against Microsoft. Let me say it one more time - Microsoft is not a good company. They constantly used dubious business practises to lock people into using their software.

Stop defending a bad company just because you are blinded by some sort of ignorance to any other viewpoint.

I am not saying Billgates = evil, I am not saying Microsft = evil, and I'm not saying any other software company (Apple, Red Hat) is any less evil.

I like Windows (in its current form), the NT core is a solid base - and I hate Linux/Apple fanboys who rip Windows saying it's unstable/shitty/slow when it clearly isn't. Windows 9x/DOS was a joke, a horrid piece of nonesense that was unstable and generally shitty. But then again Microsoft didn't make DOS did they.

And time for a thrid statement of a fact - Microsoft is not a good company, stop defending it with rubbish claims.

Just woke up from sleeping for about 2 hours or something. Feel like shit, can't get back to sleep. Headache. Ugh...

Good golly it's fast :D :D :D :D

Don't ask about the title, it was the subject for some random porn spam.

College application has left the building! Put myself down for AVCE Info. Technology (2 A Levels) and A Level Psychology (something different :p). Just have to wait for my interview dates now, drop Physics, blag my way through the rest of the term, and I'm off, away from the horrible, shitty, depressing lump of annoyance that is my school's 6th Form College.

Me = Win (Y)

My name is Huw and I do school-related work at 3am. There is a hole in my soul.

Fwazzle.

Just installed Apache, set up port forwarding, and got my PC's web server running happily at http://pc.wuffle.com. Fun.

Turned Apache off for now as I was just testing some things out :E

Did my Art exam thingy today, finished off my Soviet flag design - it looked very cool imho :proud:

I think because I've missed assloads of school she wanted to bitch at me since teacher mentality is something like 'you not in = you done no work', a flawed presumption I think. I went on to produce a large lump of work, she went a bit sheepish I think.

Heh, smelly teachers.

I go to bed at 03:00, and wake up at 08:00, feeling like shit. Don't know why, just my fucked up sleep pattern in action I think.

Anyways, today was Huw's Red Hat 8 fiddling day I think, sorted out NTFS mounting, compiled the NVIDIA drivers into the upgraded kernel I installed, configured some of the hardware that was missed on the install.

WineX is a complete bastard to get going, so I've left that for tomorrow maybe. Once I've got CS running on Wine I can dump Windows then :)

Oh yeah, here's what I spent yesterday producing in Art:

It measures 3ft x 2ft so it's pretty impressive :E

Just tried out some of those iron-on tshirt transfer things. Worked pretty good, I'm pleased :)

Very little work, quite a lot accomplished (Y)

Just sorted out something I've been meaning to do for a long time - I've now set up automatic creation and retrieval of Wuffle.com database backups to my PC. Tis pretty nice, and now I don't have to make the backups manually anymore :)

Here I am, in school, whoop-dee-doo :(

I wonder what would happen if you combined cheese with a horse.

Dean: "A cheesey horse".

Dean = win

Tonight a created a proper flag made out of thing cloth material and many printer transfer sheets (too much bloody ironing for my liking).

Measures up at around 60cm x 40cm :)

I also now have somewhat of a fan channel (started by Raz) at #bluetooth on Quakenet IRC :O

My new printer came this morning, a quite lovely Canon i850. Tis very fast, much quieter than my old Epson, and even printing photos on plain paper is very impressive.

Good thing about this one is that it uses USB2, so it doesn't eat up 100% of my CPU like a dirty old parallel port printer does.

I think I'm going to like this new printer since it basically just printed a photo - or at least something that looks exactly like a photo you'd get back from the film developers.

I tried printing on a sheet of 4x6 glossy paper that came in a sample pack with the printer. It's really impressive :)

Slept for the best part of this evening, so I think I'm going to be up for quite a while yet, or maybe not. Depends I think.

It was funny, I wandered into school for the two afternoon periods, which I thought was fair enough since I'd spent the morning waiting for the new printer (which was needed desperately) and setting it up and shit.

Anyways, my form tutor Mr. Meade had an amazing bitch session, something about how school isn't some place where you come and go as you please (despite 6th form is entirely voluntary I might add). I never knew I 'come and go as I pleased' - if I went there I was there for the day.

Then some attempt at a threat was tried which cosisted of him basically saying that I would have to 'face him' and there would be 'hell to play' if I carried on. I'm not sure but I think teachers get annoyed when they don't see any emotion out of you when they're trying to rattle you - my wadump.wuffle.comys of just staring with eye contact at them and nodding a bit gets to them I think.

Bit of tra-la-laa imo, very odd.

I *may* officially drop Physics tomorrow, but I don't know yet. I really want to but maybe getting something in Physics could be useful - I have yet to research the requirements of a few University computing courses.

I've made a screen grab of my current desktop, which I think I'll update every so often or something.

Updated the links page a bit, added some webcomic links and did a little tidy up :)

I must've slept funny because it feels like my diaphragm has been stabbed several times 'IN TEH FACE!!!1', man is it painful.

Bloody hell it hurts. I move, it hurts, I stand up it hurts, I sit down it hurts :( :( :(

Doubt I'll be in school for the rest of the week.

Ow :( :( :(

It seems that Physics is not a requirement for any Computer Science uni course, so therefore it's bye-bye Physics :D

Been sleeping all evening again :/

I dunno why, I'm sleeping alot lately.

I've created a little GIF animation that replaces the address bar icon if the browser supports it (Mozilla does ;)). Here's a little video (200KB) which shows what I mean.

I've just made a rather nifty Mozilla splash screen :proud:

You can grab the proper bitmap image here.

That's a rather nifty key fob I just made out of a southbridge CPU I ripped off an old P4 motherboard I had lying around :D

Damn thing was a bitch to get off, the 10 million pins on the bottom can really hold it onto the main board.

Feel like crap right now, bad throat :(

"How's things in Disneyland?" I ask my feathered chum Samba.

"Great!" he replies, "But I can't find the atomic warheads."

"They're by the gift shop next to Generic Ride Number 3." I tell.

"Cheers." he says while walking off.

&lt;spd-dmn&gt; lee: hows the baybee
&lt;Virtualee&gt; spd-dmn She's great! Growing so fast!
&lt;spd-dmn&gt; aw
&lt;spd-dmn&gt; got any pics?
&lt;spazzer&gt; has she sprouted appendages yet?
&lt;KK-&gt; lol
&lt;spazzer&gt; don't babies grow like potatos?
&lt;spd-dmn&gt; ahaha
&lt;spd-dmn&gt; spazzer you're on crack, buddy
&lt;spazzer&gt; you mean they DON'T?
&lt;spazzer&gt; they come out with arms and legs?
&lt;spazzer&gt; shit
&lt;spazzer&gt; i have a whole new respect for women

I should get the lovely Apple Pro Keyboard I ordered in the morning :D

Here, read a book:

Apple keyboards are nice :)

I got hold of the Domo-kun movie on Drew's site, increased the brightness and then recompressed it to Windows Media format to make a file less than a 5th in size of the original.

You can grab the higher quality Windows Media 9 version or the generally lower quality Windows Media 7 version (best bet is to right click and choose 'save-as' on the link).

Why are there monsters abusing my shoutbox? I really don't want to limit it down to one or two shouts per IP per day...

Been doing a little testing with PHP and I've come up with ZIP file creation via PHP which is something that'll come in handy for the images section I've been meaning to get round to.

I just saw a website ad that said 'GET HARD' in big red letters. Scared me I tells ya.

I'm never going on the WSJ site again...

I've actually started work on the back-end stuff for the images section, dealing with file uploading into the database, don't expect anything soon.

I took it by pointing a telescope at the moon then placing my digital camera to the lens. Not bad for a first go so I think I'll have another bash at it tomorrow night if it's clear.

I'm getting better at it :D

Some cutey pet pictures.

Retrieving an image from the database is working (check out the image URL) :)

I *may* go to school tomorrow.

It will be a shock...

Bleh.

Since the weather was fine I went for a day trip with my parents to Port Eynon in the Gower. Managed to take some fine photos like the one below.

It's great that I now have a day devoted to me. A gift usually reserved for historic events and patron Saints is now something I can claim too.

My mother must be proud....

Didn't go to school today. *shock*

Done a little bit of site maintainence, now only I can use the name "Huw" in both comments and the shoutbox, and I can make unlimited number of comments and shouts. Go me.

Have a hospital appointment tomorrow, seeing a specialist about my knee.

Should be fun.

Oh yeah, Unreal 2 has a rubbish ending. It's taken me all of about two months of slow playage to get to the end and it was underwhelming to say the least. Looks nice tho.

Server admin is fun :)

flarg

Remade the Willybums.com. By remade I mean simplified the HTML and uploaded the bum invaders game Raz put together.

It's not finished yet and has a few bugs and no sound but win all the same :D

Servers playing up a think. Makes everything a bit odd. Some pages work fine, others won't load at all.

Server seems to be back 'with it' so I've added a few more pictures here and there. Of course there's always the better repositry of stuff at dump.wuffle.com.

Also cleaned up a lot of the image section code, now image titles aren't displayed in catergory view, and clicking the image while in the individual image info pages will open up the high-res version if it's available.

Just been through and checked the site for standards compliance, found some errors and sorted them out; 100% XHTML 1.0 :)

April Fools day has ended here, woopee shit.

April Fools day, what another pointless waste of time and effort.

First off, RH9 is not a mega-improvement that would be suggested by the jump from 8 to 9 - if anything this would be an 8.2 release. Everything's more refined, the new features that the Bluecurve environment introduced with RH8 have been improveed (Mozilla 1.2.1 now has the lovely font AA running as default for example).

The install process is much the same, answer this or that, set up the partitions (a process that doesn't barf on my PC like with RH8). The post-install setup routine that runs has been given a slight facelift and minor improvements (it now not only detects my sound card but also has it working), but as with RH8 it still can't detect my generic RealTek-based NIC, I have to resort to typing in the memory and IO addresses manually to get it picked up, not a big deal for me but this would essentially kill a Linux newbie.

The menus in RH8 were, to be honest, a horrible mess, with items not where you'd expect them, and some programs placed in multiple times. In RH9 this has been improved drastically, with all related things together and no more 'Extras' menu.

As with RH8, there's no MP3 support bundled in, as well as NTFS read support, and as ever there's no hardware accelerated Nvidia drivers in the distro. All these things can be fixed easily, especially the latest Nvidia drivers which were a complete joy to install compared to the earlier releases.

The usual array of applications are here - OpenOffice for word processing/spreadsheet etc., the GIMP (used to take the screenshots here), Mozilla, Evolution, XMMS, X-Chat etc. - pretty much everything most people would need.

So far so good, Red Hat 9 isn't a revolution like RH8 was but there's an ass-load of bug fixes and application updates all rolled up into one nice and stable package.

Compiled and installed MPlayer, so I can now watch Windows Media files among others, got Unreal Tournement running like a charm.

Marvelous.

Just installed the Mozilla 1.4 Alpha, everythings pretty swish. Drag and drop bookmarks folder at last :D

Upgraded the Red Hat 9 install Mozilla 1.2.1 to 1.3 and kitted it up with the lovely Breeze theme and installed the Prefbar add-on. All running to my liking now, marvelous.

Just added a load of photos, some taken today and some that I've had hanging around for a while.

Oh my word, what the hell is this. I mean, he (Jamie) actually made this? It's great how he actually tells you what he's going to talk about and the 'hit counter' which is just the text 'hit counter' is a lovely touch.

Why is it that when I get back to my desktop from playing CS or something, I always find a nice array of IM windows asking 'Are you there?' and the like. Just as I type a reply I notice a problem - they've gone offline - woo yay.

If you want a reply you can't just log on for 5 minutes then disapear.

When I am forced to watch MTV2 this is what I see. How much useless shit can you plaster the screen with?

The success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.

- TV/film/music quotes
- Quotes in gerneal
- Sayings
- Anything unnoriginal
- Names using irrelevent extended characters
- L337 h4x0r names
- rANdoM cAPs nAMes
- Nicknames stating protest at something
- Nicknames of 'Alternatives' trying to be cool
- Pretty much anything but your own name

What's the point in having a nickname that's three lines long? It just makes a mess and it's longer than most IM messages.

Just added the images from my little galavant todaywhich can be found here and here.

Going to have a shower now, and sit on my ass for the rest of the night.

College interview tomorrow, should be fun. Not nervous, it's not like they're going to reject *me* for an AVCE in computing.

Went to my college interview, and what a waste of time it was. Seems that some almighty moron in the administration dept. didn't think to give me an interview date when the I.T. lecturer was actually available.

Wasn't completely wasteful, had some forms filled in and got some information and grant forms and stuff.

Then I decided that since I payed for a 'go anywhere you want for the day' ticket I got on the bus to Cardiff and mooched around there for a while.

I can smell cooking.

On any old forum when the usual topic of posting links to your own site comes up, it's nice to have one of the best due to all the Geocities 'welcome to my homepage' crap that most people have.

Screw them all. Hard.

As I type this I'm watching the trully momentous images of the US Marines that have just toppled the central Baghdad statue of Saddam Hussein.

Nade has added Willybums to the UrbanDictionary. Wheee :D

Added a cooly-o new stats box that shows what I'm currently playing.

If you're going to IM me and then disapear offline almost instantly, and if you want an answer to whatever you ask me, email me instead. Ok?

There's a chat show on TV right now where todays 'entertaining theme' is "I Hate the Way My Parent Dresses". This show consists of multiple moany little spoilt shits bitching that their parents wear leather trousers and the like.

I mean wtf is wrong with these people. They're parents brought them into the world, fed and clothed and housed them all their life and now the unrgateful bastards moan at how they dress.

DON'T BURN YOUR PENIS!

Here's a reminder that sometimes it's for the best that we don't have all the news reported to us.

Why do I not have a 400ft mecha as my slave?

I go to bed at 3am, wake up before 9am. Somethings not right.

Just rolled my own Phoenix build to get font anti-aliasing working. All lovely now :)

My sister convinced me to go on a jog with her. Over to Cyfarthfa Park, round the lake a few times and the walk back. Knackered but I think I accomplished something.

damn hippies.

I really shouldn't have done all that running yesterday. My knee feels like someones stabbed it several times with a nasty spoon.

I've created a nice little how-to on how to install Windows TrueType fonts in Linux. It's now linked in the 'words' section (finally has something :D). Hope it comes in useful for some random google searcher or something.

I got bored, so I thought I'd make a little page with Jesus giving out advice. Here it is.

Apparantly nowadays 'degenerates' is considered 'shakespeare':

Huw: man these degenerates are annoying
Rob: yes, muchly
coolgul4: wot wot wot
coolgul4: plz no shakespeare language
Huw: ?
Rob: hahaha
coolgul4@: modern english

Today I was going through the horrid Qbasic program for my AS Computing course, and I was thinking to myself as I was finishing off the file system functions "Qbasic is shit, I wonder if you can use whatever you want, I could knock something together in PHP in no time".

So then I went hunting for the WJEC course specifications, and no, it doesn't say you have to use Qbasic, any 'high-level' language will do. So all I have to do is get that written easily, document it (do that while writing it) and then re-write the system analysis crap to fit the new end result.

I am the winner.

Super-duper-pooper

There.

I've added two images I found of Joey, who was Fluffy's sort-of-twin-brother.

Been working away at my PHP AS program. Almost got flat file adding/editing/updating/viewing cracked for one program section, once that's finished it won't be too hard to just modify the code to suite the other sections.

Just watched the Bownling For Columbine documentary by Michael Moore. If you haven't seen it you really should.

Just found this out while reading the AS Computing WJEC doc:

"The implementation should include an outline solution, with modular blocks set up with links, with at least one module being taken to a working end....The module(s)implemented for the prototype system should be fully functional, but will lack some of the sophistication that you would expect to see in the fully developed coursework...which should be included in CP6."

Which basically means I don't have to do any more programming work :D

I also did the User Documenaion today, all 12 pages of it; covering the download, installation and configuration of Apache and PHP on Windows alogn with how to get my scripts running.

Me = Win.

Today I've been pulling all my art work together ready for tomorrow when I'm actually going into school.

*shock*

Well I went into school, and amazingly pretty much sod all happened. It really puts the pointlessness of school into perspective when I've not been there for ~2 months, yet when I go back I find I'm not behind and I've up to date in my work.

Was knackered as hell yesterday, hence lack on any updates. Bite me.

I've think I've recovered most of yesterdays stuff with the posts I've made this afternoon so all is well.

Still knackerd now. 4am bed times and 7:30am wake up time for school three days in a row isn't good. Thing is I can't get to sleep, not tired like that, its more exhaustion than anything.

Hope another battle with insomnia isn't heading my way.

Just found out that the Phoenix file locking bug has been fixed. I am happy.

Woke up at somewher around 8 this morning, I must've looked at the clock wrong because I thought it was 1pm until I switched on BBC News 24 and the 10am update came on.

That means I fed Tabby the wrong food - can o' meat instead of buscuits.

I'm sick of people posting 'cool' things on forums that are so old it's annoying. They think they're the best for posting a link to whatever it is. Gah.

Just completed a massive news-posting fest, have fun with all the links etc.

It's annoying when I leave my computer for a bit, come back and find that I left the music player running and it's playing one of the many dgod awful songs I have on here.

Harry Potter books are instructional manuals of witchcraft woven into the format of entertainment.

Just been typing up some hand written work - my ability to touch type scares me.

Just created this funky little panorama Quicktime VR file from a test I did yesterday. I think Bob's in there somewhere.

Just added some new photos, mostly to the Merthyr section. Too much damn humping.

I feel like crap. Urgh.

*cough* *sneeze* *nose runs* etc.

Caught something from going to the dissdeased bloody school on Friday I bet. I bet FIFTEEN FUCKING MILLION PUNDS. Yeah. I win. You lose.

Still sick as a parrot. As sick as parrots get. Apparently they die alot.

Posted some news links. Have fun.

Think I'm on the mend now. No headaches yet to day, just a slightly stuffy nose :D

I've realised that I've accomplished nothing all week. No coding, no work, nothing.

Woops, left this go stale for a bit.

Anyways, been playing GTA: Vice City, cracked the game in a little over 19 hours of play (non-continuous), it's good game overall, but just seems like more of GTA3, nothing too special, but nice enough regardless.

Went into school this afternoon, I still have some mounting work to finish for art, but it's no problem and piss easy. Got a Key Skills exam tomorrow morning, which I couldn't care less about.

Woopoopooopwooo.

Woop woop.

Had my secondry interview for Pontypridd College this afternoon, basically just a formality since I was already accepted. The computing lecturer guy was a funny/strange man, nice enough though. Just went through what the course involves, blah blah blah.

