Writing that last post reminded me that my use of the English language is slowly becoming slightly Americanized, partially because it means I’ve a greater selection of words to use when trying to beat my old boss Kate at Scrabulous on facebook, but also because what little TV series and films I see over here tend to be American, and a good friend here also hails from that side of the Atlantic. So our flat has slowly become an apartment, this years cancelled holiday to Britain for Christmas almost became labelled a vacation, though I’ve not found myself calling the new tarmac outside our flat a sidewalk, instead of pavement, or calling a waistcoat a tuxedo vest. Most likely as they don’t tend to figure a great deal in my day to day life 🙂
Jun 19 2009
XKCD Again
OK, so I still like the dual booting desktop > swimming in shark infested seas strip (see here) and duty calls the best, but the latest output from Randall Munroe seems pretty appropriate to this household. Click the thumbnail below to see the comic in its full glory.
If you check out his blog/blag, you’ll see he decided not to dally with netbooks in the end, as his Android based phone enables him to SSH on the move, so he replaced his old laptop with a … … laptop!
I never got around to seeing what sort of quality I’d get by taking the PNG for DualBoot or Someone Is Wrong comics to a t-shirt printing shop back in Britain, maybe next Christmas? (I’d like to point out I’d gladly support the author and buy one in his shop, but those comics haven’t yet made it onto cotton).
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May 20 2009
Happy Birthday Seb
Guess what this post is about? 🙂
Now although Irina and I had a reminder on our phones that the 19th May was his (27th??) birthday, we also had one set for today, and as last year we congratulated him on the 20th, I’m going to assume that is the correct date…
Hope you’re having a great time back in Britain, was great to see you, really glad you saw Anna, and remind me I owe you a birthday drink or two when we get back again (~Christmas hopefully).
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May 14 2009
Last Known UK Photo Of Anna?
Unless I took some on my phone, here we have a shot from Dad’s camera, when he and Nick met us at the airport, after John very kindly drove us all the way down to Heathrow. Despite over eager rule enforcement from the coffeeshop staff re. exact seating positions allowed, it was great to see Dad and my ‘little’ brother one more time, and we are looking forward to hopefully seeing everyone again this Christmas.
So, here we have it, the last British picture (14th May) before we play catch up with all the Kazakh photos…
Chris Irina Nick Anna at Heathrow
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May 13 2009
Last Clydach Photos Until Xmas
Taken the evening before we left (13th May again), here we have John, Gwen, Mum and Anna enjoying a cuddle on the sofa.
Anna Looking At Gwen, Looking At John, And Mum
Mum Anna and Gwen
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Mar 24 2009
Dear Father Christmas
Finally got around to ploughing through a couple of weeks worth of unread articles over at The Register, and came across a lovely sounding SSD. The capacity (finally) and speed (obviously) are qualities that scream out ‘buy me’ to those of us looking to reduce boot times etc., but the price (for now) and availability (down to Samsung to release their PB22-J to the general public) mean I’ll probably be waiting a while. See the review here.
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Mar 14 2009
Aunty Jean And Anna
OK, here is the first of the next batch of Anna photos. It was taken on the 14th March, back in Mum’s kitchen in Clydach. We miss all our family and friends back in Britain, and are already looking forward to this Christmas, when we hope to return for a short while.
Anna and Aunty Jean
I do have some earlier photos to post as well, but some of them may be repeats of photos already published, just taken on a different camera – this was the first photo I was fairly sure hadn’t been posted in one form or another already.
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Jan 28 2009
The (Not So) Young Ones
OK, here we have a photo of myself, Irina, Roz and Nick.
Me Ira Roz Nick
We are not normally so dark in our colour choices, but as we were asked nicely, and John knows his photography, we agreed to scrabble around and find black items of clothing that at least looked neat and tidy 🙂
btw, Nick’s beard was shaved off for Christmas, in an attempt to make his girlfriend even happier 🙂 I’ve only uploaded a low-resolution version, as John may want the original for his site.
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Jan 12 2009
Belated 2009 Greetings
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…
Dec 31 2008
Almost There
This is just a quick post to wish this site’s readers a very Happy New Year.
We currently have Marilyn & Peter over (Chris & Tim’s parents), as well as John’s son and daughter-in-law and their kids, with midnight fast approaching. To our American visitors, I hope you are warming up to the evening well, to my UK amigos, just under four hours to go. To my Kazakh readers, Snovum Goddum, hope you are already having a great 2009. (Over there, Western Xmas is barely noticed, Orthodox Xmas is observed, but New Year is the big deal.) Big HELLO to Walton, Assel, DavidG, ChrisK, The Dans & their respective familys, DrKen, lovely friendly Northern bloke I’ve temporarily forgotten the name of, Mel, the in-laws, Dana & Assen, Mira, Bayen & son and everyone else – thanks to all for your support over the last year/months (delete as applicable 🙂 ).
With Arriving to Britain, settling in, Christmas, New Year, and the baby due in February, it is possible that site will see a few less posts in the future, however the blog will remain here (assuming I remember to renew the hosting 🙂 ), and I’ll try to get back to regular posting ASAP.
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