Sunday, February 27, 2005

get your rocks off

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai police have seized hundreds of fossilised dinosaur bones and arrested a man for selling the valuable relics through the popular Internet auction Web site, e-Bay, officials say.

Police working in conjunction with U.S. customs officials charged 25-year-old Thai businessman Piriya Watchajitpan with hiding and processing antiques for trade.

U.S. customs first got wind of the trade when they intercepted the dinosaur bones coming from Thailand, but officials said Piriya had also been shipping fossils to Britain, Canada, Hong Kong, China and Japan.

"We have been investigating this one for about eight months," Mark Robinson, a U.S. customs and immigration official in Bangkok, told Reuters on Friday.

The on-line auction of the fossils started at as little as $1,000 (524 pounds), even though scientists say they are priceless.

Piriya bought 30 large dinosaur fossils from a villager in northeast Thailand, where they were first discovered in 1976, for as little as 50,000 baht (681 pounds) to 100,000 baht.

He faces up to seven years in prison and 700,000 baht fine if found guilty


sorry , going rock digging for a few days !!!!

Thursday, February 24, 2005

the last e-mail i received

the last e-mail i received

tonight i received an e-mail . nothing special about it , just an e-mail from an old girlfriend . we went out for about 4 years from when she was 21 . she's 28 now i think . anyway , we split up when she went on a year long trip , things hadn't been going great at that point and it was a natural time to do it . we parted as friends , we had an amazing 4 years , partied hard , too hard most of the time .what i liked best about her was that she was soooooo funny , we took the piss out of each other and the world constantly and shared the same sarcastic humour, and i miss that . back to the e-mail . so she's currently in New Zealand and we'd exchanged the odd e-mail . if she found someone who didn't amuse her she'd say " he was Funny's brother- Not Funny " . i thought she'd fallen out with me for some reason as she hadn't replied for months so i sent her an e-mail that said this -

i'm sure you've heard about the accident , pretty bad , but i least i'm still here . got fitted with my own tailor made prosthetic last week so at least i can walk about without people staring at my foot and I've started driving again .....

then prattled on about some other stuff , filling her in on the lives of mutual friends , work etc. . and after 2/3 mins of reading finished the letter off with this ....

anyway , that'll do for now , got to go and bathe my stump !
oh , and about the foot - just kidding !




tonight , 9 weeks later i get a reply titled " Not Funny " the first line being ......

You really had me going you bastard....



the moral of the story is .... always reply to e-mails .

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

hi

So , here I am writing a blog entry again . Thanks for all the comments you have left . From time to time I looked in on some of your blogs , mostly incognito , and left comments under a not-so-cryptic nom-de-plume . Some of you worked it out . I have been so busy lately with work , the new job is going to take more effort than i had been giving it and I've been spending evenings trying to catch up , sometimes working into the wee hours night after night . I've also been spending a lot of time taking care of my daughter ( oh , I hadn't mentioned that before , had I ? ) . Well , I have a daughter – god love her – she looks like a mini-me . Same “you think I give a fuck“ expression too . She really does intimidate most adults . My priorities over the last few weeks have shifted to work , work and my daughter with sleep , eating and socialising coming somewhere far down the list . She is the most precious thing in my life ( when she's not doing 110 dB ) . It's so funny to watch her and see her learn things every day . Currently most of the learning involves watching what happens when things fall or throwing things . Or , like at tea-time this evening seeing how far a bag of pasta could be spread across the kitchen floor and what the leafy green bit of a strawberry tastes like . Have I returned to the blogosphere ? Perhaps an occasional entry , time permitting . Then who knows ?

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Bush - i can't see the strings .

I see Bush is in France at the moment . So i suppose he must think they are in NEW europe now . He might want to ask them when he's there how their intelligence on Iraq was more accurate than his . But I guess he won't .
I'm sure some of you American readers voted for him and may take offence at me and this post . so just to get this straight , I'm not forcing you to read on . If you do , and you take offence , remember that YOU TOOK OFFENCE , I didn't inflict it on you .
I just can't get my head round how he cheated his way to an election win first time ( try to sue me for saying that ) , never mind won a second term , but then Americans did cast their votes in his favour , well those who for some spurious reason weren't denied a vote ( why does he keep talking about "world's greatest democracy " . He does know what the word means , right ? ) Anyway , a few weeks ago I saw him answering questions , can't remember what about , but then he came out with the line that America was the largest democracy in the world and I just thought - he does know about India ? , someone's bound to have told him about India ? . At this stage I think if it were any other world leader we would all be asking " if he doesn't know that what else doesn't he know ? " Except this guy controls more military might than many other countries put together . That's why the world is scared . Even former friends are scared . He's just the sort of leader he himself would espouse " regime change " for .
So Mr. Bush , I have a few short video clips for you . One of them is funny , the other isn't .
Please be patient , they take a short time to load .