Happily chatting away in IRC, and the status tab starts flashing, so I click it, and I'm shown this rather odd error message:

Now, using my reasoning that just doesn't make sense.

Had an eye test today, the usual report - nothing's changed, your eyes are still crap, see you in 6 months, we'll phone you when a new pair of glasses are ready to replace your ones that have been trodden on a few times too many.

Bought two bottles of yummy sounding/looking wine and a new pair of jogging bottoms for me to wear around the house, because its comfy that way.

As part of my 'rip every CD available to MP3' program, I've realised one thing:

Where the fuck is my Matrix soundtrack and Matrix music score CD!?

Driving me crazy, can't find it anywhere.

Hate it when you download a Perl script that's 'just what I needed!', and it turns out to be riddled with bugs that really shouldn't have gotten through, forcing you to spend a while sorting it out.

That's called being a bastard.

Just came back from The Matrix Reloaded, and I proclaim Gallery seating in UCI Cardiff Bay cinema quite exquisite, but onto the film itself...

First point, it isn't like the first film, almost a completely different direction. It's just full-on, non-stop action, fight scene, fight scene, action, etc. Not that this is a bad thing, just that it makes the storyline waning at best, as if they removed all the intelligence from the first film and replaced it with kicks in the face.

The fight scenes are magical, very entertaining, but sometimes they drag on for too long. It's also very easy to tell when they use computer generated images and when it's 'real', but it's not too distracting to remove the entertainment from what's going on onscreen.

The film doesn't really go anywhere until the last 20 minutes, which is something I really don't understand, and it ends very abruptly, obviously showing that this and the third instalment are really just one continuous jaunt.

The Matrix Reloaded is definitely worth seeing (either in the cinema or other methods ;)), but you will probably feel underwhelmed once you leave the showing. Maybe the third film will clear things up when pieced together with this.

Woo yay, found my Matrix OST and score CD's. Hidden in a box in a box on top of a cupboard, damn beasties.

Ordered up a new network card for my laptop, which has been returned to me as my sister's home from uni. I'll have a nice little IRC/IM machine next to me :)

I sort of crushed the network card I had for it so.... ^_^

Fun with skinning Windows.

Now I'm off to pick up my new pair of glasses.

So I go down into town, along to the opticians, burning in the sun, and it turns out they're closed.

Bastards.

Added some pictures to the images section, so go hunt them down if your bored. Gonna start rolling out the new stuff I've coded over the next few days, still a bit of finishing and testing to do though.

You can now view an archive of news items by clicking on the News Archive link and selecting the range of news you want to view, or you can click on the pre-defined links. Have fun.

Just watched the film 28 Days Later, nothing quite like a good ol' British flick to get rid of the bad aftertaste from The Matrix Reloaded.

In other news, its bloody warm.

Gave the GTA3MTA multiplayer mod a whirl today. It's pretty cool, and definately has potential after more developments. All I could really do was knick a car and ram into some German, launching him 10 metres into the air. Good stuff.

If you pop over to the images section you'll see that there's a nifty new thing that lists the 10 most recent images added. Enjoy.

In other news, it's still freakin' warm.

Me, Rob and John went up Dean's house last night. I got impressively drunk, which means free hugs for all.

Spootle is best person ever for taking advantage of my auto-accept of DCC files and sending me funny asse film while I sleep. Computer Boy is just so damned funny.

IT exam in the afternoon. Fun.

It exam came and went. Woopee doo. Physics tomorrow afternoon. ehehehe.

Done my last exam, out of that school forever. Yippee.

Site should be faster overall now, especially the images section. MySQL needed its equivilent of a defrag.

*site tweak*

*tweak*

*tweak*

My new hard drive turned up today, the 80Gb version of my Western Digital JB 120Gb Special Edition drive. So I spent a few hours setting up the new drive layout. The 80Gb drive become my main drive, while the 120Gb has been reformatted and has replaced my 40Gb swap/storage/backup drive.

Plenty of room for stuff now :D

Got bored this evening. Have fun.

Haven't had time to try out the hard drive I molested last night, I'll get it done tomorrow I think.

Updated Breaking Up The Drive with the results of testing it after my experiments :x

Well I had a bit of fun with those magenets from the hard drive I took apart. WM9 vid for all those retards who don't know how to upgrade.

Did a nice fresh install of Red Hat 9 today, and then installed Ximian Desktop 2 on top of it. Smooth.

I'm starting a major code overhaul and rewrite for Wuffle.com which will make things easier for me in the long run.

Wheeeeee.

Had fun today installing Debian onto my laptop, getting it sorted and then setting up IRC BNC's and ident servers etc. on it. Woop woop.

DeX is still alive and sends presents of a musical kind :)

NTL have fantastic customer service.

You may notice that a few design things are changing, it's me doing it. If any changes make it looked badly screwed up then you're almost certainly using Internet Explorer so go get a better browser or something. Works perfectly in Gecko based browsers, and Opera doesn't have any nasty problems, only IE.

It's annoying when you're hungry but you can't decide what to eat so you end up with something pathetic like a cookie.

Been playing far too much Colin McRae Rally 3, finally Codemasters release it for PC. Damn their slow conversion times. Lovely game though.

Let me just give a big 'Fuck You!' to Microsoft. I'm trying to move the site to XHTML 1.1 Strict and I can't since your shitty browser doesn't support centreing using CSS auto margins. Fucking pile of shit browser.

Just finished sifting through the site and sorting out any major code bugs which means that Wuffle.com is now XHTML 1.1 Compliant, which is nice.

A number of changes include:
- Internet Explorer will make the site squashed up to the left because it's such a piece of shit.
- The input box for comments will scroll on forever in browsers that are standards compliant. Opera and IE seem to force 'soft' text wrapping by default, which is wrong.
- Links will no longer open up in new windows, so you'll have to use middle-click/shift+click or whatever your browser needs to open a link in a new window. This is to help allow better site access for screen readers/site bots that get confused with pages that launch in a new window.
- More reliance on CSS for layout and formatting. This will break crappy old browsers that noone should be using anyway.

DeX wanted me to post this for him so I did. Some drug-high quotes or something.

Been doing some tweaking and got some of the main site stuff into a different site setup e.g. the '/about' page is now accessed through wuffle.com/pages/about/ making things a bit more structured. The images section in the whole is also accessed in this way and I'll be moving the rest of the site to it aswell in time.

Journal has been updated to the new site structure. The basic /journal/ dir will takes you to /journal/latest/ and you can limit the number of latest entries by adding an integer to the end e.g. /journal/latest/10/.

Along with that you can display all entries from a particular date e.g. /journal/2003/6/25/ will display all entries for the 25th of June etc.

Still a few more things to move over (news, comments).

The news section has been given the new structure set up. Going to /news/ takes you to /news/latest/ which will show the last 20 news posts by default.

You can increase the number by adding an integer to the end e.g. /news/latest/50/ will show the last 50 postings.

As with the journal you can specify to show news posts for a specific year/month/day e.g. /news/2003/6/ will show all news posts for June 2003.

While waiting for a download to finish I thought I'd watch some TV. I thought I'd found something interesting on BBC 2, which seemed to be a documentary following a group of young people over the course of a year or so.

What I love about TV is its ability to never show the real 'youth of today' - so you had the typical arrangement consisting of a hippie who got herself arrested alot, a weird cyber-punk 'dude', a middle class christian photographer, a 'toy boy' girl who was in the police force and a black guy who was in prison, oh and lets not forget the complete gypo 17 year old who was pregnant with someones baby.

What I loved best was the peoples stupidity. I mean the hippie girl (it took me 10 minutes to actually figure out she was a girl) was all on about how she's not like everyone else. Oh wow, I must've imagined the horde of sheep-like personalities around you protesting 'peacefully' while pissing off people who don't give a shit about whatever you're having a flap about.

The middle class woman, good lord she had to *make preparations to entertain her friends*. OH NO THE WORLD IS COMING TO AND END. If you have to make a fancy dinner with candles and all that crap for your friends then they're not your friends but people you're trying to impress and be accepted to because you're so god damn insecure since your christian religion isn't filling the burning hole inside of you.

The cyber-dude was all on about how the future is his life, he wrote fan-fiction about robots and spent all his time chatting up women on the internet. People like him make geeks look too weird.

Woman-in-a-mans-world escaped the apparent hell of going to college/university by moving away from here midlands village to London and joining the police force. If the real police force is anything like on the program all the police do is help old people get back into their homes when they lock themselves out. Jeez.

The black guy almost won the prize for pissing me off the most because after getting into drug abuse and then having to rob people to pay for drugs, he then has the downright cheek to say that it isn't his fault and it's because he's black that he went to prison for 6 months . Then, when he gets released he then goes on some excuse-finding mission to find a reason why nobody will employ him, the best he can come up with is that because he's black nobody will give him a job. Jesus christ, what year is this again? NO EMPLOYER SITS THERE AND THINKS 'ONOES A BLACK GUY CAN'T EMPLOY HIM'. It's because you rob people, known drug abuser, and don't have any qualifications since you dropped out of school to take heroin.

And lasty it's gypo girl, who really made me almost seethe. Stupid dumb bitch 'onoe I can't do anything now I will have to take care of teh baby'. GET A FRICKIN ABORTION STUPID COW. Dumb fucks like that piss me off. And even though 4 months pregnant she was still smoking and taking drugs regularly. Well idiot, you're going to have one fucked up baby from the start.

The irony at the end was that the hippie girl grew out of her little hippie 'save teh EARTH!!!' phase and ended up going to university. That's how damn 'alternative' and 'different' she was.

Wow, site's working again....

Everyone vote 10 for spootle please :D

I was just completely. Shocked I tells ya. Doing a search for something on eMule I actually found Apple OSX Warez. Amazing stuff.

IE will now centre the site properly since I've added a tweak that sends non-standard code out if the server detects that you're using Internet Explorer. This means that my site will now validate as XHTML 1.1 and will also look reasonably as it should in IE.

In other news, random sleeping patterns and general lack of sleep = bad.

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop.

That is all.

I get strangely bored at 6am. Enjoy.

Heh, just realised that commenting isn't working and probably hasn't for a few days. Whoops, my bad :)

Fixed commenting :D

I like having stuff daisy chained on USB, it's great.

That is all.

Two weird things in the garden this morning. The first is that a slow and rather tame hedgehog appeared, which is something I haven't seen in the garden before. It happily ate some leftover Tabby cat food.

The second is that the two young squirrels that were playing in the garden let you get amazingly close to them, which is another thing I've never seen before.

Check out a photoshop I did for 'uses after the wars are gone' for military hardware.

Site seems a little slow tonight, and the load averages today are in teh low 40% at the moment, the usual is under 5%, so something's up.

Every now and again you come across a program that does exactly what you want, and for me today it was Linky extenstion for Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird.

This little browser extenstion adds the ability to select a text link right click on it and open it up, removing the need to copy & paste the link, open a new browser windows, paste the link into the address bar etc. etc.

You know what's weird about going for very long periods of time without sleep, the detatchment. You don't feel 'quite there' and things just seem to fudge past, everyting is disconnected.

Meh.

Created an RSS/XML news feed for the last 30 news posts, which is linked on the news latest page and should be usable by any news syndicator/harvester.

Moved the RSS feed link tot eh bottom of the news front page. Whee etc.

For all you non-Internet Explorer users, you'll now find that the logo text "Wuffle.com" is now a hand-written-scanned-and-inverted version by myself, unless of course you're a weakling Opera user who browses with the User Agent set to mimic IE.

Why don't IE users get to see the new logo image? Well because it uses PNG24's transparency features to properly blend in with the background image, and of course IE doesn't support this as part of it's 'we don't give a shit about standards' crusade.

Have fun.

Redone the button links at the bottom of the page, which is nice. Strangely the total filesize for the new set is less than the four that were there previously. Enjoy.

Didn't realise I'd killed the shoutbox, all working now :)

Tang's now got a site hosted at wuffle.com, because Tang = wonderful.

Something big's on fire, apparently somewhere near the bottom of Cefn, a few miles away, so must be a nasty one.

Passed the 1000 news posts mark, go me.

Do you eat or drink soup?

By popular demand here's a page that lists all the quotes on the site.

Which religion is right for you?

In other news, my copy of Battlefield 1942 turned up today, been playing it _literally_ all day, which is nice/sad/weird.

Lots of damn fun though, especially kamakaze jeep runs into tanks.

Ooh not updated in a while.

Been playing BF1942 and the cool mod Desert Combat more than I should.

When not playing that I've been spending my time test running various Linux distros.

Slackware 9 seems to take over USB->PS2 keyboard emulation done by the motherboard, and then goes on the unninstall support for it, making it impossible for me to actually install it, which truly is odd.

I should just dig out a standard PS2 keyboard but I don't really think I should bother as a shortcoming like that just shows poor testing.

Debian goes into a loop when it reaches the 'Set Up Networking' part of the install process, making it impossible to get past it, and provides no option to just skip the section, which is nice.

Suse Looks interesting but I really don't want to stomach downloading the distro over the internet as part of the install, and since they refuse to just release ISO CD images for me to burn I think I'll buy a copy of the CD's off eBay or something.

Mandrake looks pretty, seems to be pretty shaped up, but when I select 'install development tools' and 'install internet applications' I usually expect that to mean GCC and GTK will be available and ready for use, and at least some sort of decent IRC application will be available.

So at the moment I'm still sitting with Red Hat 9, in all it's bloated glory. Although it now is a fully configured system, running happily with all my hardware, though I haven't yet cracked sharing a printer properly with Samba.

And finally, Dante smells of wee, which is apparently something I should write alot in the journal.

Changed the site CSS slightly to move away from setting specific font sizes in favour of more client-side control as is recommended by the W3C, this of course means that IE makes the site fonts massive, but there we are, although I have technically increased font sizes a fraction.

I might create a workaround for it in the IE-specific stylesheet I use.

Made the fixes to the IE-specific stylesheet, so things look almost the same again.

Raz can now post news, so you might soon see some stuff from him instead of me.

Part of my Super-Duper-New-Admin system I've been working on is user login/access control etc. etc. All very nice, in the future I'm thinking of opening up the site a bit to allow people their own journals, images int eh gallery etc, but that's stil a while off.

There's a hole in sock number one, whatever shall I do.....

Been testing out creating tableless website designs with CSS, and here's my first go at it, all pretty basic but you can download it if you want and do what you please with it.

Huw smells

Found a nifty little website containing a browser security test that runs 20 odd tests on your browser to find out what flaws it contains. Havent really has a chance to run it all yet, as my browser crashed after 10 or so tests

Huw's Edit journal/news entry brings up the html not your original postings, so when i came to edit the previous post all the links were mashed up >_<

Been doing some background site work, well a lot of it, mostly additions and bug fixes to the new admin system I'm working on. Also started work on user logins/registrations etc. so whee wooo etc.

Saw a good film last night, called Battle Royale, Japanese with English subtitles. Really good film.

Just started playing around with the Smarty template system, just sort of seeing how it can work for me.

So far it looks like it could be a real timesaver.

Really getting into this Smarty templating system, it's pretty cool stuff.

So far the main logobox, nav bar and shoutbox is pumped out using the system, and doing so have shaved off a few miliseconds off the page generation time, which is nice :)

Pritty sure the nav bar on Huws journal page doesnt line up right

How to handle life with all those statistics being thrown at you.

I was reading the comments to a /. about how to fix the current mess the US patents system is in,and I was thinking, why do we really need patents anyway?

Patents are designed to protect and extend innovation, meaning that if you invent something nobody elese can just churn out copies for free, meaning that the competition would either have to lisense the technology off you, or create their own version from scratch that doesn't step on your patent, thus extending innovation.

Now, from my own knowledge back in the aincient times of say the Romans, or go further back, say the Egyptians, Aztecs, these people created some of the most revolutionary ideas and technological advancements, all without a patents system, and even without these patents there continued to be innovation.

Granted, that most of these advancements were machinery or other physical items that would need their creators supervision to build, or he would have to train others to do it, so others couldn't just copy it, but how many people could easily just create a copy of say a software system based on a very vague description? Straight decompilation is illegal through the software lisense so how would a competitor get at your 'innovation'? (IMO software patents are a joke, as much as a joke as patenting business methods, in effect making ideas patentable, watch out, here comes the thought police).

Doesn't copyright cover when someone directly steals your product e.g. software design? Aren't most (if not all) scientific processes difficult to replicate based off just a vague method and desription that someone could get from a patent appliation?

In todays world of silly patents, do we really need them at all?

Who wants some sausages?

Have to fend for myself for a week now. I hope the bad people don't come and get me.

I seem to have grown a strange liking for wheatabix. Dry.

Apparently Goatse.cx is a "mind-enriching experience for those who have been introduced to it". But the project itself sounds pretty cool.

Well, Natural Selection 2.0 has been out a couple of days now. And it's *Ok*. There are quite a few additions, infact to many to list, but some cool features i will mention.

All aliens in a certain range (and buildings infact) of a sensory tower will be cloacked, even when moving, meaning you can kill your enemy easily ;))

Another good feature added is the Devoure move of the onos. This allows you to eat an alien, which will slowly over about 2 minutes digest, giving you health. In these two minutes the marine gets to see inside the onos (woop de doo), and if the onos is killed before the marine is digested, he can escape and continue to be Alliiiveeee.

There are other nifty additions, and the game still continues to be fun (on occasion). The game still seems to become boring soon, and i think this is majorly due to games well over 30 minutes (with recorded games going on for 4 hours)

Still, its worth a download if you have half-life, and it adds many new features to the aged half-life engine (the only let down is of course the tell tale half-life low res textures, and the somewhat lowpoly models, which you probably wont notice). The game also has an rts style for the Marine commander, who deploys buildings etc etc.

Hmm, i wonder how long this post will be :S

What a god damn boring day. Too warm, too sunny, too boring.

Rah rah batman rah.

Got up at 5:30am, went running for ~20mins or so, just 'around the block' as it were, then to Cyfarthfa Park and back. Good stuff.

Spent the day testing some design ideas out, they're not finished yet but might make things around here change. Intertwined this with a game or two of Counter-Strike and Desert Combat, makes for a day of general sloth.

Tabby didn't like the heat today, it got into the high 20's, but the humidity is what made it killer.

It's gone midnight.

Early mornings means it's time for sleep.

Oh yeah, I've discovered over the last two days that I suck horribly at cutting cheese with a knife.

Spoooooooooks

Theres one thing the bittorrent client is useful for (or probably other p2p clients) Downloading Episodes of stuff that you missed.

Win

Today is not going all happy-dory.

Get up, do the usual stuff like put new bird food down, give Tabby here biscuits, change the water etc. etc.

Dinnertime I go to feed Tabby and she's lying on her side, toungue poking out, the usual thing she does when she's too warm. So I get her up and she's all twitchy and meowing funny. Not good.

Bring here in, plonk her on a chair and she flops over onto her side. So anyways I feed her, she eats abotu half of the 'premium' cat food I gave her (60% pue giblets the package tells me).

Managed to get her to drink some water, and then I got the fan from upstairs and put it on her. She seemed to enjoy that.

So I thought 'ok she's alright now normal rest of the day'. Of course not.

I look out the window into the garden and see a collar dove sort of flopping around and twitching on the bird table. That's something you don't see every day. It didn't even try to fly away when I walked up to it so clearly something badly wrong with it.

I come inside, ask on IRC what to do, with answers ranging from 'hit it over the head' to 'poke it with a stick'. Good stuff.

I go back outside and it's stopped moving completely. One dead dove on the bird table.

Scooped it up into a bag, threw it into the bin.

Why does the weird shit always happen when I'm on my own.

"Captain, it's too warm for the computer core to play Battlefield: 1942 without crashing."

"Time to take emergency measures!"

"Engineering, break out the Delta CPU fan at once!"

"Hmm, I think 80 CFM's of cooling goodness should be enough."

HELLO OMG WTRF B BQ

LIVING IN A TRAMPO HOUSE UNDER THE FLOOR WITH RABIES BLAKG HLLAH

"The concept of zero is surprisingly deep, and it took human thinkers quite a long time to come up with the notion of zero. In fact, though mathematicians began thinking about the concept of zero in 2000-1800 B.C.E., it was not until about 200-300 B.C.E. that the Babylonians began using a symbol that would evolve into what we today know as zero."

We didn't have 'zero' until about 300 BC. Crazy.

The Now Playing box is back. Celebrate with sweaty mansex etc.

Or something.

As everyone in the UK knows it's been bloody warm here the last week or two, and no pc likes the heat, so I decided to try and cool it off a bit better by cutting a whole in the side panel and fitting a spare 80mm fan I had lying around.

Not bad for my first circle cutting go.

Playing Desert Combat in teh heat makes it more realistic. As does having some damn player with an aimbot that allows him to shoot you with a scud missile from the other side of the map.

Pfff Great ebay items get taken down too fast :'(

[olddddddd]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3621549033[/oldddddd]

http://www.sxc.hu

A good stock photo websiteeeeeeeweeewewaeeeeeeeeeear

I've seen countless number of people today who've been having problems with Windows crashing on them, more specifically the RPC subsystem crashing, which inevitably takes the whole OS down.

Simple remedy: patch Windows through Windows Update.

The patch for the flaw that's being exploited by all the script kiddies has been out for like 2 months. It's amazing that people still don't keep up to date, it's not like you have to do anything except click 'next' a few times.

Microsoft gives 'irony' a new meaning.

Well today went happily. That is all.

/me Sexes up Huw's Dossier

Buy yours today!

Winnn
Winnn twice

winnars

Well, got my AS results this morning. Was dead empty up there at 11am. I guess most people are sad and went up early or something.

Anyways, B in art, C in computing, U in physics. Two passes which is nice ^_^

"The Rich Aren't Like Us....

During the Vietnam War, a friend of Bush's father used his influence to get George W. bush a coveted position with the Texas National Guard, which involved part-time duties at home, far from the battlefields where 350 Americans were dying every week.

After completing training, Bush requested and immediately received a transfer to an Alabama National Guard unit in May 1972. But Bush never showed up for duty, according to the Alabama unit's commander and the commander's assistant.

Military records show that Bush's commanding officers back in Texas reported he did not show up for duty there either for a year, and that they believed he had been transferred to Alabama. Officially, the period between May 1972 and May 1973 remains unaccounted for.

Reporting for military duty is not usually optional, particularly during a war. Going AWOL was typically punished by drafting the offender into the real army.

Now, our formerly AWOL Commander-in-Chief is all to ready to deploy troops who are still mostly from poorer families. If oil barons like bush believe in the fight, why isn't their blood ever on the line?

For more details see http://www.awolbush.com.

....Their kids don't go to War."

Gayyy barr gayy barrr

Went to Tenby for the day, god damn sun makes you melt. Spent late afternoon in Saundersfoot.

Woo yay etc.

Flat files are the devil. RDB's forever!

Yes, some people are incredibly stupid.

Finally saw Signs today, and I have to say, what a jumble of shit and nonesense stuck together with an almost randomly moving plot that turned out to be.

Latest Get Your War On are up. Enjoy.

First day of this mad thing called 'work' at McDonald's. Only a half-shift to get me going, and I've been placed on the cooking of burgers, which means I do one of the most repepitive things over and over for a few hours, then have a break.

I swear I've never been standing in my life for as long as I have today, 3 hours in one go killed my poor knees.

Next shift is Tuesday,

Look out for a new about:mozilla easter egg in the next releases of Mozilla ^_^

Heh, a fly just on my screen (as they do), and wasn't moving at all. So instead of just blowing it away or something I decided to just click on the task bar really fast, making the window flash up or reveal the desktop.

Whenever I did that the fly went crazy and started moving all over the screen, when I stopped it just sat there.

Crazy.

Tired, tired, tired some more.

Sausages.

My big toe is numb, must be all the standing up or something. Only one of them, my right foot to be accurate. Weird.

Anyways, I've pretty much 'learnt the trade', everything except being on the tills, and I don't really want to go there and actually have to look at the smelly troglodytes that come in to eat the shite food.

Going for ~8 hours with only a few cups of Coke to keep you going isn't a very good thing, but I think I'm coping with it ok. Actually cookign the crap gives you a whole new perspective on how vile the food actually is.

Went to the Mumbles today and had a good dinner at the Italian restaurent there. Yummy x10, especially the ice cream.

Just found a mail account for another domain that I found by accident (disk space usage for the domain was a little high), so I opened it up and it contained a whopping 1252 spam emails, amazing.

In other news, I'm over half way to reaching the monies required for the 15GB-iPod-for-Huw effort.

Dentists appointment tomorrow afternoon, so I'll probably get my hair cut aswell while I'm in town.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Just arrived home from town. Had a haircut, so my long golden locks have been cut, or something.

Went to the dentist's after that; the cavity that they saw on the x-ray turned out to be only superficial, so all it needed was a covering of their magic paste stuff. I also had my back molars covered with something that tasted horrible, to flatten them out so they don't wear so bad or something to that effect.

Bought a bottle of water and came home.

Oh yeah, the t-shirts I ordered from Think Geek _finally_ arrived, only a week and a half late, god damn sucky Airborne Express *shakes fist*

Yeah.

Buy some of this shite I'm selling. You know you just *want* the classic films lot.

Wow, within hours of posting them someone's bought the 84 videos and the old films. I guess there still are people who want VHS.... :O

Start college tomorrow, have to get up quite early, ~7am compared to my usual ~9am.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee

Here's how the first day goes:

1) Bus to take you to town centre never shows.
2) Walk to town centre.
3) Missed appointed bus to college because of no-show of previous bus.
4) Wait for alternative bus designated X4.
5) 8:15 X4 doesn't show.
6) 8:30 X4 doesn't show.
7) A bus shows up, driver claims that yes indeed it does go to Pontypridd, the intended destination. Pay for ticket, get on bus.
8) Driver seems to mislead as bus takes a merry jaunt to every insignificant little village and hamlet in the local valleys.
9) Bus arrives in Pontypridd at 9:10. Ten minutes late already.
10) Take bus to Coleg Morganwg.
11) Arrive at 9:35, go to class room.

*sigh*

Despite being about 30 minutes late I hadn't missed anything as due to it being first day everything was running late. Took a seat, filled in a few forms, talked with the other people, and that was pretty much it for the first part of the morning.

After morning break we were introduced to what the course is and what we'll be doing. The main course is this new-fangled Welsh Baccalaureate, which is a load of little caurses all put together to form a qualification worth 2 A-levels at the end of it all.

Along with that is a BTEC Diploma in computing, which is worth another A-level, and you do a full round of Key Skills (not to be confused with the other Key Skills), which are worth another A-level.

After dinner break, in which I went and got my student card printed, we just sat around for half of the afternoon, after that we were given another talk by this tank of a man from student services, which was incredibly boring.

And now for the fun of getting home, which mostly went like this:

1) Told that buses wait around the back of the college.
2) Wait around, busses start arriving, none going to Merthyr.
3) More waiting, more buses arrive.
4) More waiting, some busses leave.
5) More waiting, all buses gone.
6) More waiting.
7) More waiting.
8) More waiting.
9) Staff member comes and tells us that the Merthyr bus stops around the front of the college, although we've missed it now.
10) Wait at bus stop.
11) Wait at bus stop.
12) Take bus to Pontypridd.
13) Walk to bus stop, find that the 'bus station is under reconstruction, use stops at Taff Street', wherever the hell Taff Street is.
14) Find Taff Street.
15) Waiting for bus designated X4 or X78.
16) Waiting.
17) Ask random bus driver where the Merthyr buses are, told that for some bizare reason that they only stop at the train station, a nice 1-2 miles away.
18) Fuck this, phone dad to pick me up.
19) After 15 minute wait, leave for home.

Day one completed.

Far too tired and/or lazy to do proper news update tonight, and the last week or so I've just been far too busy and/or tired, but by the magic, and amazingly the legality of copy & pasting excerpts I can bring forth the cool stuff with relative ease.

To cut a long story short:

First I sign up to do an AVCE in Computing, 2 years, 2 A-Levels, easy.
Then I get told I'm doing a BTEC in Computing, 3 A-Levels, bit more work.
Now I'm doing a Welsh Baccalaurette, plus BTEC Computing, plus six Key Skills.

So today I speak to my groups tutor about dropping the Welsh Bac., so I can like, have time off to do my work while also being able to work etc. For some reason it felt like I was stabbing her in the face, insulting here very existence with the fact that I wanted to drop this 'New Fantastic Super-Duper Welsh Bac. Course'.

*sigh*

Oh well, lets see what kind of flac gets thrown around from this....

That certainly was an interesting party tonight, and by interesting I'll let you decide what it means.

Just uploaded a new track listing of my music files. I think Rob talked about it last night or something.

Todays shift went ok, 4pm 'til 10pm, nothing nasty like a midday rush to cope with. Of course, that's until the regional manager walks in on a suprise inspection thingy - do this do that, don't do that, do this, do that, etc. etc.

He was hovering around for 3 hours or so, bitching at Ian the manager for aboue 3/4 of an hour, at least he buggered off around half nine which meant we could close early and I didn't have to stay on until 11.

Still bloody knackered though.

"For gods sake Raz put summut else in your journal, even if it is complete rubish * searches for something thta is'nt rubbish*"

Also Check my new render for Citizen-132 mod, rawrrrr, yes i know it sucks

This one sucks even more

Glass texture is sexy though, thats the best thing about it o/

Hl2mods are gonna = win

Got off from college at 1pm today so was home by 2pm. Groovy.

Went to the staff meeting at the Bellvue pub, first 20mins was a lecture given by Mr. Big Manager Markus about this 'whole new attitude' McDonald's is going to push, starting Wednesday, all about good 'customer experience' and crap.

After that is was just joking and talking and stuff, Ian bought us all a drink (I had a bottle o' Bud for all who care), and we had a good laugh.

Still have no idea when I'm gonna actually start any real work for college, not that I'm complaining.

Fuck knows what I'm doing tomorrow since Wednesday is the 'Welsh bac.' day for those who are doing it now. That's not me by the way.

In other news, Dean smells.

Well it looks like I've got nothing to do on a Wednesday now that I've dropped the Welsh Bac. course, though the college was supposed to have something available, but looks like they don't care.

Wednesday = nice day off now then....

Turned off the shoutbox & comments limiting, as well as the various validation stuff I've bolted on; meaning that yes indeed you can spam impersonations of me saying I'm gay to your hearts content.

Have fun.

Save the Wuffle Wuffle worm, it's being hurt by all those bastards harvesting cocaine. Damn their oily hides.

Gotta get myself one of these

Some of the ads in the newspaper are too weird to be real.

And yes, as far as I can tell it is a real thing.

Surely only a yank would buy something like this, and oh look, its sold out too

The cog's of life are moving somewhat for little ol' me, college still hasn't got into a good routine yet so I don't know this or that, when I can have a lie in, when I better go to bed at a resonable time, when I'll be able to work, and stuff, so that means I'm sleeping randomly, a few hours here and there each evening and night. Fun stuff waking up at 4am.

One thing I've noticed is that there's been no squirrel visitations for over a week now, no idea what's happened to them all, and there were quite a few of the tree rats. Sad that I could identify them, although I never gave them names so it's not too bad.

As far as the iPod-for-Huw fund goes, I'll have more than enough to buy a shiny new 20Gb model when my next pay goes through, which is either this Thursday or a week Thursday, so I'll be able to buy myself an early birthday present of sorts, which is groovy.

### GEEKY SHIT ALERT ###

All you people who've been here for some time have probably noticed that major changes and new stuff usually get coded in massive lumps of furious coding, after which not much happens for a long while. Well, my PHP fingers are starting to get itchy, so expect some changes or something pretty soon.

I've actually got a whole new page design almost finished up, put to bring it into use I want to move over entirely to the Smarty template system to make life easier, which is no small feat in itself, once you see some of the horrible messes of code that I've built up since Wuffle.com first went live.

I mean, some of the stuff can be traced back to the bNetwork, now that's some old shit.

AMD released the long-awaited Athlon 64 processor today, and the whole mountain of reviews that have been fired onto the internet all conclude to basically the same thing - it's a damned fine chip. It seems to take the Athlon breed to the next level, at least equalling and mostly exceeding Intel's current flagship, the Pentium 4 *cough*Xeon*cough* Extreme 3.2Ghz, and that's in standard 32bit benchmarks, still no real word on 64bit performance. For a chip that runs 1Ghz slower than the top Intel it's pretty cool stuff (no pun intended).

### GEEKY SHIT OVER ###

Wednesday tomorrow, and so it could either be a big boring day of time wasting, or just a walk-in-walk-out event if they still haven't decided on what to make us do on a Wednesday.

Tomorrow I'll find out if the X4 bus home will give me a discount or something if I use my student ID card, since the Stagecoach into Ponty is free if I show it. Doesn't work for the Shamrock bus which goes the same route though, which is odd. Smelly bus drivers.

The squirrel thing is really odd though....

*Opens up Thunderbird*

*recieves 1 new message*

Subject: "emporitano"

WTF is "emporitano"? If you're going to send me spam, at least do it in the right fucking language.

Huw smells, he didnt even tell you that the launch of the Smart-1 was being streamed over the net. Thats because he smells of wee. He will try to convince you that i am the one that smells, but this is all part of his intricate plan of world domination by cloning himself and then creating an army of blobs made from genetically altered humans who mainly consist of cancerous cells.

But anyway,

home site of space taking off thingy
Here is where you could have seen the shuttle take off, if you were not brainwashed by huw into thinking you really ate through your mouth and breathed air....Ridicules...

Huw's home shit heads.

Yeah.

Eaten..... too..... many..... Malteasers. Bleh.

New series of Stargate SG1 (Stargate and CSI are the only tv shows bar documentaries I watch) was just on, dunno about it all yet. Looks like a direct continuation of the previous season, which is good, but I hope it doesn't drag this whole uber-1337-dude-with-big-guns thing for too long.

Seen a few quirrels in the garden over the last few days or so, good to see that they didn't get sucked into a black hole.

I'm wrapping up the new design, which is nice etc.

Wheee.

OpenOffice.org has finally hit the long-awaited 1.1 release, after a lengthy release candidate cycle. A ton of new features are in the bag, with the integrated PDF and Flash file exporting being some of the coolest.

OpenOffice.org now pretty much surpasses the competition from MS in terms of features, I'd say it's well worth the download.

/me switches off Open Source Advocacy mode

Heh, looks like the source code to Valve's HL2 engine and a few other things has been leaked all over the internet. Funnily enough, shitty Microsoft application security looks like a good culprit, as well as pretty bad admin of Valve's computer network.

I mean, shouldn't the intrusion of a Trojan working over the internet be at least detected if not blocked by a firewall?

This college malarky isn't too bad tbh, only six of us in this morning for some reason, so it looks like an easy morning, with the real possiblility of having the afternoon off.

I'm not complaining.

Oh yeah, my pay should've gone through yesterday, cleared into my bank account today, if it has gone through today it means I've got enough for a 20Gb iPod.

Me and Spawn/Alex will then take over the world. Or something.

Started knocking together the new Wuffle.com design, still some work to do but the basics are working.

This one is completely tabeless and uses CSS for all layout/design (which is split between style/structure so I can easily change colour schemes etc.), works pretty well even in IE5/6, the site uses the Smarty template engine entirely, and as with the current/old design is my own interpretation of a design off the OSWD.

Tired and smelly. Yes kids, I'm home from work.

My pay still isn't going into my bank properly, so I have to get that sorted tomorrow as the store manager's back from holiday. This means technically I have _more_ than enough money to buy an iPod, even enough to get the 40Gb model now, but alas the money's not in my account yet :(

Bums Bums Willybums

Looks like my pay has sort of been sorted, bank details are now on their system, been payed cash for a cheque that never materialised for some ungodly reason, and now it's just a matter of waiting for everything to sort itself out when pay goes through on Thursday.

I'm thinking of merging the journal and the news together for the new site designs, as I don't have as much time to update either as often anymore, so maybe things would be simpler with everything in one place.

I'll be replacing the site over to the new design once I've got commenting up and tweaked the colour scheme a bit more, if you look the shoutbox functions properly atm, with a nifty link to open a page of all shouts in a new window.

Just ordered my 20Gb iPod from Apple, got confirmation and everything, although from Spawn's experience I probably won't see it until next week or something.

Damn their slow delivering hides *shakes fist*.

Checked my bank today, all the remaining pay I was waiting on has finally gone through, so that means everything's sorted and I'm reasonably rich again after the iPod taking a bite out of my wallet.

Wiff wiff wiff wiff.

Wiffy wiffy wiffy wiffy.

Bored bored bored bored.

Tired tired tired tired.

As you can see I've moved over Wuffle.com to the new site design. Still deciding whether to muck about with the some of the colours, especially those for links and stuff.

Still got things to bring across, but the news section, shoutbox, journal and commenting is all working, which is nice. I think I'll leave the journal as a merged thing.

And yes it is my birthday today, woohoo etc., and yes I am a sad git not doing anything special for it.

p.s. to Raz, I've dropped the link tag so you'll need to use html for everything now, although I've converted all current links to html when I moved over to the new database format.

Wheeeee

Weeee New design.

