August 2005 Archives

According to this news story, as many as 1000 people were killed in a stampede when panic spread over rumours of suicide bombers. If there were actually any suicide bombers in the crowd, and they had managed to blow themselves up, there's no way they'd have been able to take this many people with them.

Let's hope this is not the start of a worrying new trend.

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And in a follow-up to a story I commented on a couple of weeks ago, I present these links
Original story
Follow-up 1
Follow-up 2

This just beggars belief. He doesn't need a community order and a drug rehabilitation order. He'll ignore those. Just as he'll ignore the order to pay compensation to the shop owner. He needs a short sharp shock. As I said in my original post, he should be put into solitary for 20 days (one day for each year of his life) and then after that I reckon he should be put on army basic training. That should get him off the drugs and knock some sense into him. I'm not in favour of just locking people away and letting them fester in their own stupidity, I'm in favour of rehabilitation. Give people an opportunity to shine, and they will. This kid just hasn't had any opportunities yet.

So I got the hard drive cloned. Took another two hours after I made my last post on the subject, but it got there in the end. I took out the old drive, put the new one in as master, put my old slave back in as the slave, and switched on.

Boy, is it ever fast now! I had no idea that putting in a more up to date drive can make such a difference to the speed of the PC. It boots up faster than it's ever done before, programs start faster, everything is faster :-) As the new drive is a sector-for-sector copy of the old drive, the programs and files are still just as fragmented as they were before, but since the new drive is that much bigger than the old one, they're now squeezed into the first 10% of the disc and not spread all over the place. Maybe this will account for part of the increase in speed. Of course, the new drive spins faster, has a faster data transfer rate and has a bigger cache than the old drive, which is probably the main reason for the speed increase.

When HDClone was doing its business, it told me that I had about 250 bad sectors on the old drive. I've no idea if I've lost the data that was in these sectors, or even if there was data there to begin with, but all I know at the moment is that the programs I use all the time still work, and the programs I don't use often, well, I can reinstall them if I have to.

The next step is to copy all the data from the slave drive onto the new main drive, and reformat the slave drive to get rid of Linux. Wish me luck.

This morning I went shopping, and as well as treating myself to a couple of steaks, some lamb chops and various other items of food generally deemed as being "healthy", I went to the computer bits shop and got a new hard drive. A whopping great 250Gb hard drive. I knew it was a mistake to apply for another credit card, but what the hell. The drive wasn't a fortune (in fact, it was less than I paid for a 160Gb drive a couple of years ago) so I can sort of justify it to myself. It's going to replace the ageing 20Gb drive in my PC.

Now, the 20Gb drive is the promary drive, which means it's the one with Windows on it. Since I don't want to reinstall windows and everything else that goes with it, I decided the best course of action would be to clone the drive. I'd done some hard drive cloning at work a few weeks ago, and knew that Acronis let you have a fully-featured 15-day trial version of their True Image software in exchange for your email address. I thought this was a fair exchange, so I downloaded it.

I took out my existing slave drive and put in the new one (as a slave). Then I discovered the PC wouldn't boot any more. What the...? A few minutes of thinking later, and I realised it must be the Linux partition I put on there. You see, a few months back I got an attack of geekiness and decided to install Linux as a second operating system on the PC just to see where it was up to these days. Linux installs a boot loader so you can choose whether you want Windows or Linux when starting the PC. So far so easy. Trouble is, the boot loader menu was installed with Linux on the slave drive, and since I've just taken out the slave drive and replaced it with an unformatted drive, the PC wouldn't boot any more.

Ok, let's see if we can uninstall Linux, or at the very least get rid of this boot loader. Since I installed Linux I only booted into it three times, so I guess I can live without it, and despite all my anti-Microsoft feelings and the satisfaction I get from getting something for nothing, it would have to go. I could always put it back on at a later date if I really wanted to play with it again.

Hiunting around on the interwebofinformation I discovered that the best way of getting rid of the boot loader was to reboot the PC with the Windows XP installation disc in the cd drive, press R for recovery, and then type in the command "fixmbr". Ok, couldn't be easier. Of course when I pressed R it asked for the administrator's password, and I couldn't remember what it was. I entered my own password and it didn't seem to like it. So I reboot into Windows, go into users, and reset my password. Turns out I am the administrator of my own PC (I thought I was) so I must have mis-typed my own password. Anyway, once I'd got rid of that, I fixed the boot loader thing and was able to boot up the PC with my 20Gb drive as the master and my new 250Gb drive as the slave.

