Stuff to do with me and about me
Well, I have managed to blow one of my new years resolutions already.
In my attempt to waste less I have had to start eating the vast amount of chocolate that has accumulated during the xmas break. I thought long and hard about what I should do and unfortunately the less waste scenario was more favourable!
Oh well I guess that ill try that one again next year!
Happy New Year!!
Well another year is here and I just about managed to see this one in!
It started off with a few drinks, some food, some more food, some piss taking, some more food and some party games!! I opted not to play twister as I didn`t want to start a new year with a dodgy back, so I sat back and watched the girls make fools of themselves and then decided to try and tie the boys up in knots buy `fixing` what body part goes on what colour.
We then went home to see the New Year in watching the fireworks going off around the London Eye, god knows how much was spent on that. But I will say that it looked a bit of a mess towards the end, so much going off the whole TV screen went bright white!!
I decided to make 2 New Year Resolutions this year –
1) Waste less
2) Stop eating chocolate for a year again.
I guess we call all stop wasting stuff, but with 2 fussy child eaters in the house its not always as easy that.
As for giving up chocolate again, I say again as I have done that a few times in the past. The main reason I guess is the fact that I was partially to blame for the consumption of around 85K calories over the Christmas break. Far too many chocolate sweets around and far too many half price chocolate sweets on the shelves in shops!!
Unfortunately there are still around 28K+ calories still floating around the house!
Hmmm, I wonder how I will get on with those this year!!
Its Christmas 🙂
Lots of fun today as the time has come that the boys have been waiting for, am surprised though as Father Christmas has left them both some presents even thought they have both been very naughty this year!
We had Christmas at home this year, as T is now getting to the stage where he knows more that is going on, we thought it only fair that we have Christmas day as family day.
Bit disappointed as I got the wife what she wanted, but she is still not happy!!
Today I set about trying to import my old Snowey blog posts. There were 644 entries dating back to 22/09/2005! Didn`t realise that I has posted so many!
I wrote a quick PHP script to take each table entry and check for certain criteria with in the blog posting. If they were not there then it would import the entry.
The criteria that I was checking for were – inappropriate language, inappropriate content, content that I had deemed no longer relevant and a few other miscellaneous things.
Sadly there were only a few entries that were passed and imported! Given that I don`t really think that it is worth importing those few as they might not be understandable due to prior blog postings not being there for reference!
Will have to see though, as some of the posts I would like to put back up.
After more than 11 years of running my Snowey websites I have decided to take them offline.
I started them as a bit of fun when Smokey and I were forced to participate in various social events and gatherings and ended up like a couple of plums in the corner.
Sadly, now I have grown up, they do not fit in with my life style anymore and a lot of the content is not really appropriate for what I am doing now.
I will never dump the domains so maybe one day, when I have more time, more money and more appropriate things to go on there and I might restore them from the backup.
Well, it was only a matter or time before this happened……
Today I went to Colchester Zoo to do my Zoo Experience Day that I got for my 40th birthday.
I opted for the experience that had Elephants, Birds of Prey and Reptiles.
Last time I was up close with Elephants was in Sri Lanka when I was on honeymoon, we both got to feed a small elephant calf and watch them have their lunchtime bath in the river.
I had to pick reptiles as I have one myself, thought it would be great to see other reptiles and where they live. If I`m honest I wasn`t too bothered about the Birds of Prey – but I have to say they were probably the best part of the day!
The Elephants
They were great, huge beasts of an animal, I got to feed one up close and watch them coming in at the end of the day to be locked up for the night. The metal work on the cages is unbelievable, but then when you have something that big you can`t have it made of chicken wire!
The Birds Of Prey
These were unbelievable and as I said by far the best of the day purely because of the surprise that I got. I wasn`t expecting them to be like they were.
I got to hold, with the help of a very thick glove, small owls up to a very large and menacing looking Eagle which weighed an absolute ton.
Reptiles
I was looking forward to seeing these – I got to see –
Rhinoceros Iguanas – I loved these, they were great, they move like you wouldn`t believe especially when going after a flying locust. They came charging up to us when we went in their enclosure, they for that close that I managed to give one a stroke 🙂
Green Iguanas – they were not quite as big as my boy Yoda but it was still great to see some, in a huge enclosure.
Giant Millipedes – not strictly reptiles but they were in the same room as them. We used to have 3 giant millipedes so was nice to handle one of them again.
Snakes – I was holding one just as my boy looked through the windows at me, he so badly wanted to come in and hold them with me.
Komodo Dragons – these were the last reptiles that I got to see. We went right into the enclosure at the back, where we could see them. I was only a few feet away from one of them, they are phenomenal creatures.
I would love to do that again.
Well its been a year today so i think that its time i got rid of what data remnants i have left from my past.
I had a look around to see what was there that i could get rid of, surprisingly there was rather a lot – paperwork, source code, programs, emails, dongles, phones, mobiles, CD`s, DVD`s, MySQL databases, MSSQL Databases, hard drives, cloud storage files, keys and backup hardware.
All gone now.
Today we went to get H his birthday present from one of his Granddad’s.
He asked him if he could have a snake, and granddad was only too willing to get him one. Unfortunately granddad could not be with us when we went to get it, and needless to say he wasn’t there either to pay!
So, we had a look at a few snakes and settled for a nice quiet corn snake that H was able to pick up and hold with no real issues, I didn’t see the point getting one that he couldn’t hold or one that was too big, as it might be a bit daunting for his to start with.
We picked a nice stylish vivarium for her and a few things to go in it along with some fluffs for her to eat. All that set me back just over £180!! Some contrast to when we got Yoda all those years back as a rescue case from the RSPCA man that we knew.
We get her home and set everything up in H`s bedroom, laying down the law about what he can and can’t do. He decided to call her Rex, after Commander Rex out of Start Wars! I guess we need to get her sexed as soon and she is old enough to make she we have the right name for her – but then I guess once we have called her something we can’t go back on it.
I can see that Rex is going to be interesting, the wife won’t go anywhere near her or help us with her, so I guess it’s me and H doing it all.
I have finally upgraded Satan, my home server which is now running in its 4th reincarnation, to hardware that supports Hyper-V.
Given the MCITP certification that I am currently working on, it made sense to have access to a Windows Server 2008 R2 training infrastructure that I could access remotely and that was separate from my main Server.
It was a bit of a faf to get it going, I had to upgrade the BIOS on the motherboard 3 times to get Hyper-V to be supported. For some reason updating the BIOS caused the OS to fail to load, and at gone 01:30 in the morning I couldn`t be bothered to figure out why that was!
Satan V4 is now up and running the following hardware spec –
Windows Server 2008 R2
Intel Core i5-3550 CPU @ 3.30GHz
16GB of PC3-10666 1333MHz Ram
Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H Motherboard
2 x 500GB SATA – Raid 1
Now I just have to install all my software, scripts and support tasks the same as the old server 😐