Friday, February 18, 2005

1 Giant Leap

Every once in a while a piece of music comes along that breaks the mould and becomes a necessary part of your sustinence . This was the case for me a couple of years ago with a CD that was released . It's still in my car CD player today ! I challenge anyone reading this not to like it .
It was a project begun by 2 people but included many others , like Michael Stipe of R.E.M. , Robbie Williams , Maxi Jazz of Faithless , Neneh Cherry , Senegalise singer Baaba Maal , the Indian vocalist Asha Bosle as well as actors , writers and philosophers . The concept was to record artists from many different cultures / countries playing together and being able to learn and interact with each other . However , these artists would not meet as the album was recorded largely on 2 laptops powered by car batteries as the intrepid 2 moved around the world . the result was an amazing album , simply called 1 Giant Leap . To whet your appetite a downloadable fact-pack is available on PDF which tells you more about it than I ever could .
I'd encourage everyone to go out and buy this either on DVD or CD . I know it can be bought at Amazon in the U.S. and here in the U.K. ( the project's website can sell it direct too ) . If you're in any doubt have a read through the reviews on the Amazon link .
The full story is covered on the project's website .



Thursday, February 17, 2005

some light relief

there seems to be a lot of "blues" around looking at other blogs at the moment . symptomatic of this time of year i think . so this entry is devoted to light relief .

subervient chicken - just tell it what to do ( thanks tony )

transform your face - have a pic of yourself handy

interactive voodoo doll - pins and fire supplied

have fun !


Wednesday, February 16, 2005

who calls at your door ?

working from home , as i do now, has it's advantages and disadvantages . one of these i've found was quite unexpected . it seems every day someone calls at my door . perhaps it's just the area i live in, i don't know . i'll give some examples of what i'm talking about of people who have called in the last few days .

1. the swedish student on a gap year selling hand made ( and quite nice too ) cards with inset windows of real wild flowers . she explained she was funding a gap year by doing this . stupidly i didn't invite her in . she was unusual for a swede in that she had long very dark brown hair . bearing in mind how long i've been without carnal company i should've at least made her a cup of warm tea and suggested a quicker route to her next destination but my morals got the better of me and i didn't let her over the doorstep .

2. the betterware catalogue man . he was back to collect his catalogue which he'd posted through my letter box a few days before . he wasn't too happy that i'd chucked it . my view on uninvited mail is that it goes in the bin . am i wrong in this ?

3. the couple , a fat 30 something man and an 80 something woman who came round to ask me if i was concerned about what was happening to the global environment and the way energy resources were running out . like the swedish gap year hooker this one caught me out because what they gave me was a booklet with scriptures from the bible stating what god was going to do about it . you've got to admire their unique approach . we had a brief discussion and a bit of craic during which the nice old woman asked my age and how young i looked ( i'm a sucker for that kind of dirty talk ) .

i realised after they left that i was standing there with my flies unbuttoned . nobody seemed to mind . so there you are , is this all normal or am i a weirdo magnet ? or.... am I the wierdo ?




Tuesday, February 15, 2005

more for firefox users ...

If you've arrived at this entry via an internet search involving Spaces and Firefox you'll find a series of entries about Firefox and MSN Spaces in a list accessed from the home page of my blog.

just thought i'd add some more useful things for those of you who read the big entry on Firefox and msn spaces and wanted to try more Firefox convenience .


first , some useful extensions I've added to customize Firefox and make it do tricks that I.E. just can't do . also how Firefox automatically copies your I.E. favourites across .

link preview - this extension brings up a thumbnail of the link you're hovering on allowing you to get some idea of what the content might be before you click through on it . it's generally handy but extremely useful when you do a www search as you can hover on the links of the result .


translate - this extension allows you to place a button on your tool bar which automatically translates the page from several languages into English . much handier than having to open up a separate tab / window and feed the url into babelfish or altavista .
if you use Firefox already why not give these extensions a go . if you don't ....... download Firefox anyway and next time you've got a free half hour fire it up and see what you can do with it .
Firefox will automatically import your current Internet Explorer favourites by a feature already built in - shown here . so there's no excuse not to !
to link from your space to this entry simply use this url to make a link or hyperlink button .