Pwn

Happy birthday to huww,
Happy birthdayy to huwww,
Happy birthday mcdonalds frying oil mc huwww
Happy birthdayy too youoouoououou

Thank you for that Raz....

Anyways, my copy of The Matrix Reloaded arrived today, so I watched that for a bit when I got home, skipping the crap bits e.g. the useless going back to Zion/rave scene/naked neo scenes.

It's impressive just how unintelligent the film is.

Still no iPod, but according to Apple they send it 5-6 day delivery since it's coming from Euroland warehouse or something, so alas, probably a few more days to wait.

And if you want Exploding Mead(e), I'll see if I got them hanging around on an old archive CD or something.

Why does orange squash smell funny? Is it just me that thinks it does or is there a definate strange odour that it gives off?

It's strange in Desert Combat when you see a tank roll down a hill, clip a sandbagged gun position, and then flip into the air, before safetly landing the right way up and carrying on.

I take the afternoon off, so I don't have to go to work straight from college, which would be a complete bitch. So anyways, I get home and what do I find sitting on the chair -

Hmm.... I _wonder_ what it could be?

I open it up, and guess what's inside?

Sadly, not apples, as you might've guessed, but my iPod. Wooo!

What I find amusing is a protective sticker over the actual iPod:

Haha, yeah, I would never do that ^__^

So anyways, I plug the dock into my PC's FireWire port, install the XPlay, and then sit the iPod into the dock. Here it is doidump.wuffle.comng what it's doing right now - charging up the battery and syncing my music files.

I think the 2nd worst thing about working in McDonald's is that when you get home you smell. Smell of the grease, smell of the food, smell horrible. This is why I shower so much.

Uch a fi.

Just got back from teh hospital. My toe isnt broken

Been playing around with iTunes for Windows, which I downloaded yesterday. It makes the iPod <-> Windows things just work, rather than making it a big fuss. You plug in iPod, iTunes syncs the music, unmounts iPod, ready to go - no more battling with the 'Do not disconnect' crap, and syncronised song ratings is a new plus.

Shame I can't use the iTunes Music Store, stupid American pigopolist media companies stopping Apple from going global.

Still a bit iffy with managing the music library, and it lacks the track listing lookup feature that WMP9 has, relying instead on good ol' CDDB instead, which is useless for sorting out MP3's.

At least iTunes doesn't munch 10-30% of your CPU times like WMP9 does.

It really needs a 'minimise to system tray' option though, but strangely it does have a system tray option, there's just no way of making iTunes disappear from the taskbar.

Ordered up a 512MB stick of RAM for my PC, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long while now. I don't think Desert Combat will be able to whore 1GB, at least in it's current bloated form.

Got off work early today because it was quiet and I'm cooler than everyone else ^__^.

The 512MB of RAM i ordered yesterday arrived this morning, although installing it alongside my current 512MB caused application to randomly crash, while having it in there on its own would make Windows BSOD when booting up.

So it looks like it'll have to be replaced. I might just have it returned and buy two sticks of 512MB as running with 3 sticks in my motherboard would drop the RAM to 266Mhz, which smells almost as bad as Raz.

Get to work this afternoon, clock in, start making a run of Big Mac's. Thing is there was a cock-up somewhere, meaning that for the night there were a total of 10 crew members on shift, when usually it would be closer to 4 or 5.

Cut a long story short I got given the evening off. Woo yay.

Bored. To hell. And Back.

Oh well, some binary calculations to look forward to.

Chris stop reading over my shoulder.

Nosy git.

Got an email today asking if I wanted to renew bnetwork.co.uk, but if not to click the link and confirm that I wanted to drop it.

I clicked the link. Bye bye.

You can now use a bit of HTML in the comments, mainly the a, b, i, u and img tags. Woo yay.

Within 2 hours of enabling HTML, the comments are Goatse'd. Thank's Raz.

Anyways, just ordered up a bounty of albums off Amazon and CD-Wow -
1. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Soundtrack
2. Radiohead - Hail To The Thief
3. Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American
4. Jimmy Eat World - Static Prevails
5. Jimmy Eat World - Clarity
6. Matrix Reloaded Soundtrack
7. Animatrix Soundtrack

All stuff I already have "aquired", but nonetheless I've bought the CD's of them. I always thought the 'I buy stuff I download if I like it' thing was a load of crap.

Been working all weekend, and I'm working tomorrow and Tuesday, so that means my feet are on the brink of imploding.

Interestingly on Tuesday it looks like I'm going off to the Nant Garw business park to work in the McDonald's there for the day. Apparently because the place is understaffed or something, so for each day this week one of us from the Merthyr branch is to go down there and work for them for the day.

Feh.

I've actually gotten off my arse and done something to the site, so for the last 20mins I've worked away and put the add/view quotes page back up. Enjoy.

I don't know what kind of copy protection my Hail To The Thief CD that came this morning is supposed to have - but it's ripping fine in iTunes using my Philips CD burner. The Toshiba DVD drive wasn't too happy about it though.

I wonder how much is cost EMI Records to use the copy protection, despite it being crap.

Stupid bloody Crucial, finally send me a replacement 512MB of RAM, but it turns out it's more fucked than the one it's replacing - a total of 756 errors found using the MS memory tester app they make you use before authorising an RMA.

Bastards.

Just ordered up my ticket to see Muse at Cardiff in December. Woo yay etc.

Fuck me it was loud tonight. I still can't hear properly.

And indeed, the bands were HARDCOER!!!11 TO THE MAX!!!

Oh yes. Well, maybe not.

Got my ticket at least :D

In other news, I'm completely fucked with college work to do tommorrow :E

Argh.

Is it me, or was adding a slight fake echo the 'in' thing for recording albums during the 80's?

OMG I have eaten every other flavour of Starburst's in my Big Bag o' Starburst's, now only strawberry remains.

I am but a God among men! Bwahahahahaha

Lime > You

Finally broke the 3000 song barrier -

^__^

Shit it's like, nearly half 6.

Shit.

No Dean it was not my body that the police found and I am fine

Fuck you Fileplanet. Apparently I have a subscription to have access to 'high speed, reliable downloads', two key things WHICH I HAVE NOT TODAY. 30Kb/sec on a 550Mb+ download that times out with 50Mb to go, corrupting the file in the process IS NOT COOL OK.

Stupid shit.

Wikky wakky woo woo.

/me rocks out to New Order

mmm....80's.

Oh yeah, my clothes stunk of a certain 'consumable' when I got home today. Steven knows what I'm talking about

As I have absolutely nothing descent to write here, here is a random picture:

Oh wait, maybe I do...

...

...

...

Moo.

Time for some news posting I think.

I have to say that kettles are the coolest thing on the planet.

I mean, what's cooler than an electrical appliance that can boil reasonably large volumes of water in minutes?

Oh wait, lot's of things.

/me spins away

And Stef, you pwn about as much as a dirty old man. Maybe you'll take that as a compliment. I dunno.

I kick ass at giving presentations.

Oh yes I do.

Well my entire weekend basically consisted of working. Fun fun fun.

Pay day Thursday though \o/

For Nade, Mr. iPod is still alive and happily sitting in its dock atm:

I'm sure it'll be happier when the iCleaner and iSkin I ordered up arrive sometime this week ^__^

It's pretty sad that I'm starting to push feelings onto the thing :E

You know those days when you say to youself "hmm..... I've got quite a bit of free time today, I think I'll do [insert productive usage of time]." - and then it's pretty obvious what happens. You sit on your arse all evening and end with absolutely nothing to show for the time.

I might as well have just hit myself unconscious for the evening.....

### geeky shit begin ###
Anyways, for the last day or two I've been giving SuSe Linux 9.0 Pro a whirl, and I must say it's impressive. It's nice to look at, speedy, and using RPM's is practically as simple as Debian's APT - it really is a sweet distro with everything working and nothing breaking with the slightest touch (e.g. RH9/FC1).

I think it may become my new permanently installed distro.

My only annoyance is that Gnome hasn't been as carefully tweaked and loved as much as KDE has for this release, which is understandable since SuSe is a pro-KDE distro, but things may change with the recent buyout of SuSe by Novell, who also bought out Ximian, the kings of Gnome.

You see, Gnome > KDE.
### geeky shit over ###

Christmas has come early for Mr. iPod with the arrival of the iSkin I ordered for it this afternoon. Looks pretty nifty, tbh the photo doesn't do it justice.

Craig smells.

Actually did some work today.

I am amazed.

Craig smells.

Not as bad as Raz tho.

JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 1:
Michael Jackson is being investigated for drugs.
During the Neverland raid, police found class As,
class Bs, and all the male members of class 5C.
---------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 2:
Where's Michael going on holiday?
He's off to Tampa with the kids.
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 3:
What did the woman on the beach say to Michael?
"Excuse me, but you're in my son"
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 4:
How do kids at Neverland know when it's bedtime?
When the big hand touches the little hand.
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 5:
What does Jacko have in common with a Big Mac?
They're both old meat between young buns
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 6:
What does Michael hand round after dinner?
The under-eights
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 7:
What does Jackson have in common with whisky?
They both come in small tots
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 8:
Good to see Jacko dangling his kid off the balcony.
Usually he just tosses them off.
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 9:
What do Michael and Wal-mart have in common?
They both have boys briefs half-off
---------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------
JACKO MEMORIAL JOKE 10:
Jacko's wife has just given birth to a baby boy.
"How long before we start having sex?" asks Michael.
Doctor: "I'd wait until he's at least 14"

My first impressions of the iCleaner stuff that arrived this morning was 'what a pile of shit' - it didn't seem to do anything at all.

But I didn't rant off on here straight away because I must've been doing something wrong - other people have said it worked wonders blah blah blah. So I tried using the polish again using one of those little soft cloths that you use to clean glasses and I think it worked this time, the screen is less scratched than before.

So maybe if I give it a few more goes I should be able to make Mr. iPod spanky new again.

Just ordered up an Antec Plusview 1000 case, a new power supply to go with it, and a Sony 4X DVD +/- writer.

Hooray for me.

Just came back from seeing The Matrix Revolutions at UCI Cardiff Bay.

It sucks.

I'm sure that before fimling they had a lovely script, but somwhere in the anals of the photocopying department the decent dialogue and direction of the film got thrown into an abyss, never to see the light of day.

It's lovely that by the end the machines are at peace with humans, and anyone who wants to leave The Matrix can apparently do so, despite having already chosen their path or some other such ill-concieved Oracle nonesense.

That's another thing, the whole Oracle-changing-bodies sub-plot was so malnourished it should never have been in the film - it's as if the only person who didn't know what happened to the character was the poor sod watching the film.

Of course, the Not Dead New Oracle is about as usefull as the Dead Old Oracle whereby every-frickin-question thrown at her gets practically the same response - I cannot tell you/you know the answer/you will know the answer/you will know the answer when you need to choose/blah blah blah my character is pointless.

The inspiration for the demise of Neo could only have been made more obvious if they tied him to a cross and stuck him on top of a film; it's almost disgusting how they laughably try to 'answer' the 'questions' from the previous two films.

Just my

It's funny when not even php.net admins check their code for simple errors on a test area before uploading to the production server.

Done some general site potching, most significant for IE heathens is that you now have a PNG8 logo at the top of the page which although not as yummy as the alpha-blended PNG24 logo other browsers get to enjoy it's better than the textual logo.

Other changes I've done has been to clean up some of the HTML/CSS, the 'all shouts' popup page now has the same style as the shoutbox, and finally news and journal posts now have a clickable PermaLink which you can use to link to a posting even if it's long gone from the front page.

McHuw: Kung Fu Master III

You know what I love, I really love it when you're not told that a tutor isn't going to be around for the lesson, meaning that I could've gone home at 12pm or something, instead of having to wait around for the college bus at ~4:30pm or whenever the hell it feels like turning up.

Well, no real loss, just went to the common room instead and watched that Spiderman film, the one with the chameleon-haired girl in it. I swear her hair went from scarlet, to red, to brown. Randomly.

Pure madness I tells ya.

Somehow got signed up for a 12-party shopping trip to Hay-on-Wye on the 11th December too.

The correct comments to this journal entry are:

• OLD
• OLDDD!!!!!111
• STFU RAZ
• OMGAWDS RAZ U SMELL

"At the bottom of the tourism league came Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, with 4,000 overseas visitors last year, none of whom were recorded as holidaymakers. According to the statistics, most said they were visiting friends and relatives. Blaenau Gwent also attracted no holidaymakers from overseas, but had 5,000 business visitors and 2,000 visiting friends.

/me waves the least-visited-in-Britain flag \o/

Well Muse was awesome.

That is all that needs to be said.

Man, I haven't posted in this thing for nearly a week. Crazy that.

In other news, my new case and DVD burner arrived, sans power supply which I had to re-order with them. Also ordered up a load of blank DVD's, a few case fans (a clear lighty up one for the side window mounting) and a USB extension cable. Truly exciting stuff, especially the USB cable.

Put myself down for The Big Game LAN in January, which should be nifty since a load of people I know are going and stuff. Let's just hope Mr. PC doesn't have a fit over the filthy English air blowing around inside it :p

More crazy is that my Uncle is taking me with him to America in February, god knows how that arrived at my feet but fair enough anyways. Little short on details atm but looks like a trip to a few West Coast-sh places - Las Vegas, San Fransisco and the likes.

Mad.

For all you people who may or may not have recently seen MIchael Moore's 'documentary' Bowling for Columbine, I'd just like to share something with you before you go off on some seemingly 'enlightened' trip, discuss things with you're friends maybe - the thing is full of shit.

And once you've gone through that, try a more in-depth look into the 'documentary'. Two sites written and owned by Americans by the way.

As most of you probably know I'm quite heavily anti-USA, especially regarding the US Government, but I disagree with such a huge pile of shit such as Bowling for Columbine being portrayed as honest and factual programming.

Changed the site logo to add some sort of christmas spirit. Fixed some minor code niggles here and there, nothing major. Forum is sitting in its still-early stage, and will do so for some time to come. Did a little rework of the Wuffle.com admin stuff, Raz you need to login using your email address instead now mmkay.

Oh yeah, sorting out a proper passport is the most evil thing devised by the gremlins in the UK government.

New power supply arrived this morning...

Off:

On:

Awesome night out yesteday, got mad drunk.

Can't really remember much of it though. Lord knows how I got home.

The few bits and bobs I ordered off ebuyer arrived this morning, along with a Coolermaster heatsink & fan, something which I niether ordered nor have payed for. Fool on ebuyer for putting in my package as I'm keeping the damn thing, it's a pretty nice heatsink and the fan is of the low-noise variety.

Does this make me a stinking thief? Normally yes, but as ebuyer are such a shitty company I think it's a good compensation for all the shit they've pulled on me over the years.

Ill :(

Still fucking ill.

It's not nice when every time you swallow it feels like someone just stabbed you in the neck. Couldn't even sleep at all last night. Randomly sweating like a peado in a playground is fun too....

Annoyingly still ill :/

Taking the piss tbh.

Gotta love ebuyer.

You see this morning arrived a box, quite a sizable box at 40x30x20cm, but when the delivery guy handed me the box I noticed that this big box was also very light.

For this medium sized parcel, with the ability to contain as much as 240,000cm3, all that was inside it was two sticks of ram selotaped to the bottom - each one sized at only 15x4.5x1.5cm. or about 100cm3, so 200cm3 in total.

Am I missing something here? Why in Gods name are they using such a large box to hold these two tiny RAM sticks?

Huw's home. Huw's home. Merry Christmas and stuff.

/me falls back into the not-updating-wuffle black hole

Possibly one of the greatest works of satire ever created.

Fixed the spam situation on the quotes list, as well as curbed the ability to spam it so easily.

Taken the rediculously-outdated news section off as the default module and replaced it with the journal for now. See how it pans out, at least until I have some time to give it a proper regular updating.

The Big Game is in a little over two days now, which should be a good laff.

Now I'm going to go to the fridge and grab a beer.

Happy new year.

I see loads of you people decided to come here soon after 12:00....JOIN THE CLUB.

www.visitwufflefirstthingonnewyearsday.co.uk

Visit it, It's a real website!!11111one

Back from The Big Game, which on the whole was a marvelous adventure.

Had a good laugh with the OUK people among others, and a few bizare things to report.

1) There was this strange manbeast there, and for the first day we weren't quite sure whether it was male or female. It could easily have been either. That night the manbeast turned into the snoring manbeast - the most horrid noise emitting from its nasal airways. Ging even tried to shut it up by throwing a packet of crisps at it but nothing seemed to work.

After some investigation on the Saturday it turned out that the thing was male after all.

2) Alot of the people there were weird - very weird. On a number of occasions a few of them would wander over to our table and just stare into the side of my PC. Sometimes they commented on the RAM or the CPU cooling fan as some sort of bizare small talk. On the few times that I actually returned the conversation in a really polite way they got strangely worried and sort of scared, I don't know if this was down to my accent or they just weren't expecting verbal interaction.

I'm thinking of hiding 100 or so LED's in the case so that when this happens again I can press a button to set of a flashing light show that would hopefully send the gormless nerd into a siezure.

One guy even sort of told me that my case is a standard Chieftec case - despite it clearly stating on the front with both a case badge and the name imprinted in the front plastic that the case is made by Antec. I just said ok to that comment in hope that he would go away sooner.

3) Most of them have low levels of personal hygeine. I mean, I may be a massive geek but at least I still brush my teether, have a wash and shave in the morning and shower regularly. Many of the people there smelled - and having ~50+ of these kinds of people in the same room concentrates the effects to horrible levels. Ging even bought some air freshener to try and rid the area of the stink. It didn't work too well.

4) 'Pro-gamers' are asshats. Giant pulsating asshats. The team I was on consisted of me (Bluetooth), MrRogers, Barry, M^tt and Dynamite, and we just couldn't really be bothered with taking the Counter-Strike tournement seriously but we played anyways.

Amazingly we got to the finals and we were playing a 'pro' team called Ultra-Serve, they even had their own branded t-shirts to cover up their mingers.com quality carcass'. By the time of the finals we'd been playing match after match of CS, easily over 5 hours of matches, more Counter-Strike than I've played in easily the last 3 months.

We were all bored and pissed off at this fact so instead of playing the finals in anything mimiking a serious fashion we sort of collectively decided to piss about, team killing and blowing ourselves up with grenades and the like.

Of course, the 'pro' team didn't like that we were messing about at they're very-important-final-match-for-the-tournement and kept asking us to play properly and stuff. Fuck that.

5) There was this guys PC on the network called Tom, so we assume that its also the owners name, but this Tom had the most horrible stuff in his Windows shared folders. Tens of movies named dog-fucking-peeing-woman.mpg and the like.

Tom certainly was a dirty little lad.

