Seriously Bad Timing

I have just taken on a new role at work and don't really know what I'm doing yet. To make things worse, the only other person who does this job is now on holiday for a week! I just hope nothing goes wrong that needs sorting out because I won't have a clue how to do it. I really don't need a bad week at work this week because I tend to worry about things - if something does go wrong this week and drags over into next week, I'll be worrying about it all through Christmas!

Please - everything work!

Christmas in Animal Crossing

This Saturday a message appeared on the town notice board, telling the world that there was going to be heavy snow the next day. It snowed all Sunday, and settled overnight. So now I can make snow men, yay! Apparently they talk, if you have done a good job making them they say nice things and if you don't then they moan.

Found a big festive tree in Tom Nooks store yesterday, it is also on sale today too. So I got one and put it in the main room of my mansion, it fits in very nicely with the furniture in there.

Fancy's Diet

Oooops, forgot to write up last week about Fancy's weigh in visit. Sadly he gained weight again last week :(, even if it is ever so slightly. So, we have decided to carry on with the diet until Christmas and if there's no improvement have a rethink of the situation.

Snow

Yay, for the first time this year I've got snow in Animal Crossing Wild World!

Fancy's Diet (part 2)

This week Fancy's weigh in did not go according to plan.

For a start he ran away and hid around the time of his appointment, causing me to ring the vet at T minus 10 minutes to report him missing in action, so unable to attend his meeting with the nurse.

Explaining to the surgery was no biggie though, they just laughed and said to ring them when said cat made an appearance to see if they could squeeze him in later in the day.

So, our visit was rescheduled to 5pm, and we got there this time with no further hiccups. Sadly, Fancy did not lose any weight this fortnight, opting to gain slightly. We put this down to the time of day (he usually gets weighed in the morning), but this does mean that the fortnightly visits will continue instead of becoming monthly visits as I'd hoped for. Ho hum :( Here's to the next 2 weeks!

Animal Crossing

I have been playing the game animal crossing for the Nintendo DS since June, ( when I got my DS Lite), and to be honest didn't think i'd still be playing it so regularly a few months down the line from buying it. Most of the games I buy, I play lots for the first few weeks then my interest wanes somewhat.

What makes it more strange that I have kept playing for so long is that there isn't any kind of objective to it, you pretty much do what you want. You can fish, catch bugs, go shopping, chat with the locals, visit the museum and have a cup of coffee in the cafe.

There are some challenges set, like enlarging your home, starting with a small hut with the possibility of graduating to a mansion, by way of paying of the ever increasing morgages from Tom Nook, (local shop owner/builder) at the town hall. You are also challenged to make your house nice in order to get a good rating from the Happy Room Academy, by colleting series of furniture and applying feng shui principles of decorating.

You earn money by selling things, like fruit, bugs, shells etc. or running errands for your neighbours, like delivering mail and presents. I'm currently saving up (you get a saving account at the town hall) to pay off my final mortgage of 948000 bells (ACWW currency), I'm saving rather than paying of bits 'cos you get interest on savings, but you don't pay it on the mortgage. Have saved 323000 bells so far, have a long way to go :(

Introducing Jeremy

Jeremy is the oldest boy cat, he is 13 years old. We got him from a blue cross rescue centre as a replacement for a cat we'd had that had died. He is a very loyal, loving mog, who is very easy going. He loves hunting for mice, being the centre of attention and sitting on peoples' shoulders like a parrot would.

Introducing Sally

This is Sally. She is old for a cat being nearly 18. We've had her since she was a kitten. She growls, bites and smells bad, but we love her lots anyway :)

Fancy Fights The Fat

Hi there.

For my first ever blog i thought i'd talk about my cats battle with obesity. Fancy is my youngest cat, he turned up on the doorstep about 8 years ago and decided he'd like to be part of our cat family, which at the moment consists of 3 cats.

He has always been big!! But until recently I have always argued with the vet that his bulk is just big bones, however, about 8 weeks ago i was told he really should go on a diet, since he weighed 6.13kg, (most cats are considered large when they weigh over 5kg). So, he's now on diet food from Royal Canin, and making fortnightly visits to the 'Fat Cat Club' at the vets'.

It has not been an easy few weeks. Anyone with a cat will tell you that they eat what they want to eat, and this diet food must have seemed like a poor substitute for the stuff he's used to eating. The first month was bad, although he lost a bit of weight the first visit, going down to 6kg, he then decided he didn't like the diet food on its own and started eating elsewhere. This meant that by the second visit he had gone up to 6.2kg and the third visit he was a massive 6.4kg. I decided that it's better to not follow the diet to the letter and have him eat at home than have him go elsewhere so we came to a compromise, half diet food and half normal food mixed together.

When the next visit came around the news was good he'd lost a bit of weight and had gone down to 6.29kg, and the visit after that he was 6.19kg, its coming off slowly! His next visit is on Monday, i'll post how he's done this past 2 weeks then >^..^<

Environmentally (Un)Friendly Business

I work for a rather large company whose PC's must number well over a thousand at a guess. Bearing in mind that we're all supposed to be doing our bit towards saving energy, why can't we turn them off at night? We are all told to leave them on (just turn off the monitor), so they can send updates out overnight (apparently if they send them out during the day, it will slow everything down too much), but I really don't know what updates they are talking about, maybe the odd Microsoft security update, but I can't think of much else. Even at weekends or when we are on holiday, they tell us to leave them on! It must waste the company thousands or even millions of pounds every year!

Labels: Update

I have removed all labels from my posts as I realized they weren't being applied consistently. I will, at some point, try to go through and apply a new, more consistent, set.

Bizarre Pricing?

Today I have been looking into subscribing to Caller Display with BT. It was going to cost £1.75 per month, but I decided to do it anyway. Just before I did, I noticed that it came free with "BT Privacy at Home". I expected that to cost even more that Caller Display, so I almost didn't look at, but I'm glad I did - it is actually free! Not that you really get anything else with it, apart from getting registered on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) which is free anyway (and a good thing!).

Why would anyone pay £1.75 per month when they are giving it away for free? Sounds silly to me, but I'm not complaining!

New Blogger

I have recently transferred to the new Blogger system, and my first impressions are positive! I seem to have lost my nice pop-up comments, but I think I might be able to get them back. I like the drag and drop layout adjustment - it is a lot easier than hand-writing the code! I have started to add labels to a few of my posts, but I'll finish the rest off another time as it is now after midnight and I've got a busy day at work tomorrow (I don't know why, but just lately I've got into a really bad habit of going to bed late, getting up late for work and being tired all day. Fortunately, I've still managed to get to work on time, though I'm not sure how sometimes!!)

Forgetful

I've been very busy at work the last couple of weeks - they keep giving me new jobs to do. I don't mind it (I rather like the extra responsibility), but it has meant rather a lot of overtime, and not all of it paid.

Today I kinda messed up though. Someone from another department was wanting a load of work doing ASAP. I explained that it would take two days at the very best, so would be ready sometime Wednesday at the earliest. Unfortunately it completely slipped my mind that I'm off work tomorrow! I only remembered just before going home when I heard someone else talking about tomorrow off. By this time, it was too late to do anything about it. I'm just hoping that someone else from my department will be able to do some of it tomorrow so I can then finish it off on Wednesday.

Forgetting about a day off - how bad is that?!

Too Nice To Say No

I've been covering the early shift at work this week - not because I wanted to do it particularly, but the person who normally does it is away. He sent an e-mail to the whole department asking if anyone would cover it - no one volunteered. I ended up saying that if he couldn't get anyone else then I'd do it. I didn't want to, but I didn't like saying no.

I have covered the late shift a few times and I quite like that, but I don't like the early one. I don't mind starting early, it's just the getting up early I'm not very good at! I just hope management are noticing all these different shifts that I end up covering when it comes time for my review!

Oh well, only one more day then I'm on holiday!

Synchronise and To-Do List for Google - Please!

I've become a fan of Google's Calendar over the last couple of months, but there's an extra couple of things that would make it complete - synchronising with Outlook and a to-do list.

I (along with a lot of people I suspect) want to synchronise their calendar/address book etc with their phones and PDA's. Most devices seem capable of synchronising with Outlook, so it would be ideal if Google could do this. I have heard of RemoteCalendars, but it only works with Outlook 2003 or later and I only have Outlook 2000! There must be a way of doing it - Plaxo have a plugin for Outlook that does it with their service, so it can't be too difficult (I expect licencing could be an issue though).

I know there is a to-do list module for the Google Desktop, but that's not quite the same as a proper web-service. Again, if this could be synchronised with Outlook, that would be great!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining (how can you when it's all free?), I just think that these would be useful additions to an already impressive suite of applications.

The Wonders Of Modern Technology

Despite temperatures approaching 30°C, thanks to the wonders of modern technology (air conditioning) I'm still nice and cool at work. I can't help but smile when people are ringing me all day and complaining that it's too hot! Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be outside (in a shady spot!) too, but if I must work, then I'm glad of the air con!

Google Video

I must admit to being a big fan of Google and have been using the Personalized Homepage for quite a while. The other day, I went onto it from a friends computer, so of course I wasn't signed in. Just as I was about to sign in, I noticed the Google Video. Whilst I don't have it on my personalized screen, I have no objection to them putting it on as sample content. What I did object to was the actual video that loaded - it was called something like "2 girls fight" (I forget the exact name now). Refreshing the page several times revealed a number of similar videos which I would view as 'inappropriate' and certainly not the kind of thing I would be using to advertise my services if I was Google! I don't know whether or not they have any kind of filtering system in place, but I certainly think they should be a bit more careful about the kinds of things they have on their front pages.

My Computer Has Hiccups

I mean this quite literally. Every so often my computer makes a 'hiccup' sound (just did it then). I'm fairly certain its my main hard-drive, which is really annoying because I've only had it since October 2004. My secondary hard-drive has been going for over 6 years with no problems! To be fair, I suppose it gets a lot less use (the reason its me secondary hard-drive is because its smaller).

What's more annoying is that I wasn't even getting ready to replace it - its still plenty big enough! And I've only just managed to get everything back the way I like it after upgrading (and reformatting) my computer at Christmas. Just hope I can transfer everything across to a new drive without too much difficulty! If I can, I really just want to transfer everything across and not have reinstall Windows and everything else. Has anybody done this successfully? What's the best way to go about it?

Scandal and Local Elections

There has certainly been no shortage of political scandal here in the UK over the last week or so, but how much of a difference will it make in the local elections in just a few days time? Whilst John Prescott's affair is embarrassing and the Home Office's (Charles Clarke) hash up with releasing foreign prisoners without considering them for deportation is appalling, will it, or should it, affect the local elections?

My personal opinion is that in local elections, you should vote for local issues and leave the national issues for the general election. I don't know, maybe I'm over simplifying things. Maybe you should treat Labour as Labour and Conservative as Conservative, whether local or national - after all, they should still be pursuing the same goals and have the same attitudes.

What does anyone else think? What is the arrangement in other countries with local/national government and how do issues affecting one affect elections in the other?

Battery Converter

I read an article a while ago about someone who uses a GPS receiver and got fed up of it going through his 'AAA' size batteries so rapidly. What he did was to make some kind of adapter so he actually powered it by a couple of 'D' size batteries which were connected to a couple of dummy 'AAA' size batteries in his GPS receiver. This way, because 'D' size batteries are more powerful, he didn't have to change them as often.

I am interested in making a similar adapter, but my electrical engineering skills aren't quite up to the job. I was hoping to find something on the Internet about how to make one, but I can't find anything. Does anyone have any ideas?

Backlinks

I think I have now got the Backlink code about right, but the trouble is I have no way of testing it! None of my articles have backlinks at the moment, but I'm assuming that's because no one's linked to them!

I wonder if somebody would mind putting a link to one one of my posts on their blog, just so I can find out whether or not this is working!!

I know I haven't posted for a while, but I do intend to get into the way of posting a bit more regularly.

This is a test link to a previous post.

Blog Updates

Well, after getting a few more spam comments, I've decided to turn on 'Word Verification'. I'd rather not do, but I'd much rather not have spam comments.

The next thing that I intend to do is to use the Backlink feature. However, I'm going to have to work out how it works because I would like it to work exactly the same way as my peek-a-boo comments do. Will it be easy? I doubt it, but it will maintain a certain amount of consistency across the site. Fingers crossed!!

Problem with Nokia PC Suite

I have recently started using the Nokia PC Suite to synchronize my phone with Outlook. I have all my contacts stored in Outlook already and I make use of both the 'Name' fields and the 'File As' fields. This allows me to record someones full name as Johnathon Smith but still lets me use their nickname of John.

However, Nokia don't understand that I would rather him be called John on my phone. They use the 'Full Name' field as the name when I synchronize with my phone. This means that in my phone he is called Johnathon Smith. The only other way is for me to tell Outlook that his fullname is John, which is just silly! At least give me the option of whether I want to use the 'Full Name' or the 'File As' name!