what was said

Were you here last week?
Ah, yeah, I think I was.
Yeah, thought so. My friend recognised you. (There was no friend in site)
Are you staying in here for the rest of the night?
Not sure. I'm with a group of people.
Do you want to go to a party?
Sorry, my mate's emigrating, it's a sort of leaving-doo. I'm just going to go where everyone else goes.
Uh, OK. Do you think there's something wrong with me? (What?)
No, no. I'm just going to drink a lot and have a laugh with him before he leaves.
Do you think I'm good looking? (Oh, no.)
You're not my type. (perhaps too much tan and make up)
I'm not ?
Well, do you like the intellectual type or the sporty type? (this should do it.)
Ha, Ha. The intellectual type.
I'm the sporty type.
Ha, ha, ha. You're funny! (Oh, crap)
I'm not really.
Ha, ha.I've got the house to myself later. (What?)
I thought you said you were going to a party.
Ah, well, if I wasn't going home. You know...
Oh! Well, it sounds like you are. Enjoy your party. (Obvious, surely)
Ha, ha.You could come too. (But apparently not....)
To the party or home?
Um, with me.
I think I'll have to decline, sorry.
Do you not fancy me? (I'm sure we've done this already)
Ah, no, not really.
Are you being rude. (Perhaps)
No.
I think you are.
Well, whatever.
Don't you want to sleep with me? (Deaf or stupid?)
What! No, look I'm not interested. Sorry.
You're being nasty.
I'm not trying to be, honest. Look come half one everyone'll find you attractive.
Will you come over and talk to me later then?
Ah, that's unlikely.
Ha, ha, ha. So you don't want to kiss me now then? ( I sense a need to use the BIG ONE)
I'm, er .... gay. (I can't believe I just said that)
Fucking wanker!!

you said what?

Went to my new favourite bar on Saturday night before returning to have an impromptu party at my new house.

Quote of the evening was....


"Do you prefer the intellectual type or the sporty type?"

"The intellectual type."

"I'm the sporty type."

*pause for dumbstruck look*


Priceless.

Media Player powertoy in Spaces using Firefox

Via Mike Prilliman (who's one of those IT guru types) I came across an extension for Firefox called IE Tab which was made to allow developers to see how a page would render in IE but without having to leave Firefox.
Simply put, download the extension, install it, close and re-open Firefox to enable the extension. Then click on View, Toolbars, Customize and drag the IE Tab icon to your toolbar. That's it.

Now whenever you open a Spaces page where you see a Media Player click IE Tab and the page will load as IE sees it, including a functional media player. You can have IE Tabs and Firefox Tabs open at the same time.

Send donations or favours in lieu of money to me at ....



The small print

Readers are reminded that I know nothing about computers, the internet, women or self-discipline. Favours of a sexual nature are accepted (and preferred) though not if you're male. If this clashes with other extensions, crashes your browser or gives you a nasty rash you're on your own but let me know as I enjoy a laugh.

testing , 1,2,3.

God only knows how I misspend my time but last night and today has been misspent getting round Firefox users not being able to make use of the Windows Media Player Powertoy in Spaces because Firefox doesn't use Active X which is a non-internet "enhancement" that Microsoft have built into IE (and of course Spaces relies on this).

So, and I can't take all the credit for this, I think I have found a way.

Full write up and instructions soon. Suffice to say - via my Firefox browser I can see/listen to the Media Player now with a slight tweak.

I've left a little ditty for IE users in the meantime. Enjoy.

(The host's server might be a wee bit on the blink- let me know if you hear anything)

when I got home

I flew home late evening and arrived to find a lot of people in the house drinking, music playing . Walls are still unpainted their bare plaster still drying or dusty. A friend, Jan, links arms with me and walks upstairs to a dimly lit, furniture-less room with few people in it. I haven't seen or spoken to her in a few years. She was my first girlfriend. She was upset and asked me why I'd done/said certain things. I was aware of a group of 3 or 4 men standing several feet away as she held my arms leaning back against one of the dusty walls her eyes looking directly into my soul. As I struggled to reply my girlfriend/partner, Ana, walked up the hallway into the room, pulling me away. She wasn't happy to see me perhaps because I hadn't even said hello when I came in, or so I thought. Ana, walked me over to the opposite wall, her petite east asian frame seeming smaller in the emptiness of the room. Holding me just as Jan had and piercing me with eyes welling up she asks me why I've been so cold with her, especially so soon after her assault, some lads/men had hit her a few times when she had been making her way home after a night out six weeks ago. I felt the pain of Ana's grip on my forearms as she became angrier, speaking with a trembling chin, louder and louder until she let go, pushing me away.
"I was fucking raped that night, haven't you worked that out!"
I stood in shock, contrasting emotions cascading over each other in a second. Anger/hate at them, guilt, love.
She stormed out, the room open mouthed, back down the hallway leaving me feeling emptier than I'd ever felt, me still speechless desperately trying to swallow the lump in my throat that felt like it was choking me.