Despite these things I had a very good time chatting too and wandering around the local area with Ging, Eagle, M^tt, Rogers and Barry and it's a shame that I had to go early on the Sunday morning due to the bastard long road trip home.

First day back at college since Christmas and I've forgotten my disks. Thus, I cannot do *any* work, which is fine by me.

Nobody else seems to be doing much work anyways, so winnar is me.

How To Wash Your Dog

Place a medium size Hum-vee , three large Spades and a Cheese in a bathroom. Make sure a Stapler is in place to keep your dog from Wanking in the tub. Isolate the dog in your Thong before running the water. Fill the tub with Spotted Dick . Put the dog in the tub. Putting Beer in your dog’s eyes may help. Use a Binman to wet your dog from head to tail including the Spleen . Rub Milk all over the dog. Drain the Urine out, rinse off your dog and Eat .

I sort of ordered one of these tonight:

A tasty PowerBook G4 15" with all the trimmings such as DVD burner and the backlit keyboard.

Has yet to be confirmed by Apple but hopefully will have the cogs moving soon.

Poopsicles.

That is all.

Well, and this dancing hippo.

Sorted out spending money, well, most of it. Haven't decided if I'll get some more closer to the trip to the states or not. $500 should be enough though tbh.

Thinking of cancelling my PowerBook order and just buying one when I'm in America, since there's an Apple store not far from the hotel we're staying at in Los Angeles. Works out I'll be able to get it for about

Gotta love the NASA Spirit rover, fantastic thing that.

I mean, look at these two photos, the first one is obviously Mars taken recently by the NASA Spitit rover, while the second is a remastered image from a Soviet lander to Venus from the mid 70's.

The thing is, they're not just any old photo's, they're photos from another fucking planet - it's roughly what things would look like if you went there for yourself.

I think it's all rather awe-inspiring to be honest.

A cornerstone of the internet is temporarily no more it seems - Goatse.cx has been killed by the domain registrar citing contract violations.

Found a copy of the official complaint document (160Kb PDF), which was filed by a Rhonda Clarke from Australia.

A 'mirror' of the site has spawned at http://goat.cx.

Goatse.cx, rest in peice.
Goatse mirrors, long live thou.

After some meaty hosting problems, wuffle.com is back, and celebrating is 1st birthday, complete with a birthday logo.

Isn't that lovely.

Love you Sp^wn :D

Doesn't really need much more explaining.

Got a phone call this afternoon from the Apple shop. My PowerBook has been delivered to their store and I can pick it up whenever I want. Considering it was ordered yesterday afternoon that's some pretty fast deliverying on Apple's part.

Huw is now the proud owner of an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop.

:D

Backlit keyboard on the PowerBook is sweet. Here's the keyboard normally:

Flick the lights off and the keyboard automagically backlights, while the screen dims to save battery power as it doesn't need to fight with any other lights.

Here's a better shot with the screen switched off:

Ill with a bastard of a cold which brings with it the most satanic headaches known to man.

Hurrah.

Exploding whale of doom

Passers-by and cars were soaked in blood and body parts were sprayed over a road after the bursting of the whale, which was being carried on a trailer.

Someone's after my noodles.

Enjoy.

Superbowl 2005
Courtesy of spananan

The Wireless Access Point i bought off eBay arrived today. All set up and running fine within about 10 minutes.

No more network cable when using my PowerBook now \o/

Marvelous stuff.

Flying out tomorrow morning, all packed and ready to go. Land of the not-so-free here I come.

Camera's been upgraded with an extra 512Mb card so I can take a good 900 or so photos. Doubt I'll get anywhere near that though.

Mr iPod is packed with songs so should get me through most of the *cough*12 hour*cough* :( flight.

The PowerBook isn't coming along so if I'll be able to update Wuffle while I'm out there isn't known.

Let's just hope Raz doesn't go mental with Wuffle while I'm away.

See you all soon.

Mwaahahha, while the huw is away, the raz can play.

Any requests to start this so called "mayhem?"
I think a little tubgirl should go down well?

Huw is back, and I've just removed tubgirl from the journal entry. In the comments is fine just not on the front page.

Anyways....

American kids and American teenagers are possibly the single most irritating thing I have ever witnessed with my own eyes. Having three of them, who are at least somewhere in the 16-18 range talking shouting at each other about how much this or that sucks and managing to use the word 'like' almost as much as I use the word 'fucking' is impressive. Although having this debacle continue for the entire length of a 1 hour and 50 minutes long internal flight is soul destroying. Its as if their entire life centered around how annoying some random teacher is. Really, it was interesting to find out that this teacher wore BROWN TROUSERS OMG NO!!!!111 WHAT A MONG LOL!!!!!111

Small American children should be used in psychological warfare, they really are incredible. 'Nemo' - some character from an animated film that I haven't seen, is apparently found in every fish tank in a giant aquarium that I visited. Hearing the words 'look Mom - I found Nemo!' or some slight alternative over and over again really makes you want to destroy humanity. Especially as American kids seem to breathe helium or something.

That is all.

I have finally discovered to my dismay that OpenOffice on Mac OS X is just horrible. Since there's no direct port you have to run it within X11 and have a number of silly support libraries and programs installed along with it - it doesn't even try to look pretty.

Anyways....

A cool little thing I have found is that in Safari (Apple's KHTML-based browser) you can switch on an option to spell-check words you type into a form field as you type, highlighting any typos by underlining it red.

A nifty thing and something I haven't seen in any other browser.

Bloody cold out.

It's suprising how much darker things look on Windows compared to my PowerBook because of the default gamma settings.

The background of the picture below for example isn't actually just a dark/black-ish fuzz.

Go go gadget alternative web browser.

According to a new report Merthyr is the 6th fattest town in the UK.

Uhm....yay?

Omgawdz went to fishland today and bought some fish, and then i went to speakershop and bought some speaskerksa and then iw ent to lampslant and pbiught some lamsp, and then i want to asda and bout a itusthe box so i could vlow my nose.

Tang can now post on Wuffle. Enjoy.

Raz smells.

I had a dream not long ago... where I was being chased by this thing only I didn't know what it was, was too scared to look back you see. And uh, so I was running, and everythin else was runnin from this thing as well, all the insects around me were runnin too. And we ran into this shed, me and these insects who seemed to be my friends.. and when we were in this shed, there was shitloads of spiders around, only these weren't really my friends and they were crawling all over me.. Couldn't move though cos of the thing outside. Yep was scary.. Wonder what it means? Am I a derranged little shite? :(

OMGZ I JUST PASSED MY DRIVING TSET LIKE RAH!!!1 :D

This is possibly one of the oddest banner ads I have ever seen. I have no idea what it was advertising as I didn't click it, that would also ruin the enigma of it.

The unnamed man argued that, as his wife lived in Thailand, the local authority had to compensate him for his "considerable sexual needs".

Any ideas why my Google now looks rather different?

I HAVE A PENIS IT IS VERY GAY, I CAME IN MY EYE WHEN I WANKED OFF YESTERDAY
I HAVEA PENIS IT IS VERY LARGE, THE BEST WAY TO WANK OFF IS WITH A HAND OF MARGE
I HAVE A PENIS IT IS VERY SMELLY, WHEN I CAME THE OTHER DAY IT LANDED ON MY BELLY

Thank you for that insight Tang.

Anyways...

As you can probably see, to the left is a list of the last 5 news items. I don't know why it's there now but I'm just trying a few different things out.

Switched page caching and PHP compiling back on, the biggest effect this will have is on the quotes list that now generates in about 0.5-1 seconds (depending on whether it uses cached page or not), rather than the 4+ seconds it was taking without it. That's like a 100000% speed increase or something.

I'm thinking of moving Wuffle.com over to MovableType as it means a lot less work for me to update the site and stuff.

I got thinkin tonite.. why is it, that the terrorist attacks in Spain aren't noticed anywhere near as much as the ones in America on 9/11?

In terms of population, about the same amount were killed, and yet it hasn't made an impact on people in general. Is it because we've experienced terrorist attacks in the west before such as 9/11? I don't think so, its almost as if it matters more if the attack happens on American soil rather than Spanish or maybe any other European country.

This is mainly directed at americans, they don't know, so they don't care about what happened in Madrid. I just don't think thats fair, 200 innocent people are dead, and yet theres many Americans who don't even know about it, at least not the extent of it.

It pisses me off, and yet, as I've said to a couple of people tonight, I'm guilty of it myself in a way. I feel bad for that, I don't think its right of me.. Spain has practically the same living conditions as any western country, and it could happen to any one of us. Just think how much happens in your life, the people you know, the things you've experienced, seen, the memories you have.. well 200 of them same lives belonging to innocent people are gone forever now. And think how their loved ones must feel..

I dont normally get like this, im not a peace-loving person or nothin really. But I guess I just realised a few things tonight. You know, people say that a lot of terrorists are freedom fighters, I don't see how. To become a terrorist, in my opinion, means to intentionally kill innocent people. Thats not fighting for freedom..

I know a lot of poeple might say innocents were killed by bombing in the Iraq war, but they weren't intentional killings. I know it doesn't make it any less tragic, but it does make the mentality of the people responsible very different. terrorists are quite honestly complete fucking pricks, and I'd like to personally kick the shit out of every one of them.

Hmm.. anyway.. I'll hush now.

Wow, Tangy being serious, first time ever methinks.

Some Random French Bloke

Not a liar spanana.

Great new option in OS X 10.3.3. Means that I don't have to press the fn key if I want to use Expos

What a giant waste of my time going to College this morning was.

Missed the first lesson because I had a dentist's appointment, so when I did get the Ponty I'd missed that. Web design lesson is just non-issue since it's just carry on with the design work.

Fuggit.

Just finished listening to episode 3 of LugRadio and it's a mad good laugh. Even for the majority of you who aren't massively into computers & software you should try and listen to it.

It's gonna be one of those days when you find a dead rat just outside your front door that's had been munched on for a good bit.

Gave my PowerBook it's first clean today, so all pretty once again and rid of thumb marks and the like.

Spent a good 15 minutes doing that. How nerdy....

That thing is possible one of the scariest robots I have ever seen. Actually, I think it is the scariest robot I've ever seen.

Imagine what it would've looked like if he tried to make it look human instead.....perish the thought.

Tabby isn't well. Not eating, drinking, groggy, easily irritated and she keeps doing what I can best describe as 'retching' as if to be sick.

Either she's got a nasty fur-ball or something on the way, or she's finally on her last legs. This is the kind of stuff that happened a week or two before Fluffy popped his clogs.

If she's not better by Monday she's going to see the vet.

According to the vet Tabby's not doing too good today, she's still on a drip and will have to stay a while longer. My mother has to go and sign a consent form this evening so they can operate on her to try and sort out what's wrong with her throat. Because of her age there's a good chance she won't wake up from the anaesthetic, thus I think I'll go up to Brecon with them to see her.

On a good note the vet did say that the blood test showed nothing wrong with her kidneys, so if she does pull through she should be with us a while longer.

I seemed to get absolutely smashed last night. No hangover though so winnar is me.

Anyways, Tabby's had the operation on her teeth and throat, and come through alive at the other end with a clean bill of health. My parent are going to Brecon later today to bring her home.

\o/

Been trying out a bit of stop-motion photography, with this little movie as the result.

Gonna try making one over a longer period of time but first I need to get hold of a power adaptor for the camera as I don't think the batteries would hold up for longer than a few hours of continuous power-on.

Work in a bit, all night....woo yay.

Wuffle.com seems to have risen from the dead, albeit restored from a backup, so some under the hood changes I've made over the last few days have been zapped. I'll restore from my latest nightly backup tomorrow - don't want to make any change right now since there's still some weirdness about.

Wheeeeee....

I think it's funny....

Spent the morning setting up my home network properly, securing SMB shares, configuring DHCP, stuff like that. Installed a nifty modified firmware onto my Wi-Fi access point which almost quadruples the transmission power to 84mW (standard is 22mW), which means a healthier signal for me when further away from the access point. I've also turned off WPA authentication and made it a .public access point.

I have no idea why because I'm probably the only person in Merthyr who uses Wi-Fi.

Found a cool little add-on called Saft for Safari that gives Safari a few features that I miss when compared to Firefox, mainly Find As You Type and address bar keywords.

Now it seems I can comfortably switch to using Safari as my default browser on Mac OS X, despite Firefox being my choice on every other platform I use, it doesn't seem to 'click' well on Mac OS.

Ghost Town is possibly one of the most interesting nuggets of gold I have found on the internet in a long while. Well worth a good read and a good look through all the pages.

For the next few days or so I'm going to see if I can go without my main x86 machine, if I can it's bye bye heaving monstrosity.

Just spent a few hours getting some things done that I've been meaning to do for a while.

Took my PC's monitor off the table and put it away for a while, meaning that 50% more space is available on the table now. Cleared up all the CD's and games and stuff that's in the rack and all over the table. Threw away at least 100 CD's of things I no longer want or need. I mounted my wireless access point onto the side of the CD rack which in turn is mounted on the wall. Now I get a full 4 bars signal strength when in the living room, which means a lovely clearer signal.

All tidy and no crap everywhere now.

Whenever I need to use my Windows box now I have to connect through Remote Desktop, which I now remember means no games, which means no Desert Combat. I think I can survive.

Nothing quite like IRC'ing in the garden while listening to Zero 7.

For some strange reason I've spent the last few hours remaking the HTML and CSS for wuffle.com from scratch. The code I've got looks practically the same, but it's all a bit neater and tidier.

I think this may turn into another start-from-scratch project to keep myself occupied.

"When people instant message me, about 80% of the time I ignore them and pretend I'm not at my PC."

I'm not alone....

Episode 5 of LugRadio is up, and funny as ever. Go download it and see for yourself.

Did a Friday close, started at 4pm, didn't get home until 1:30am, didn't get the bed until 2:30am.

Got up at 8am, back to work for 10am, home by 6:30pm.

Hurrah.

So god damn tired.

Tabby is the most irritating thing ever.

Stupid cat.

iiiiiiiiiiiif i had a big willy, id call it billy, iiiiiiif i had a big willy, i would slap it silly, iiiiiiiif i had a big willy i would have a thrilly, but iiiiiif i had a small willy iiiii wooooould CUT IT OFF AND STUFF IT DOWN BLUES THROAT TO COUGH HE'D GROAN AND CHOKE WHEN His ARSEHOLE I POKE AND I WIN SO FUCK U ALL WITH AN OWWIE SHARP PIN

ZERG RUSH KEKEKEKEKE ^_^

/got nothin

I was bored so I made a pretty wallpaper from one of my icicle photos from Christmas time.

You can have it in 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 flavours.

Enjoy.

Well last night was a damned fun time. I think the aftermath from RM's was quite entertaining in the Indian food place.

Dean, have you changed your mobile number or something? When I try it I get incorrect number message.

Installed the latest Mac OS X.3 update, which was version 3.4 of the Airport wireless bits and bobs. As usual it's a little flakey - my PowerBook just started randomly losing my wireless network connection for a moment, and my signal strength was cut almost in half which was strange.

So I manually removed it and now everything seems okey dokey again.

Just wasted a good few hours of my life reinstalling Windows on my main Windows box after a rather strange disk-based COMPLETE FUCK UP.

For some bizare reason, Windows first started booting off the primary hard drive, and then when actually booted the hard drive wouldn't show up in device manager or the volume manager. Really weird.

After a few restarted Windows then decided to refuse to boot altogether, fdisk, and the Windows XP setup refused to touch the hard drive so I couldn't just format & reinstall, I had to boot into Linux and with a bit of pushing was able to simply delete the entire partition table for that drive.

From there on everything was fine. But reinstalling Windows + million patches + apps really is a boring experience. Thank god I take a nightly backup of all the important stuff on the drive, so nothing of value was lost.

Hurrah.

Went to see Shaun Of The Dead with Dean this evening, which was a thoroughly entertaining film - the TV trailers don't do it justice, especially to its non-comedic moments wich are at points far more interesting than the slapstic humour.

Nice amount of good ol' British swearing too, with bollocks being a favourite.

A copy of the delightful Equilibrium that I ordered off Amazon.co.uk's Marketplace arrived today, although it's not quite what I expected and definitely not what was described on Amazon.

It arrived in a place brown envelope - no bubble-wrap packing to protect the DVD. Oh, and it didn't even arrive in a DVD case, the seller preferring to put the disc in a plain CD jewel case.

The label features Asian lettering on it, the English type around the disc edge is poorly positioned, and there are a few spelling mistakes.

And bizarrely, there is a Microsoft product serial number sticker on the back of the jewel case - what software it's for I have no idea, but I'm sure the seller thought it would be a dump.wuffle.comnice added bonus or something. When I tried the DVD, Japanese subtitles were forced on by default, and the disc has no region coding or copyright notices on it when played.

Overall I have no doubt in my mind that this is a pirate copy of the disc, and I'll be getting in touch with Amazon as well as slagging off the seller.

I might do something tomorrow.

Not quite sure what yet though....

I have to be honest, but I have never personally witnessed stranger things involving people not wearing clothes than what a few people got up to last night.

I was not a part of it.

Pulled a 13 hour shift yesterday - started 11am, finished 12 midnight. Although it was only meant to be an 11-7 shift, three people did no-shows for their night shifts so I was asked to stay on for the close.

Anyways, being a bank holiday meant that I was paid extra anyways -

Yay, the squirrels have returned to the garden :D

Been doing a lot of digging though, not very good for the lawn.

I have come to the conclusion that Tabby is the most annoying thing in the world. She wakes you up in the middle of the night, wanders around the house yowling all the time, wants food all the time, wants attention all the time, hisses and growls at you for no reason, does weird things out of the blue like run out of the room for absolutely no reason.

God damn cat. I swear she could be used in psychological warfare. Been driving me crazy with my parents being away the last week.

Wowzers, just had my first ever Mac OS X Kernel Panic, which was a truly shocking and new experience.

Obviously Mac OS X doesn't like you trying to copy files to an encrypted disk image which you are trying to dismount, especially when the disk image is stored on a network share that you have already dismounted.

Wheeeeeeee.

ph34r t3h 13337 b077l3 0f 5mirn0ff 1c3

Ugh.....

What the hell?

I didn't think my site was that gay....

Good old Google image search, never ceases to amaze me:

And theres a caption competition that goes along with this, winner gets

Have to post something so that the red naked man who made Google think my site was about dogs isn't right at the fecking top of the front page.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot - there seems to be an iPod Mini sitting on the table here :)

In another one of those just plain bizarre things, I got sent a Barclays platinum credit card in the post this morning, something I never asked for, with an impressive credit limit of

It seems that summer is finally here, at least for today - knowing Wales it'll be pissing down or snowing tomorrow :<

Still, no work today, first Sunday I've had off in a good long while, which is nice to say the least, means I get to IRC and post this from the garden.

I love wireless internet.

Pay day Thursday, which is a bloody good thing considering I am fucking skint right now - I have barely

The beetle's are coming to kill us all! Run for the hills!!!1

14 hour shift Saturday night, 6 hours of broken sleep (thank you Tabby), then a lovely 11 hour shift.

25 of 48 hours spent in work.

Kill me now....

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh........

Ended up working at the St. Mary Street store in Cardiff yesterday. Two of us had to go down to help out because of the football match in the Millennium Stadium that day.

That means a day of hell. And it was.

Woo yay....

June 10th is the date that the Local and European elections are taking place, and today I've been doing some homework on all the various parties to see which way I'm goign to swing.

Right now I'm edging towards the Green Party - they seem to have spot on policies for GM foods, renewable energy, creating greater ties with the rest of Europe.

I'm going to email hem to ask what their policy on software patents is, which is my main gripe at the moment, as the Lib. Dem.'s have a great anti-software patents policy which is rather nifty.

The few things I ordered from Japan arrived this morning :D

Two t-shirts and yummy Domo-Kun keyring.

My tickets for the Incubus concert in Cardiff arrived today \o/ Can't wait :D

In other news, I've gotten myself a new phone with a new mobile number - a Sony Ericsson T630 with T-Mobile. It's all very swish, especially with the Bluetooth wireless connection to my PowerBook and all...

Trips to M^tt for getting a mention on slashdot for his WiFi backpack thingy.

Posting this using an internet connection using my mobile phone. Connected at a wholesome 9.6Kbps which is tardy slow but surprisingly good enough for light browsing and instant messaging etc. Not costing me a penny either since I'm using a non-0845 access number which tricks T-Mobile into using my bundled minutes for the call.

Haven't figured out how to use faster GPRS access yet, although that's charged by the KB so might rape my wallet somewhat.

What was cool was how easy it was to set up, basically tell Mac OS to use the phone and give the account details.

Internet wherever I am now :D

Scary.

Incubus concert was absolutely fantastic. Hundred Reasons were supporting them, which I had no idea of so that was a marvellous surprise. Great evening of great music, and some impossible mixing and drum solos by Incubus when they were stalling because of a guitar failure.

What I found a bit strange was that a large part of the crowd didn't seem to be enjoying the music, not moving, loads of people just standing around almost disinterested. That was weird.

Well I cast my vote at the local polling station this morning - Liberal Democrat for the local elections while the Green Party got my vote for the European elections.

In other news, bus tickets are expensive and piss me off.

Here's a picture of some tiles.

Tiles for you all to enjoy.

Fucking lazy bastard staff who phone in 'sick' to watch the football so we're three people down for the night shift. No chance of getting people in to cover meaning we're beyond screwed all night.

Stupid frickin' Big Mac promotion and disgusting greedy people.

Stupid fucking home by 3am.

Amazing, the bottom womans dream date is Eddie Izzard, and there his profile is right above.

Madness!

Mad coolies of MSN Messenger on my phone.

iTunes Music Store has been launched in the UK :D

Threw in my bank card details, and I've bought my first album - When It Falls by Zero 7 for

Somehow, someone always manages to accidently deliver a fridge by courier instead of a much-needed tape.

My PowerBook seems to have been afflicted with the quite well-known creaky/sticky hinge problem that makes the left-side hinge creak when the lid is moved, the problem also makes the screen difficult to move in small amounts.

Looks like Mr PowerBook will need to be sent off to Apple for a little love and attention.

In other news, I have one bastard of a cough and sore throat which I came down with Wednesday night. Keep getting really tired and falling asleep for little naps all the time which is strange.

Glad to know that the elephant remains found and hasn't been lost...

Can't....stop....coughing....god....dammit!

College is over for me.

Hip hip hooray.

I'm sick of the state of Iraq. Every day you switch on the news. Yet another round of car bombs, suicide attacks, militia skirmishes - soldiers who are losing faith in their governments dying day after day - civilians suffering with food, medical, power, water shortages day in day out.

How long have the 'coalition' been in Iraq? How are so many parts of the country still with out running water and reliable electricity supplies? From the start the vast oil reserves held under Iraqi soil were supposed to be used to fund the 'rebuilding' - all that the oil seems to be rebuilding is Halliburton's bank balance.

It's fucked up and I'm sick of it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3840101.stm
Aharaharagagaagga
Gaaaaahaaagagagaghag

So far I've bought 42 songs off the iTunes Music Store which means I've spent somewhere in the region of

Found out this evening that my sister and her boyfriend have got engaged.

Just one of those things that leaves you sort of speechless....

The pains of backing up tens of gigabytes of data over a network.

My LaCie d2 Firewire hard drive arrived today, so now I have 230Gb+ of external storage goodness to abuse.

Hostname: MrPowerBook.local - OS: Darwin 7.4.0/Power Macintosh - CPU: Motorola PowerPC G4 (1250.00 MHz) - Processes: 54 - Uptime: 9h 4m - Load Average: 0.61 0.39 0.47 - Memory Usage: 183.85MB/512.00MB (35.91%) - Disk Usage: 83.13GB/308.27GB (26.97%)

Heh, 308Gb ^_^

You should all go and buy some of my stuff, yeah.

Check out the Wuffle.com Moblog for a few nice pictures of tonight.

You don't want to know how much I had to concentrate to type this out....

Going to try and upload a refresh of Wuffle.com I've had sitting around for a month or two. Nothing different really on the looks side of things, just purer code behind it.

Anyways, is it sad at all that I have a counter on my desktop of the number of iTunes songs sold?

I didn't think so either....

The last of the computer bits I've been selling on eBay has finally been sold, all making a tidy bit of money for little old me.

Now all I have to do is get the second wave of auctions under way. Still quite a load of stuff here which I just want to get rid of, including a peculiar array of CD/DVD readers and writers.

Time to get out of here for some drinking....

Just ordered Battlefield 1942 for Mac OS X, which means that I'll once again be Desert Combat-ing with my spectacular Black Hawk flying skills.

No work tonight, which makes a nice change, and hopefully I'll be going out again to exchange money for fermented vegetable drinks.

I've linked the Wuffle MoBlog on the side bar thing over there to the left, although I'm going to have to do something about the colour scheme it uses.

[iTunes: "Hulahoop Wounds" by At the Drive-In]

The Now Playing music thing is now back and better than ever before after I found a nifty little app called Kung-Tunes, which does exactly what is says on the tin.

Anyways, a $10 donation went the way of the author for this little gem.

After getting home from work tonight, I sat down and watched Fahrenheit 9/11 which I downloaded off P2P, something which Michael Moore apparently says is a-ok.

My opinion of the film is that it's possibly less biased than Bowling For Columbine, but seems to be sloppily directed. Michael Moore doesn't seem to know what he wants his 'documentary' to be about - George W. Bush's failings as President of the USA, the ties between the US Government, corporations and other countries, or the invasion of Iraq.

The film (let's not fuck about with the 'documentary' genre - it isn't one), touches on all of these topics, but in my opinion doesn't go into sufficient detail, or ask the right questions - Moore preferring his sensationalist way of presenting things that may or may not be true or have been edited cleverly.

Moore has said that he wants his film to be an educational tool to help fight the mass of ignorance that resides in the United States, and it wonderfully works as a tool for doing this, although for the people who aren't so ignorant to the things that this film touches on it isn't really isn't going to teach you anything new.

I implore you all to see this film.

Oh yeah, and the viciously spiritual lady who lost her son in Iraq was sort of disturbing to watch - you felt her pain but also was put off by her fanatical personality.

The iTunes Music Store has hit its competition target of 100,000,000 purchases.

100 million songs - that's a lot of music....

I have too much spare time today....

Mac Rumors is covering leaked details of the 4th generation iPod that's to be announced next week.

I can honestly say I have achieved nothing today.

I got up at 10 and I've basically just bummed around on the internet all day.

Amazing.

Despite having not coded anything substantial for 2 months+, I've just coded a wonderful PHP script that takes the Kung-Tunes HTTP POST output, dumps the song info into the database, and also formats the little now playing sidebar box, working out if anything is currently playing (using the time the song started, the time now, and the length of the track).

No more FTP text file uploads and all done in less than 15 minutes!

In other news I think I'll take Mr PowerBook in for repairs on its screen hinges either tomorrow or Wednesday, which means a tiresome trip to Cardiff to the the Apple specialist shop.

And now for something completely different....

Enjoy the little page I put together that lists the last 50 tracks I've played through iTunes. I'm not finished yet, but the basics are there and more.

Mr. PowerBook has been sent in for repairs, and will be out until Monday at the earliest. This means I have transplanted myself onto a Windows machine with one of the most horrific monitors I have used in quite some time.

I'm seriously going to have to do something about this monitor.

Wuffle.com's back, after fixing what I hadn't noticed until this morning - some people heavily leeched the fuck out of fun.wuffle.com and thus it hit the bandwidth limit I had set for wuffle.com.

Anyways, I've turned off fun.wuffle.com for now, although everything's still available under dump.wuffle.com for now, although I think I'll sift through what's worth keeping when I get Mr PowerBook returned.

Last night tagging along with Dean and Rob for some DJ'ing at the Bellevue was good fun - although Dean got visibly stressed over our lack of tunes, although I think we managed well, even had a fair few people up and dancing despite it being a late night session.

The moblog has some pictures taken throughout the night.

Last night seemed really crappy and a-typical to me.

Maybe it's because I don't seem to be able to get drunk while socially drinking anymore, thus all I see is a load of pissed teenagers, something I have to put up with alot in work, while I'm just what can be best described as warmed by the drink.

Maybe I should become a vodka junkie or something so I just end up in a coma after a few hours and be a bit more lively during the evening.

I want my god damn PowerBook back.

Neeeeaarrgh.

Just bought a new workhorse PC to replace the aging P166 machine I have currently running such wonderful services as my IRC BNC's, Apache and the like. Little slimline P3 800Mhz box, which I'll throw in a couple of 512Mb RAM sticks I have lying around to make something that'll hopefully generate Pisg stats a little quicker.

Not having my PowerBook is frustrating at best, I can't do any work on Wuffle.com among other things - I'm itching to code.

Ah well - working evening/night shifts for the next 4 days, so all is fun :/

Today we all got given a little electronic step counter doo-hickey, which is part of a new promotion we'll be starting soon. So the four of us starting at 4pm for the night shift put them on to see who'd done the largest number of steps by the end of the night.

I won with a rather brilliant total of over 16 thousand step by the end of the night - while my nearest competitor finished with a mere 9000 or so.

My mother will be proud!

At last I have a few days off from the mofo place of work.

Spent the day setting up the new machine I bought to run home.wuffle.com off, as well as all my BNC's and other services, and IRC stats by Pisg are generated wonderfully quick now. So I am happy with the quiet little white box.

Mr. PowerBook is still in repairs, although hopefully only a day or two more, depending on a few factors.

Had a phone call from the nice bloke Steve at the Apple shop this afternoon about my PowerBook. Apparently, for some bizare reason, Apple won't allow even authorised resellers have the hinge parts to perform a warranty repair, and it took Apple almost 2 weeks to mull that over before letting the shop know.

So instead I gave Apple Support a call, and talked to this very quiet Indian woman, who after much typing has organised UPS to drop off a pre-paid box which I'm to pack Mr PowerBook into and then have UPS pick it up to ship it to Apple to not only have the hinges repaired, but apparently they perform a full maintainence on the machine.

Which is nice...

This means that Mr PowerBook's repair process going into the 3rd week and is starting to piss me off.

Just bought myself a ticket for V2004 music shenanigans, so you can count me in now Rob.

The latest Colloquy build now works wonderfully with my BNC's, and so I have now ditched XChat Aqua in favour of this lovely app.

I've also added a sidebar item for the latest moblog image, as well as done a basic skinning of the moblog to make it fit in a bit better with wuffle.com. I've also moved all the sidebar items around a bit.

Guess what I just ordered for the princely sum of

I hate Red Dragon FM.

They seem to think I want to listen to the same 10 pop crap like Usher songs every hour.

I assure you I don't.

It's a damn shame you can only pick up Virgin Radio on craptastic-cancer-inducing-AM.

Nope I didn't go out as I do not wish to spend cash when I've got the V-Festival literally round the corner.

So instead I've spent the afternoon potching about on the internet in front of the TV again, as Mr. PowerBook is back with and no longer has a sticky horrible hinge.

I don't know what it is, but SystemUIServer is the most ridiculously unstable daemon in Mac OS X - today it's just been falling over and over, usually requiring me to log-out and back in to fix it, as it's not shutting down and restarting on its own as it should.

Oh yeah, my 'wuffle dot com' tshirt arrived this morning, meaning that it will be pimped out at V Festival to hopefully much puzzlement to those around.

In other news, the latest Penny Arcade made LOL, and nearly rofl.

Finally home from V Festival.

Saw a good few acts, although there was some unpleasantness, but what difference does that make now - I still had a reasonably good time. Stupidest thing ever was the drink tickets thing - seemed like a completely pointless exercise. Although

Coolest. Toilet. Ever.

I seem to have fixed the problem of Mac OS X's SystemUIServer service (the one that handles the menu icons on the top right, sort of the System Tray of Mac OS X) constantly hanging and refusing to be killed and restart without a logout-login.

I tracked the problem down to it only hanging when I started iTunes - nothing else seemed to cause it crash. So I reinstalled iTunes, but that didn't fix it, repaired permissions, ran a disk check, all the usual stuff - nothing worked.

Eventually I gave up up, hit Google and found just a few relevant results which revolved around some cache files being corrupted, so I deleted them and tried again. Still no worky.

Frustrated I decided to do an Archive & Install of Mac OS X which thankfully only took about 20 minutes to give me a fresh install of Panther. Patched it up to 10.3.5 and started up iTunes.

SystemUIServer hung just as badly as before - but as I was doing this Stargate was starting on Channel 4, which I wanted to watched to I pulled out the power cord to take Mr PowerBook with me to the living room.

The battery status bar icon changed state to show the remaining battery life time, something that shouldn't really happen when the service that runs it is crashed. I clicked on the icon and it's drop-down menu appeared, the same for the Bluetooth icon and the Airport one.

I closed iTunes and started it back up and this time nothing bad happened - SystemUIServer continued to run and the icons continued to work.

God knows how I fixed it, if at all it was something I did but it's all working now and no longer frustrating the crap out of me.

Just spent 15 minutes hacking Simsi to shit in order to integrate it into my own site, and after some tweaking the Wuffle Moblog is now just a standard page and no longer a separate sub-domain.

Hurrah.

Why must Apple tempt me into buying a new ipod by sending me money-off vouchers and coupons for free accessories. Neeeargh!

My mothers birthday present arrived from Amazon this morning, and she wasn't here to witness the delivery so all is more secretive. Gotta love Amazon's gift wrapping and card diddlies - saves me the effort despite costing

God dammit 13 hour shift of pain.

Apple have announced the iMac G5 and I must say I'm impressed - Apple have managed to squeeze not only a G5 64bit cpu, but everything into a shell that's only 6cm deep.

This has to be a sign that Apple can squeeze the G5 into tight spaces and a G5 PowerBook isn't too far away.

I have to be up for 5 in the morning.

Endure a 4 hour drive to Sussex.

Go to a funeral.

Come home.

Ugh....what a great day this is going to be.

Well the funeral and general meeting of 'that side' of the family was the worst thing I've had to experience in a long time.

Pointless, awkward, and insulting, all rolled up into a a horrible Thursday.

Also, I have now been screwed over in the sleep pattern department due to being up for far too long and drinking copious amounts of Red Bull, needed to survive the especially arduous trip back home.

I'm just generally burning up with resentment right now, not helped by having to perform yet another horrid ritual called working last night.

I have no idea if I supposed to go to college today, let alone this whole week.

Ah well.

Mr PowerBook must've been running off fumes or something for the 20 or so minutes that it insisted it had no power left in the battery:

Ill :(

Wasn't feeling 100% at work yesterday but this morning I just felt like cralp.

Yes, cralp.

Blergh.

Is it that time again? Three years ago today huh? The day where America remembers the time when an entirely preventable event took place purely because of the US Government's ignorance to realise that credible intelligence is something to be noted.

Happy 9/11 everyone!

Ah...first day back at college.

What an absolutely mind numbing experience.

This semester is going to be just as craptastic as the last, I know it.

Wheeeeee...

I am now the proud owner of a fancy Gmail account, which means that I have a whole 1Gb mailbox to fill up with account activation emails and other such fluff that has to be put up with to register for websites etc.

Of course, I'm not going to use the Gmail account for anything other than junk crap because I neither want Google scanning my email content or keeping emails I delete forever and a day.

Time for a random picture...

...there you go.

This morning I've spent 30 minutes or so trying to get Simsi (the script that makes the moblog work) to have workable PermaLinks, as well as see if I can get my comments system to work with it.

Unfortunately Simsi doesn't use a numerical ID for each posting, which would make things easy to integrate, instead it uses an urlencode'd date string which is wholly incompatible with my setup.

Thus I'd have to seriously hack the shit out of Simsi to make it work, meaning that I think it'd be better off if I just began work on my own moblog code.

So right now there's a link for the comments page per moblog posting which doesn't work at all, and PermaLinks are back and they do actually work.

Friday saw the arrival of two new kittens, and so here is Emerald, a 9-week old kitten, and Amber, who's just over 13-weeks old.

They are sickeningly cute, and constantly run around playing with each other or with one of the toys we have, as well as exploring behind every sofa and TV and everything else they can (annoyingly) run behind. After which they tire themselves out and cuddle up together to have a snooze.

Tabby hasn't really warmed to them yet, although we're waiting for them to get used to our house before mixing them with her.

Spent my evening of freedom being entertained by the two kittens; they are just the most incredibly entertaining things ever. After years of having older cats in the house I think I'd more or less forgotten how active cats can be.

I'm sitting her typing this contemplating starting on my own moblog PHP code, although I don't really want to start and get into anything at quarter to 11 at night and end up not going to bed until 3am.

Hmm...

Mr iPod is running short of space as alas my iTunes music library is well over the 4000 song mark.

Looks like I'm going to have to start thinking about getting a shiny new 40GB 4th Generation iPod....oh what a shame.

ARRRRRRRRRGGGHH.........

College destroys my will to live.

I wanted to go out tonight with a load of people from work as a sort of goodbye-celebreation-thing for a few people who are leaving for uni and won't be around at least until Christmas. I didn't have a shift Wednesday night so I thought I could go out with them and have a good time.

Of course, I have to work now because no-show happy people happen to be working, and they are obviously just not going to turn up for their shift, preferring to go out with everyone else instead.

