My dad just phoned me to tell me that he’s bought an old V8 Range Rover.

How utterly random.

3:42 pm | Posted in Randomness, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

Writing about Ooh, a quiz. from Warm Copies Make It Better

Roxor.

4:09 pm | Posted in Boredom, Randomness, Warwick Blogs | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Playing with CSS is evil.

Also, I have been told to say that Mohammed Ali is a sexy manbeast.

That is all.

4:01 pm | Posted in Randomness, Warwick Blogs, XHTML/CSS | 7 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

As is given away so unimaginatively by the title of this entry, I am now back in the lovely land of England. And I can’t help but feel rather depressed, really.

Coming back on the M5 today into the heart of the Black Country made me realise that Ireland is just such a better place to live. The sight of factory after factory producing utter crap and chavs sporting their latest tracksuit just makes me utterly sick of this entire thing.

Whatever happened to being British? There used to be a time - not so long ago - when this nation respected some of the traditions of old. Now it just seems we’re all interested in is screwing someone before they screw us more.

I like being able to go to a proper English shop, purchase a cup of tea (drunk from a china cup, of course) with some scones and sit back to read the newspaper or simply admire the nice view. What do we have now? Hey, let’s go and get some café latte and rush to work in order to work our arses off all day for pittance, and then have the Government screw us up the ass, giving all our money away to the EU and other such worthy causes.

To give you an example of why I’m getting so utterly sick of the people in this country, let us consider the glorious people, mythically known to all as “my next door neighbours”. Personally, I like to call them “the stupid twats”.

My grandad kindly stays over at our house during the holidays doing jobs that we don’t have time for in the general scheme of things. One such task was the re-painting of the garage doors which have looked quite manky as of late. Admittedly, he started the job at the sultry hour of 8am. However, he wasn’t making what is generally classified as unreasonable amounts of noise, and had to go and get the appropriate materials for the job.

Upon his return, he begins the task at hand and all is going quite swimmingly. About five minutes into the job, however, the next door neighbour decides to show her utter contempt for us and to kindly acknowledge the fact that she is indeed a stupid cow by saluting my grandfather with a bugle salute at an obscenely loud level.

Now, my grandad isn’t as they say, getting any younger. I dread to think what this may have done to others of his age, but I’ve known a lot less to cause far more drastic consequences; the issue of a mild heart attack leaps to mind, of course. As he told me upon my return: “I had half a mind to tell her to stick it up her arse.”

Quite.

Now, the issue of my stupendously moronic neighbour aside, I am finding more and more people like this every day of my life. Namely, a bunch of moronic and ignorant twats. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of having to put up with people who find it amusing (for lack of a more appropriate word) to shout at us for having made the mildest of inconveniences in their obviously busy schedule.

Seriously - what kind of people do we have living next to us? It’s not like we sit around the living room plotting how to make their lives the miserable hell that it quite obviously make it out to be. It’s not like I go around randomly pumping out 19,000W of pure noise into their foundations.

This is the kind of thing I’m on about really. You just don’t find this kind of irrational behaviour over in Ireland. For the most part the people are friendly to talk to, and more importantly, I feel safe walking by myself around the town. You only need to venture 6 or 7 miles down the road into Aston to get a shotgun up your arse and a 9mm down the back of your spine. Hey, that sounds like a laugh.

So, you ask yourself, what was the point in this incoherant gibberish? Simply put, this blog (of sorts) is a place where I can vent my frustration without physically going next door and barbequeing the equally annoying dog.

Anyway, besides all of this, it’s good to be in my house, even if the surrounding area is about as nice as a giant turd embedded in a sea of urine. I can at least find some comfort in my room and my various bits of tacky memorabilia. However, we did have some surprises when we got back.

Firstly, the house has changed quite a bit. My grandad has also been working on the garage which now looks like it might be actually used for something other than storing every object known to mankind. The veranda area has also been cleaned up quite a lot, and that can only be a good thing.

The second nice thing was the postcard that I received from Sarah who got back from America a few days ago. Was fun to read up on what they’d been doing and all that, so it killed a few minutes.

And that was about it. Bugger.

In terms of my schedule for the next month or so, there’s not an awful lot on the cards.

• I want to get out more than I’ve been doing for the past two months, and hopefully catch up with some people that have been missing for an awfully long time.
• Work my arse off to earn money.
• Lose some weight, since I didn’t exactly eat “heathily” in Ireland. Bastard Guinness people.
• Attempt some more maths. Possibly.
• Go up to Warwick on possibly the 21st.
• Random things that I am yet to think of.

University is possibly the one thing I’m looking forward to at the moment. The holidays seem to be dragging and I’m quite keen to get on with my degree and get it finished. Not because I’m eager to leave, but I think that until I’ve finished I’m not going to know how to go from there. Right now, postgraduate work really sounds appealing, but I’m not entirely sure and the more I think about it, the more I want to beat myself to death with a giant teaspoon in a convoluted and provocative way.

Besides teaspoons, university and general agression towards pretty much everything, there’s a bit of an empty void and rather a lot of mild depression/anxiety - I’d quite like to see people before I slip into utter crapness of doom.

This entry didn’t really turn out as I’d expected it to. And it’s really long. Hmm.

PS: I’ve heard of the trials and tribulations of Coventry. I’ll pop down when I can to visit all and see everyone. Also - nice job on the garden Helen, it’s looking absolutely great.

1:29 am | Posted in Politics, Ranting | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

…is, as they say, “the roxor”.

However, it’s now 4am, and I’m rather tired. Enthusiasts will be pleased to know that I did actually do some work on the site today (whee), so we’ll see where that goes tomorrow perhaps.

For now, I bid you farewell.

4:01 am | Posted in PHP/MySQL, Randomness | No Comments »

Unfortunately I’ve had a rather busy week so it’s been impossible to update this thing. However, I’ll (briefly) fill everyone in.

I saw London bombings on TV. I don’t need to add anything to what’s already been said. We’ll get them.

However, I spent most of my week at work, logging tapes and various other things so there’s not been much time to actually do anything. Hopefully that should all be finished and done by tomorrow or possibly Saturday (maybe even later than that, but I really hope not).

Today, however, was rather good. Got shiny new 8mbit broadband from Bulldog and it is very fast. So a fair proporation of today has been spent doing various bits and pieces in connection with that as well as a goodly amount of programming.

Currently, I’m tidying my computer and performing some much-needed maintainance (which I’ve learned is essential with XP really). Perhaps I’ll take it apart later and clean the damn thing out, since everything is bloody caked in dust. Could also do with a couple fans taking out/being turned down since it’s rather noisy.

For those that care, I shall be down in Plymouth until the end of next week and I will be leaving on Friday. You have been warned - or something…

8:45 pm | Posted in Personal, Politics | No Comments »

According to business software outfit TouchPaper, two thirds of IT directors said that giving tech-illiterate business folk the latest gadgets created additional work for tech support.

Really? I’m shocked.

10:35 pm | Posted in Randomness | No Comments »

Again, it’s another “look, I’m making the effort to blog but don’t quite have the time!” posts.

As you can probably tell, don’t quite have the time to blog at the moment. However, come tomorrow and I promise I’ll post up a full list of things that I’ve done.

If I have the time…

Runs quickly

11:34 pm | Posted in Randomness | No Comments »

Well, they found the Michelin teams guilty.

How utterly surprising.

I can only hope that the Michelin teams announce their immediate departure from F1 over to the GWPC, since there is obviously no point in continuing with this stupidity. Mosely, Ecclestone and Ferrari have killed the sport I once loved, and it really is an awful shame. You just have to love this quote:

Based on their report our technical department will decide whether or not to invite the stewards of the French Grand Prix to exercise their powers under Article 127 of the International Sporting Code in respect of any car fitted with Michelin tyres.

Great, let’s have another six-car race! Amazing! You know what? I’m going to buy myself six tickets now just to fucking celebrate watching what will effectively be the Schumacher Grand Prix. Hey, why not just rename F1? I’m quite liking the sound of F1:FS; not only does it stand for Formula 1: Fucking Schumacher but it also stands for Formula 1: Fucking Senseless and Formula 1: Fucking Stupid.

In other news, I’m once again working on the site. Hopefully over the next week or two I’ll be able to add various bits and pieces. My aim is to basically fill the site up with all of my programs and other projects, as well as putting up a more comprehensive links list and perhaps adding some more people.

Anyway, enough for now. I’m going to go and eat some more food, and then play around for a bit with Linux. It’s all rather good fun, really.

3:20 pm | Posted in Ranting | No Comments »

Some of you may have noticed the “Register” button in the top right corner. That is indeed the button you need to perform clickage upon in order to register your account here. Here’s a list of things again:

• Added registration!
• Fixed a couple of minor cosmetic issues.
• Fixed the people page so that it renders properly in IE, because as we all know: IE is “teh sux0r”.
• Fixed some LaTeX issues. Not of the kinky variety.
• Added a new feature to the comments system. Your e-mail address is displayed, but with a new twist. If you set your e-mail as dave@monkeyfish.com, it will get displayed as dave@dontspam.monkeyfish.com, so the robots won’t necessarily be able to find it easily.

I may also have some image validation thingy to make sure that robots aren’t trying to register.

So, apart from this, all is good. I’m still mulling over the photos section idea, and in order for me to bring it back, it does need a complete recode really. This will take a few hours, and whilst some of you may say “hurrah, Dave is a giant goat with loads of time!!” I am neither a giant goat (except on Sundays) or possibly a person with loads of time. Okay, that’s a lie - I have loads of time. Which leads me back to the beginning of my argument. Oh dear.

Anyway, it’s another lovely day around here, so I might go out in a bit and enjoy the sunshine. Or possibly run around like a headless chicken. Oh, the hilarity of it all.

1:43 pm | Posted in Randomness, Site Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |