philip-harvey.co.uk

TacheBack – Day 30

2009-09-30T00:26:00.002+01:00

Well its the final day and time to dawn the dictator or the Chaplin.
Anyways will be glad to get shot of this and looking and feeling like an idiot.
I am not back in work till next week so not sure how much I have raised from there until I go back.
Its looking good for breaking the £200 mark, something I did not think would happen.
Final day folk that have not made a donation can do at :
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby
ps let me know what you thought was the best style… Mines was the handlebar / lumberjack look.

TacheBack – Day 29

2009-09-29T12:51:00.002+01:00

Time for a comedy tache…
1 day left.
Will it be the pencil or the Hitler?
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

Tachback – Day 28

2009-09-28T21:22:00.002+01:00

The box car.
Couple of more designs to go and we are done…
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 27

2009-09-27T15:29:00.002+01:00

Today I have attempted the Sheramic. (Note to readers I never wore that T shirt yesterday as I changed just before I went out again)
Tomorrow I think its the box car……
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 26

2009-09-26T10:15:00.002+01:00

The Painters Brush. Thats today's style.
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 25

2009-09-25T15:33:00.002+01:00

No more handlebars!

Got bored of the handlebars and felt the mocking had came to an end so decided that I would attempt on the final week different styles of tache. I have done the lumberjack biker look tache.
Not sure how many of these I can pull of in the final days. I would say the current style is Chevron. Horseshoe has been done. I think the attempts I need to do are the Painters Brush, Box Car, Pyramidal and the Regent (Dictator aka the Hitler tache) That will take me to the final day and a shave.
Whoop.
Anyway sponsorship dried up 5 days to go to reach my target!
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 24

2009-09-24T17:03:00.002+01:00

Well with under a week left sponsorship started to dry up. I want to break the 200 mark. Looking forward to a shave and getting rid of this!
http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 23

2009-09-23T11:39:00.001+01:00

Looking like a proper tache today! 7 days left…

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 22

2009-09-22T11:42:00.001+01:00

Almost on the home straight. Was at training last night and was taking all sorts of slaggins for it! They were trying to get me to keep it for a season. Walking about like a tit for one month is enough for me never mind a year!

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 21

2009-09-21T11:48:00.001+01:00

I trimmed my stubble and was going to leave it like that and just keep on top of the stubble for the rest of the week. Decided when I was in bathroom just to have a clean shave so the tache is out there. Glad I am not at work anymore!

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 20

2009-09-20T18:34:00.001+01:00

10 days left and it seems like there not been much growth on it for a week.

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 19

2009-09-19T22:27:00.001+01:00

Shaved the soul patch off today before heading out…

Starting to get bored of the lumberjack look. Will shave that off after training on Monday I think.

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 18

2009-09-18T18:23:00.001+01:00

Final day of work and final mocking in there for a while (at least for a few weeks)

Have been called today Biggels, Girngo and Vlad.

Out for my brothers birthday tonight. Roll on some more mockings.

TacheBack - Day 17

2009-09-17T09:09:00.001+01:00

Had a shave this morning get rid of my few days stubble. Was driving to work and was thinking what the hell is this on my face! Starting to look forward to getting shot of it.

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 16

2009-09-16T16:06:00.001+01:00

Starting to get Itchy now..

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 15

2009-09-15T12:01:00.001+01:00

Well we are 1/2 there now and starting to get thicker.

Sponsorship has started to dry up now better start to pester some folk.

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack – Day 14

2009-09-14T08:38:00.001+01:00

Almost 1/2 way there for the taches.

Starting to thicken up, wonder what this will look like in another 16 days!

TacheBack – Day 13

2009-09-13T13:32:00.001+01:00

Got myself a trimmer today when out at Tesco, helped get rid of the beard.

Tache is starting to thicken up… Office should be fun tomorrow.

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

BeardBack – Day 12

2009-09-12T17:58:00.001+01:00

Really need a shave. Will get to it tomorrow, keeping up with my normal weekly shave and be able to unleash the tache again for the office on Monday morning

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

Tacheback – Day 11

2009-09-11T16:32:00.001+01:00

Got myself a beard now, good for hiding on social events like tomorrow :)

Will shave on Sunday or Monday morning for full tache glory!

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

TacheBack - Day 10

2009-09-10T14:14:00.001+01:00

Starting to look like a tramp....

Beard is coming back. Ever seen a yeti before?

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

Tacheback – Day 9

2009-09-09T13:43:00.001+01:00

Well the days are flying in and my tache is starting to take shape….

Decided to smile today!

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

Tacheback - Day 8

2009-09-08T15:28:00.001+01:00

Got through yesterdays mocking's ok. Beard starting to grow back. Is it going to be ginger? Only time will tell.....

http://www.tacheback.com/jobby

Tacheback – Day 7

2009-09-07T15:10:00.001+01:00

Well into work and yep the mockery has started.

Cheers to my fellow tachebackers who have yet to make the plunge and shave their beards off. Least I think i have braved the worst of the slagging in work.

What you gonna do when the jobbymaster runs wild on you!!!!

I done a bit more pruning this morning. 23 days left. Its already feeling like a struggle….

Going for the Hulk Hogan look. Got some strange comments and awkward situations today, but alas its for a good cause and got some sponsorship out of it.

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Tacheback – Day 6

2009-09-06T21:45:00.001+01:00

Done nothing this weekend and decided it was time to unleash the tache fresh for the office tomorrow (hopefully be able to bag some sponsorship) After all its tache back and not beard back.

Wonder how the rest of the team is getting on with theirs…..

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Tacheback – Day 5

2009-09-05T18:42:00.001+01:00

Its the weekend and I have not left the house today… Still no sign of a shave either.

Least the washing has changed in the background!

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Tacheback – Day 4

2009-09-04T14:11:00.001+01:00

Excuse the mess in the background (dam woman). Thinking of shaving tonight or tomorrow.

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Tacheback – Day 3

2009-09-03T14:22:00.001+01:00

Need to start to think about what do with the next shave. Suggestions welcome.

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Day 2

2009-09-02T11:45:00.001+01:00

Growth is starting to come....

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Tacheback - Day 1

2009-09-01T15:47:00.001+01:00

Had a shave this morning getting rid of my normal week worth of growth.

Looking young and fresh!

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Its been a while....

2009-09-01T15:42:00.001+01:00

Its been a while since I have blogged. I have kind of lost interest if I was honest blogging about random pointless things in my life.

However I have seen an opportunity for use of my web space and that is for a daily picture of my Tacheback growth.

Tacheback is a charity event lasting all of September which lets men grow a mustache and every penny donated goes to the event for Everyman Male cancer Campaign.

If you would like to sponser me on growing the slug on the lip then please click the link below.

http://www.tacheback.com/Jobby

Wedding Cake

2008-07-28T21:12:00.001+01:00

Now this is a wedding cake!

More pictures can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/77724016@N00/sets/72157605369972957/

Hard Drive tools

2008-07-02T13:37:00.001+01:00

Couple of tools that are useful for diagnosing hard drives. These can be booted from a CD or a floppy. You can even run these inside Windows if you like.

