May 27 2009

Made Me Mad

Category: Kazakh Driving,PersonalChrisM @ 1:49 am

Walking back from our flat a couple of days ago, I saw a baby being carried by his/her mother in a car. This, sadly, isn’t too unusual in Kazakhstan, and I think I’ll have a few battles in the future when it comes to insisting that Anna is able to use her car seat over here when we get a lift.
Part of the problem is that the law in Astana (laxly enforced) only applies to the front seats as far as seat belts are concerned. This means that even if belts are fitted in the rear when the car was made, they are often ignored, left under the seats or in some truely kcufed up cases removed!
Anyway, back to my story… Not only was this small baby held loosely in her mother’s hands, she was actually sat/leant against the dashboard in the front! So we now have a baby inches away from the glass windscreen, should any accidents occur. But it didn’t end there, this car was an almost new Toyota (Camry? I didn’t notice the exact model), and I’d bet 100 dollars against your 5 that it had air bags.
This means that should even a relatively minor shunt occur, the air bag would… well, lets just say that that baby’s parents would most likely be grieving.
It doesn’t matter how many people tell me that there isn’t the culture of safety over here, or that people don’t consider things like seat belts & car seats for children as necessary/affordable, it does not take a fricking genius to look at the little bundle of joy in their arms and wonder what would happen if this car was crashed into, right now. Anyway, rant over, and just to show that this sort of problem is obviously not just restricted to Kazakhstan, here is a quick picture from failblog I noticed recently…

fail owned pwned pictures

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May 18 2009

Xbox 360 Posts

Category: Personal,WordPress,Xbox 360 UpdatesChrisM @ 1:27 pm

Just a quick explanation for anyone wondering why a games console appears to have hacked into this site 🙂

The short version is that my Xbox 360 posts details of games I have played recently, and any achievements attained. Whenever you see the nickname AntiSceptic, you can swap that for Chris, in your head 🙂 SilentlyScreaming is pretty much the only other alias I tend to use online. That was too long for Xbox live though 🙁 So I had to use my second choice, the one I ‘borrowed’ from Gavin all those years ago.

The slightly long winded version is this… IF my console is connected to the internet (not possible right now, as I have no xBox WiFi adaptor, and there is no network socket in the in-law’s living room), then every time I play a game, the Xbox Live service is informed of any relevant data. From Microsoft’s servers, the people over at 360voice & GamerDNA extract enough data to create blog posts. (See the last link in this post to see the original version). From here, my blog grabs the RSS feed for that page (see here), and posts the information up, under a different user account (it was simpler than trying to form lots of regex expressions to swap AntiSceptic for Chris or ‘I’, and I didn’t like making it look like I was actually talking about myself in the 3rd person), using the WP-o-matic plugin.

As mentioned, the Xbox 360 is currently offline, so the posts so far have all been my console ‘complaining’ that I’m not giving it enough attention. I’m not sure what will happen when I reconnect it when we move back to our flat – whether it’ll ignore games played and achievements…. …. achieved, or amend the older posts, or simply provide a summary of what has been missed.

Anyway, why do all this? Because I wanted to see what was possible. Am I claiming any sort of originality here? No, Narcogen has been doing this for a couple of years, I only just got around to viewing his site’s source to get a clue how he achieved this. Ha, upon checking I had got the right URL for his blog, I now see that each Xbox post actually has a link in it to 360voice. Hey ho.

You can see my official profile over here, and the 360voice/GamerDNA pages here.

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Mar 20 2009

Hopefully Not A Prediction

Category: PicturesChrisM @ 5:33 pm

of Kara and Muska’s opinion when they meet Anna for the first time in just under a couple of months…

funny pictures of cats with captions

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Mar 17 2009

Anna At The Seaside

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 10:44 pm


These are from the 17th March, apologies that we are once again quite far from real time with pictures of Anna’s growing up, I’ll try to rectify that soon.
Let your mouse hover over the image’s for a brief description, as normal. Not sure why, but I don’t like the way the title is displayed with WordPress’s gallery, so I don’t enter any in that field normally. I’ve also heard from a few relatives that they hadn’t realised you could click on Anna’s photos to see them in a higher resolution, so my apologies for not making that clear earlier. If any friends or family want a particular image to print etc., drop me a line and I’ll supply the original version for better quality.

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Feb 21 2009

Last Set From 21st February

Category: Anna's Photos,PersonalChrisM @ 9:44 pm

No, really, I think these are the last unpublished photos from Anna’s birth day, after this there will be a little more variety. If you are used to reading about Kazakhstan, WordPress info, Amsterdam and Conspiracy Theories, sorry, you’ll just have to have a little more patience…

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Feb 16 2009

Happy Birthday Inessa

Category: FriendsChrisM @ 1:36 am

Unless it was yesterday, in which case, our humble apologies. Our phones, computers and notes disagree if it is Monday or Sunday.
Whichever day it is, we hope you have a great one filled with fun times, surrounded by those you love.
Happy Birthday Inessa

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Feb 15 2009

MyBlogLog Problems

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 8:33 pm

The MyBlogLog widget (far right column, red background with avatars on it) is currently creating itself a 3rd column in FireFox and a similarly rooted display issue in IE7. Therefore, it will be removed until I get around to finding out what is wrong.
Which reminds, anyone else using the xMark WordPress theme have an issue with static PAGES (not posts) dropping their 2nd column to the footer position?

[edit]
Just realised that there are two MBL based widgets in use. I’ve removed the one that had registered visitor’s faces, the ‘recommended posts’ widget has no rendering issues, so is remaining.

[edit2]
Nope, the issue is still occurring within the ‘Meta’ widget. Time to try other stuff. Please excuse any temporary graphical glitches in the mean time.

[final edit]
OK, turns out when I last upgraded the DandyID services plugin, an option was either newly created, or mistakenly defaulted to a different setting. Reverted to normal, cleaned up a few other widget based problems, and finally should be back working again.

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Feb 08 2009

So URL shortening occurs from …

Category: Tweets,Windows MobileChrisM @ 4:47 pm

So URL shortening occurs from WordPress posts, but not fring? Thinking I’m giving up on fring anyway, the app is causing my Kaiser to crash.

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Jan 28 2009

Midwife Post

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 3:10 pm

As we sit here waiting for what may possibly be our last pre-natalmidwife appointment, I decided to see how Opera (a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox) handled the admin interface (dashboard in WordPress’ case) on my phone.
Other than a small issue with occasional graphical corruption when the on-screen keyboard vanishes, and a small issue with text entry alignment, all seems well. Until I swapped to an Orange 3G SIM card, and bought an ‘unlimited’ data bundle, it didn’t seem worth the effort normally.

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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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