Now to clone the drive. I started up Acronis, went through the wizard, and set it going. Ten minutes later it told me that it couldn't read from drive C due to a corrupt index. Bugger. Let's try scandisk. That didn't find any errors, but Acronis still wouldn't copy the drive. What I haven't mentioned is that each time Acronis decides it can't read the disc, I have to reboot the PC. Each time I want to start cloning again, I have to reboot. Each time I wanted to try and fix the boot loader, I had to reboot. I've booted the PC so many times today I'm afraid it's going to get straight on to the police web site and report me for giving it a good kicking.

So I gave up on Acronis. I booted the PC again (poor thing doesn't know what's hit it today) and went online to find other solutions. As I type this (on the laptop) it's busy cloning the drive using a freebie program called HDClone. According to the article that mentioned it, HDClone is an OK program, not the most fully-featured one out there, but it will clone a drive to a bigger drive. Which is exactly what I want it to do. It's copied nearly 12 million sectors so far, and found 115 defective on the drive. Looks like my old 20Gb drive might not have lasted too much longer at this rate, which is another reason I can use to justify the upgrade. It's only 30% cloned so far, so I'll have to wait a while longer to see if it's actually worked or not. Still, it's only taken me three hours to get to this stage, another couple of hours won't make any difference!

But I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do with 370Gb of hard drive space...

I've been feeling a little under the weather this past week... I've got a tightness in the chest and it hurts a bit when I swallow. Nothing too drastic, it's not kept me off work or anything like that, but it has made me feel lethargic.

So today I lounged around the house in my dressing gown. I watched Miss Congeniality on DVD (amusing enough to pass a little time but not exactly rip-roaringly funny) and then promptly fell asleep in front of the cricket for six hours. I'm feeling a little less groggy now than I did this morning, but who knows how I'll feel tomorrow.

My ex used to say that I made a bad patient when I got ill. I don't know if that's true or not, but if today was anything to go by, then I'm much better off being left alone to just get better on my own. i don't want anyone fussing over me, and I don't want anyone asking me to do anything around the house when I'm not in the mood. So a day to myself to let my body sort itself out is just what I needed, thank you very much.

I had intended to join a gym today. I've been thinking about it for a few weeks now, and I got an email from them the other day saying it was half price membership until the end of the month. Now I know I'm not in the best of health, and exercise is probably not the best thing to do when you're feeling ill, but I thought I'd take advantage of their offer and then start going next week, or as and when I'm feeling better. I definately need to do something, I can't sit around the house all winter feeling sorry for myself like I did last year.

I've also been spending far too long playing around with the settings on MT 3.2, installing new plugins for the sheer hell of it, and then spending ages working out where I went wrong installing them, heheh. Still, it's a learning exercise. There's a plugin called stylecatcher which will download and install different style sheets from the Movable Type web site (or anywhere else that wants to make style sheets available). This is a pretty good plugin, if only so i can get some ideas about layout and colour schemes and see how they're implemented in the CSS. Unfortunately the style sheets may not work properly with my customised screen layout templates, but it's a neat idea nonetheless. If someone would like to modify the plugin or write a new one to let you download and install templates as well as styles, then that would truly be neat.

I also had a play around with another plugin called EnhancedEntryEditing which provides a full wysiwyg editor for making new entries. This is also pretty neat, but I can't say that i've been crying out for the features it provides. However, the more I look at MT3.2 the more impressed I am with it.

So that where I am today. I'm glad tomorrow's a bank holiday, I can get some errands done that I wasn't in the mood for today (like getting some food in) and hopefully I'll be right as rain for work on Tuesday.

Ooh this is nice........ just upgraded the blog to Movable Type 3.2 and I'm very impressed so far. Not least because my comments are working again, so if you want to leave a note, feel free to do so. The upgrade to 3.2 took about half an hour, most of which was actually spent uploading the new files to the server. I went to log in, it updated the tables and did all its background stuff, and here I am :-) I love it when it all just works right, you know?

