I got sidetracked by being overcome by boxes and having no phoneline for a few weeks, so here’s what’s been happening…

I hired a van from the 25th to the 27th of June which was, coincidentally, the same time that the weather thought it’d be really fun to rain constantly. The 25th was spent mostly sat in the van on either the M62 or in a mega giant queue leading down to my house. Only I wasn’t allowed to drive to my house as the road was shut. The slightly irritated policeman told me to turn around and find some other way to my house. I had to make a five mile detour just to get around a roadblock 50 metres from my house. There was another block the other end of the road too, but I ignored that one.

Thankyou people who helped me move house, I think I’d still be doing it now otherwise

The rest of that week was spent using the van to take my old house and move it into my new house. It took forever as I’d not packed everything into boxes, mistakenly believing that it would be quick to move things. Ha! no, it’s not… I did two van trips and four car journeys before the house was empty. I left behind a washing machine and a wardrobe.

On the 29th I went to a conference set up by the school I’ll be working at. They gave me a laptop They gave me a laptop that was severely locked down to the point where I had to become quite creative at connecting to my local network.

The following week was spent unpacking boxes. So many boxes… if it takes two weeks to pack, it takes three to unpack - especially when you have a large kitchen, but no storage in it. I do have a mysterious dungeonlike place under the stairs though. Most of my stuff is now neatly packed away or piled in corners. I went to the recycling centre (tip) yesterday to get rid of a ton of shit left from when this house was done up before I moved in - the builders had filled the bins with wire and pipes and then left two bags of rotting rubbish outside too. That smelled great when I tried to move it and ants came out the bag.

BT turned up a week later to install my phoneline, which was nice. My laptop denied having a modem in it though, and wanted to connect to the Internet to find drivers. I resorted to visiting my cousin and letting my laptop talk to the Internet there. Once back at home it was all happy again and I could use awful dialup to go on the Internet… only I couldn’t as I didn’t have a new ISP yet!

Using the phone and my dad I signed up to Be Internet, plugged their dialup details into my laptop and reconnected with the world. Be made my Internet work on Monday, I’ll write about that separately.

So yeah, in the past three weeks I’ve managed to move house and it’s great. I do not have people living above me, the ones at the sides are normal, nice people who talk to me. I have a garden, somewhere to put my car and windows in every room. Of course there is random damp patches on some of the walls and under the kitchen floor there is a small lake, but I’ve taken that to be normal now. I like the view out my windows at the back, it’s a field, some trees and a little hill. The hill is really a rubbish dump, but they seem to be covering it over with soil gradually. I looked on Google Maps and it stretches quite far. The local council should really get more intune with recycling, I have a green bin for normal rubbish (err what?) and a brown bin for cardboard and paper only. I can take tins, glass and plastic bottles to Sainsbury’s but nobody seems that interested in plastic meat trays or sodding plastic bags.

I took millions of photos while moving, but since I’ve stolen the RAM out of my server I have nowhere to put them. Some have been uploaded to my Flickr account though and they’re what you’re currently looking at.

When I finally get the RAM I ordered off eBay I’m going to set up Apache on my server, allow incoming connections and turn it into a webserver. Once that has been done I can use it to store all my photos and selectively put some of the nicer ones on my piku.co.uk gallery. It’s quite a bit of hassle getting photos online, I want a nice and simple method that doesn’t require farting around with lo

ng and error-prone HTTP uploads.

My house came without a fridge or washing machine so I’ve had to buy both of those. The fridge came three days after moving in, and my washer is due to arrive tomorrow. This is good since I’m running out of clothing and my bedding could do with a wash. The best part is the house has a normal electricity meter - no more walking to the local shop to buy tokens - good job since the local shop is a Post Office five minutes down the road, or the middle of town.

Click on any of the images to view my Flickr photostream.

Last week (or was it the week before? I can’t remember) I signed up for Be Internet’s super speedy ADSL2 service. Currently I’m using their not so speedy dialup system. I can’t believe I used to find this fast…

Shortly after signing up to Be I was sent an SMS telling me my activation date and that my BeBox (the ADSL box) would be sent to me the day before activation. And just like it said, I got it this morning. I unpacked it and noticed a sticker telling me not to plug it in until the line is activated.

I managed to ignore the sticker for a whole two hours!

