So here we are at that time of year where people often seem to need a few days recovering from the Christmas celebrations to prepare for New Year. Life has carried on as normal here we saw Dad a couple of times before Christmas – Nick was over here in Clydach with his girlfriend, and then returned to her Mother’s for Christmas Day itself. The first time, I believe, he hasn’t been with us. We had a great day despite his absence, with the usual leisurely pace being taken. Dessert was finished by evening though, so compared to years gone past, we did well. I hope to add a few more photos to the blog later, as John has been taking some shots of us in his studio. Other than that, yes I still owe you readers a Jimi wallet and phone holder review. (Short version is the Jimi is great, and the cradle mostly fine).
Dec 24 2008
Friends Roundup
KZBlog has recently started posting again, following a break. You can catch up on the first podcasts in Kazakh, the state’s reaction to people demonstrating and attempting to invade a mayor’s office and finally a piece on the Religion laws currently being considered by the president, including what is possibly the first publication of the American Kazakh Embassy’s reaction to criticism of the restrictive regulations.
Also, Alex has started blogging again regularly – her birthday last month is covered, as well as her new job, her new place (see here and here), a great Christmas novelty find, and a post on Nick and Roz’s visit to her place.
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Nov 11 2008
Awww. Cute. Or Not?
Saw this one recently over at FailBlog, and I wanted to post it here.
Although the comments go into some details on this method of postage being accepted as the norm in some parts of America a while ago, my initial reaction was that a young child has posted it, and it was just plain cute, rather than backwards/stupid…
see more pwn and owned pictures
OK, further reading of the comments bring up the claim that this was actually an experiment to see if this method of paying for postage would work or not. It still reminds me a little of children’s Christmas letters to Santa, or addressing a letter to “Bob Jones, that house opposite the shop by the Church, Munington” 🙂
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Oct 28 2008
Nick et al Off To Australia
This Wednesday my brother, Nick, is going to Australia with his girlfriend, Roz, and her mum, another Chris. They will be back by Christmas, but not before Irina and I return to Swansea this mid-November (more on that later).
As I was going through the almost year-old photos on my phone (I really need to sort and post them more often than that), I found this one of Nick and Roz, just after Christmas last year at Mum’s.
Nick And Roz At Xmas 2007
I hope their trip over goes smoothly, that they have a great time there, and will come back with lots of stories and photos to show us all 🙂
Oct 08 2008
Apples For The Teacher?
That is just so last century. Deciding to offer her tutors something a little extra, an un-named 15 year old girl in Wortley, Yorkshire, baked up some cakes with an added ingredient she neglected to mention… Peanuts or perhaps buckwheat flour? Something else that could have kicked off an allergic reaction in her teachers? No, she (wasted IMHO) added weed (well more likely it was hashish) to the dough, and got her educators stoned. Check out the article for a little more information. The fact that the staff were sent to hospital makes me think she either put a lot in the cakes, or perhaps that the adults weren’t used to the effects.
OK, so that is a Christmas cake, but it looked too pretty not to use 🙂
The girl was lucky in that no charges were bought, but she was obviously suspended, and now attends a different school.
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Oct 06 2008
Strike A Pose
As avid readers may remember, my brother is shortly off to Australia with his lovely girlfriend (Happy Birthday again 🙂 ) and her mum. With impressive foresight, he has been asking people what they want for Christmas, so the two of them can try and sort out all the pressies now, rather than rushing around like headless chickens when they return to the UK, just a few days before Xmas itself. I would have been tempted to use the trip as an excuse, and wait for the New Year sales to pick up some bargains, but Nick has a more mature outlook already I guess 😉
Anyway, I’ve been struggling to find something I’d really like, and having asked for contributions to charity for my birthday earlier in the year, I have to admit my selfish side is rearing its head, and wanting to have something to unwrap this December.
Something I noticed over at buy.com was a pretty high quality webcam, which has a number of attention grabbing features. Primarily, the $30 rebate on an already competitive price obviously caught my attention, although the Carl Zeiss lens (as used on many top end Sony digital cameras) is pretty important for those of us hoping for a little more than the traditional grainy, blurred video provided by older webcams.
