Well I woke up at 3am this morning and I didn’t really try to get back to sleep as the alarm clock was set for 4.15 this morning to get ready for the drive to the airport. It was a quick check of email to make sure we hadn’t had any important emails come in and then it was time to shut the computer network down, pack it in the hand luggage and let the cats out for their last roam around the house. They all seemed to be very suspicious that I was letting them out of their room AND they were hungry as we were not allowed to feed them last night so needless to say they were making their feelings heard.
(seeing as though this post is pretty long, the rest of it is in the more section)
Month: April 2005
Well about the only thing left in the house is the furniture AND the broadband connection 🙂
The pickfords movers came at 9.10 this morning (slightly early) and got stuck in pretty quickly. We had 43 boxes (i think we had allowed for 44) and they had finished by 12.10pm. The box-to-tea ratio was not bad at 22:1. They could have had more but the packed ALL the mugs so I’ve not even got a mug to drink coffee from between now and Wednesday morning. That will have to be rectified if I am going to be awake to get to the airport.
I gave away all my motorbike stuff on the freecycle mailing list. One guy was extremely thankful and took everything I had (apart from the helmet and gloves which had gone mouldy). Then this afternoon a mechanic came round to collect the motorbike. After a couple of minutes fiddling with the choke and a boost from a special battery pack he had the bike running. He wasn’t able to drive it away because as soon as the booster pack was disconnected the bike died, but I was very impressed that it started up. He had to bash the brakes with a brick (which promptly split in two) to release them as they had siezed up a bit and after pumping up the tires (with an electric pump) he wheeled the bike down the lane. I was very sad to see it go as I had many a happy mile on it and seeing him getting it started to easily I wish I had flogged it for more money.
The freecycle network was quite neat as last night I deleted all the content on Boring Bulb Blog and recreated articles on all the things I had to give away. Then sent an email out to the list and people could comment if they wanted the things. That way everyone knew what was left. As I received comments I moved the category from Free to Gone and the url that I gave out only contained the Free items. It worked out really well – thanks MT
We had a celebratory meal out at The Plough at lunchtime which was nice. Kristen had a duck wrap and I had a steak and onion baguette. Mine wasn’t as nice as I remembered from the Friday lunchtimes at Siemens – partly because it didn’t have gravy on it and partly because a lot of the steak had fat/gristle in it. The bits that didn’t were nice though. Kristen wanted to go to this pub as we had often driven past it but never stopped so now was a good time.
Last Freeware Version is a neat page of download links for software that was free but then became shareware. Some of these tools (like popcorn) worked great and did their purpose but then became bloated and charged for.
Popcorn is a great email reader for when you are on the road and just *need* to check your email.
Got a letter from the tv licensing company today asking me to “send the balance of 0.00 together with this letter…..Please make cheques payable to…”
I am so tempted to do this just to see what would happen.
The cats have been shown in the Cat Gallery – April 2005 on moggies.co.uk (also click the next button on that page) and they will also appear on cat of the month in May!
Now that we have told everyone to use 1899 to ring us in the states at 3p per call, they’ve only gone and increased the price to .5p per minute. Still a good bargain but does make it a bit more expensive than it used to.
I went round a friends house on Tuesday night to teach them how to manage the church’s website which runs under Mambo (which I’m starting to regret installing!). Unfortunately this person only has mac’s in the house and doesn’t really know much about the technical side of a mac apart from using word, email and graphical/music packages. He wanted to install a copy of mambo onto his own mac so he could play without distrupting the live server. However mambo needs mysql, php and apache installed. Thankfully apache was already configured but php wasn’t working – it was just displaying the files as text files. However when I searched for httpd.conf it didn’t come back with any details – instead I had to open terminal, change to a directory in /etc and then vi the file – only to find it was readonly, owned by root and when I asked for the root password I was met with a blank stare. I then used netinfo (i think) to remove the asterix in the passwd file for root, changed the password, logged in, edited the httpd.conf and hey presto – php was working. Undo the root passwd setups and then onto mambo installation.
This worked ok until we got to the sql installation as although mysql was installed, we couldn’t find a frontend to configure the databases and couldn’t find anything in google…I thought Mac interfaces were meant to be really helpful and friendly? This one certainly wasn’t.
Anyway, we carried on with testing on the “live” site and discovered that we needed a way of uploading files, specifically mp3 files, to the mambo server but you can only seem to do this if you are the administrator of the server. Not much use for giving users the ability to upload certain files and pictures.
The next solution was to use ftp, so does anyone know a good, easy to use (gui), free, mac ftp client?
Alternatively anyone got any alternatives to running a cms website that allows registered users to upload files (like a blog). I might just start again with an installation of WordPress – might be easier.
As part of our clearout we’re selling our 4 hobbit standee on ebay. Check the description as I had to ensure we were totally covered…… 🙂
We managed to sell our Sky Digibox last weekend and 2 X-Files series 1 dvd box sets. The weird thing is that the opened (but new) box set sold for more than the shrinkwrapped box set!
After my post about Animal Airlines being a bunch of cowboys I get the following amusing email from them. Spelling mistakes left untouched 🙂
DEAR MR/MRS. HELSBY – YOU REALLY ARE DEARS,
WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS – FOR JOINING OUR ‘COMPLAINTS CLUB’ – I AM SURE YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST MEMBERS IN OVER 40 YEARS. HOWEVER, DON’T GET TOO EXCITED BECAUSE,SADLEY, YOU WILL BE DISSAPOINTED TO HEAR THAT WE SIMPLY CAN’T FIND ANY OTHERS WILLING TO JOIN YOU BOTH. BUT HOLD-ON IN THERE, LETS SEE WHAT THE NEXT 40 YEARS BRINGS – YOU NEVER KNOW!
AS YOU ARE BOTH THE VERY ‘FIRST’ MEMBERS TO THE CLUB WE HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE YOU ‘HONARY LIFE MEMBERS’ AND I HOPE YOU WILL BOTH ACCEPT THIS INVITATION IN THE SPIRIT IT IS INTENDED.
BON VOYAGE,
TONY
We’re going to be moving and I really hope there is a decent curry house in Columbus. For my memory, I had a chicken tikka bhuna