May 07 2009

Take Away Their Ammo!

Category: Personal,PicturesChrisM @ 11:13 am

So, if you have read the recent comments on this blog, you’ll have seen someone wasn’t happy with their appearance in a snapshot I took. In a blatant attempt to prevent further such outrages, said person sent me a picture they took on my birthday. Well, to prevent any kind of potential censorship/blackmailing occurring, here it is in its entirety 😉
I’ve also included a shot taken moments before/after by AlexC . You can see the original image in her Birthday Celebrations in Wales post.

JohnNameless Individual’s shot

Chris 30th Birthday Cake Not So Flattering Photo

AlexC’s shot

Chris 30th Birthday Cake Not So Bad Photo

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Apr 30 2009

With John, Ira & Anna at the ‘…

Category: Pictures,TweetsChrisM @ 3:34 pm

With John, Ira & Anna at the ‘Big Pit’. Photo exibition, John’s work included. http://twitpic.com/49rgk First attempt at this tweet failed.

John Welsh Salon Photography Exhibition Big Pit Wales

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Apr 25 2009

Dad Don’t Moan – The Other Ones Had Stranger Looks!

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 2:18 am

These ARE photos from a day that has already been posted about – 25th April when my brother, Nick, and Dad came over to Wales for a birthday meal. We went to an New York-Italian restaurant, and I loved the food and company. For complicated filing reasons, these photos aren’t residing in my ‘not yet published’ folder within Anna’s archives, so I wanted to post the pictures now, so I can close a Windows Explorer window I’ve had open for a few days as a reminder to publish them.

Chris Anna Birthday Meal

Chris Anna Birthday Meal



Dad Nick Chris Birthday Meal

Dad Nick Chris Birthday Meal

wow, just looked at the photos properly – Anna looks so tiny in comparison to now, sat in her car seat there!

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Apr 03 2009

Pip & Con Come To Visit

Category: Anna's Photos,Friends,PersonalChrisM @ 8:46 pm

Moving on to the 3rd April (only two more posts to go before I’ve exhausted the supply of photos on my hard drive (I still need to check Irina’s camera’s memory card for more recent shots)), and Pip & Con came over to visit. With Con soon heading off to Thailand (by the time this post actually appears on the blog, he should have finally made his flight onwards to Australia, fingers crossed), Pip kindly volunteered to drive him over to Wales to see Anna before he went. She hadn’t seen Anna either, so it wasn’t an entirely selfless act. From what I remember, and the Facebook photos suggest, we got through a fair amount of vodka, once Anna was safely asleep, and they managed to set off the next day for England with only a few hours missing from their work shift 🙂

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Mar 14 2009

Saturday Afternoon Update

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 4:00 pm

Aunty Jean and Uncle Pete are here, the Wales vs. Italy rugby match is on, and I’ve finally finished adding the required privacy pages to around twenty sites that are currently displaying Google’s AdSense adverts. I hope to post a few links by Tuesday, that have been sitting around waiting to be published. I still need to find the photos for the Jimi wallet review (left my wallet in Tescos yesterday, returned after an hour or so to still find it sitting on the side of the till!), take and post more photos of Anna, and try to at least finish posting the 2008 Amsterdam photos.

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Mar 05 2009

Flowers And Feet

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 1:47 pm

First we have a shot of the bouquet of flowers/clothes that Nick and Roz sent to us back in Wales, and then a shot of Anna’s feet with Ira’s my hands, back on the 5th of March. Again, the second shot was taken in John’s studio, but I don’t think I’m breaking a publishing embargo 🙂 , as looking at the different shots, I don’t think this one will be used in the book.