Sunday, February 13, 2005

connect or die ... and the lesson

it's so frustrating when you can't figure a problem out , isn't it ?
i spent a large part of yesterday getting more and more angry about a problem i couldn't solve - namely - i couldn't connect to the internet . here's my tale of woe .

morning - browser can't find websites . so...... tries other browsers - no joy .
my
internet acceleration software ( ON-SPEED ) says it can't connect . ah , that must be the problem , their server must be down . so ....... connects browser directly at websites instead of through ONSPEED's proxy server - no joy . bollox.
i figure the router is the problem and check it's connection . so ..... the router detects an ADSL line but no connection to a server . shite !!
i reboot the router several times to no effect and end up losing my encrypted wireless connection to the computer . feck, feck , arse ! so ......... i move the router from downstairs to upstairs where the p.c. lives ( which is a major operation as it normally stays in a unit where a video , satellite DVD and t.v. are so there's about 2 miles of spaghetti and half a dozen knots to untie as well as feeding cables blindly though tiny holes in the back ) so that i can connect the router via a LAN cable . still no connection . bastard , bastard !!
i take off encryption and re-establish the wireless connection .
i re-check the phone line to make sure i can make a phone call ( i know i should've done this earlier ) . but , still no joy . what the fuck .....
must be the fucking ISP - Tiscali . but , no connection so no phone number . ah , but i have an old disc somewhere .. so .... i load the CD and get a premium rate number to dial . and .... i speak to someone in India , who needs my e-mail address before he will answer any questions ( and he can't spell or understand my accent ) . why do i get the dyslexic Indian in the call centre ? anyway , after running up several pounds of almost clear profit for Tiscali he tells me i'm dialling the narrowband help-line and he can't help me . BASTARDS !!!!!! so , he gives me another number which i dial .
this then tells me if i'm ringing about a " no-connection " problem that there is a " major BT outage in the north east of England . mmmmm , i don't live there but could that effect me anyway ? it also tells me to ring another number , the " status line " which would give me an update on the problem .
so ..... i ring and the line either goes dead or is constantly engaged .a lot less than no joy . i'm gonna fucking break legs now , somebody better speak to meeeeeeeeee !!!
YOU USELESS FUCKERS !!!

it is late now and i go to bed with chest pains which are still there this morning . lo and behold i can connect now .

so what's the moral of this story boys and girls ........ it is of course " when something goes wrong , you should do fuck all about it , particularly not spend most of a day trying to sort it out and certainly not get stressed about it , you should totally ignore the problem in the naive hope that it will sort itself out ... which it will . "

here endith my lesson .

Thursday, February 10, 2005

using Firefox browser on msn spaces

If you've arrived at this entry via an internet search involving Spaces and Firefox you'll find a series of entries about Firefox and MSN Spaces in a list accessed from the home page of my blog.


to those of you who have recently become aware of me , thanks for visiting . due to time commitments with starting a new job my blog entries have been a bit poor of late . if you want a better read go back to my archived stuff for December and January .for now i'm going to cut the sarcasm and stupidity to do something I've been meaning to do for a while ...... which is cover the topic of the advantages of using Firefox browser instead on Internet Explorer for your msn spaces browsing .if you already use Firefox you are probably aware of a lot of what i will say , however , there might be an odd nugget in there even for you .

i'm not anti Microsoft , i just think there are some advantages a modern browser like Firefox has over I.E. .

1. it's a multi-tab browser rather than a single / multi window browser . just click the tab to see the other pages you've opened . no minimizing / maximizing windows like in I.E. .
2. it's faster loading for most pages .
3. it's configurable , meaning you can customize it to suit how you work .
4. as it's open source it's continually being further developed and enhanced
6. it's a lot more secure than I.E.

it's not the only browser i use . i do still use I.E. sometimes ( spaces has been designed to dove-tail perfectly with I.E. ) and i also use Avant browser which is like a multi tabbed version of I.E. . each has it's own advantages and disadvantages . i know Firefox doesn't work perfectly with msn spaces so I've found workarounds where possible . i'm going to cover the advantages / workarounds in turn below .

advantages

multi tabbed - you can open multiple pages at a time , each in it's own tab . this makes cutting and pasting address urls easy , for example if you want to leave a comment . it's quicker to copy and paste than type it in .
also - you can click on a comment with the middle mouse button ( provided your mouse has been set up to do that ) and open someone's page url from a comment they left . this will open in a new tab ( or the same tab if you prefer ) .

spell checker - this is a problem with spaces , no spell checker , and if you type like i do you probably need it . with Firefox you can customize the browser by adding a spell checker to it called " spellbound " . simply highlight the text and click on the spell check tool bar button and away it goes . saves so much time on long entries .