I’m not sure whether the face tracking software included would be a useful addition, or simply a toy to play with, but the ability to pan and tilt the camera from your PC is a definite boon. Although not apparently a built in feature (yet?) I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to bodge up some code in conjunction with remote software, so you could scan around your room whilst in another house or even country! Anyway, I’ll need to check a few other details before considering the purchase (by proxy 🙂 ), but even if this webcam doesn’t end up on my wish list, there are enough other products at buy.com to keep day dreaming for a good long time to come…
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Jun 11 2008
Missing Posts
OK, so I definitely need to clear some time in the next week or two, and try to catch up with a lot of posts (and photo editing) on this blog. Although my memory of my holiday last September may be a little hazy by now, I’m hoping the pictures will either refresh said memory, or paint a good enough picture to give you, the reader, enough of an idea. After that, we have our trip to Britain over Christmas and New Year, with Mum’s wedding in between. After that we have finally meeting up with Tom the pilot, contact being made with an American Jazz singer hopefully coming to Astana to play some sets locally. Finally, we have the birthday trip to Amsterdam (I may need to link to upcoming forum posts for the Coffeeshop specific info) and Britain again this April and May. I’m hoping that by posting this summary now, it will remind me what is missing, and force me into actually taking the time out to write a few words and crop a few piccies. To friends and family still waiting for those posts, thanks for your patience so far.
Jun 04 2008
PC No Longer In Pieces :-)
As I mentioned previously, our main PC had a major failure with the hard drive that had Windows and all the apps on it. It is most probably just a coincidence, but this occurred directly after I updated my on board audio drivers. Upon rebooting, I was presented with an error message stating that HAL.DLL was corrupted. Not a problem, I’ll drop into Safe Mode and find which CAB the file is compressed within on the XP Install CD, expand it and drop it into place. Another reboot bought up multiple file corruptions, including BOOT.INI . As the hard drive was only 40Gb, and was already second hand, I decided now would be a good time to finally insert the 500Gb drive I got for Christmas from Mum. Having fitted the drive in (not as easy as before, as there were still another three internal drives attached), and installed XP, I discovered that the install process had decided to make the boot drive L: ! This caused issues with some driver installation programs, and I discovered that the Windows Disk Management util could only reassign letters to non-OS install drives. So, using a few different utils, I recovered the faulty hard drive to the point that it could be read again, and rescued every directory I could. In the end, I only lost my Firefox bookmarks, in terms of important non-backed up data, so all that was left was another OS install, hardware and their respective drivers to be added on at a time, and now that I have 500Gb to play with for just programs, all the programs I could lay my hands on to install.
Anyway, things are now settled down enough for me to return to my normal routine on this PC, so thanks to those people that were patient enough to wait for me to respond to e-mails and comments.
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May 29 2008
Hard Drive Died
The post title says it all really.
My old PATA Maxtor 40Gb hard drive, which contained the Windows OS installation, Program Files, Outlook’s PST File, my Favourites etc. died late last night. I am currently in the process of installing and configuring everything onto my Christmas present – a 500Gb Seagate drive. I’m hoping to be able to recover the essential data I need from the drive later, and I had already taken the decision to keep all other data (My Documents, Downloads etc. etc.) on my other drives.
If you don’t see me online with IM apps etc., you know the reason why. I’ll post back once everything has settled down. Which may take a while, as downloading SP3 etc. on a little 128Kbit connection does take some time.
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May 28 2008
GPS Equals $$$ ?
As readers will know from past posts, I got a new phone this Christmas to replace my old PDA, phone and bluetooth GPS unit. It has already been pretty useful for the obvious things like getting directions with route finding software, finding out where I was with Google maps, and marking places of interest for future visits. However, what about those people who don’t want a full on multi-system like the Kaiser? Miniaturized GPS units, like those that GTX Corp are producing could well be catalyst in a huge consumer boom in purchases. Whether it be a small belt clip for athletes, a discrete vehicle tracking unit, or simply anything with such a small GPS Tracking Device integrated into it, the potential uses are only just starting to be realised. The fact that the technology has improved so much means that size constraints no longer apply to what sort of existing objects can easily be redesigned by manufacturers to integrate location tracking, and with the increasing availability of the internet whilst on the move, you don’t even need to be in a centralized office to co-ordinate the data coming in. All this means that many people see GPS-based companies as the next wise move for investors looking to get in relatively early to a blossoming sector. Do I have enough money to invest in companies? Not yet sadly, but if someone asked me which areas were worth considering, it would have to be in my top 5.
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