So many of the people I work with piss me off so much. Lazy, unreliable shitheads.

I have no idea who sent this but apparently the kid in the photo is a fat shit.

There we go.

Hurrah for having to drag myself through an 8 hour shift with hardly any staff around needed to survive a Saturday day shift.

Finishing at 7pm pisses me off aswell. Too tired and to late to go out or do anything really.

After seeing a post on Slashdot I've decided to go through my iTunes Music Library, and tally up how many tracks I have from four simple sources: CD's I personally own, CD's from other people, legal music downloads (iTunes), and tracks I've downloaded illegally (P2P). So here's the results:

Total tracks: 4335
Personally owned CD rips: 691
Other CD rips: 633
iTunes purchased: 166
P2P: 2845

So in total that means I have 2845 illegal tracks in my music library, about 65%, while around 1490 are legal (using the belief that having a copy of a friends CD is legal under fair use etc.

Oh aren't I a filthy thieving bastard....

Some company pays a fat amount of money to run a banner ad on a site, then the overpaid prat in the design department fucks it up by misspelling 'or'.

*claps*

Apparently I have 6 whole Gmail invites to give away, so whoever emails me/adds a comment with their email addy so I can send them one can have one.

On another note, I've installed a SiteBar page which is linked to on the sidebar now.

FULL OF BEANS!!!11

Still at work, but it's funny at least.

Here's another one, who's apparently weird and likes touching his teeth. Can't really argue with that....

Went to the Apple Store this afternoon to go have a gander at the new iMac G5's, and they are very impressive indeed.

The 20 inch model is something to behold. The screen is absolutely massive, bright, and has absolutely perfect picture. The 17 inch iMac G5 is the more appealing of the two - it has the same internal spec as its larger brother but the screen is just the right size to not be overwhelming when your sitting just a foot or two from the screen.

I also tried out BF1942 on the 20 inch model, and considering the iMac G5 only has a mid-range 64Mb Nvidia card powering the graphics, it ran nicely even at the 1660-by something-or-other native resolution of the 20 inch LCD display on maximum graphics settings.

The iMac is ridiculously thin, and incredibly easy to move both on its tilt and on its base, while somehow defying gravity and not tipping over.

They just keep on coming don't they....

Dean seems to have developed some sort of really bad photoshop'ing skill.

It's that time of year again. That time when I'm a year more awesome and some sort of gift receiving event occurs.

To mark the event I also bought myself a shiny new Canon Digital Ixus 500 camera, although it won't be with me today due to the horrid thing that is delivery.

Awesomely I am not working this Thursday, which I think is a good opportunity to perform the act of refreshing oneself with fermented vegetable drinks all night.

New camera arrived this morning, all shiny and new. It's absolutely tiny compared to my current Canon PowerShot A40 but has a nice metal shell and has a good weight to it. Of course, it's 5 megapixels of picture goodness mean much higher resolution and quality pictures, as shown in the comparison a put together:

As you can see, the picture from the Ixus 500 has better definition of the bricks and the top of the roof. Another nifty thing on the camera is that it can sense if the camera is being held horizontally (normal), or vertically for portrait shots, and then automatically rotates the image so it's the right way up. Nifty.

A very nice camera, and bought for a very good price of

If two cameras take a photo of each other at the same time, does the
universe explode?

Just made a few changes to the HTML templates - so now wuffle.com validates as XHTML 1.1 Strict (XHTML 1.0 strict previously) as well as CSS 2 - this means I now have to kick some more ass and look into the bizarrely modular XHTML 2.0 spec - although I think I'll have to wait until browser actually support this one, it's radically different to the HTML we know today.

Possibly bigger than Xbox.

A trip to the quiet town of Stafford for me, meaning a crackingly early start to the day at 5am and enduring the travel time up north. Went to an open day at Stafford uni, which is a very nice place - if you want you can basically survive on the campus, or if you want some freedom the town of Stafford is literally just a short walk down the road.

I think I've decided which uni I'll be starting at next year...

Apparently.

Finally got round to starting a 24 fest from the box set of series 3 that I got a few days ago.

Over 1000 minutes of 24 goodness. Score.

MUUUUUTAAAAAAAANT!!!!1

I went nuts this morning and bought a new 1.2Ghz 12-inch Apple iBook along with a new 40Gb iPod and a .Mac subscription.

Wheeeeeeee....

Just donated to the Spread Firefox New York Times advert project - which will purchase a number of adverts in the New York Times when Firefox finally hits 1.0 and gets its first official release, in return for my name appearing in the ad as a supporter.

Yesterday was an absolute event to remember - taking a trip with a load of other people to the Epillettes play a set at a small indie music pub in the east end of London. Such a good laugh, the Epillettes played what is possibly the best set I've seen them do, and we all came back home in 5 in the morning tired and slightly drunk.

We made a nice little encampment of Welsh people by taking over most of the available seating, and throwing our support out when needed. You would never have guessed we were in the middle of London though, everything felt as if we had never left Merthyr - or Cardiff at least.

Madness.

Dean has once again insisted on inflicting his perverse image editing skills on me.

Enjoy.

w00t!

Just before the US presidential elections get under way this week, I'm getting a bad feeling that George W. Bush is going to get re-elected. Even though at the moment it's a 50-50 call between Bush and Kerry.

In every news report where the American public is interviewed, really bizarre opinions of Bush being responsible for making America safer, being a good president while America is 'at war' (with 'terror' apparently), and other random strangeness I just think that a vast amount of the American public is incapable of rational thought.

The worst possible thing that could happen is going to. I just know it.

What the hell is wrong with America...

So it looks like the vote counting officials and the US media aren't going to rabidly call the election winner without all the votes being counted this year. As such it'll probably be tomorrow morning until some sort of winner is declared for the US presidential elections.

Gripping stuff....

In other news, I'm being attacked by a virus which isn't knocking me down but it's making me incredibly tired and I have a sore throat (sOre THRoAT FROM ALL THOze COX U SUCK LOL!@!!!) so these few days I have off from work are probably going to spent trying to ward off any further infection.

Where are yooooouuu Mr TNT..... :(

Good news: The port of Doom 3 to Mac OS X has finally got a publisher and is going to be released in time for Christmas.

Bad news: It needs at least a 1.5Ghz G5 to run.

Ouch.

I am now the very proud owner of a shiny new 1.2Ghz iBook, a 40Gb 4G iPod and a .Mac subscription, which all arrived this afternoon.

It's an absolutely lovely machine, although the 256Mb of RAM definately needs upgrading. Sadly, the 512Mb that Crucial sent me seems to be dud, so that's going to have to be returned. God damn Crucial.

Nice 'n small, and it stays cool, which makes a change from my lap-cooking PowerBook, and I'm getting something like 5 and a half hours of battery off the first charge, so the battery has yet to be worn in and reach full capacity, which is just maddening.

I think I like this little white machine.

Answers on a postcard to the usual address. Or in the comments. Whatever.

The lack of anything for the last few days has been from me being far too busy with stuff in Real Life(TM), boiling down to being ill, work and sleep. In something near that order. God damn bitchin' headaches too.

The incredibly wonderful Firefox web browser has finally gotten its long-awaited 1.0 final release, with the press release being picked up as news all over the place, which just goes to show how big Firefox has become. Which is good.

The full-page ads in The New York Times will be printed in issues over the next week or so, which will feature the name of yours truly buried in the named supporters.

And finally....

sausages.

A replacement stick of memory from Crucial arrived this morning for Mr iBook, meaning that the little white machine now sports 768Mb of RAM, which makes an unbelievable amount of difference to how quick the machine runs. It's nice being able to run Safari, Colloquy, Proteus, iTunes and Mac OS X itself and still have 400Mb of memory free.

It's sad that this site exists in a way, but it's definitely not unexpected.

My Firefox profile ASPLODE!!!1 :'(

This game is amazing.

Nothing more can really be said about Half-Life 2.

It's the middle of November and already it's snowing, and I don't think I've ever seen it snow this early into winter.

I blame G. W. Bush for this.

They appear from out of nowhere - any shelf, open cupboard and behind
anything with access, cats will go in and pop out randomly. Little
buggers.

An ever-present smile, an almost evil stare.

For the last week or so I've been battling with not being able to sleep well at all, in so much that I wake up after 12 hours sleep or so absolutely knackered, and then stay up for a few hours tops and then go for another little kip. It's killing me and I feel like shit all the time.

In other news, I sold Mr. PowerBook on Monday for a princely sum, and today being Thursday I've spent the money I made on parts for my next project: a kickass gaming PC. Yes, a PC.

Anyways, this morning I ordered this list of parts:

• Antec Performance One P160 aluminium case
• Antec TrueBlue 480W power supply
• Samsung 710T 17" TFT monitor
• Asus A8V Deluxe Rev. 2 motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor
• 2x 512Mb DDR400 Crucial Ballistix CL2 memory
• Western Digital 74Gb Raptor 10k RPM SATA hard drive
• MSI Geforce 6800GT 256Mb graphics card
• Creative Audigy 2ZS sound card

All in all, it should be a very nice machine >:)

Half of the pieces for my new PC have arrived, including the shiny new case and TFT monitor, and so I cannot yet build a functioning machine. Instead I'm using the TFT screen as a 2nd display for my iBook. The picture is fantastic on this thing.

The Antec case is incredibly light and has a lovely finish to the aluminium, and rather niftily was supplied with some CD drive fascia, and one for the floppy drive, which means no ugly white drives to be seen.

Putting up Christmas decorations all over the store at 1am isn't fun.
At all.

For some reason I went and installed a Welsh language pack for Windows XP.

It's madenning.

The Half Life Saga Story Guide is an absolute gold mine of information that's been pieced together from both Half-Life and Half-Life 2, as well as other sources, to create a timeline of events that starts even before Half-Life, and goes into future speculation.

A very interesting read.

As you should be able to see, I have put up this years Christmas decorations, which amount to a new logo and I've changed the colous for the two top stripes.

Five minutes well spent.

Maybe.

I've been playing around with a Longhorn alpha build for a little while, and to be honest, I don't see anything special with it. It's obvious to me that this isn't some major new overhaul of the Windows operating system, but rather just another OS release, much like Windows XP. Except there's no drivers for anything whatsoever.

And what the hell is with that sidebar thing? I cannot see one useful thing that could possibly be contained in it. Why the fuck does the clock have to be so big, why would I want to have a rotating slide show in there? The fuck?

Anyways, I've dumped some screenshots here, although be warned, it's nothing spectacular.

Customising my iPod's icons is fun :)

Is it just me, or does the Burj Dubai tower, look like The Combine citadel from Half-Life 2?

All I can say is I hope it still plays as good as it looks :F

Made a short time-lapse film again, this time from the view out the window of the opposite side of the street this evening - one shot every 10 seconds for about 2 hours. Not really a very good angle, but its just a little mess around - I might try setting up a more downward view or something tomorrow.

Running the camera of its internal battery isn't ideal either, a mad rush to change the battery with my spare when it dies messes things up a bit.

My love for the funny that is Dinosaur Comics has no end.

Every strip is wonderful.

As you may or may not have heard, the Mozilla Foundation has finally gone and had its donation-paid-for advert printed in the New York Times, which is cause for much jubilation.

My name is in the advert, tucked next to the bottom of Firefox's left ear.

Friends is the most pathetic attempt I have seen at running an Instant Messenger system - the number of times it works is far outnumbered by the number of times it's broken.

What a big smelly turd.

In other news, I've been scouring the web looking for a pointer as to why Mr PC turns off power to the firewire ports when it's in standby or powered off, thus meaning Mr iPod doesn't stay charged when plugged in to it, which didn't used to happen with my old machine. Not a OMGNOE!!1 problem really, but something I'd like to know if there's a jumper to move on the motherboard to keep the firewire port always powered or something.

And my Half-Life 2 poster turned up today, and no, I didn't by the Gold super-duper Valve HL2 Steam package. I'm not that mad.

Nice and warm inside though :)

Merry Christian Religious Ceremony.

And stuff.

Five days without an update.

Crazy.

Oh dear, 2005 has rolled up quickly hasn't it? Just last week I was thinking to myself how in a weeks time it'll be 2005 and whoopsadaisy, here it is!

Actually, I tell a lie.

For some reason I've had Mr PC converting rips of the Futurama DVD's I got for Christmas to Xvid. That's a lot of DVD's to transcode and I think it's got at least another day or so to go. I have no idea why I did this but I think it's for some sort of convenience thing, having every Futurama episode neatly packed into a 250Mb MPEG4 file on my hard drive seems convenient to me. Yeah, that's it.

Other than that I've been doing some working.

New years Eve was great, and by great I mean not great at all, although we did shut early which was nice, especially seeing all the twats trying to open the locked door to the store. Haha, owned.

The very first day of January 2005 was also nice, as being the day after mass-getting-pissed by the public means that it was dead quiet all day and again we just shut nice and early. Again I got to see mong after mong try and open the locked door. Great stuff I must say - almost the highlight of my day although I'm not that pathetic.

Amber scared the shit out of us all today by climbing out onto the windowsill of an open window at the back of the top floor of the house and getting stuck. Luckily she had the sense to start meowing like crazy, although she was absolutely petrified and grabbing her was a frightening struggle.

Stupid cat.

I bought a new phone or something aswell.

I've become obsessed with playing Colin McRae Rally 2005 lately, spending the little time I do spend playing games almost exclusively racing around dusty/muddy/tarmac-y courses against the clock. Great fun.

The game also has an impressive damage system which I've documented here in screenshots.

As part of today's Macworld Expo in San Francisco Apple announced their much-rumoured flash based iPod - the iPod shuffle. The little thing must truly be lovely to behold, as within the little list of legal ass-coverings at the bottom of the page is the advice that the iPod shuffle should not be eaten. It's either a little joke, or not - the latter being scary.

Also announced today was the newest, smallest, and cheapest Mac to date - the Mac mini. Basically they've squeezed a G4 eMac into a tiny little aluminium box not much bigger than a stack of CD cases. All the potential Mac switcher (which I think this machine is aimed at) has to do is take it home, plug it into their PC's keyboard, mouse and monitor, and away they go into the world of OS X.

The 2005 version of iLife was also announced, with the new iPhoto being something I might really want to get, and apple have also started what appears to be their own office suite to rival Microsoft Office for OS X.

Called iWork, it's currently a two-pronged collection containing an upgraded version of Apple's presentation app Keynote, paired with a new program called Pages, and is an easy to use word processor with a heavy slant on making it easy to make impressive little publications quickly. Apparently Steve Jobs also let slip that they've got a spreadsheet program in the works that'll be released as a free upgrade to iWork shortly.

I have decided that my precious iPod has become far too popular. I used to be able to walk around Cardiff and not see a single person with the little white ear-buds, now though I see them everywhere.

The thing is, when I'm walking around with my iPod, you don't see it - it's safely in my pocket playing tunes and the earphone cable is hidden away tucked behind my t-shirt. This is not what you see every other twat doing, oh no. They have the big long white cable dangling everywhere, and have their iPod in their hand as they walk like a fashion statement loving tit.

Right now I'm about to start shopping for a nice new pair of earphones to replace my Apple white ones. Fuck being part of the unwashed masses.

For some reason the Grand Master of Evil Bill Gates posed for some freakish photos for some teens magazine back in the 80's. It really looks like some weird-assed nerd porn or something. Eww.

Pac man light switch hee hee.

I've finally gotten around to putting my old 20Gb iPod up for auction on eBay. Hopefully it'll get something more than the

I love how winter brings the clearest nights - makes for some great photos.

Hee hee heeeeeeeeeee.

Green Day tomorrow \o/

Jimmy Eat World supporting \o/

Gonna dance the night away \\o \o/ o// /o\

Green Day last night was absolutely incredible - definitely the best gig I've ever been to. They ran through some of the new album, then played all their best stuff from years gone by. Just amazing.

Anyways - I stayed the night at my sisters place in Cardiff and as Mr. iBook was brought along in my bag I've got a few hours to kill until we're ready to go back home. iStumbler came to my rescue and found a number or unsecured wireless networks for me to choose from, meaning I have the internet \o/

What a dirty communist hax0r I am...

Some sort of socialising event involving pubs and alcohol.

Madness I say.

I've been playing around with making short videos from time-lapse photographs as I've now got a proper camera tripod that I can use to keep my camera steady for long periods of time.

The first of the two I've made today is of a clock sped up going through a 30 minute time frame, and a return to the traffic on the street outside my house.

Pretty good, although I have yet to nail down how to get consistent, or at least smoother lighting between photos - I'll have to play around with all the exposure controls on the camera.

I bought the Half-Life 2 'behind-the-scenes' book and it arrived this morning. Pretty interesting read as it starts off with an overview of the original Half-Life development, and then tracks how Valve moved on from such a massive success to create Half-Life 2. There's plenty of annotated concept art and screenshots all the way through, as well as scripts and written pieces. It's really quite interesting to read through especially when you see the things they cut out of the final game, and how initial concepts changed into what made it into the Half-Life 2 release.

I've also got World of Warcraft on pre-order with Amazon, which apparently is being released to UK masses on Friday, which mean Amazon will probably get a copy to me by sometime next month. Hopefully.

Bought some songs off iTunes, which brings my total of iTMS-bought songs to a squidgy 244, meaning I've spent nearly

Just signed up to Audioscrobbler, which is a neat site that tracks what music you listen to, much like my music page, but with a whole massive community interaction and statistics gathering bolted on. Which makes it cool. Have a look at my profile page to see the (few) tracks that I've listended to since signing up.

Right now I've got my camera mounted on a tripod pointing out a window and taking a picture every 10 seconds. I started it at precisely 17:20, and it's going to run for a whole 24 hours, which by the end of it will give me a frightening 8640 individual pictures. At 15 frames a second that gives a movie that'll run for nearly 10 minutes, so I think I'll run the final thing a little faster than that.

Anyways, I've made a little short clip from the first few load of frames which you can view here.

Yeah, so Windows decided in the middle of the night that it didn't want to takes photos all night, instead prefering to crash and burn at 2am. Bastard Windows.

Instead I have now found a program that does a similar thing but instead runs on Mac OS X. Nice happy stable non-shitty Mac OS X.

Gonna have another go tomorrow I think.

Been playing World of Warcraft for quite a bit of my time since I bought it arrived Tuesday. My first character is a Warlock and right now I'm up to level 14, which is nice - although I still die quite a bit.

It's amazing how quickly time is sapped away while playing this game though; mostly because you spend a lot of time simply running from one place to another, fighting off beasties as you travel. Bleh.

All the quests seem to be the same thing aswell - kill this, go here, talk to this guy, get this, kill 15 of these, go here. Yeah, it's real fun killing some group of Defias bandits for the 1000th time, I'm sure.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a new phone, which is surprisingly the same as my old one, but in white!