Seagate Seatools
IBM / Hitachi Drive Fitness Test
Maxtor Maxblast 3
Maxtor PowerMax
Western Digital Software & Drivers
Fujitsu Utilities

No Luck Clark

2008-06-30T18:21:00.001+01:00

It was a torrid battle but there can only be one winner.... What sets us a part is this rule from the website. 12. In the event that two or more teams have the same points, the manager that registered first will be deemed the winner.

Pos.	Team	Mn.	Pts.
Euro Gidda Championships :
Last Updated: 30/06/2008 18:09:12
http://eurofantasyfootball.metro.co.uk/
10776	The Brown Note	59	253
10898	Clarkies All Meat Treats	62	253
18461	Dels Super Destroyers	57	222
35697	Yer Maws Athletic	48	179
53445	Taking up the rear	47	152
54373	Paisley Park Ring Pirates	54	151
56180	Daves Dyslexic Winkers	57	148
60053	Giddas XI	37	143
68230	Cunny Funt FC	29	133
99999	VKR Superstar Bhoys	0	0

Handcock - billboard

2008-06-24T10:24:00.001+01:00

Will Smith - Cock. Not your average superhero.

Firefox spell check

2008-06-19T08:23:00.001+01:00

Carrying on from previous post. I have been Firefox spell check since Firefox 2.0 and have just managed to added a miss spelled word into the dictionary.

Quick Google search and I have found out how to edit the entry that was added. This is only for windows, no idea how to do it for mac or Linux.

Open C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles or click run and type %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles.
Open your profile folder, it should have a .default extension.
open persdict.data with notepad or any other text editor. Delete or add words and save.

Had to write this down as I am getting old and tend to forget things these days unless they are documented.

Firefox 3

2008-06-17T23:18:00.001+01:00

To those that still use Internet explorer Mozilla has today released Firefox 3.0. Again they get this out before Internet explorer 8.0 which I have in beta. Firefox can also be used on mac and Linux can comment on these OS as I have not used them in years.

So far the new Firefox seems a lot faster and my spell check works again on my desktop which is a good sign.

Most of my add on's are working fine again with the exception of the blog this in windows live writer. Which I can deal with.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html - for the download.

Feeder - Classic Grand Glasgow

2008-05-29T08:39:00.001+01:00

Went along last Thursday to see Feeder at another small venue. This mini tour that they were doing was really for them to play their new songs live as a warm up for the festival season. Having managed to get hold of the new album Silent Cry which is out on the 16th of June I knew they would play a lot of new songs.

The set list which was as follows :

Feeling A Moment
Shatter
Miss You
We Are The People
Come Back Around
Tracing Lines
Guided By A Voice
Just The Way I'm Feeling
Sonorous
Pushing The Senses
My Perfect Day
Fires
Yesterday Went Too Soon
Lost And Found

encore

High
Just A Day

Good to see they are playing My Perfect Day and Yesterday Went Too Soon. The new songs sound good live (6 of them) and I am pretty sure they will be doing a tour in September or October to support Silent Cry.

The venue itself is somewhere I had never been to see a gig. As usual we turned up late and missed the support band, by the time we got in it was packed. Managed to make our way down onto the floor and my 1st thoughts were hmm this could be a struggle to see the band. The stage is about 1ft off the ground making it hard for the vertically challenged people to see. As soon as they came on I could just see their heads. My recommendation if you are seeing a band in here is head in early to either get close to the front or so you can stand at the balcony. The sound from here was great and was a nice pleasant venue. I look forward to seeing more bands in here.

Again no photo shots due to having a crappy camera, really need to invest in a new one!

Bruges

2008-05-28T07:45:00.001+01:00

A short train ride (40 mins or so) from Brussels is Bruges. We decided to visit this city on our second day in Belgium. Getting of the train the city looked like any other city so far. Train station loads of cars and buses. In the distance we could see some church steeples and decided to head in that direction.

As soon as we crossed the main road beside the train station there was a major loss of cars and the roads became rather narrow and a lot more push bikes appeared. Turns out that the city from this ring round has been preserved as a historic city (no idea what era Google says 12th onwards).

Meandering round the small streets and catching all the sites we also noticed how many canals there was in the city, we found a boat which was fairly priced which took us a tour of the city on the canals.

Some more beer stops and we sampled the local beer. Brugse Zot translates to mad Bruges. The beer is still brewed in the historic center itself. One of the best beers that we sampled while in Belgium.

A walk back to the train station and a well deserved snooze on the train was now in hand.

Brussels

2008-05-27T23:08:00.001+01:00

For my birthday Michele booked a weekend break in Brussels. Was not somewhere that was high on my list of places to see but hey ho she was paying for it and she did mention that there was loads of beers.

When we arrived there we decided to find our hotel and then have a stroll round the hotel. Michele booked us the Renaissance Hotel in the European area of the city (right beside the parliament). After getting settled it was decided we would have a quick stroll round the area we were in. We found a nice area for drinks at the Place Jourdan which had lots of cafe's selling all sorts of beer.

While grabbing some beer we bought some well deserved fries from the Masion Antonie, Belgium fries cant go wrong there. These fries were fantastic and I would highly recommend anyone going to Brussels to hunt this place out for the fries alone. After sampling some more of the local beers at the Place du Luxembourg we decided that the next day we would head to Bruges for a day trip as we wanted to see that city as well.

After our trip to Bruges we were back in the city and ready to explore. We jumped on the underground to the center of town and then hopped on a city bus (decided that this would be the best way to see most things in the city) City bus was pretty decent took about an hour all in and covered a fair amount of the city with plenty of stops if you wanted to get off. After doing this trip we decided to head for the Grand Place are have a look about here and trying to hunt down the Manneken Pis who was dressed up for us today.

Another beer stop after this before we decided to use the tour guide book we had and try and find a chocolatier that was a ride away in the underground. Without getting lost we managed to get right to the place and sampled some chocos.

With all the site seeing done for the day it was time to head back to the Place Jourdan for some chill out beers and fries!

Dashboard Confessionals - ABC

2008-04-10T12:28:00.001+01:00

Went along to see Dashboard Confessionals at the ABC on Monday night. After seeing the Twilight Sad in King tuts the other week Paul pointed out that this was an acoustic solo tour from a poster that was there. Sigh I felt let down and cheated!

So went along to the ABC after a few beers and grub, and caught the end of John Ralston support act. Was just him and his guitar, wasn't to fussed about him and just drank some beer and thought hmm this is the way the rest of the night will go.

Then on came Dashboard Confessionals or should I say Chris Carrabba, came on and started with The Best Deceptions.

He fired through a load of songs and was amazing live, holding his own no problem on the stage himself and his guitar.

I have to say that this is up there with one of the best gigs I have ever been to. I don't tend to take pictures or videos at gigs (that's normally Paul's job!!) so here's a links to youtube videos.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nq29mo0_4fM

Check the rest of rambo10071986 videos out he has the whole gig there :)

He mentioned that they were back in October for a tour with the band. Don't think it can get any better than Monday night!

There will be Blood

2008-03-11T21:16:00.001Z

Never fancied this movie, but decided to see it as I wanted to see all the movies that were nominated for Oscars.

The story in the movie sounded dull, and when you think about it there could not have been much of a story there to work with.

