General

This is a very good new site for the EDL..

www.edl.me

Well well well, that's 2008 all done and consigned to history, never to come along again. good riddance I say. So All my readers, well the 1 or 2 of you who pop by every now and then to see if I have written anything new? I haven't since well November 2008. Just too busy sorry. You know the credit crunch and all that boring stuff. I wish you all a great 2009 and hope that. though it will start tough for a lot of us, that it does turn out good.

One big change that is happening, is that the lovely folks in the USA have gotten rid of a Dick and A Bush who have been doing nothing but make the world a worse place to live, all OK in their fine Ranches, Tax paid security guards and all that. Lets hope that the Obama team can bring along better things.

Israel and Hamas currently are behaving like a bunch of teenagers who are having a squabble over who's the Daddy again. It's a no he started it first, no he did arguments, either way, they both need to grow up and learn that fighting isn't the answer. It's a waste of energy, in more ways than one, like how much does it cost to fly 80 odd F16 fighter bombers for a 5hr sortie? Not the same as it costs to fill 80 odd SUV's. Who's going to pay for all the buildings that have been demolished? Oh, yes, us tax payers here in Europe, we paid for the last lot to be built! I'm sure there were other ways to knock them down if the Israelis didn't like the look of them. I don't think it will be the Israelis who will be paying to have them rebuilt, Oh, yes, that's the US Tax payer. I guess it's fine going to war when someone else is paying the tab.

The credit Crunch? yep, that's mainly the banks not trusting each other. Ya, tis fine if your mate thinks he has a nice scheme that will guarantee you a return of 12% every year, only to find that he was on top of a huge pyramid scheme, well that's Mr Madoff (or Made off with your cash).

So I can say good riddance to 2008 and welcome 2009!

I haven't blogged, commented on the going ones in London, or the tech stuff. I didn't even comment of FF 3 being released last month sometime. If you haven't got it, I can only recommend it. I have been testing it from it's early days, when it wasn't even safe to use it, but that's me, living on the bleeding edge of technology. I have heard that for some people it crashes all the time, I haven't been able to see these systems, so I cannot comment. But if they say it crashes for them, then I have no real option but to believe them. But I would like to know why. That will be for another occasion.

The great auspicious day 08/08/08, one good thing about that, is it works on what ever calender system you use, be it European or US. We now have end to end coverage of the Olympics from China, the opening was, as you would expect, pretty good, I can't say it's the best in the world, it's the best one yet, London will have to pull something bloody amazing out of the hat, one would be that it won't cost more than the £9billion ! I bet it will end up costing more. Not really for me to worry about.

Summer has gone on holiday for this week-end. But one thing when there is rain, there is pretty much likely be a rainbow to follow, and it didn't disappoint. check the image below,

This looks like a fine life. Just sit on yer backside, take it easy, and be fed bambo. That's a fine fine life! Ahh if only...

OK. I've been very busy over the past few weeks, my website got a bit hacked up again, and it took me a bit longer to fix than expected. one small file was missing!

Anyway. I'll post something up this week-end. 3 days off Wooop!

A new year, a new theme, OK, I know it's Feburary, but January was went by far too fast. So, what to do think ?  I like it, It's clean, a bit nippier but that's all relative to how fast ones internet access is.

So, so far this year, not much has happened, I'm still waiting for the Canon 450D not yet out, but I'm not deperate enough to came for a week out side some local camera shop, like some fools fo for getting a crap mobile phone, you know the one, that ipod with a phone bulted on, yep the iPhone. You can of course see some of the photo's that I have been taking over the past, with various degrees of success, from a film camera, those throw away ones, to mobile phones to a borrowed Canon 400D over at my gallery, (link above)

Other than that, not much, I may write about some Bishop who thought it might be a bright idea to kind of suggest that it may be unavoidable that we should have religious laws to be included in a Non-Secular legal system. I think this will not happen.

That's all folk(s)

Oh and Ireland lost against Frence in the Rugby... Boo, just 5 mins more and I guess we could have done it.

So yesterday was a great day for taking photo's. The sky was clear, the air clear, but the temperature bleedin' freezing. So off I went with a camera friend of mine to take some photos of London. The trip started from the London Docklands, then a skip south to Greenwich Observatory to take some shots over London. Clouds started coming over, making for a good skyscape.

Next of down to the Themes to take a boat trip upto Tower Bridge then a walk over the millenium Bridge to walk over to the London Eye. This was where I was testing low light, night photograpy. All in all good fun, and it took me a few hours to warm up. I have pretty much decided to get my own SLR camera, So you poor souls will be getting more photos.

You can see the rest of the photos at this link.

Warning, this is Geekdom!

I've been pondering on this for the past few weeks, how can I make my backups faster onto my NAS drive (Network Attached Storage), I've had one that runs at a normal office LAN speed of 100Mbps. This is fine if you copying files or opening files from a NAS drive, it's when you want to do a big 150GB backup, that this just takes hours! I, for one, am not a great person for waiting for things to happen, well, OK, only in computers, I like things to, you know, happen.

So, I checked the specs of my PC, and noted that it's able to go at 1000Mbps, ie 10 times faster than the current normal LAN speed. An idea forms in my wee brain, If, I can have a network that runs at 1000Mbps then doing these backups should be a hell of a lot faster. Now I needed to check what I would need, so formed my shopping list.

• 3 x cat6 cable
• 1X Gigabit hub
• 1x NAS drive

The cabling is important, OK, I got CAT6 I could have using CAT5e, but better have top notch cable, and have future speed potential of 10Gbps. Always better to have more than less in this case.

