Month: May 2006

New, old, sleeping

A couple of new blogs (links on the right in the ‘overflow’) to play with. The Big Brother one might be interesting, and Unreliable Witness already has shimmers of possibility.

The update to WordPress and the activation of … er.. one of the spam plugins seems to have done the job. Well worth it.

And in other startling news my headache has gone. It finally gave up around 6pm last night, although I still tried (and failed) to get to bed early. Sorry Zoe but thanks for the advice, although there is no way I could sleep with the window open.

I just can’t do it, it’s the same if there is too much light in the room, I need peace and quiet and darkness before my brain will finally accept the fact that I should be asleep. This holds true for the first few hours after I’ve fallen asleep where the smallest noises can be enough to waken me from my slumber. A few years ago a new fridge heralded a couple of nights of frustrated tossing and turning, the dull whirr and click from downstairs enough to keep me from gaining a comprehensive degree of unconsciousness.

But after the first couple of hours, well just you try and wake me! You could turn our bedroom into a parade ground, or allow an entire African savannah to stampede across the bed and you’d be lucky to get more than a murmur from me. In fact, and this is according to Louise as… well I couldn’t tell you about this because I’m asleep at the time… if you didn’t know me you may think that I’ve slipped away in the night. Between the lack of movement — I have an entire double bed to myself at the moment yet still find myself occupying the usual third, hanging off the edge like some large hairy mountain goat — and the s l o w n e s s of my breathing I can appear to be in a state of complete torpor.

This state remains until the radio switches on at blurry o’clock in the morning, bringing with it the slow painful progress to normal awaken-ness. This process takes until around 9am and includes breakfast, a train journey and two cups of coffee.

So, in an effort to collect some truly awful puns I’ll ask you: How do you sleep?

Quiet

Dropped Louise off at the airport at 3.30am on Sunday morning. Wide awake when I got home so I upgraded WordPress, everything went very smoothly indeed (or you wouldn’t be reading this!).

By 7am I was wilting and fell asleep on the sofa for a couple of hours kip, something I think contributed to my stiff back today. I spent the rest of the day going through weird phases of high energy and complete lethargy. Most odd.

And this morning I awoke with the beginnings of a monster headache. One of those “please stop tightening this metal band around my skull” types… and the painkillers aren’t budging it.

2 questions, 1 comment

Question 1. WordPress users – all of a sudden I’m getting loads and loads of spam comments — 536 overnight. This is despite the fact I don’t USE WordPress for the commenting here (yet). I’m still on version 1.5.2, which spam plugin is best?

Question 2. XP users – I think I have a virus. The internet ‘outage’ I experienced the other night may have been a symptom and there is SOMETHING that is using a variety of outgoing TCP Ports. But I can’t figure out what it might be.

I’ve udpated and run AVG Anti-Virus, SpyBot and Ad-Adware. My firewall is Symantec and isn’t reporting anything odd, it’s only when I call up netstat via DOS prompt (“netstat -s”) that I see the number of “Active Opens” rising. I’ve just re-booted the PC, fired up Firefox and started typing this post and already the number is at 61.

I’m stumped. I can’t even think of what to look for, and if my anti-virus can’t catch it, the firewall isn’t flagging it (despite changing settings to ask for every teeny tiny movement in and out to be flagged), what else can I do?

The comment: Andy and I have swapped emails and I’ll happily state here that he did not mean anything nasty. Looks like it was a combination of bad days and misreadingness. All is well with the world again (bar the above, obviously).

Snippets

What to start with, what to start with…

Ohh come on, you know fine well. Love it or loathe it, the carnival/freakshow that is Big Brother has kicked in and what a marvellous piece of car-crash casting it looks to have been this year. From the campest gay in Glasgow (Shahbaz AKA the “wacky Paki poof”) to “the one who may just be the most normal” Bonnaaughhh (Bonnie), the Vickey Pollard-esque (Nikki) to the geezer-ish wideboy (Sezer – rhymes with Caesar) it’s probably the most outlandish group they’ve come up with so far. And that’s before you consider the fact that they’ve included someone with Tourette’s Syndrome (Pete).