I woke up this morning trying to comprehend what had/was happening. There is no Ana, it wasn't my house. Why had I dreamt this? Relieved. Confused.

Guess what

Well, after looking through a load of old photos I was going to scan one in and have all 3 readers guess where it was taken. Of course my scanner decided that it wasn't in the room ....

"Error, scanner cannot be found. Bummer error"

Now I knew most computer errors were bummers but I'd never actually seen one admit it before. Progress, I suppose.

So as I can't post it you're going to have to guess what the picture was of. Should be easy enough, just tune in to my thoughtwaves in a Uri Geller like way.

Easy Peasy.

What? You need a clue? O.K. then. It was taken with my own fair hand in the mid 90s.

hate

I need a tantrum, a proper 3 year old tantrum. I've been doing some thinking tonight and come to the conclusion that I hate this person. I didn't think I had it in me to hate anyone. Not like, perhaps. But I really do despise this person. No humanity, no empathy (not genuine empathy anyway). No ability to take in what's going on and the big picture. In short, a complete cunt. I feel a need to tell this person tomorrow.

Who do you think I mean?

Some things stay the same, some things change

Met some friends on Saturday night for a drink at a lovely wee bar in the city. When I say wee I mean the whole bar is smaller than my living room and, of course, packed to the rafters. It's covered in posters and album covers from the 50s through to the 70s and has made little or no concession to modernity and fashion the decor being more 19th century than anything else - an original parlour bar. That in itself has made it fashionable, for now. The irony. The toilets consist of 1 cubicle per sex (although I dare say they may at times accommodate more than 1) and if you squeeze through the bodies to get to them before you have to give your foot a warm shower you really should be given a medal. It's situated in one of the old streets, cobbled with parking on one side only as it's so narrow. When I was looking for somewhere to park I crawled up the street past the front door at the very same time a 6 ft 9 transvestite (who hosts a gay club around the corner) was leaving. I looked like a curb-crawler cruising within 2 feet of this blond mini-skirted giant. Inside Bisongrass and 7yr old Havana rum helped grease the vocal cords and we had the penultimate ripping the arse out of each other session before one of the triumvirate moves to live in Australia. Hard to think he'll be gone soon. We all feel it but being men can't do any more than scrape the surface when we're face to face of how it'll change all our lives. I will get something written down for him. He's a good, deep, intelligent, warm hearted, big fucker and I know I'll get him blubbing and, if I'm honest, me too.

2006 - A Spaces Odyssey

What a week of technofuckery. My car keeps having a flat battery and popping the boot lid open. The new business line at my new house, well even the phone company can't work out what's happened here but it goes along the lines (ha ha, oh all right!) of them activating a line on one exchange and erecting a pole connected to another exchange. Even I know that's not going to work. Someone was supposed to be here on Thursday to fit the junction box inside the house. Do I have to tell you? Good. But if he had it would have been fun to watch him try to work out why the damn thing wasn't connecting. To add insult to injury they delivered a phone book to me on that day.

Back to the car. They discovered what I had suspected which was a current drain on the battery from a component. A "module" (I believe this is the generic name they give to something they don't themselves understand) which apparently controlled everything including Tower Bridge, the Hubble Space Telescope and a cigarette machine in a nearby bar, had decided to turn into HAL. This would therefore explain why I lit up like a fucking Christmas tree after being in the car for even just a few seconds. 5000 volts needed to produce a blue coloured spark apparently - I kid you not. Still, they seem convinced it's fixed even though I can still light a fine Cuban cigar off the static discharges. No doubt I'll soon find out on a morning when HAL is telling me it's 1 degree - the sadistic, narky silicon fucker.