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) is a sliver miner who comes across oil. He soon builds an oil empire and the story is based around Little Boston and the oil underneath Little Boston.

Daniel Day Lewis performance in this movie was fantastic one of the best I have seen. I was captured with him and his character right from the start till the end that's over 2 hours! That alone deserves an Oscar as my mind tends to wander after about 40 minutes in the cinema, that or I decided to sleep.

I would recommend seeing this movie for his performance alone.

IMDb

YouTube Trailer

Zack and Wiki : The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

2008-03-11T20:57:00.001Z

Bought this game on release day as we were doing a Tesco shop at the time. The price was good so spent most of the shop on my mobile checking out the reviews of this game.

So it was a hunch buy, was not 100% sure what it was about but hey thought I would give it a go.

Zack and Wiki reminds me of a old point in click game like Monkey Island or Beneath a Steel Sky. Where you used your mouse to click around the world and solved puzzles. The mouse is replaced with the wiimote and the world is replaced with a level.

The story starts off with you on a plane before being attacked and crash landing. You come across a treasure chest which turns out to be Barbaros head. He then tells you if you find the rest of his parts he will tell you the location of his treasure. So off you set trying to find his parts that are stored in treaure chests throught the map.

What I enjoyed about this game the most was the way the Wiimote was used. You actually interact with objects that you come across. Some good examples are a saw, pick the saw up and you have to hold the Wiimote like you would a saw and then the motions to saw until you are finished sawing. Another example is having to place objects using the Wiimote, using the Wiimote as a key or moving it to turn switches

The levels constantly get harder and more frustrating as the game progresses, many a time I would have to turn it off have a think for a few days before going back to solve the puzzle. What makes this game so different is there is always more than one way to solve the level.

Anyone that enjoys a challenge and the old point and click adventure games should check out this title on the Wii by Capcom.

I hope they make a squeal for this game but like most Capcom titles on Nintendo it will not sell well and will be ported.

Next to finish Mario Galaxy or purchase no more heroes?

Demo of one of the levels can be played in flash on Wii or PC here Click gameplay and then play demo level.

http://www.zackandwiki.com/

Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles

2008-03-11T20:07:00.001Z

Well with the writers strike now over it will take a while for TV to get back to the norm. I watched the 1st few episodes of the Sarah Conner chronicles and got bored of it as was very average. I have since went back to this because of having nothing else to watch,the show has picked up but still follows the same story from T2.... Terminator....chasing....other protecting. Only so much you can take of the same story churned out again and again.

Not sure if I will stick to it, anyone got any suggestions on TV?

PJ wearing

2008-01-24T22:02:00.001Z

This is a start of a rant. I have now lived in Glasgow for 2 years before that I lived in the Paisley/Renfrew area. For the past 2 year I have seen folk walking about outside with there PJ's on, in shops, walking dogs, pushing prams. These folk are mostly woman/girls and regardless of weather conditions. Now I have never seen this before and Paisley/Renfrew is not exactly miles away from Glasgow.

The only way i can see a good excuse for being outside in your PJ's is a house fire, gas leak or a serious injury to life. There is no defense for walking the streets in your nightwear. If I have to pop to the shop its on with the jeans and a jacket, takes 2 seconds.

All I can say is what the hell is wrong with these people and is this a common thing in Glasgow!

Chaos: The Battle of Wizards

2008-01-14T18:46:00.001Z

This game was one of my favorite Spectrum games. For those not familure with this game, basically its a battle to the death with wizards in a turn based game. There's a magic phase where you can cast spells from your list with all other wizards also casting their spells. This is then followed by a movements/attacking turn. Myself and my brother would battle it out as kids along with 6 other CPU controlled wizards, sometimes we would team up before double crossing. Or being sneaking and building a wall then casting a raging fire and watching it consume the map (if you can call it that!). Anyway the game turned out there would always be a proper fight at the end of the game.

I found a link to play this online, brung back some good memory's of the simple but classic game.

Play Chaos: The Battle of Wizards

*Update*

Found this link to Chaos Reborn which is an up to date remake.

Best of 2007

2007-12-31T15:14:00.001Z

Well its that time of year again for the lists to start appearing all over the web.

This list will be my choice of best movie, best game and best album of 2007.

Best Movie

Having a cinema pass I tend to see a lot of movies through out the year, last year I went with Pans Labyrinth. 300 was good action movie along with Transformers. The rest of the summer blockbusters were very average movies. Movies I found good this year are The Lookout, Eastern Promises and 3:10 to Yuma. 3:10 to Yuma is got my vote. Westerns are not my scene at all, yet this caught my eye with fab acting from Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

Best Game

Well my gaming time is no where near what it used to be. Games I have played this year are Crysis, Bioshock, COD4, PES2008, Mario Galaxy and a load of DS games. My vote for best game is going to go to Mario Galaxy. At 1st I was not sure on this game when viewing clips of the game during the year, how wrong could I have been. One of the best games I have played since Resident Evil 4!

Best Album

There is a few contenders for my award of best album of 2007. Biffy Clyro - puzzles album is fantastic its on constantly in my car along with Linkin Parks - Minutes to Midnight. I was left disappointed with the Foo Fighters album yet they were still great live a few months ago.

My favorite album of 2007 is going to be a little unknown band The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns & 15 Winters. This album I have had since the start of the year and I always find myself going back to play this. The album is 9 songs long yet its number 15 in my Overall artists on Last.FM

Dr Jones

2007-12-10T21:44:00.001Z

New poster has surfaced onto the net for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Not sure what this movie will be like , not even sure of the plot line I am guessing that its a quest for the crystal skull. Wonder if he will still be fighting nazis? Only time will tell. 22nd of May.....

R A D I O H E A D - In Rainbows

2007-10-10T11:43:00.001+01:00

Used to be a massive Radiohead fan up till the Kid A era. I still grab their albums in hope that they go back to their roots.

In Rainbows is Radiohead's 7th album which can be downloaded from their website it follows the trend from the Kid A onwards and is crap. I make that 3 good albums to 4 duff albums.

Wonder when they will chuck it.....

Download album here....

South Park - 3 more seasons

2007-08-29T09:56:00.001+01:00

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt stone have signed up for 3 more seasons of South Park each containing 14 episodes. Unlike The Simpson's which has faded in the past years for me South Park keeps getting better.

Trey and Matt have signed an agreement for digital media so I am sure we will see lots of ring tones and other bits and bobs appearing shortly....

Story continued at BBC.

Googlebot

2007-08-23T16:54:00.001+01:00

Googlebot - Can anyone explain to me how this thing works?

Roughly about a month ago I was checking my webstats, I had came across a lot of links from Google image search. I decided to dive a little deeper.... It turns out that googlebot had indexed my page and when you searched for Die Hard 4 images my website was listed on the 1st page. I thought ok not a big deal with that.

A few days later I checked my stats to find the site was back to normal hits, hmm odd. I done a google search for Die Hard 4, nothing showing for my site. I then done a site:www.philip-harvey.co.uk to see what google had indexed. Again not showing.

More days pass and noticed a lot of linkage from http://pingugus.awardspace.com/index.php?s=die+hard again I thought ah sod it hotlinking part of the Internet I suppose. Following my discovery I decided that I would try site:www.philip-harvey.co.uk to see what google had found for my website, to my amazement it had die hard 4 picture yet it linked to pingugus site. At this point i gave up trying to understand what was happening.