I’d imagine a lot of the initial focus will be on Pete, and I hope that they at least TRY and play safe. It would be too easy to reduce his condition and play him up as a laughing stock, although I fear the ratings may have some influence on this. Only time will tell.

~

I have to agree with Jason, this year the NBA playoffs are all about the team (baby!). In the past the focus has always been on the individuals, the Michael Jordans, Shaquille O’Neals, Kobe Bryants and so on, but this year whilst the superstars are there the focus is switching to the best team. It’s been a gradual process with the Pistons leading the way and forcing the NBA machine/marketing department to start lauding teams over single players. I’d suggest that is simply because, whilst they are without a doubt the best team in the league over the past couple of season, they haven’t ever signed a superstar name, and even the league’s best efforts to try and pull some of their players up into that ‘stratus’ has failed because.. well… Big Ben just ain’t that charismatic.

~

What would the world be like without the internet? OK, what would MY world be like without the internet?

I got a scary glimpse into the past last night as BlueYonder had a few connection glitches. Only lasted about two hours but it was slap bang in the middle of me trying to get some work done and, you know what, I couldn’t. I was stuck on one piece of coding and had nowhere to go to look it up! PANIC!! EEK.

Thankfully normality was restored and the first thing I did? Look up the BlueYonder support page and WRITE DOWN their telephone number!

~

And finally, if you are bored here, scroll on down and pick a site from the list on the left. They’re all quite good and don’t feature as much “dross” as I do. Apparently.

Ach. To be honest I really REALLY don’t care if someone doesn’t like what I’m posting here. It’s very VERY simple, don’t read it. You don’t HAVE to visit here, you don’t HAVE to read all this. I’ll still post it anyway so there is little point in complaining. Ohh yes you may think this is a democracy but let me assure you of one thing, whilst I’m very very stunned and amazed that so many nutters of you keep coming back, what I do with and what I post to this site is none of your business.

Shocking stuff to end on but, frankly my dears, I was THIS close to “hiating” for a while. And for me that means this site closes until I’m ready to come back. The fact that you are reading this can be taken as a two-fingered salute to both my own attitude (which sickens even me sometimes) and to the fact that I don’t run this site to please anyone else bar me.

Phew. That feels better already!

UPDATE: Me and my big gob
OK, as ever I’ve jumped in with both feet. Yes one comment that was left yesterday irked me, but hey such is life. If I’m honest the comment isn’t that big a bother to me, and I was probably focussing on that as an excuse. What I should really do is take a break from this site. Which I will sometime soon, if only to provide a gap in which to upgrade WordPress, get the spam plugins sorted (lots of trackback stuff all of a sudden) and whatnot.

A true story

I usually get into the office around 8.30am. I use the first 30 minutes of the day to check email, have a coffee, and plan my day. I usually hit a couple of websites as well.

For a long time one of those websites was metafilter but I find it a bit hit or miss these days so I’ve replaced it with DIGG (still hit or miss but easier to read) and Lifehacker. It was a visit to the latter that sparked this story.

Lifehacker covers a lot of topics, from productivity tips to useful software, useful websites and, as it did this morning, some silly/fun stuff, namely it linked to an article on how to play the spoons.

My initial thought as I skim read the post was… umm.. ok.. and on I scrolled to see what else had been posted. Pretty soon I’ve forgotten about the post and my working day begins (and I won’t bore you with talk of document management systems).

Now, around 9.30 I’m usually heading for a cup of coffee and that was no different this morning. A couple of co-workers were already in the kitchen, and we start chatting about… well, nothing in particular. Then one of them says:

“You know, I think I need to get a new hobby… I’ve always wanted to be able to play the spoons.”

Honest. You couldn’t make it up.

Freaked me right out that did.

Destiny

Because sometimes the resonance never ends.

On a clear day
I’ll fly home to you
I’m bending time getting back to you
Old moon fades into the new
Soon I know I’ll be back with you
I’m nearly with you
I’m nearly with you

When I’m weak I draw strength from you
And when you’re lost I know how to change your mood
And when I’m down you breathe life over me
Even though we’re miles apart we are each other’s destiny

Zero 7 – Destiny.