Mini happy returns

Over the years I've had a wide selection of cars. Some good, some ...not. Of course my first car was a Mini which I bought when I was 18. It was a complete pile of shite - hideous two tone paint job and wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding. But it was mine. It was only 8 years younger than me and I'm glad I had it (although it didn't run more often than it did) because it was where I learned about those sort of things. I learned how to bleed brakes (and inhale asbestos before I knew what it was), change brake shoes, replace wheel bearings, change the cylinder head, dismantle the carburettor (when cars had those). And it gave me freedom at a time when I still lived at home.
Fast forward 24 years and I drive a car that cost 200 times more but has broken down 10 times in the last 2 months. Of course now you lift the bonnet and see a wall of plastic, no recognisable engine features remain and the home tinkerer is reduced to ensuring he has the emergency number programmed into his phone.

Can I have my Mini back please?

Subscribe to tiny world review

You may have noticed a new orange symbol appearing on the right hand side (this'll make no sense if you're reading this at some future date when I've completely bolloxed up the layout of this blog page) which is the RSS feed symbol.
Clicking on this takes you through to the RSS feed (I know, it's so f'ing obvious isn't it) where you add the said RSS feed (see I said it again) to a newsreader or feed aggregator of your choice like Feedburner or Bloglines or Google or Newsgator or del.icio.us and others.

Now naturally I feel like Charlie Clever Clogs today for doing this but who f'ing knows if it works? Allright, I do. I checked it and it greatly improves the look of the RSS feed in Firefox and dovetails brilliantly with the new Internet Explorer 7 beta 2.

Anyway, give it a try if you want to. Or just click on the damn thing for fun. Or send me money. Or give me offers of sex.

Yep, either of the last two will be just dandy.

no knickers

Today, I have decided, nay decreed to be ...

"No knickers Thursday".

Patrons are kindly requested to remove their downstairs undergarments for the duration of the day.

May you enjoy the pleasantly cooling breeze and brushing of your clothes on your nether regions.

feckin' drink

I'm having a think about my drinking.

I don't drink every day - maybe once a week, I just drink too much, perhaps that should be tooooo much, then generally live to regret it. I get greedy and the more I drink the more I need. I suppose that defines me as an alcoholic. My liver stings the day after (for years I never drank enough fluids and was probably always dehydrated) and my sharp wit and sarcasm turn lazily to borderline offensiveness. Or not.

Some thought required. Maybe just one more then.

letting go

Isn't it amazing how much rubbish we collect as we waddle through our lives. Moving house helps sort out the important from the irrelevant whilst always maintaining a degree of just-in-caseness. Being partway through my 2nd move in 2 years I travel fairly light though still have a lot of things that should beggar the question "when was the last time you used/needed/wanted/wore that?" Today, while looking for some pics of a friend (who's emigrating) I trawled through half of my photos, the old fashioned printed ones. It was reassuring to see my ability to take pictures has got better but less inspiring to see what a low base it started from. A work in progress. As I reminisced of people and places I couldn't help wonder why I still had most of them. Old girlfriends, lost friends, mostly people and places who now have no bearing on my life. People who I no longer wanted to remember for one reason or another. What is it that makes us hold on to these? I decided that next time I looked in that box I owed it to myself to sort out the important from the irrelevant. Then put it back in the wardrobe, just in case.

Treewalk ing

What the f's he on about now? Ever had a day when the page you want to load just won't or pictures and links in pages take forever? Me too!! Especially now I've got my broadband enabled at the new house. No idea what it is but I can't load pages for shit. Until now.

The solution I came across accidentally (like everything else) and ... by fluck!, does it make a difference. It's called TreeWalk DNS. I'll try to explain what it does but as I'm stupid this will most likely be wrong. When you type in a URL the internet service provider's address book converts it into a number and "connects" with it. Sometimes however this information in the address book gets corrupted or their DNS server acts up. This is when you get error pages and slow or non-loading pages. Your computer keeps these addresses temporarily and disposes of them when you switch off. Treewalk doesn't use your ISP's DNS server and also keeps a copy of regularly viewed pages' addresses even after the p.c. is switched off hence faster loading.

If you're happy it's safe why not try it. It auto-installs even on a broadband network and seems to speed up things dramatically particularly if you use a multi-tabbed browser like Firefox. Your firewall may warn you about an application called "named.exe" trying to act as a server. This is what's meant to happen. There's a support forum at the site.

Oh, and it's free.

Get it here.