Created at The Hero Factory

Photoshop can do so many things, this is one of them

The MRI happened last night. Nothing too dramatic about it to be honest, dress me up in a kinky grey gown, strip any possible piece of metal from my carcass, set me up and roll me into this big white tube. If it hadn't been for the complete lack of bar code, I could have been being swiped across the Tesco checkout. You can't move much in one of those thing and they fix your head in one place - given that I was in this tube for around 45 minutes, I inevitably fell asleep - no surprises there then.

It takes about a week to process whatever it was that they recorded, so there's yet another visit planned to see the consultant next Sunday - at least that means another entertaining drive at high speed through the camel souk in the dark, always fun.

It was Fight Club last night again, so feel free to check out the Trash Can for my offering this week. Also see the shot I did for the Boxer Turtle theme, "Better than Sex" - it's a bit of an in joke for the members at TPF, but judging by the votes I've received so far, it fell a little flat.

Today's major news is that as an organisation that is prepared to hang on Bill Gates' every last work, today we have not only got PHP installed on one of our IIS6 servers, we also have an open source application running on it; in our case, the Mantis bugtracker which we intend to use as an action tracker for internal use. So far it looks good, we just need to tidy away a few extraneous options and give it the 'look and feel'. Quite pleased with that one myself. Wonder if I can get them to install b2evolution?

...this is just too good to leave alone

Finally and at long last, I think the laptop is finally set up. Took long enough though. First I had to do a rebuild back to the default factory state to get rid of what the shop put on it, then un-install half the crap that comes with the factory build, download and install McAfee, add Firefox, then install Office 2007 Ultimate (502 Mb download), get all the MS updates (another 307Mb of downloads) and finally this evening, I've got it hooked up to the WiFi network, once of course I'd replaced the older Netgear DG834 with the wireless Netgear DG834N. Hallelujah! It all works - at least at the moment.

Wonder if I can have a little peace now to track back into Piglet and start messing with the PHP? Not a chance I shouldn't think.

Tomorrow gets the MRI on my back out the way, so another trip to KFNGH. At least I'll get to lie down whilst that happens - maybe I'll even catch 40 winks... ;)

Whilst I'm here, check out this image over at flickr: Day 154 - Living Room Levitation. I first spotted one of Lisa's photos around 12 months back and she just keeps getting better and better. If you have a moment, drop in and say hi, tell her I sent you...

Anyone daft enough to follow what's going on around here will have noticed that my rate of posting is steadily deteriorating. It's nothing deliberate, though work has been a bit manic of late and isn't likely to let up any time soon - nothing new there though. We were promised that we'd get a bit of a breather once we moved into Salwa, but it's been anything but.

There's also that nagging question of what the hell is this blog for? I've not worked it out and I suspect that you haven't either. I've read that you should try to find your own voice on these things, but given that a blog is essentially mute, I'm not overly sure that will help. If I think over what I do with my down-time, you can perhaps see some glimmers of what's bashing away at the keyboard at the moment; I 'aspire' to become something of a web-designer, I dream of playing the perfect round of golf, I seek to take that elusive emotionally charged photograph, I slave away at making some defining musical statement. In reality, I'm a bloke who owns a PC, a bag of golf clubs, a camera and a few guitars. The credit card maketh the man I think. I'll keep plodding along though and maybe one day it'll make a bunch of sense. :))

These are things I need to do, so I'll have to come back and amend this as I go. Think of this as my conscience if you will:

1. Change 'localhost' to '127.0.0.1' in _basic_config.php
2. Convert this skin to 960gs format (and if I can work it, the Fluid 960 Grid System)
3. Remove all those 'br' tags I used to get this skin to display properly in Firefox, and use the proper technique to make it behave properly
4. Fix my Kubuntu server so that I can FTP into the root of /var/www and have the files run without having to go and change the permissions on them afterwards
5. ...there will be others

I've been meaning to do one of those life inventory list things for some time, so I thought perhaps it was time I made a start on it. Like anyone in this world, over the course of your life you accumulate skills, things you have done or are capable of and so on. This list is intended to be record of those things that I either can or have done in my life:

I've done a bungee jump
I can play guitar
I can play a bass (though less well)
I can rock climb (and have lead an E1 5c route)
I have built 3 guitars
I'm a competent photographer
I can develop and print B+W film
I can process E6 colour transparencies
I can write HTML and CSS
I can use Photoshop
I can drive a car
I understand electronics (I was an Air Comms tech in the RAF 20 odd years back)
I can solder
I have built a small guitar valve amp
I can assemble a PC from components
I can install software
I have set up a small home network, including building a Linux LAMP server
I've set up a blog on my own webspace (you're reading it now)
I've visited Canada, France, Iceland, Germany, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Spain (mainland and Majorca) and Italy (this excludes changing planes in Holland & Switzerland).
I've seen Stoke City win a trophy at Wembley
I actually lived long enough to see Stoke City makes it into the Premiership (never thought I'd see that one)
I can iron
I can cook
I can play golf
I can record my guitar/bass playing into a PC based home recording studio
I have sung (very bad) backing vocals on a friends released CD and also contributed some guitar parts to it
I'm an experienced project manager (perhaps as well, given that's my job)
I can do DIY
I can do my own car repairs (can't remember the last time I felt inclined though)
I can read (fairly basic, but an important skill all the same)
I can ride a motorcycle
I can cycle
I can play football
I can make palatable home-made wine
I've worked doing 'humping and dumping' for bands at some of the local concert venues around Stoke-on-Trent (Buzzcocks, Thin Lizzy, the Scorpions, Hawkwind, John Miles, Siouxie & the Banshees, the Veins, and a good few others I can't remember right now)
I've worked clearing conifers from an ancient oak wood in Wales on a conservation working holiday
I've read the whole of Stephen Hawkings' 'A Brief History of Time'
I've hand reared a brood of starlings that were turfed out of their nest to the point where they could be released into the wild
I can swim, and somewhere, have a badge for completing 2 miles
I once stood as a candidate in a local council election (I didn't win)

This list doesn't seem all that long, so I'm sure there are lots of things I've missed. Part 2 could turn up at any time in the future as I think of things.

...hence