Update: I've just installed the MT-InlineEditor plugin and apart from a minor problem on installation which turned out to be something I did when I moved the blog to a new host a couple of months ago (i'd set up the site root as a relative path instrad of an absolute path, in case anyone's interested), all that went fine as well :-)

The plugin works by putting a "click here to edit" link on the individual archive page if I'm logged in to the MT admin area of my blog at the time - so anyone else reading this won't see the link. That's pretty cool stuff - not that I edit my pages much after I submit them in the first place, but you never know....

Oh, and by the way, the upgrade to 3.2 only went as smoothly as it did because of all the hard work the SixApart people have put in to developing it. I've been following the progress of the beta version for a few weeks now and even though I wasn't one of the beta testers myself I can appreciate how much time and effort must have gone into it. A sterling effort, jolly good show, chaps. Now, if I can only find where they've moved everything....

I'm going to take this opportunity to wish a happy birthday to my mum, who is not ashamed of the fact that she's 60 today. I bought her a card with a badge that read "It took me 60 years to look this good!" and she's wearing it with pride :-) She's also driving around in her new car (ok, so she got the car a couple of weeks ago, but it was still a birthday present to herself) with her brand spanking new personal number plate on it. It took her a while to find a plate that she liked, because she's got four initials, and UK plates only have groups of three letters on them. I had a look around for her and found a plate which had all four initials on it, but not consecutively, and also her age... I was rather surprised when I mentioned it to her and she said "Ooh, I like that one!"

I quite fancy the idea of having a personal plate myself, but I'm going to force myself to wait until next year, when I'll be able to buy a plate that has my initials and my birthdate on it. My birthday falls on the sixth of the month, and 06 plates can only be put on cars registered between March and September next year.... so if I buy the plate I'll have to get a new car to put it on. Which kinda makes it an expensive plate, doesn't it?

Eeek... I just realised that both my parents are now pensioners... does that make me officially middle-aged?

I've just been informed there is a problem with leaving comments on the site.... I'm not sure at the moment what the problem is, but if you do want to leave a comment then use the email link on the left to send me a message.... I'm looking into the comment problem, if I had a clue where to start, that is...

The Manchester Evening News reported yesterday:

TODAY the Manchester Evening News appeals to our readers to help catch the city's dumbest hoodie.

The hapless hooded thief was well and truly caught on camera after he staged a raid in David Arathoon's CCTV camera shop.

The culprit was filmed from every possible angle as he posed as a customer and asked to look at some cameras before snatching a £700 laptop from the counter and running out of the shop in Dale Street.

Some of the comments at the end of the story are interesting. Here's my take on the story.

Like it or not, the clothes you wear tell people a lot about you. Bikers have a similar "bad image" with the leather jacket look that scares some people, and hoodies are also now getting a bad reputation. Front-page stories of a boy in a hoodie robbing a camera shop is going to do nothing whatsoever to repair that bad reputation.

Someone else commented that CCTV cameras are useless at preventing crime. With the youth of today absolutely nothing is going to stop them committing a crime, even the very real possibility of getting caught. However, that's not going to deter the "feral youth" of today. These kids treat prison as a holiday - a place where they get three meals a day and a bed for the night. The problem today is that the punishment does not fit the crime. Someone pointed out that all he's going to get is a slapped wrist. They're probably right - that's no deterrent at all. I'm not suggesting we go to the extreme of chopping hands off or anything like that, but a month in solitary confinement with basic food and a mattress in the floor should at least give him time to reflect on his actions. As an aside, there was a programme on TV earlier this week called Supernanny. In order to change the behaviour of a wayward nine-year-old, the nanny put her in a "reflection room" for nine minutes (one minute for each year of her age) so that she had time to think about what she'd done. This is solitary confinement in disguise, and the fact that it's in a dining room and not a prison cell doesn't make any difference. After a while, the child stopped sulking and started to think about what she'd done to get herself put away for a nine-minute stretch, and eventually she realised that being sent away on her own was no fun at all and so she started to behave herself.

If this hoodie is put away in a room on his own for a few days (one day for each year of his age) surely he'll decide that the punishment is no fun? Of course, he's got to get himself caught first....