Can't really go wrong for

I accidentally opened the Airport menu and so quickly clicked-out of it, but then I thought it looked a little different size-wise than normal. So I clicked it open again and lo-and-behold there's a new network there:

So I launched iStumbler to check it out in a bit more detail, and it confirmed that some quite close by neighbour is running a wireless network, presumably using Apple hardware like an Airport Extreme base station or something.

I'm not sad enough to go traipsing up and down my street with my iBook to narrow down the source though...

As long as I don't cough I feel fine.

The coughing part hurts like a stab to the chest though, dammit.

And the waking up at four this morning with a bad chest....man I'm tired.

Daytime TV sucks more than stupid people too.

Despite being lambasted by a vast majority of member states time and time again, shot down over and over, it seems that the Corporate Lobbying Powers-That-Be(TM) are going to get what they wanted - patentability of software. The European Council has decided that it's going to go against the decision of the EU's member states and push through legislation making software patentable.

In other words, big businesses both in Europe and around the globe have 'persuaded' the EC that software patents are a darned good thing really and that the democratically made decisions of the EU member states must be wrong. Therefore, forcing software patents upon every country is the only solution to allowing Big Business with Big Money and Big Lawyers to create intellectual property monopolies with which to crush competitor, especially small ones which can't afford Big Lawyers.

Understandably, people are calling foul on this.

In something of a Michael Jackson moment my once white T630 has been transformed into the Liquid Black model after surgery I performed on it this morning. I bought the black casing on eBay from some guy in Hong Kong for less than a tenner including postage, which is some damn fine value considering it also case supplied with the special shaped screwdriver needed to take the phone apart.

The actual transformation took about half an hour to do, and I used a handy guide I found on the internets. It's amazing how these things just all clip and slide together and how everything's all compacted into the phone - every bit of space inside is used.

Take a look at some of the fancy Easter Eggs in World of Warcraft I went on a trek for - Old Ironforge and the Airstrip all in clickable, lickable gallery form.

Mmm...

I think there is something wrong with my site if this is what people search for to find it :(

Also, looking through the stats it seems that for some reason this month dump.wuffle.com has become incredibly popular with people on some sort of car enthusiast forum and a few others, and so my monthly bandwidth is being burned away far more than normally. Thus I've locked out dump.wuffle.com/images/funny at least until next month.

Waffles.

Hope you all enjoyed this years April Fools page, and if you missed it well I know you're crying on the inside.

Yeah, my PodFas figure arrived this morning, the kookie little thing - number 59 too!

In other news:

More on that soon.

I'm off to Copenhagen this Sunday, something which I've had booked for a few weeks now but have kept quiet about until recently. For some reason whenever I tell someone, the response is always the same - why Copenhagen?

To this I say something along the lines that it's from what I can tell a lovely part of Europe, and the locals have a good grasp of English, which always helps.

So anyways, pricey National Express is whisking me away Sunday to Stansted Airport, where Easyjet are lobbing me across the North Sea to Denmark. I'm staying in what has been reviewed from my research as a lovely hotel that isn't too pricey for 4 nights, and I've got a sum of money to burn.

Got some ideas on what I'm going to be doing, with a day planned to go visit Sweden, which is just a tiny hop across a bridge to.

From what I can gather my hotel has its own free wireless internet which should mean I'll be posting or something, maybe. Yes Mr. iBook is coming with me.

Just need to sort out what I'm taking...

Waiting in the middle of Stansted Airport, my bag of crap (clothes) is checked in and is probably being thrown around by Easyjet's staff as I type- hoorah.

Wireless internet rules I have to say, opened up my iBook and I had a network straight away, of course you have to pay :(

Copenhagen Day one photos

Copenhagen is crazy.

Off to Roskilde today.

Back home at long last - excruciating coach journeys are the lose.

My copy of Mac OS X Tiger arrived this morning, something that I promptly installed onto Mr iBook (after making sure I had a backup of course).

I must say it is a tasty new version of Mac OS X, Spotlight being my favourite thing so far, and Dashboard being something I don't really care for, although the effects it does are cool. Anyways, Spotlight (the new search system) is absolutely fantastic, type in a search term and it instantly finds everything related, groups them up and choose what it thinks you're most likely looking for - all in the blink of an eye; it really is good.

Mail is now a decent looking email app, mostly because of the UI change because I absolutely despise pop-out drawers.

Everything seems a bit more nippier as usual with a new version of Mac OS, with the Finder loading up thumbnail previews of images far quicker than before. Safari has also been given a speed-up.

So far so good, none of my apps broke in the upgrade, nothing got destroyed and Spotlight is absolutely fantastic :)

Firefox has celebrated its fifty-millionth download and along with a raft of give-aways they've also posted an apparently live count-up of Firefox downloads as they happen.

How unsurprising - Tony Blair got in again.

The bastard.

Looks like the BBC has pulled a doozy with their stupid new-fangled 3D weather forecasting map thingy. The UK seems to have either turned into a desert, or is in the aftermath of a nuclear war because last time I checked we're not living on a grey-brown blob. The general populous seems to agree with nothing but scathing comments of dissatisfaction sent in from the public.

Not to mention that the BBC now completely fails to recognise 'wind' as a part of the weather, as well as the radar cloud maps and pressure maps going straight in the bin. The only weather we'll be having now is rain I'm sure - rain shown on the maps with a slightly darker blob.

We really should be told how much this crappy new system cost the paying UK public.

Through some random chain-of-information I've just found out that by the end of the month Nildram are going to upgrade my ADSL to 2Mbit and charge

Running my iBook through my TFT monitor and using my USB keyboard and mouse just makes me want a Powermac more :(

It seems the battery in my iBook is a deadly ticking time bomb waiting to go off and kill us all in an atomic explosion to dwarf that of Hiroshima or something.

Unlikely, but anyways, Apple are sending me a brand new battery for Mr iBook for free, which I can't complain about :D

Saw Jimmy Eat World tonight at the Cardiff students union.

Great stuff.

I think that's enough.

On the weekend I bought a Canon EOS 3000 body for

Click on the picture to see the video of a cool optical illusion dragon I made, its stare follows you around the room :O

Here's some of the shots from my first two rolls of film from my new camera - scanned in using my fancy-assed new scanner for super-duper resolution scans.

It's a shame the weather's been so crappy last few days as I would've taken a lot more.

Switched on BBC News 24 this morning, it was more or less the usual stuff - the G8 summit talks, protests, sport, weather, run of the mill kind of stuff; and then around 9 the day changed. First of all it was a power surge, then a power surge that caused an explosion, then more and more information trickled out, that was until the first shots of the bus explosion came through and everthing went nuts - this wasn't just a power surge.

Live feeds sprung up and were piped around the world instantly, Reuters news crumbled under the pressure, BBC interrupted normal programmes on BBC One, Sky News stopped running advert breaks (bravo), and Tony Blair makes a statement to the world, vividely shaken and deshevelled. At the peak, BBC News website was pumping out over 10Gbits of data every second with nearly 50,000 connected to the video streams, without even making their servers shake.

London being struck by a terrorist attack, who would've thought that when they got up this morning?

Click for a video of what happens when World of Warcraft goes crazy - one second you're on the boat to Menethil harbour, the next you're flying through the air from Hillsbrad. Of course this was in the midst of the servers going up and down all over the place for emergency maintainence because of some lovely duping and other bugs that were found in the last patch so maybe that had something to do with it.

In other news, I've got a new batch of negatives to scan and go through, and it's sunny outside.

Woo yay.

http://www.onemorelevel.com/games/avoider.html

Crazy Asians and their flash games.

For those of you who don't know I've been in hospital the last few days, after being taken to the hostpital Monday to have my appendix sliced and diced out of me on Tuesday, because for whatever reason it wated to burst within a day or two and smother my insides with pus. Glad the doctors decided to do the surgery despite me only suffering from the pains in my gut, not the usual sickness and high temperature - the surgeon said he's never seen an appendix so swollen that didnt cause more pain than it was to me.

Not only that I was drinking the same day, and eating food the next - a really good recovery time which is usually 4-5 days after.

So I'm discharged and home but have been told to take 4 or so weeks off work.

Which as you can imagine I'm utterly distrought about.

Yes.

Really.

I win.

Apple released a new reassuringly expensive mouse that has no clickable buttons - the entire thing is touch sensitive with a scroll ball for up/down/left/right scrolling.

So it looks like hell froze over and Apple may start bundling a multi-button mouse with its systems.

I'm waiting for a bluetooth wireless version though.

tarting to feel a bit more mobile finally - although I still ache when slouching on the settee and moving from sitting or getting out of bed is a little painful, but it's all just waiting for my muscles to get their shit together.

Due to my housebound status the last 2 weeks my photographical expeditionary quest has been somewhat limited. Not really been doing any picture taking although I've still somehow managed to click off 2 rolls of 36exp film. I think I'll get my ass into town tomorrow and get some latent images chemically burnt into some permanent negatives. I also want to buy a 50mm prime lens from Walters - amazingly they are cheaper than buying both online and getting one second hand off eBay. My faith in internet shopping is shaken to its core I can assure you all.

Being nothing more than a filthy non-working bum at home I have been mostly eating scorpions playing World of Warcraft - where as well as my level 60 Warlock with a pimp hat, I've been levelling up my sexy Night Elf priest who's currently at level 33 and kicking ass at slaughtering raptors and tigers and such in Stranglethorn Vale.

The Darkmoon Faire is making a visit to Elwynn Forest and has set up camp just south of Goldshire with cheap booze available and I picked up a rare necklace by sheer luck for a bargain price. Although yet again Blizzard has lied and/or not lived up to its promises and released a faire that doesn't have any of the promised mini-games and fun stuff that would make the faire something to really mess around with; all we have is a crappy item hand-in quest with shitty rewards.

Been doing some spending over the last few days.

Yesterday after having my stitches removed I went to Walters in Pontmorlais and ordered a 50mm f/1.8 prime lens for my EOS camera, which I should be able to pick up tomorrow.

Last night I ordered up a 1GB stick of memory for Mr. iBook, as it's been getting tiresome waiting for iPhoto to grind through images when I have more than just Safari and Proteus open.

This afternoon I also made a small order for some digital prints from PhotoBox, just to see how good their standard 6x4's and their fancy 20x8 panorama prints are.

Thanks to some impressive web crawling referrer spamming and other bizarre stuff that those wonderful people of the spammer and porn industry perform to increase their Google rankings or something, I have burned through all my bandwidth allowance for the month in just over 13 days. If any of you visited ands saw a bandwidth exceeded error or a password prompt well now you know why.

For now I've redirected (www.)wuffle.com to my home server and it'll be up and down over the day while I upgrade Apache and stuff so I don't get inadvertently hit by some sort of infectious disease or 1337 hax0r attack, and this does mean that dump.wuffle.com among whatever else is offline for now. There's also some weirdness with Pivot as it doesn't enjoy just being carbon copied to a totally different environment.

Hey, look what's back.

I got sick of using Pivot and how easy all the spam-bots and what-not could completely take over the site.

So instead, old wufflage returns.

I have to go out for an hour or so right now, but when I return I'll update this with the few megre entries in the old-new site.

Good morning everybody. Wuffle.com is back on its home server, I've synced up the pivot database and uploaded my phat-assed anti-spammer access rules file, which should give all the nee-doers a very pretty 403 error page. I've been testing it with my home server last few days and it seems to block them all pretty nicely so it's all good.

In other news I've got myself a new lens to replace my cheap-ass 28-90mm, with a tasty Canon 28-105mm USM model that has the fancy focus system, larger aperture wide open and better optics. Also been getting a good number of nicely large 10x8 prints and such through Photobox. Certainly cheaper and more convenient than printing on my home inkjet.

Peanuts.

Not the first and not the last time Google search is exploited for comical results. Hehe.

You can't make stuff like this up.

Been playing the new Day of Defeat: Source mod for Half-Life 2 that was released yesterday or something and my my is it good fun. Really polished and the fancy-assed HDR lighting with light bloom and exposure adjustments galore. Just check out the screenshot below:

Cool huh? :)

Makes hunting through tabs a bit easier when you can see them :)

Hurrah for Safari.

Tycho and Gabe at Penny Arcade continue their crusade against Jack Thompson. It's actually quite funny.

Jack Thompson by the way is a self-appointed moral overlord of computer games and goes on US television alot saying how games are making kids everywhere turn into killer ninja robots or something. The US media of course laps him up because he's crazy in the head.

Finally got round to buying a dedicated bag for my camera stuff, and bought myself a Crumpler Shrinkle backpack which also has a nifty detachable pouch for my diddle iBook and even the whole photo gear compartment can be taken out so the bag turns into a normal backpack too. Has a clip thing on the side too to hold my tripod.

Nice and flexible for the win!

A good reason why you shouldn't have your laptop make noises when it starts up and crap.

Amusing.

Yes, someone has made a scale model of San Francisco in jelly. They even have a video of a jelly city earthquake.

I mean, wtf?

It's headlines like this that remind me why I don't like polluting my mind with tabloid media.

Were the original Ultra memory cards not 'ultra' enough so they had to bring out a second version?

Can they make them any more 'ultra' I wonder...

Guess whos Canon 20D arrived this afternoon ^_^

Just waiting for the battery to charge and then I can fill up that new memory card trying out my new camera :D

Happy days.

The whole Sony DRM vs. Your Rights debacle has come and gone, leaving a bad taste in everyones mouth, from the EFF to the security software and antivirus firms that really don't know how to deal with the 'rootkit'.

There is something about how big business thinks they can do whatever they want and get away with it that's quite frightening.

I've got a ton of prints I've had done through Photobox, all different sizes - 6x4's, 5x7's, 8x10's and even a few 12x5's, and now I need to put them all together in an album.

I'm thinking of buying a really old 'antique' album off eBay or something and using that for my album-ing needs, something really classy - or just buy photo polethene pockets and filling up a folder for the cheap route.

Need to buy a freakin' shoulder bag for my photo stuff anyway, getting annoying squeezing stuff into my crumpler messenger bag which really wasn't designed for the lumpy lenses and my camera body. Still loving the Shrinkle thought for long-haul movement.

What really gets to me is people who pollute online galleries with multiple shots of the same god damn thing, what the hell is the point?

This isn't just on flickr, but any gallery on the internet - I swear it's because they think 'oh its digital pictures on the internets no cost!' they just flood a set with multiple clone shots. It makes sense for showing a timeline of something but still life come on. The wall is the same no matter how many shots you upload.

Choose one god damn picture to show what you want fool.

In other news I have one absolute bitchin' bad throat & cough.

I love how a sore throat is caused by your own body reacting to an infection but because your immune system isn't smart enough to specifically target the infection it just goes all cluster-bomb happy and eradicates everything. Thus a shitty sore throat.

/golfclap

Merry Christmas assholes.

Oh joy of joys, the raptor hard drive in my PC is on deaths door. For the last two weeks or so it's been randomly screwing up and causing Windows not to boot up and such, so I knew something was up. But I thought I was all good and safe as all my important stuff like my camera RAW files and music is stored on my big fat Lacie external drive.

That was until my Lacie drive went nuts yesterday.

So now I have two drives I'm struggling to keep alive using my voodoo magic so I can burn a backup to DVD's, then delete the files off the SATA drive to make room for files I'm recovering using a nifty utility off the external drive.

Thankfully I seem to have only lost maybe a handful of MP3's (no iTunes Music Store files thankfully), one or two episodes of Lost season 1 (which I have on DVD now) - nothing terribly important, all my photos have survived intact which is good.

It seems the clever hard drives have done a good job at saving themselves for as long as possible and right now are holding things together after some coaxing so I can makes copies.

I've RMA'd both of them for replacement under warranty so I have to post them maybe tomorrow or Thursday, which doesn't really mean much since I keep all my business on Mr iBook. I can't play WoW much as it's quite painful at times on the little laptop.

I'm thinking of getting a 2nd set of my SATA drive and the external one to make a raid array safety net now, this is a close shave and my first experience of a nasty hard drive asplosion and it's not fun.

I really can't decide whether to buy the Canon 85mm 1.8 prime as I want something a little bit longer than my 50mm but nice and wide, or buy the Canon 70-200mm F4L to be my first mid-tele zoom, or save up for another couple of weeks and get myself the Sigma 70-200mm F2.8 which could be my tele lens and even be comparable to the 85mm prime at that focal length.

Oh me oh my...

In other news the duff hard drive have been sent away, the Western Digital going all the way to Germany, and so it's just a waiting game of how long it takes them to inspect and then get replacements sent back to me.

You can't touch me Nefarian! We've defeated you many times, and this won't be any different :D

Bah, just had another good fright from this infernal PC...

Whenever the hard drive was being accessed it would feeze up completely, and then work again, then freeze up etc etc.

I thought this new replacement drive was knackered or something.

Turn out the SATA cable wasn't plugged in firmly. Stupid cables and their crappiness.

Disaster averted anyhow!

Lord knows how that lens got into the state its in, but being an L lens I'd bet my money on it still working perfectly fine :E

I post and browse on a number of photography forums and one thing I see over and over again is really starting to annoy me.

Idiots with some money buying a Canon 350D/20D/5D and yes even the mighty 1D 'because it's what pros use' and then complaining about how the pivtures from their

lol

Just looking through my stats for this month so far, and come up with a bunch of pages that are linking to here (mostly the Wuffle Dump). Might do this regularly, but for now here's the best of what is linking here.

Google Image Search is number 1 for sheer number

Some Canadian girls myspace profile has my flying warlock screenshot.

Some foreign blog has used a really old photo of mine to illustrate a poem about something I'm not really clear of (Google Translation).

'Styra's' Livejournal links to and old quick Photoshop of Fabio in front of the White House. Marvelous stuff.

Then of course there's the usual bunch load of forums and message boards and clan web pages etc. etc. that link to random images and oddly post made within the last few days linking to the /funny/ directory that has been blocked off for a very long time now. Strange people link to images they can't even see.

My Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 superlens is here :D

Comes with its own solid padded carry case, tripod mount collar, big-ass hood, and added awesomeness.

It also took a world tour all the way from Hong Kong to get here:

Snowing.

Argh.

Rather funny.

Finally got my external Lacie drive back from being repaired.

I'm sure it takes 2 months to change a hard drive.

And it came back without a UK plug on the lead.

Assholes.

Got my flash by the way :D

It works lovely too.

It's actually a nice day! No snow, rain, clouds, clouds of raining snow locusts.

Amazing.

According to some woman with a degree Goths are so awesome because she was once one and so they all grow up to be astronauts and pilots and brain surgeons and stuff.

Yay.

Estate agents are lying, cheating, criminal bastards according to the BBC.