I checked my stats the other day and more hits than normal, site:www.philip-harvey.co.uk shows Die Hard 4, google image search shows Die Hard 4. So in a month we have had nothing, to Die Hard to hot linking back to nothing and then had Die Hard images again.

Does anyone know how the bleeding thing works as its starting to bug me!

/rant over....

Glasgow Greggs

2007-07-27T13:16:00.001+01:00

I have been on a course this week in Glasgow and at lunch have been walking round the city killing time. I was surprised by the amount of Greggs the bakers there are now in the city center of Glasgow. There is one in almost every corner of a main street now. Yesterday I counted 6. After visiting there website to get a rough estimation there is 11 within a 1 mile radius! How lazy are the people of Glasgow that they need 11 within such a small space?

Shop Locator - Stick in Glasgow to see how many are there!

Who reads books on PC's?

2007-07-18T23:43:00.001+01:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the 7th and final book of the series has already been leaked onto the Internet with 4 days before release. Somebody has got a hold of a copy and then taken photos of every page and uploaded them. For anyone that cares you can find them in the usual locations. This got me thinking who actually reads books or ebooks on PC's? This copy of Harry Potter will indeed damage your eyes if you were to sit and read it as the words that go into the middle fade with the light and you will struggle to read.

At Least I will get a quite weekend this weekend!

Update: Who ever has taken these photos has left details of their Canon serial number. Canon camera owner # 560151117, a certain J.K. Rowling's lawyer would like to talk with you....

Super Mario Galaxy: E3 2007 Bee Mario

2007-07-18T23:01:00.001+01:00

Continuing from my last post, Bee Mario looks like it could be fun......

Super Mario Galaxy: E3 2007 Walkthrough

2007-07-18T22:57:00.001+01:00

I am not sure about this Mario, I did like Mario Sunshine for the cube even though there were a lot of people who disliked this game. Super Mario Galaxy looks like there is way to much going on in the screen which will lead to mass confusion jumping from planet to planet. Only time will tell.

Super Mario Galaxy: E3 2007 Walkthrough:

Kwik-E-Mart

2007-07-12T22:41:00.001+01:00

A selected 7-eleven stores in North America have been transformed for the Simpson's movie. They have turned 7-eleven stores into Kwik-E-Marts and are selling selected Simpson's goods such as Krusty O's and Buzz cola. This is fantastic only if we had something like this in the UK!

Flickr set of Kwik-E-Mart 1

Flickr set of Kwik-E-Mart 2

Kwik-E-Mart Blog

My favorite one

Here's a clip of Apu after being fired from the Kwik-E-Mart!

Looking forward to the Simpson's movie.....

Cash Loans

2007-07-12T21:43:00.001+01:00

I keep getting junk mail through my door about cash loans, ccj no problems, unemployed welcome etc. The comedy thing about this is they advertise a loan of £300 over 55 weeks with repayments of £9 a week totaling £495 with a typical APR of 177%! I mean 177% at first I thought this was a typo and they forgot to put the decimal point in.

After doing some research this is indeed NOT a typo. Provident Personal Credit were the culprits this time. They have a loan calculator on their site I deiced that I wanted £50, minimum loan term was 31 weeks, right. APR was 365.1% Have a play with it see what the most APR you can get!

I think anyone who takes a loan of this sort of money with such high APR must be crazy, I do understand that there must be people out there that do have problems with their finances but I am also sure that if the saved £9 a week for a year instead taking a loan they would be ok.

Half Life 2 : Episode 1

2007-07-12T21:01:00.001+01:00

Its been a while since I have been playing PC games. Since I bought a new PC a few months back I decided to stick Half Life 2 back on. I was amazed with the graphics as previously I was running this on 1ghz AMD Athlon with all settings down low.

I noticed that steam were doing a special $9.99 for Episode1. With the exchange rate being silly just now it would seem rude not to buy this for £5.

Episode 1 leaves off right where HL2 finished with the explosion of the Citadels reactor. Time stops and Vortiguants appear and rescue Alyx. The G-Man is then seen around a black screen and blue lights as Vortiguants seem to hold him back. "We'll see about that". Vortiguants then teleport you outside the Citadel.

You start the game outside with Alyx robot Dog rescuing you from rubble. You are then tasked with escaping city 17 before trying to disable the rector from exploding.

The game itself looks a lot nicer over HL2. Only grumble I have had with it was it was way too short.

As I escaped city 17 I am now looking forward to Episode 2.

Trailer for HL2: Episode 2 below.

T in the Park 2007

2007-07-11T14:18:00.001+01:00

From last years moaning about flags I am going to try and stay positive about T in the Park 2007.

This year was the 1st year that T would be a 3 day event, fantastic gives the campers something to do on Friday night. Only downfall I could see with this would be the amount of traffic trying to get to the site for the 4pm start. The campsite opening at 9am meaning a lot of folk would be leaving early doors.

With this knowledge we set off about 10ish. I am wise to the Kincardine bridge and the roadwork's there so took an alternative route through Stirling. No traffic until we got about 2 miles from the site, then took about 2 hours to get into the car park. This year we got in a really good carpark right beside the campsite entrance, great.

On Friday we seen bloc party and the artic monkeys. The monkeys were not very good live, I did however enjoyed bloc party. With the campsite a bog it took 50 minutes to get back to our tents after artic monkeys.

Saturday we had planned to start the day seeing Little Man Tate, due to Gogol Bordello not playing the times were all wrong on the NME/Radio 1 stage. Caught a few bands here and there until the Lost Prophets were up.

Stayed in the golden circle to watch James, the lead signer was in a right moany mood going on about feedback from his earpiece. Bit disappointing. We then made a dash for the Pet Sounds tent, this is the 1st time I have actually been in this tent missing it out in the past. We caught Cold War Kids who sounded great. Came out and had some nice food from the Healthy T area and caught the end of arcade fire.

Razorlight up next stood at the back for this and seen some neds trying to start a crowd surf from way far back, all ended in tears!

Once Razorlight were over we headed back into the golden circle to see the Killers who had an excellent set and were very good and entertaing. I did like the fact that they came back out twice and played past 11.

Onto the Sunday, strolled in early as we had a busy day of trying to catch lots of bands. Started with the Herdons - crap. We then headed to the Bacardi B-Live stage to catch some of Itchy sax on Paul's recommendations. Another 1st for me as I have never been into this, great atmosphere with the floor bouncing reminds me of a nightclub when you are on holiday in Greece or Spain. Michele had a few Bacardi which went down better than the cider or Tennets!

Michele then was wanting to see Avril so we headed into the golden circle to see some of her performance. I have to say that the other girls on stage were highly annoying, stayed in there for the Goo Goo Dolls. We had planned to go back and forward to see Gossip Paulo Nutini and Mika but there seemed to be too much traffic between the stages so just faffed about the main stage and watched some Paulo Nutini.

Moved round to the right of the stage for some Fratellis and the sound was god awful at the side and after a few songs made our way down to the NME/Radio1 stage to see Biffy Clyro. After seeing them in the Barras a few months back I knew they would put on a good show. With not many folk there we easily made our way down the front. Another great set just seen way to short for my liking.

Back to the main stage to catch some Kings of Leon, I do like this band but I have seen them at T before and are pretty dull, left with a few songs to go and seen Jet. Another band that once they had played their hits failed to impress me and I grew rather tiresome of their set.

Went and got some more grub, and back in for the editors we were lucky to get in as they closed the tent as we just got in. I was supervised at how many good songs this mob have!

To the headliners snow patrol - hmm having seen them before I know they are awful live with lightbody not being able to hold a tune. Gave them 10 minutes then headed to the King Tut's Tent to see some Queens of the Stone Age. Gave them about 10 minutes and caught the end of Damien rice.

My problem with T this year was that there was so many bands that we missed to do being on at the same time as others. The 4 headliners on Sunday night we could have easily watched.

Highlights - Killers set.

Lowlights - Traffic on Friday.

You can watch highlights on BBC's T channel or 301 on freeview. Red button may also work....

PES 7 Screenshot

2007-07-11T12:41:00.001+01:00

Not sure what version this is from PS3 or 360. Only time will tell which one will have the better format.

Ride Accidents

2007-06-24T07:12:00.001+01:00

We are thinking of going to Alton towers very shortly and I am thinking of changing my mind after coming across this web site RideAccidents.com.

I thought that ride accidents would be rare it looks like every week something goes wrong. A 13 year old girl lost her legs last week when a power tower cable snapped.

Its got me worried about going on theme rides again!

NHL : O2 Dome

2007-06-12T13:38:00.001+01:00

The NHL are coming to London's O2 Dome in September with the Anaheim Ducks and LA Kings. The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup last week, I wonder if they will be brining the cup to London for the start of the new season. I am not sure if it just sits in the hockey hall of fame in Toronto or if that is a replica! (quick Google search say: The MCI Great Hall houses the Stanley Cup, with either the current cup on display (if not traveling) or a replica on display.)

Hockey fans in the UK may be able to get a photo with the cup?

Glasgow West End Festival

2007-06-12T13:14:00.001+01:00

We missed this last year due to coming home from Canada on the day that the street party was on. This year with nothing planned and the weather being ok we took a walk down to byers road to be met by a mass of people, never expected it to be this busy!

All in was a good day caught a number of bands and drunk some cider, cant go wrong with that on a Sunday afternoon. The Festival runs for a while longer with all sorts of bits and bobs on. Might try and catch a few bands before it ends. Never took a camera as mine is a but clunky these days but you can check out Paul's photos over at his blog.

http://www.mcgunnigle.com/?p=618

http://www.westendfestival.co.uk/

Tesco: Last Days

2007-06-12T12:54:00.001+01:00

Browsing the net today and came across an interesting video on the news of the world site. Having done my time in Tesco I am fully aware of this ritual

Link to News of the World: News

One year on

2007-05-24T11:30:00.001+01:00

A year has now past since we started to renovate the flat and it does not seem like it at all. We have done loads to the place since we got it and there's still a few odds and ends to complete.

What we have done

New roof in living room

New central heating

New bathroom

New Kitchen

Floored 3 rooms and halls

New doors

Removed old gas fire, replaced with fireplace.

Wallpaper/painted

Still to complete

Door finishing's (painted and handles)

Dishwasher fitted flush and plinth attached.

Bath panel to be bought and fitted.

Floor the 3rd bedroom.

Door bell and external light fitted

As you can see from my previous post most of our time is focused in the garden just now, these sort of jobs can be done once the autumn arrives and the weather is not so nice.

Photos of start to current status

Blinds

2007-05-24T11:00:00.001+01:00

Finally its no longer a peep show at our place as we finally have blinds! We placed the order in January for blinds and then we changed our mind and wanted to get double glazing. After a few quotes we decided just to go back to getting the blinds and to get the double glazing later.

Garden Update

2007-05-24T10:53:00.001+01:00

Its been a couple of months since we started to attack the garden, things have been moving on slowly weather permitting of course. My dads friend Andy came and fixed the fence at the bottom of the garden, there was a piece removed and he welded this back on for us. This stopped folk using our garden as a shortcut.

When we cut the trees down all the branches were left sitting in the garden, these would have to be tidied up before anything else could be done in the garden. The same guy who welded the fence back on loaned us a shredder which allowed us to shred some of the branches. The bigger branches got cut into logs and piled up. My dad has bought a fire pit which allows him to fire in our logs and burn them in his backyard for warmth through the summer nights.

Next thing we done was remove the fence that partitioned our land off, this was a pointless fence in my view and allows the kid above us to play in more of an area instead of all the toys in the communal area for the washing.

Once all this was completed, the lady above us paid for the grass to be cut at the back. Meanwhile we started to plant plants at the front of the garden. The front lawn is very mossy and after killing a lot of the moss and weeds has left the lawn patchy. We planted some sort of bush into the middle of the lawn which has now started to blossom.

Fast forward to last weekend grass had grown again and a tree stump was still to be dug up. I got my lawn mower out the cupboard and cut the front and back grass. The lady above us land is too hard to cut with a lawn mower as there is loads of hedge stumps and stones under the grass so I decided not to break my lawn mower.

Digging tree roots up is hard work we have managed to get part of the root dug up and are moving places with that.

Not long till I get a shed, before we do that I fancy painting the wooden fence!

What our garden currently looks like.

New PC

2007-05-21T12:40:00.001+01:00

I have finally took the plunge and bought myself a new PC. About a year ago there was very bad thunderstorms in the area. I decided to turn everything off in my room and watch the lightning from my bedroom window. One of the bolts hit the telephone pole which is located at the bottom of the garden there was a flash of light and then a big bang. Odd

Once it was all over I turned on the TV and PC, the TV came on ok yet there was nothing from the PC, something had went I tested out the memory, graphics card PSU on my brothers machine which was sitting spare as he was in Canada.

While he was away I stole his PC and fired my HDD in to keep me going, I have been struggling along with this until it just stopped working. I had to buy new memory and a new graphics card to try and get this machine to stay stable. Still no joy at this point I had lost myl rag with the machine and decided to buy new parts. I was trying to stay under the £400 budget and get a semi decent machine.

Antec Sonata II Piano Black Quiet Midi Tower - With 450W SmartPower2.0 PSU

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P Socket 775 1333SFB iP965 SATA 8 channel audio ATX

OCZ (OCZ2G8001GK) 1GB (2x512MB) DDR2-800 PC2-6400 CL 5-5-5-12 Gold XTC Dual Channel Kit (LIFETIME WARRANTY)

XFX 7600GT 590MHz 256MB DDR3 Dual DVI PCI-E

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 - 1.86 GHz 1066Mhz FSB Retail New

I managed to stay under the £400 mark, fired in my 500GB sata drive and my DVD writer and started to build this.

I have to say I do really like the case and it is well worth the money to buy a decent case, normally I skimp on this part and go for a budget case. Not anymore I can no longer hear when my PC is on and its black finish is very nice for the eye. A review of the case can be found here.

With all new machines there is a little bit of tinkering to get it to run stable. I have not yet tried any games out although I have ran some benchmarks to see how well the PC performs. I have read that the gigabyte motherboard and the processor are good for overclocking another thing I may try out at a later date.