I've had a quiet day today. Pottered about the house, done some laundry, went grocery shopping, watched a dvd, the usual last-day-of-a-week-off slobbering around you want to do before it all gets hectic again. I've eaten my curry and staggered upstairs to the computer. As soon as I sat down an email popped up. it said:

hi Danny

it's Friday-8.15pm and you've not written on your blog-last line of Monday's says 'see you all on Friday

Catch you soon

Thanks for reminding me :-) What have I been doing this week? What on earth can I find to write about? Oh yes, I went away for a few days, didn't I? That's right, with my son and my ex-wife. Before we went away I told my ex that I was a little surprised to get a text message from her asking me if I'd like to go away with them for a few days. I asked her why she'd asked me and she replied "because our son would enjoy spending the time with you." Which I thought was a good enough answer... when I told people I was going away with my ex they all thought she must have had an ulterior motive, but even if she had then it's not apparent to me even now we're back.

Since my cousin S bought a new laptop at the end of last week, and since we were able to transfer all her data off it last weekend, I was able to take my new purchase (her old laptop) away with me. Why take a laptop on holiday? Well, I thought I'd use it for several things:
making notes for blog entries
watching dvd's in the evening
downloading photos off the camera to free up the memory card each day.

As it turned out the laptop wasn't too good at playing dvd's, but I managed to use it as a dumping ground for photos and blog notes. Here are the entries, tidied up and editied for your delight and delectation.

Monday afternoon, 5pm

The trip down was easier than expected. I thought we'd have to stop at least three times along the way, for everyone to stretch their legs, go to the toilet, throw up or whatever. But we only stopped twice. That's once at a service stop, and once for half an hour in a traffic queue. The road we intended to take was completely gridlocked, but fortunately we were able to give up on that and take a different road down to London. We set off at 10:40am and arrived at the hotel at 4pm. Not bad at all, actually.

Son was pretty much well-behaved in the car on the way down. We travelled 200 miles on the motorway without a single cross word between any of us, but when I stopped the car just outside town so that my ex can get the directions to the hotel out of her bag, we had a little tantrum. He wanted to have a box of cereal (we'd brought some breakfast stuff with us because, guess what, travelodges aren't bed-and-breakfasts). Anyway, he asked for a box of cereal, mum said no, not until the morning, and the trantrum kicked off. It wasn't a major tantrum, it only lasted about 10 minutes or so, and everyone managed to calm down enough for me to find the hotel.

The hotel itself was basic. Very basic. You get a bed, a table, a chair, a wardrobe, a shower and a kettle. I haven't seen any signs telling me not to use the kettle in the shower, though. The wardrobe doesn't have a door, so I guess the cleaning staff can criticise my taste in clothing without having to expend any extra effort. There is one major disadvantage to this hotel though, and that's the fact that it doesn't have a car park. I have to park the car across the road in the market car park, for which there is an hourly charge. I'll see in the morning if I'm going to leave it there tomorrow night as well.

Ok, so this is time to relax and recouperate after the long drive down. I've unpacked, showered, and have another 15-30 minutes to myself before we find somewhere to go for dinner. I suppose I'd better use part of that time to get dressed.

Update:

Dinner at TGI Friday's was only spoiled by the small matter of getting a call from the office at 6:20pm. I had to wander over to a quiet area of the restaurant and try to give the boss a solution to the problem down the phone line. Not the easiest task in the world, and didn't exactly bode well for the rest of the week. Still, I was too far away to get called back at the last minute, so I wasn't going to let it get to me.

Tuesday 16 August

First day at Legoland. A good day out, not perfect, but not a disaster either. The lad was quite well-behaved, although a bit gringy at times. He loved going on the dragon rollercoaster with me, and on the "pirates fall" log flume with him mum. Lunch was at a burger bar in the park, and I had a fairly quiet afternoon while the others spent an hour queuing up for the log flume ride. We managed to hold off buying any toys for him until home time, and we left about 3:30 because my ex was getting tired. The rest of us could have carried on for longer, but since we're going back on Thursday we can do all the things we never got a chance to do today.

The car park overnight cost £4.80. They charge £1.20 an hour, so we're either going to have to grin and bear it for tomorrow when we head into London on the train, or try and find somewhere to park for free near a train station. I don't think we'll be able to do that, though.

The weather was gorgeous, although we took too much stuff with us.

Wednesday 17 August - Day in London

All in all an excellent day out. Son No 1 was as well-behaved as we can expect him to be after dragging him on and off trains and up and down stairs all day. He got gringy occasionally, and mum decided on the train on the way into town that he wasn't going to get a McD's for lunch because he was being rude (fake burping and answering back).

In the morning we went on the London Eye. My ex was nervous before going on the London Eye, and she sat on the bench in the middle of the capsule all the way round. Something to do with being scared of heights, although she admitted near the end of the trip that it wasn't as bad as she thought it was going to be. I must admit I wasn't actually aware she was scared of heights, she likes going on planes and rollercoasters and such, but I guess there's still something you can learn about someone even three years after you got divorced from them.

We weren't too sure what to do in the afternoon. We had the idea of taking him to the Natural History museum or the Science museum, and I had thought last week about seeing if we could take him to see a West End show. After we'd been on the Eye we packed everyone and everything up and went to Leicester square on the tube. There's a ticket booth there that sells last-minute tickets for the shows. Unfortunately when we got there we discovered they didn't have anything for the show we wanted to see - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. So we thought we'd get a bite to eat and consider our options. It was at this point we had some tears from the lad as he realised we weren't going to McDonald's. However, they only lasted 5 minutes or so. We went to a deli and had salt beef, houmous etc, he had some chips. He was happy enough.

On the way into town I had bought a Time Out magzine and over lunch we phoned the Palladium to see if they had any tickets for the matinee. We were in luck - there were some tickets left, so we packed everything and everyone up once more and got back on the tube. I must admit that I wasn't at all nervous about travelling on the tube following last months bombings - I was much more concerned with getting everyone to the right platform at the same time and with an absence of tantrums (from anyone). Fortunately, all the tube travelling went off without a hitch.

When we arrived at the theatre we were greeted by a man outside selling tickets. Against my better judgement I bought three tickets off him for just over half face value. I was nervous as we went in (what if we had bought counterfeit tickets and they wouldn't let us in?) and I was nervous as we took our searts (what if we had bought counterfeit tickets and someone else had tickets with identical seat numbers?) I was only able to relax once the lights went down and the show started.

I challenge anyone not to enjoy a West End musical (or Broadway, much the same thing) when you see it in the flesh. I'm not a big fan of musical films (The Blues Brothers being a notable exception) but I can watch a stage musical any day of the week. The sheer amount of thought, planning, rehearsal and imagination that goes into a show is mind-boggling, and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it, and I'm pretty sure the lad enjoyed it too. In fact, he was enthralled for the most part. He got a bit bored 5 minutes before the end, but then again that was after a two and a half hour show. I thought it was fantastic how they'd managed to rework a very familiar story to make it work on stage, and still make it a very familiar story. I've just realised how this sort of contradicts what I said about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I was disappointed with that film because it wasn't different enough from the original. I was impressed with the Chitty show because it had to be different from the original because it was being presented through a different medium, yet they still made it close enough to the original to be what you expected to see. You see?

Enough of my digressing. I asked him on the way out what his favourite part was, and he said it was when the car floated. "Not when it flew?" I asked him. "No, silly" he replied, "things can't fly inside! It was on strings!" But secretly I think he was well impressed with it all anyway. He was as well-behaved as any other child in the audience, they all wriggled about and asked loud questions from time to time. I don't think he distracted anyone too much, although his mum did think he was being a bit too active. Poor kid can't sit still for more than 5 minutes.

So... a hugely expensive day, but well worth it. You can't go to London and go on London-exclusive attractions without spending money, and I approached the day with the attitude that we're going to have a good time regardless. And we did :-)

Thursday 18 August

Second day in Legoland. We were much better organised for this day than we were on Tuesday. We dumped our little buggy at the door and hired a big double buggy that was big enough for one boy, one rucksack and one packed lunch for three. See how much more organised we were? We even managed to take a packed lunch with us on the last day! There's not a lot I can say about today, the weather was gorgeous (as indeed it had been all week), and the lad didn't get bored or play up too much while queuing up for the rides. I think he was just excited to be there, and he took everything in his stride. He knew that we'd already bought him presents and souvenirs, and didn't ask for anything else. We did the other half of the park that we didn't get to do on Tuesday (it's definately at least a two-day-visit place) and even then there were loads of rides we didn't get a chance to do.

We left at six, and since everything was already packed in the car, we headed straight for home. We were hoping that he'd fall asleep in the car without too much trouble after having had a tiring and busy few days, but maybe it was only us that had had a tiring and busy few days. Six o'clock we left, quarter past eight he finally decided to lie down, and quarter past nine he was asleep. We were home by 10:30, and had to wake him up again to get him in the house... ah well.....

Final thoughts: well, I don't know what my ex made of it all, but as far as I'm concerned it was a successful trip. Our son had a whale of a time, and although we all got short-tempered from time to time we were all able to avoid shouting matches. And that's what it was all about, really, wasn't it?

Next year, if she wants to go away for a few days with him again, I'm going to suggest a week in Tenerife. I'm sure it'll be cheaper!

By the way, some of the photos from the trip can be seen on my Flickr page.

I've been meaning to post a new entry on the blog all week, honestly I have. I'm not working this week (yay!), instead I'm off on holiday with my ex-wife and our son. We're going to spend a couple of days in Legoland in Windsor, and have a day out in London. Last week was a big round of making sure everything's going to be OK in the office in my absence, buying smart clothes for the trip away (thanks Mum!), buying new shoes, helping my cousin transfer 2Gb of data from her old laptop to her new one (thanks for the pizzas) and emailing/chatting with a girl who found me on the Speed Dating web site (not any of the girls I'd mentioned before, this is Speed-Dater-Girl No 4).

So all in all I've been too busy to even sit down and write a post here. I'm not ignoring you, honest I'm not. I guess I'm getting on with my life instead, so no complaints there.

Time to see if we can expect any delays on the way to London. See you all on Friday.

It's coming up to three years since I moved into this little house. Three years of living on my own after spending pretty much my whole life living with family or flatmates. I spent a year on my own in a bedsit in Croydon when I was a student, but even then I was out at the pub a lot, or visiting with colleagues and college friends. But now I'm back on my own, and although I don't mind my own company, it would be nice to be able to share my life with someone else again. Hence the recent foray into speed dating (which is going pretty well so far, I think).

However, that is not what I intended to write about in this entry. What I was going to say was that in the three years I've been living in this house, this is the sum total of the changes I've made:

• I painted the living room before I moved in. It was white before, and it's a slightly brighter white now.
  
• I put up a shelf in the bedroom so I could get my hi-fi off the computer table and out of the way.
  
• I moved the tumble dryer from one side of the kitchen to the other so that I could get my bike in and out of the back door.
  
• Changed one light fittign and one lamp shade.
  

That's it. The house still has the same carpets, wallpaper and curtains left here by the previous owners. It still has the same kitchen and bedroom furniture. It still has a sign on the bedroom door with the daughter's name on (it's "Louise" in case anyone's interested).

But here's what I find intriguing about all this: Why do I not feel the need to change anything? Why am I happy to sleep in a yellow bedroom, to cook in a yellow and blue kitchen, to walk up a flight of stairs with a green carpet on? Is it just another sign of how I've put my life on hold since the divorce? Is the fact I've just realised all this just another sign that I'm ready to move on?

... I don't need my thumbs for very much tonight, because I can't grip a thing. And stop sniggering at the back.

The reason for my current lack of digital dexterity? I've been screwing all afternoon. Now listen - what did I just say about sniggering? Stop it at once, or I won't let you read any further.

Ok, it's time to come clean now. Right, that's it. You at the back. Stop reading now. If you're only going to find double entendres in everything I write when it's plain I'm only using single entendres, you can look away from the screen and stare at your mouse for the next three minutes. Shall the rest of us continue? Good.

I've actually spent the afternoon at my ex's new flat screwing together a bunk bed for my son. She got it off a friend a few weeks ago and ever since then I've had lots of planks of wood and a mattress in my front room [stares at the back row looking for any signs of sniggering. Or even stifled sniggering].

Not only does he have a bed now, but I've also screwed the lid back onto his toy box, screwed a handle on the living room door, and screwed together a TV stand for the living room. That's a lot of screwing for one day.

All in all, a very good afternoon. Not a single cross word between any of us, and if we manage to keep that level of civility up when we go to Legoland and London the week after next, life will be good indeed.

Was that a snigger you were stifling a minute ago? See me after class...

I think I've got writer's block. I'm sitting here staring at a blank screen and I can't think of anything interesting to put on it. Actually, that's not quite true. I can think of lots of things to put on it but I can't work out how to make each of them into a blog post on its own. So here's a collection of snippets from my life as it stands on this Saturday morning.

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I still haven't found out who the mystery speed dater is. I sent a message to a girl with the same first name as mystery dater, and got a reply three days later which basically said "what are you talking about?". So I don't think it was her. I also think that the real mystery dater has either given up on me for not replying to her messages, or given up on the speed dating web site for not delivering them in the first place. Either which way, I haven't heard from her since.

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There's plenty of stuff happening at work. The new boss man started about six weeks ago and has spent his time writing a report for the board on where the company is now and where he thinks we should go in the future. He wants to upgrade the server by splitting the load across three servers instead of one. He wants to get the retail branches onto broadband and effectively make them part of the office network. He wants to get all the computer systems at head office in line so that they can talk to each other properly without me having to write little programs to convert the data from one format to another all the time. He wants to do all the things I've wanted to do for the last three years but not had the time or the confidence to go to the board and say "this is what you should be doing."

He presented his findings to the board last week and they agree with him about everything. We're going to be buying new hardware, we've kicked the new order entry system into touch because it was basically crap and we're going to be hiring a third person for the IT department to help us develop a new system in-house because basically we know exactly what we want it to do.

I've wanted to develop a new system in-house for years, and I've basically got the skill set to do so, but I've never had the time, what with everything else I've had to keep running at the same time. The new guy comes in and says "do it all my way" and they listen to him. They never listened to me when I was the manager, and they never consulted me when they chose to go with this new system they've just binned. Admittedly I was in the doghouse at the time, but I get the feeling the board don't realise how valuable my input is to a project like this. I've been with the company nearly seven years now, and I've come up with a lot of the glue that holds everything together. My new boss recognises the effort that I've put in to keep everything going, I just hope that I'm going to get the credit that's due to me.

In fact, stuff the credit, I want a pay rise.

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Regular readers may have noticed that I've not been updating you with the results of my weight loss program recently. That's because it's all gone pear-shaped, as indeed have I. I've got no-one else to blame for this but myself (and the weather, heheh) but I really really do need to do something about it. I know for a fact I'll put on more weight over the winter unless I get myself more active, and I'm currently 3lbs heavier than I was when I first started talking about all this. Grrrrrr. I went to have a look at a local gym last week, and despite being very impressed with the facilities, I just can't afford to join. I'm in a rut, I know I'm eating all the wrong foods and not getting the energy I need. I've got the incentive (i.e. I hate the way that I look and I don't want to have a heart attack in ten years time) but a three-month commitment to the gym is going to cost me at least £165, and I just can't afford that at the moment.

I definately need to have a word with someone at work on Monday. I want to make sure that they know how valuable I am to them, and I want them to pay me accordingly. That'll make me feel better from the start, and give me the kick I need to get everything else sorted out. My life is starting to just coast along again, I need to take back some control over it.

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Now, I don't think I actually had writer's block. I think it was more like writer's constipation, and as you've just seen for yourself, it seems to have cleared. That feels better......

I thought I'd give you an update on what's been happening following the speed dating adventure I took myself on last Wednesday.

As you may remember, (and if you don't remember then go back and read the original post!) I had two matches on the night. I sent them both online "flirt" messages, giving them my email address. On Saturday I had a reply from one of them, giving me her mobile phone number. Result!

Sunday was a manic day, meaning that I didn't get round to calling her until relatively late in the evening. She didn't mind this, but what was annoying was that a few seconds into our conversation, a very soothing voice came on to my phone telling me I only had a minute's worth of credit remaining. Bloody pay-as-you-go phone tariffs, I'd only bought £20-worth of credit about three months ago and here it is all used up. I just about had time to tell her I'd call her back tomorrow night before the phone cut off.

So last night I called her back, and we chatted for an hour. I think we're still trying to suss each other out at the moment. I mentioned in my original message to her that friendship would be fine, a relationship would be fine, and finding out that we don't like each other at all would be fine as well. (That's called "keeping your options open!") I don't think we'll end up dating, but if she turns out to be a friend I can go to the theatre with, or go bowling with, or just someone I can get out of the house with, then that'll be good enough for me. I'm sounding like Billy No-Mates here, but that's the way my life has ended up.

I had lots and lots of friends when I was at university, and I stayed in "uni town" for a few more years and got a job there. The company I was working for annouced it was closing the computer department, so I found myself a new job in London. A week later I met my future wife. We went to London together and were too wrapped up in each other's company to go out and meet new people. She was the only person I knew there, and I was the only person she knew. We were happy. We got married, and decided to move back to Manchester to start a family. Once here, we were again too wrapped up in pregnancy and child-rearing to go out and look for new friends (actually, my wife made some friends, but I didn't) and then when the marriage fell apart, there I was, not knowing anyone. Of course, being crap at just picking up the phone and keeping in touch with old friends has also been my undoing. Hence my speed-dating decision.

Speed-dater-girl No 1 and I seemed to get on ok last night, and I said I'd contact her again nearer the weekend. She seemed happy enough with that.

Speed-dater-girl No 2 hasn't been back in touch yet.

And there's also a Speed-dater-girl No 3, who wasn't at the event last Wednesday, but has seen my profile on the web site and has been trying to send me "flirt" messages. I've not been able to read these messages yet as it tells me there's a problem with her account or her profile or something. All I know is that someone's out there trying to contact me. I'll say this for them, they're not giving up easily. One message on Friday, three on Saturday and two on Sunday. I might have to do a little detective work, see if I can find out who it is.

I'll keep ya posted!

Last Saturday my parents and I took the kids (son and niece) to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I think all five of us were looking forward to seeing the film. Well, maybe apart from my dad, who suddenly found he had to buy 5 cinema tickets at short notice.

Anyway, we got there, we queued up for tickets, we bought sweets for the kids and we waited 40 minutes for the next performance. The kids ate their sweets and ran around the foyer. Usually managing to keep out of everybody's way, but not always. Son Number One managed to knock over Niece Number One's box of sweets and send them flying all over the place. While we were still deciding if it was ok for her to put them back in the box, an attendant arrived and swept them all into the bin. She must have had a radar on or something. Maybe there were sensors in the floor - "WARNING! Sweets dropped on floor over here! Put "Operation Sweep-it-up-quick" into action!" I swear, it was like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie, with little drones and robots waiting in the wings to be called into service, and not daring to miss their cue for fear of being scrapped at the next robot review meeting.

But I digress. We filed in and immediately my son took control of the
situation. After we'd decided what row to sit on he decided who was going to sit next to who. Until we told him that it don't really matter and everyone was going to stay where they were. He was bouncing around on his chair like a little jack-in-the-box, and I asked him if he was looking forward to seeing the film. "Yes," he said, "when I look forwards the screen is right there in front of me!" I still haven't worked out if he was taking me for a ride on that one.

The lights go down, the curtians open....... and we watch 20 minutes of adverts. Damn you, Perl and Dean! Then follows 10 minutes of trailers for new films, among which are such intellectual fare as "Sky High" and "The Adventures of Something Boy and Lava Girl"

Finally, the main movie starts. And was it worth the wait? Well, yes and no. Yes, it looked good. Yes, it was imaginative, Yes, it made me laugh out loud in places. But no, because it wasn't different enough from the original to make it worthwhile, in my opinion. No, because some of the jokes fell flat on their faces. No, because they tried to introduce some back-plot that wasn't necessary. This film had all the same elements of the original version (because they were both based on the same book) but I think the original film did it better. Johnny Depp is a fine actor but he still looks like a teenager, and Willy Wonka is definately older than a teenager.

There are two scenes in particular which kinda ruined it for me. The first was when they're just starting the tour of the factory. Wonka leads the party down an optical illusion corridor and at the end they all look like they're 50 feet tall. In the original film the shot lasts long enough for you to start thinking "Hang on, it looks like they're getting taller....?" but in the new version there's a two-second shot of them walking down the corridor and then they're all standing by the door. Huge. And the whole illusion just falls flat on its face.

The second scene was where Augustus Gloop gets sucked up into the tube after he's fallen in the chocolate river. This is a cue for an Oompa Loompa song. But everyone else (including Ma Gloop) just stands there watching the Oompas sing their song while Augustus is stuck in the tube. Surely his mother should have been running around imploring people to help her son?

Little niggles, I know. But they went a long way towards making me come out of the cinema thinking "it was ok I suppose" rather than thinking "Wow! I can't wait for that to come out on DVD!"

Now, I do believe that was my first ever movie review. I think I'll go celebrate with a bar of chocolate. Something's put me in the mood for confectionery, I can't think what though....