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Feb 14 2009

Watching Eng v Wales in a rroo…

Category: Sport,TweetsChrisM @ 5:44 pm

Watching Eng v Wales in a rroom full of Welsh people. 3-0 so far, to Wales…

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Feb 09 2009

its quite a novel experience ‘…

Category: TweetsChrisM @ 4:51 pm

its quite a novel experience ‘listening’ to Stephen Fry outside a Burger King in S.Wales

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Jan 12 2009

Belated 2009 Greetings

Category: Friends,Personal,Weather,WiFi,Windows Mobile,WordPressChrisM @ 3:36 pm

Wow, no posts in almost 12 days. That has to be improved upon, sorry. The (somewhat predictable) reasons for my online muteness were recovering from Christmas, seeing in the New Year, travelling around meeting friends and family, some of whom we hadn’t crossed paths with in a couple of years, friends coming over to sunny Wales to see the house for the first time, oh and also maintaining, repairing and improving four different PCs. Getting used to Vista from a technical support point of view has taken time, but I at least no longer involuntarily shudder when I hear the OS’ name 😉
After flashing my TyTn II (Kaiser) to a custom WM6.1 ROM (it was working boringly reliably, something had to be tweaked/modded 😉 ) and getting TomTom, music and voice commands to work whilst in the car, I installed Ubuntu onto Ira’s laptop (dual-boot obviously, didn’t think the love of my life would appreciate me nuking her Windows install), finally got around to properly securing the wireless network at home in Clydach, got the PCs all happily working as far as UPnP was concerned. This needed to be sorted as the internet radio I recvd. for Xmas could also play files on the LAN, and I was having issues just using normal folder sharing on a couple of the Vista machines.
Ante natal classes have been an interesting and mostly informative process, it is hard to believe we are now probably less than a month away from seeing our daughter’s face for the first time 🙂 We now have a lot of the items new borns need, and even the pushchair/pram/car-seat optimus prime styled transforming thingy has turned up. Ira has done some more photo shoots with John, obviously centred around the theme of pregnancy/new life etc. See previous posts for the last published examples – though hopefully John will get around to adding new posts to his blog, and new photos to the gallery soon. Which reminds me, don’t forget to check out ConJoinery if you are in need of carpentry or joinery skills… when Con came over here for a few days, we got around to setting up a quick blog to promote his work, and showcase previous projects. It obviously still need more content, but the basic framework of WordPress 2.7 and useful plugins are in place.
After all that I finally noticed that this site is once again down to a PageRank of 0 (see many previous posts regarding Google and post links-for-money issues. Anyway, I now know why there is a lot less work around again. From n/a to a 2, then up to 4, spanked by google down to a 0, recovered to 2, then back once more to 0. As the only thing this alters for the worse is the potential income for this domain, I’m not crying into my cereal. The unique visitor numbers per day has been steadily bouncing between 250 and 600 a day, even when no fresh content has been added, so I know the search engine traffic, and regular repeat visitors have carried on regardless. It is a little strange to find out which of your posts are popular, and the search terms people googled to get there. If you’ve not already enabled AWStats on your site, it might be worth popping along to your CPanel interface and turning it on…

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Nov 10 2008

Pack It Up, Pack It In

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 4:06 am

So, with the move imminent, what are ‘must packs’, and what are we leaving behind, either for DaveG & Nat to look after, or leave at the in-laws? Well bulky things obviously are a big no-no, so if we had any real sporting equipment around, they’d be left behind. For Irina, she needs to have clothes to keep out the damp in sunny Wales this winter, as well as clothes that aren’t too tight fitting (our little Lolik is still growing! (I need to find out if I can get permission to post a picture of Ira’s bump sometime 🙂 )).

Open Suitcase

Personally, I’ll be taking as many t-shirts as I can get away with, a few shirts and a couple of thick jumpers in case we go for any long bracing walks in the local hills and mountains. I think I’ll leave behind my big winter boots and furry coat, as it won’t be reaching -40 centigrade unlike here in Astana. I’m also trying to keep the gadgetry down to the bare minimum, though I suspect Ira and I will have different interpretations of that phrase 😉

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