Next, the hub, yes, for your gigabit lan, you can't use your normal ADSL router as that only runs at 100Mbps not matter what you try and do, it just won't run at 1000Mbps. I got the Netgear GS605 (info on hub here and you can buy it here.) pretty cheap and well, very easy to setup, just plug it in, power it up and off you go. OK, you need to get that old cable that was connected to your PC, from the ADSL router and put that into the Netgear GS605, otherwise, you won't have access to the internet!

And finally, you need the NAS drive. There are a lot out there but a few that are good. I checked out the following:

Ok folks, some of you are/maybe having problems with adding comments to my, well, world famous, blog!

As I is a very busy techie guy, I will have to find some time to work out what could be causing this problem.

So if you get an error along the lines of /www/se/bundled-libs/PEAR.php on line 848

Then that's the techie problem I'm having, It will take a while to fix as time isn't something I have a lot of these days.

So bear with me while I try and find what's causing the above error as at the moment I haven't a clue what's causing it!

Thanks,

Well folks, this site will go off line for sometime over the week-end. Just to let you know....

Other than that... some one went into a shop to hold it up and wanted to steal a Sony PSP3, the shop keeper said they had none in stock... SO the man ended leaving with only a Microsoft Xbox.

Simple moral of this story, check the stocks first, before trying to steal something.... Sheeesh

*UPDATE* 05/05/07 around 13:00 hours

Well, the upgrade when fairly well, just my gallery site has got a wee hitch. I'm sure I'll have that sorted before the week-end is out.

Also to add, the very nice folk at Servage did 90% of the hard work. Thanks again.

So I have this nagging cough that just doesn't go away. So, of to the old GP I goes. This being the UK, it's not always easy to make an apppointment to see your GP, so the quickest way I have found is that everything is an emergency, then you can get to see the doc the next morning between 09:00 and 11:00, not too bad but one does what one can.

I was prescibed simple Linctus hopefully it will work. Me being me, I look up on t'internet to see what it does, how it works etc.

Low and behold the powers of Google, I find my answer.

• there are two types of cough medicine, cough expectorant and cough suppressant - although there is little evidence that either is effective.

• the logic behind use is that:
  • a 'dry cough' with little phlegm requires a cough suppressant e.g. codeine and pholcodeine linctus.
  • a 'productive cough' requires a cough expectorant to help bring up phlegm e.g. 'ammonia and ipecacuanha mixture BPC' - expectorants are designed to force the cough reflex to propel the phlegm out of the bronchi - there is no evidence that they have any effect.

Source

 What tickled me with this one is the comment about expectorants.. there is no evidence that they have any effect. There you go, the Docs can't explain why it works.

30 years ago, there was a young boy, who 30 years ago was a not very well boy, he did go to school, but only for 2 days a week, this young boy was nobody else but myself. I was doing hemodialysis 3 days a week for over 9 hours. It all started with a phone call, I picked up the phone, the person at the end asked if they could speak with my mother, I handed the phone to my mother, It was 6pm there abouts, I was to go to Paris, there was a kidney waiting for me. I got some clothes together, with the things a 10 year old thinks he will need. I gather it wasn't very useful.

So I set off to Paris, accompanied with my eldest brother and my mother driving from Luxembourg to Paris. We arrived in the early hours of the 28th of April 1977. This was the infancy of kidney transplantation on children. I had the operation at around 7am. I remember waking up afterwards in a seeing my mother and brother who were talking to me, but through a window, the nurse was covered head to foot, I could only see her eyes. I was in a totally sterile room, I was in there for around 3 days, before being moved to children's ward, but again in a fully sterile room, but this time I was allowed to have visits from family members, but they had to wear full sterile outfit. I think I was in there for a week or so, before I was moved to a semi-sterile room.

I had my first acute rejection 3 weeks after the transplant, I can remember having a temperature of 40^o or so. I recall I was put on a bed if ice cubes, somehow they didn't feel cold, but was most definitely cooling down. 3 weeks after that I was allowed home, I was well puffed up with the steroids, My mother didn't even recognised me, I looked very much like a munchkin from the wizard of OZ.

So today was the 'Flora' London Marathon. 26miles to run around London, Why ? I mean, the weather was gorgous? and 36,500 people decided that run around London for fun?! I tell you, the sun got em! Madness I tell you. I simply watched the first 30 mins of these 36 odd thousand running, and I was knackered and needed to have multiple water stops, or coffee for me.

With temperatures hitting the high 23⁰C there were plenty of peeps who simply concked out before the end of the race.

The thing about the London Marathon, is that a lot of people do things for charity, Very good for them and to be honest, it's a very good platform to publicise you charity, as they will get some air time on the BBC.

What grabbed my attention on the BBC website, is that there is this blind guy who wants to do 7 marathons in 7 days. Fine I say, I ope you make it, but has anyone asked the guide dog? I mean, I know dogs like to have a good run around, but, 26mils or 182mils in a week, doesn't sound like fun for the dog.

Anyway, here he is:

Image from BBC

Yep, Just before St Pats Day when everything turns Green! Today is Red Nose day, Where everything is Fun, and people want you to open your wallet and give cash. Why give cash and get nothing in return? Why not give cash and get a great book! Yes, Shaggy Blog Stories is out for you to buy. So, run along, nothing else to read here, go buy the book.

That's your mission for today... Buy the book and make some one happy!

Thinking of the net, internet when it was young, there wasn't much one could do. you could write a basic HTML page, it went nowhere really.. It was when you started linking that things started to get interesting. I wont go into too much detail. However, the video below says what I would have said, but much better.

Rather interesting no?