New Car

2007-05-21T10:33:00.001+01:00

With my old Ford Focus 1.8 Zetec W reg was starting to feel the strain (more like the tax and MOT was up at the end of the January). There were a few bits and bobs wrong with it.

Suspension was gone
Remote Key Fob not working
Power Steering Leak
Exhaust almost rusted off
Door locking randomly while driving

I decided that it would be more cost effective to get a new car. So I started digging about the Internet looking for decent car deals. I am not a fan of Arnold Clarks so I was trying to avoid them at all costs. With some Internet digging I came across motorpoint, had a general look about there site and cars in which I was interested in the new ford focus 3 door 1.6 - 1.8 Zetec with climate pack. .

They had a couple of 3 door 1.6's on their website, so decided that I would go to the showroom in mount florida to see what these looked like. On arrival at motorpoint we were not hassled by any sales person to look at cars, we were given a brief chat about how motorpoint work. We were given a pit of paper and told if you like any cars then come back and see me and we will give you the keys to check over the car. At this point I mentioned to the guy I wanted to look at 1.6 focus they had on their website.

Turns out that this car was sitting in Wales and I would have to pay for transport and if I never wanted the car then the money would be refunded. Couple of days later I got the call that the car was indeed transported and was ready for my inspection and a test drive.

After an inspection and a test drive I was sold, so much more comfortable ride (not hard with broken suspension) and bought the car. The car was ready for pickup a week later.

I have now had the car a few months and there is some things that annoy me about the new focus.

The interior is not as nice as the old one
Handbrake is on the wrong side
Cup holders are smaller
Clock is on car radio.

Number 4 is a right pain as I have an aftermarket head unit, the pioneer deh-p77mp. Now this does not have a clock on it so I have now lost my clock. Which is not the ended of the world when you pick up a small clock from halfords. I plan to add a mp3 player to my radio as there is a nice little slot that I could sit one into and hook up to my head unit with ease. Another project that I will undertake one day.

The pros for the new focus are:

Comfortable seats
Air conditioning
Quick clear front screen
heated wing mirrors
Better fuel consumption.
More leg room

Couple of Photos of car.

GNER Web

2007-04-03T18:29:00.001+01:00

I am currently on the train back home from a work visit to Newcastle. Booked my tickets online for 2 singles and deiced to upgrade to 1st class for an extra £10. This gives me free Internet while on the train, allowing access to OWA and Internet browsing. Normally the charge for all day Internet is around £10.

Another benefit of the upgrade was breakfast this morning along with complementary drinks and comfty seats.

I will be trying to book my tickets in advance for midweek again as traveling by train is a lot less stressful.

I am now bored and have restored to testing the speed out of the wireless Internet. Currently downloading a random file from znet at around 10kb/s. Chancing my arm and started up utorrent 4kb/s down and 9kb/s up. More than likely killing everyone else's Internet.

Now to kill some more time playing games...

Bad Movies

2007-04-03T18:06:00.001+01:00

Recently I have seen a lot of bad movies at the cinema. A quick rundown on the movies that you should avoid.

Ghostrider - Nicholas Cage in a toupee, nothing more can be said.
The Hills Have Eyes 2 - Trainee solders go into the hills on an arms delivery which goes wrong. Rubbish
Premonition - what a dull movie, so many flaws after viewing it. Dull.
I want candy - the clips you see on TV are as funny as this one gets.
The number 23 - Jim Carey should just stick to his comedy roles, another snoozefest.

Only decent movie to come out recently has been 300.

Garden

2007-03-26T15:13:00.001+01:00

This weekend we started to attack the garden. There are lots of things we want to do to the garden. The only picture I took of the garden when we bought the place last May.

From this you can get the rough idea that the garden has never been maintained. First thing we needed to do was establish a fence at the bottom of the garden as neighbours were using this as a shortcut between streets. To do this the trees down the back of the garden would have to be cut back to allow a fence to go up.

In I step with a saw....

Now the garden looks even worse although I am assured that the trees will grow back. We plan to leave one and place a garden shed where the other is. If you look closely enough you may notice a door at the bottom of the garden. There is indeed a fence down there which is quite sturdy but a bit of the fence has been cut away. Using an old door taken out of our house (and left in the garden for a few months) we blocked this gap to try and stop this being used as a shortcut.

Next course of action which will most likely be next weekend is to try and remove the tree at the bottom right of the picture. Really wish I bought a chain saw!

Anyone looking for some spare firewood?

Playstaion 3

2007-03-23T13:42:00.001Z

Well according to Sony next generation gaming has now arrived with the launch of the Playstaion 3 across Europe.

I have no interest in paying such silly money for a games console £425 is crazy and you still need to buy a game and a HDMI or component cable. Making the purchase even more costly, they could have at least stuck a HD cable in the box, after all its just not a games console but a Blueray player.

I was happy to fork out 180 for a Wii (which I still don't have due to preorder being canceled) and will eventually pick up a 360. No doubt in a few months the price of this unit will plummet due to terrible sales.

With the reports of people queuing at stores and plenty of ps3 stock available I decided to have a quick look on eBay.

670 PS3 available. Nice! The folk that bought the ps3 to try make a quick profit are onto plumbs. A lot of the buyers have covered their bases with buy it now's and reserves. I can see a lot of these heading back to the stores when the reserves are not met.

I will keep my eye open for a cheeky no reserve ps3 as there may be a bargain in it!

Hollywood Deja Vu

2007-03-07T17:03:00.001Z

Filmjunk have an article on Hollywood studios releasing movies of the same similarity within the same year. There's a few good examples my favourite is Pixar and Dreamworks.

Toasta Bags

2007-03-07T13:11:00.001Z

Lunch for me is normally a dull affair, either made up sandwiches or a trip to the bakers. On a Friday I normally frequent the chip shop. Well today I have just used a Toasta bag from JML.

I bring my usual cheese sandwich into work to eat at lunch time, but decided to use this Toasta bag to turn it into a toastie. These things are superb and mess free.

Basically its a bag which you can fire into your toaster and cook loads of things, your toaster will need to be able to fit 2 slices of bread in one side for you to use this. According to the packaging you can cook chicken, fish, burgers and eggs from this. Think I will just stick with my toasties!

Taking about 3 min's to cook my toastie causing no mess at all. Fantastic, quick easy snacks for lunch!

You can get these bags here

Crisps

2007-03-02T09:22:00.001Z

Crisps are my Achilles heel, I tend to eat too many of them. With salt and vinegar being my favorite. I really cant go these new sensations that walkers brought out.

Recently we bought a 36 pack box of walkers. I have managed to demolish the box within a week. Once I start eating them I cant stop....

Glasgow Inner Ring Road

2007-03-01T16:42:00.001Z

Stumbled across a site called pathetic motorways today, firstly my attention was pointed to the Renfrew by pass. As I was brought up in this area I decided to have a read.

In more digging I came across the Glasgow Inner Ring Road. I find this quite interesting as there has been many a times I have wondered what the off and on ramps sitting doing nothing on the M8 were for. Turns out there was meant to be a motorway going round the city.