The box is called a “SpeedTouch” and is made by a company called Thompson. When attacked with Telnet it bears a striking similarity to my Alcatel Speedtouch Pro ADSL box. Looks like something got sold off to another company…

I’ll write more and give pictures when my line has been activated. Currently it is “Awaiting activation”. I think it’s an automated system doing all of this since before midnight my order status was “We have sent your BeBox to you and it’ll arrive shortly”. At 11 past midnight it’s now gone on to “Activating your line”.

I’m going to reload the page to see if it’s changed, turn the box back on and then once satisfied nothing has changed, will go to bed I’m not impatient, honest!

Memes are funny things. One minute you’re a sensible, thinking being writing a post on the Internet, next minute you’re on teh interwebs spouting all sorts of nonsensical junk. It’s really weird, nobody sits down and says “OK, this is a new meme, you can reply to anything with all your base… and if you feel like it, the form I iz in ur <noun> <verb>ing ur <other noun>“. We just sort of vacuum them up from each other. Wouldn’t it be great if actual, real information was transmitted in the same way?
Seems even the real world of printed text isn’t immune, as this story from the Houston Chronical of all places shows.  It’s amusing watching someone attempt to report on Internet culture, unless you visit several hundred message boards a day it just doesn’t make sense It’s like trying to explain a Monty Python film to someone who’s never heard of them - it just doesn’t work.

I’m off to pay a deposit on my new house now. Or is that I is in ur shopz payin’ my depositz, can I has keys pleez? Damn you Internet

I came across this post while on a random Stumble session. On there you will find a little program that can crawl an RSS feed and give a reading ease value. Point it at your blog’s feed and see what it says. My blog has the following results

• Syllables per word: 1.49
• Words per sentence: 19.50
• Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 60.90
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 9.61
• Gunning-Fog Index: 20

which probably means half of you can’t understand what I write, since supposedly you need 20 years of school education to understand this. I think it just shows I’m not the most organised of writers when I put things in my diary. I do have a habit of just typing away with no real planning or ideas.

Firefox is a great browser, but for some reason it has moments where it seems someone has poured treacle into my PC or the code has been written in BASIC. Quite a bit of this is probably my PC, the randomness of the Internet and other things I can’t control but being a “power user” there must be something I can fiddle with…

Open a new tab and type “about:config” into the addressbar. Look at all those cryptic options! It’s like browsing through /etc or poking the Windows registry with regedit. Fancy a fiddle with the settings? I found two sites that tell you to change things and type in new configuration options - all with the promise your browsing experience will be “faster”. They don’t quantify what this “faster” means, but hey! ignore that and have a fiddle, it seems to have made things load quicker.

Now if only there was a way to make Flash not clog the browser up, or Java bring the whole thing tumbling down.

Firefox Can be Faster

13 Tweaks 

The English language is a tricky beast. Being a mixture of various other languages, mixed with some grunts and the importance of context it’s no wonder people get it wrong. In fact I’m sure there’s grammatical errors creeping into this post as I type.

Most people won’t notice the odd missing comma, the time you used a semi-colon rather than a full-stop, or missed off the period from the end of “etc”, etc. What stand’s out a mile though is that damn apostrophe. Their like a giant flashing beacon that say’s “Err… I have no clue where it goes so it goe’s in everything”. Same with “their”, “they’re” and “there”.

I’m quite glad I have English as my native language; learning this loosely structured mass must be quite hard. So, in the true blogging style, rather than write about ways to improve our typing I thought I’d simply link to someone else.

Five Common Mistakes That Make You Look Dumb

Technorati Tags: grammar blog writing

Powered by ScribeFire.

Yeah, my school protects its inmates from the horrors of the Internet through the use of a web proxy. This web proxy is pretty useless - ask any of our kids how they get around its filters and watch.

About the only people it seems to inconvenience is us, the teachers. I just tried to visit my Google Analytics site and… nope, that’s porn that is. So is trying to search for Scunthorpe.

I bet now I’ve put those words in here my website will be blocked…

Lost

It’s a bit like the GMail invite system.

Oh, don’t forget the clocks go forwards tonight if you live in the UK.

One of those pretty kaleidoscopic pattern generators. Whirl the mouse around and watch the pretty patterns.

http://www.qbesq.com/