bookmarks ( favourites in I.E. ) - in Firefox i save all the blogs i like to 1 folder ( which i've called blog spam - don't be taking offence anyone ! ) . as the browser is multi tabbed i can open all these pages with one click " open all tabs " for that folder . i also have a folder for blog tools which amongst other things contains the Google translation page and several url submission pages to submit my blog to various search engines . again these can all be opened up with 1 click , i then copy and paste my blog url into each of them .

workarounds

Firefox will only let the entry be typed in 1 colour - black , 1 font and size . I've tried using a special add-on for Firefox called " cuneAform" which i thought would get round this , simply draft my blog entry in cuneAform and cut and paste it into Firefox .


when making a new blog entry in Firefox directly ( i.e. not using cuneAform ) spaces between paragraphs and sentences written on different lines aren't respected when the blog entry is submitted and published . again the workaround comes from an add-on for Firefox called "FEdit" . it simply gets added to your tool bar and when you've finished typing your blog entry click on the FEdit button . line breaks will be added to the page , click publish and voilà .

#### UPDATE - 27 June 2005 - MSN Spaces adds an html editor that works with Firefox so no need to use cuneAform or FEdit any more . #####

some page layout formats available in msn spaces look different in Firefox and Internet Explorer . this is just a trial and error thing . i now use a layout that suits me AND looks ok in both .

adding photos or customizing layout by moving elements . both of these work differently in Firefox , but there are no problems , it's simply a different way each has of doing the same task .

summary

i could go on , but that 's plenty for now and covers most of what anyone would need . if you intend to try Firefox and need help with anything just leave a comment . if you know something i don't do the same , all comments and tips welcome . I've tried to include links throughout the entry of anything I've mentioned and screen shots which should help explain .
if you want to re-direct to this entry simply hyperlink to this url ......




Wednesday, February 09, 2005

41 is half a life ...

41 . that's right . XXXXI if you're roman . 31 if you're female , attractive and young .
so what does it mean to be 41 . don't feel 41 . definitely don't think i look it ( although i'm sure someone will challenge that ) . do i feel twice as smart as when i was 20 ? absolutely , although at 20 i knew everything , or was it that i just thought i did . many times smarter than @ 20 . more open minded ? more laid back ? yes . less naive . yes . i suppose it's around this time that everyone takes seriously the fact that they're in the last half of their life now , there's no time to let things pass you by , the sand in the hourglass is already mostly in the bottom . don't take this the wrong way . i've no negative emotions about my age simply a realism that if i want to attain , do or achieve certain things then i have to make the decisions and commitment necessary to make them happen .
the only thing that scared me was putting my pic through the transformer tool and out came the old me looking like my 75 yr old mother does now !

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

.... so i wanted to let the world know ( not that the world cares or needs to ) . it's now just a number , and has been for a long time . long gone are the days when i used to take my birthday off work each year . long gone are the days when i thought of it as a compulsory sex day . birthdays , new year , christmas day should be compulsory sex days - i don't mean that if it's your birthday you can just walk up to whoever you like and expect some fun , although the idea has it's merits . i mean that if you were in a relationship that some days are more special days .for example , more special than getting soaked putting the bin out days and more special than than i've got you're dad over days .so that's my thoughts on it . probably be numb about having a birthday tomorrow when it arrives . ( mental note for next year , take time off and do something special ) .

Monday, February 07, 2005

technology hates me !!

i'm getting a bit paranoid .
in the last few weeks i've had problem after problem with nearly ever piece of technological apparatus i touch . such as .....
my handsfree car kit stopped working
my computer started freezing and had to be shut down
my firewall gave me false e-bay password sending alerts
my new work laptop can't connect except through a lan cable
my new car had it's car phone kit installed and it doesn't work
my new broadband business line won't work
my laptop can't open word documents
my pen drive caused my computer to reboot
this doesn't happen to everybody , or does it ?

Thursday, February 03, 2005

make B$ - buy these blogshares....

just got this today . this is taken from blogshare , the virtual blog stock market .
it represents the increase in share price of tinyworldreview shares . so the theory would go like this . buy share now , link to tinyworldreview . as the no. of links increases so does the share price .
can you see the correlation ?
for the current share price and full details go to here





what i learned yesterday ..

.... is this .


1. sharp knives that you've just recently sharpened are still sharp .
2. falling out with the knife after you've realised this allows the knife to remind you again that it's STILL sharp .
3. cuts and salty dish-washer tablets don't like each other .
4. the knife will always win .

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

my first death threat

well , i have officially received my first death threat ( on msn spaces that is ) . bring it on !


as it was in spanish i have provided a translation of this entry .


Mi primera amenaza de muerte

Bien. He recibido oficialmente mi primera amenaza de muerte (En el espacio de msn) , bring it on !!