Now there would have been no need to cross the Kingston bridge to get to the other side of Glasgow, or even to the north or south of the UK. The M74 is now meant to complete this loop of the city. Joining on just south of the Kingston bridge. This was touted as a 2008 completion, the fact they haven't even started means 2018 is more likely, or never.

Die Hard 4

2007-03-01T15:55:00.001Z

New poster surfaced for this movie.

Trailer can be found here

Ice rink badly damaged by blaze

2007-02-27T18:24:00.001Z

Looks like Fife Ice rink been burnt down, wonder where they are going to move to.

Ice rink badly damaged by blaze

Doors

2007-02-19T13:39:00.001Z

Another fast weekend for me. Friday night I was playing football, then to the pub. Saturday morning to ice hockey, when I got back my Dad was round starting to get ready to put some doors up.

We have had many problems with doors, so we have had to build them out using more wood. This required some cutting to correct sizing and then wood glue. Took lots of time and effort lifting and holding doors trying to get them to fit etc.

We managed to get 3 up over the weekend, this leaving 1 more door to be put up in the final spare bedroom. This door has been glued and clamped, may require some planing to fit. While waiting on the final door to dry since it was a nice weekend started to attack the fence in the back garden. If we to be doing the garden the fence must come down, so took 1/2 the fence down. Reason behind taking 1/2 the fence down is we are very high up and when its windy its very windy. My bins deiced to take off, with leaving 1/2 the fence this gives it some cover!

Next thing I need to do is look at handles and painting the doors, and door frames again......

Never ending.

Blogger and Windows Live Writer

2007-02-15T15:16:00.001Z

Today Blogger made me move from my blogger account to my Google account, ok fair enough, I changed my setting in Windows Live messenger and then went to blog...

java.lang.Exception: RPC handler object "blogger2" not found and no default handler registered

Nice error message that means nothing to me!

Lovely, looks like blogger and WLW dont like each other anymore. So went on about the usual way of fixing things. Since WLW is Beta got the new version, still same error.

I finally managed to get it going again, so for anyone that uses blogger and WLW here is a quick tip of what to do if you get this message.

Step 1:

Delete your blog from WLW completely. If this is your only blog, then create a dummy one so it allows you to delete the real one.

Step 2:

Add New Blog
Press Tools--> Add weblog account and follow the prompts: (Names of Prompts are in Blue)

ADD NEW BLOG SCREEN: Choose the second option, titled "Another Blog Service" and press NEXT.

Step 3:

Configure Writer to work with your current blog service.
Username: "username@gmail.com"
Password: enter your gmail password.
Press NEXT

Step 4:

Follow the rest of the wizard through to completion. Follow this up with a test blog.

Gmail: Check other email

2007-02-15T14:51:00.001Z

For those people who do not have a Gmail/Googlemail account, Google have added a very good feature, mail fetcher. This will allow you to grab mail from up to 5 external accounts and bring them into Gmail. For me this is not a benefit as I have moved my main accounts to Gmail, and dropped my pop accounts.

A few years ago, I was actually using outlook in the house to pull down Gmail, NTL and ukonline accounts. Now with this added feature I would be able to login to Gmail from anywhere and access all my emails from this one place. I can see lots of mail clients not being used anymore!

How to setup

Glasgow - One of the UK's Friendliest City's

2007-02-14T09:46:00.000Z

Not sure where they get this from....

The thing that bugs me is that how can it be one of the UK's friendliest citys, yet its the world capital for knife crime. Does not add up in my books.

Dentist

2007-02-13T13:46:00.000Z

Visited the Dentist yesterday, 1st time I have been since I turned 18 and they started to want money off me. Being ahem a poor student I was not keen on the idea of paying for dental health care, especially after they tell me I needed braces. Nice of them to wait until I had to pay to spring that one on me.

Anyway Michele booked me an appointment in her local dentist, my teeth have not been causing me problems, so thought sod it few bob to get a clean and a polish.

Had my checkup, and indeed teeth are fine and dandy, even had some x-rays taken to check for anything he had missed. Going back next week for an impression as I enquired about a gum shield. Quite proud that I am 25 and have no fillings, the amount of junk food and fizzy juice I drink should be a dentists nightmare!

When I mentioned this to Michele, she was straight to the point "least I don't have squint teeth". Sigh confidence booster right there!

Ice Hockey

2007-02-13T13:24:00.000Z

Well I have been out of Ice Hockey pretty much since the summit center ice rink closed in Finnieston, probably about 1999 or 2000. I have had a brief comeback with the Paisley under 21's, at that time the Paisley coaches had problems with players coming from Glasgow, so a lot of the guys just sat on benches or never got picked for games.

Fast forward to last Christmas, was on a night out in Paisley and met a guy that was in the under 14's with me at Paisley. Says they still play recreational hockey on a Wednesday night and should pop along. That I did, when I got there spoke to the coach who said "yeah bring your stuff and come on". There lies the problem, my Dad decided to fling some of my gear out, shorts and kitbag to name.

With buying a house, and doing it up I decided not to pursue my hockey career any further. Then one day I was browsing eBay and I thought I would see how much kit bag and shorts would cost. Turns out there was a shorts in my size unused for a very good price. Kitbag was second hand but does the job.

With these now in my possession the hunt for a club was now on, I had a look on the web and found that the Paisley Ice Rink had closed to be resurfaced and fixed, great! All that effort to getting my gear back was wasted, as most of the teams had moved to Kilmarnock and I could not be bothered training at 10pm on a school night.

On digging a bit further it was mentioned that Paisley would be moving to Breahead as their new home. This was due to paisley ice rink putting plastic ice down. Now I have been here before when the summit center closed Glasgow was to move here, so I took this information with a pinch of salt.

With the confirmation of Paisley moving to Breahead at the start of February 2007, I started to dig looking for teams. I came across the Paisley Panthers website (watch out for the bad music) only one out of 4 teams that have a working website. Keeping an eye on this website it was announced that they would be training at 7.30 every Saturday morning. An excellent time for me, I am up most days early taking Michele to the bus station, so getting up at 6.30 on a Saturday is not really an effort.

Now having been of the ice for so long, I had fears of being really crap when I did go back on the ice. Turns out I can still skate, shoot and pass a puck.

After the session I was asked if I wanted to sign for the club, which I may as well do, seemed like a nice bunch of guys to train with and play a few games with.

Bobby

2007-02-12T12:20:00.000Z

Went to the movies last night and seen Bobby. One word to sum this up, pish.

Toy Story 3 and Snake

2007-02-09T15:27:00.000Z

Sony has confirmed that Metal Gear Solid franchise will be coming to the big screen. We all know what happened when folks got their hopes up for a halo movie. Will see how this pans out.

Meanwhile Toy Story 3 has been penned in for a 2009 release. Rumour is Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter is to write Toy Story 3.

Seagulls

2007-02-07T21:07:00.000Z

Was in Dundee at the weekend, mainly went to pick up a suspender belt for ice hockey and to test drive my new car. While there took the opportunity to visit Michele old work mates and friends. We told them t hat we were going to go to Jimmy Chung's Chinese buffet for dinner, one of our favorite places for food in Dundee (apart from dominoes pizza).

Her old work mates told us that it was shut down due to them finding seagulls in the freezers and they were selling this as chicken. This still never put us off going and sampling this new type of bird.

They said it was in the local paper, now if a place is caught with frozen seagulls, I know they are going to throw the book at them and not let them reopen, well I hope that's the case. Have tried goggling it for a news article cant see anything bar things on folks blogs.

Anyway went along for the buffet, and have to say that it was not as tasty as I remember. Must have been the seagull that made it taste better!

Ricky Gervais - Fame

2007-02-02T16:02:00.000Z

Went along to the opening night of Ricky Gervais new standup Fame. Warm up guy was called Robin Ince and was introduced as a good friend of Ricky's. He was alright and kept the crowd amused, seemed a bit nervous with some stuttering, probably never played to a crowd this size before.

With a short interval and back into our seats, Gervais started to be introduced over the loudspeakers by a mock up Matthew Kelly stars in their eyes theme.

This ending with the "Tonight Matthew, I'm going to be Ricky Gervais!" Queens One vision then comes through the system with the curtain opening to revel a 15ft high illuminated letters spelling RICKY with a crown on his head and a huge Emmy Award on the stage to hold his can of beer. "Well that's the budget spent".

Start of his act focused on cancer patients, very amusing. The disappointing thing was he was only one stage for an hour. I got the impression that as the tour goes on he may increase this as I am sure there will be a night that will be recorded for a DVD release.

Site Moved

2007-02-02T12:54:00.000Z

As described I was attempting to move my site over onto a hosted webspace. I have successfully managed to migrate from blogger webspace to my own. (not bad only took me 2 months!)

I bagged some webspace from www.godaddy.com only problem I have is that for some reason webfilters pickup my site now as 'dating'. Honest I am definitely not looking!

You may have to update your feeds if your a subscriber.

Kitchen Tiled

2007-01-19T16:37:00.000Z

For Christmas parents deiced that they would pay for the tiles in our kitchen and my dad would tile over the holiday period.

We started just before Christmas and managed to finish one side of the wall. Once that side was complete, we thought the other side would look good 1/2 tiled. Once this was complete we took off the blue wrappers that had been covering the units for 6 months.

Few odds and ends left to do in the kitchen. Gas pipe needs to be cut and moved so dishwasher goes in flush. Panel can then go underneath to finish that off. There's a small gap between the dishwasher and the washing machine. Joiner has to come back and fill that in.

Back To Work

2007-01-09T15:23:00.000Z

Well yesterday I went back to work. Nothing much happened over the Xmas period, managed to finish of the tiling. Once we had done one side we decided to tile the other as well, will blog with photos later.

Got my home Internet working, watched the 4400 season 1 and 2 and prison break season 1. Bagged an xbox + 4 games before Christmas, so put in about 17 hours into finishing fable:the lost chapters

As I am back at work was killing time over lunch and came across http://www.thetrailermash.com a site hosting all the mockup trailers and parody's of movies from youtube. I like the way they have redone Uncle Buck to make it look like a horror movie. Some of the supposed horror movies I have watched must have used the same trick as this trailer!

Week Off

2006-12-21T16:31:00.000Z

I have been on Holiday this week, always have plans for things when your on holiday and you can never get them all done.

The idea was that I would have an attempt at trying to finish things off in the flat.

Started with getting the correct size of doors on Saturday. Dad started to put one up on Monday, called to say that the sides have collapsed, great. Doors would have to be returned and door frames built out, nightmare of a job.

When I got back home, noticed that this may be salavagble, there was some spare wood in one of the bedrooms, which fitted perfect between the door panels. Bit of glue to this would solve the problem of the collapsing doors.

With 1 door on bedroom, toilet and 2 hall cupboards doors can now wait for the living room, and 2 other bedrooms. My attention has turned to trying to finish off the kitchen (we finally managed to decided on kitchen tiles!)

Kitchen has started to be tiled and should hopefully be finished by the end of the week, I have been fly and got the easy ones up leaving my dad to cut tiles.

Christmas tree

2006-12-21T16:25:00.000Z

Since this is our 1st Christmas in our flat, thought I would write about our tree.

Best thing about this tree is we "borrowed" it from Michele's parents, nothing better than a free tree. Fairly decent height, comes with free accessory as well!

Not one for much tat at Christmas, only other decorations that can be seen is a tinsel round the fireplace.

What makes this better, Michele's Mum will be storing it for us for next Christmas as well. Result!

Site Moving

2006-12-13T14:06:00.000Z

Finally managed to get arround to buying some webspace, I have been attempting to move over, so far the best i have got is website working no links or pictures working.

I will be working on this in the next few days.

El Laberinto del Fauno

2006-11-29T11:18:00.000Z

Also known as Pan's Labyrinth, caught this movie last week after seeing the new bond. For opening night being in a 120 seater in Cineworld Glasgow tells me that there is not much press behind this movie. The cinema hall was about 3/4 full.

I think this is the best movie of 2006, still not released in USA, probably why this release has been fairly quite. Get to the cinema and see this.

Pans Labyrinth is set in the fascist regime of rural Spain in 1944. Centering on the main character Ofeila, her Family are uprooted to a military outpost, with her Stepfather a captain of the army tasked of ridding the area of rebels. Seeking escape form the world she is living in she is drawn into a fantasy world as dangerous as the one she wants to leave behind.

I am normally put of by movies that are subtitled as I tend to focus too much on reading, I was fine after a few minutes.

http://www.panslabyrinth.com/

Workplace

2006-11-28T14:54:00.000Z

I have seen a number of odd things at work, cats getting stuck underneath the cabins, rabbits in the summer but I think this is the strangest I have seen so far.

Kitchen Painted

2006-11-20T10:37:00.000Z

The idea with the kitchen is to tile 1/2 and paint 1/2. With the walls bare they needed an undercoat of paint, which happened to be the left over white paint. Kitchen got a quick coat of this over the weekend, the doors and window frame also got some gloss paint. This brighten the place up as the walls were a mankey brown colour.

Now we just need to decided on colour, the kitchen units are white my interior decorating skills suck so will be leaving this to Michele. My parents are getting us the tiles for Christmas so just need to hassle Michele to pick her paint and tiles.

Things to do

2006-11-16T15:34:00.000Z

Not much happing at all in the house, with Michele gone this weekend I have plans to paint the kitchen. Few things still need to be finished off.

Doors - We need to order doors for all rooms bar the bathroom
Blinds - As its now dark at night, people can see in like a peep show.
Paint and tile kitchen - Paint is the easy part, hard part is getting Michele to pick the tiles she wants.
Finishing touches to Bathroom - Towel heater still to be fitted.

We are planning to try and get all this finished by Christmas (glad I still have a week off!)

Hall Floored

2006-10-30T10:46:00.000Z

Not much been happing in the house for a while, finally got phone cable and went back down under the hatch, getting to know my way around down here and was down and back up again in 5 min's.

Next step was to sand the door frames and skirting boards for a quick lick of paint. Managed to get the skirting boards and the bottom of the door frames finished just in time for my Dad having a few days off work.

With his couple of days off he floored the hall, great only room which I never had to do any flooring. This was also the hardest room to do because of the door angles and raised bathroom and kitchen floors.

Needless to say an excellent job done here.

Some before and after pictures: