Flo and I went shopping today. Ostensibly we were buying a few books and getting some "furry prawn" sushi...but we ended up stopping for "a snack", a pair of ill-fitting "pink cloppy shoes", some other things, and a bratwurst in a roll...Then we came home.
Today Ian and I took the kids to the heinously expensive Blue Reef Aquarium that opened a few weeks ago in place of the old "Wild Walk"....I say it was heinous, but to be honest I thought it was brilliant, though typically the girls weren't as impressed...well not all the time.
Still, I found it a thoroughly entertaining way to spend a good 2-3 hours, and the best bit was watching Flo interact with the 3D IMAX film about whales and dolphins and that....reaching out to stroke them, recoiling from huge whale flippers and trying to catch pieces of floating seaweed. It was awesome.
Esmae took her 3D glasses off because it was too scary.
All of Ian's pictures are bound to be better.
I've been running an extreme beta of Google's Chromium OS on my Acer Aspire One [aao] for the last day or two, and I have to say apart from a few niggles it's actually pretty decent...
Yeah. Not so cool...turns out it is H1N1...
It's like having human flu but the gubmint say I shouldn't leave the house. So Rosie (and Flo) very kindly picked up some drugs for me, viz:
Despite a head full of snot and a throat full of barbed wire I had a considerable amount of fun today.
Once Flo had it in her head that I wasn't speaking all that often, she pretty much entertained herself for the morning...doing jigsaws, pretending to be a cake seller to "The Silent Prince" (my crowning role), and taking turns using the laser pointer to annoy Moshi. We almost didn't notice the rain.
After lunch we headed off for Esmae's party where I adopted the role of Science Professor and the assorted kids made various machines, models and other contrivances....I should have taken photographs (I will next time I do it), but here's a small highlight of what was constructed with apologies where I've forgotten names:
I appear to have a small, very annoying, ulcer just on the inside of my top lip...On the other hand The Annoybours (tm) took in a parcel that turned out to be the NatGeo Dinosaur Encyclomapedia thing I ordered for an as yet undesignated recipient, and announced they are moving!!
They said they're having problems with "the toilet".
We all know the real reason...Moshi loves metal!
Everybody needs good neighbours....with a little understanding, you can find the perfect plaaannn!!!!
I found the perfect fucking plan!
Some of you may know that my neighbour can be seriously annoying. I think the clincher is the fact that one of them screams like a girl when he's arguing, and they argue a lot....anyway:
Over the weekend and on Monday night there appeared to be some kind of screaming/swearing match going on every couple of hours. I think it was something to do with a game on the PS3 because intermittently there were the screams, cries and stuttering gunfire of war (and no cops turned up outside)...all at stupid hours....mostly during the night.
This really harshed my work day out, so I decided to have some fun while I was out of the house and they were presumably sleeping off their slanging match.
Before I left for work in the morning, with very bleary eyes, I accidentally turned the amp on and slipped while turning the volume...Apparently I mistakenly set the volume to 8*.
I spent the day occasionally connecting to the media machine and making it play music I thought they might appreciate: Nirvana, Living Colour, Rage Against The Machine, Aphex Twin, Goto80, (1 song on repeat for 2 hours :)....AC/DC...Sabbat!
They left me an awesome note.
I blamed the cat.
* I never put it to 8. 7 makes the windows rattle upstairs....4 is for rockin' it up...3 more usual
I spent the day cycling in the rain, sorting computers out, eating chicken, drinking guiness and lazing on sofas...you?
Novel idea...been ages since I posted. Soz.
I've been busy, and to be honest nothing of any major importance has happened...except I've found a new improved method of annoying/entertaining Moshi, viz:
I wave bye bye...
It has been an odd week. I felt a bit "not guri" on Wednesday (which I put down to poor blood sugar) but having rushed back to pick up Flo, cook dinner &c, I eventually spent the evening throwing up and attempting to go to bed at 8pm...[draws veil]
Thursday was much the same, though I spent a very strange ~10 hours lucid dreaming/hallucinating while twitching and sweating in bed....Friday I felt like someone had driven through me with a truck, but managed to hold it together enough to look after Flo eventually.
We spent Saturday doing our usual thing (alien tree hunt, cafe for cake, playground, park, trampoline) and observed an afternoon-long kinda fight thing between Moshi and "Tabby" (a decidedly un-tabby cat recently arrived, that believes it has rights on Moshi's yard, food & bed....Flo named him...though he is sometimes called "Sparkles", depending on her mood). Seriously, we came back from the park and he was asleep in Flo's bed while Moshi sat on the window sill and watched him! He'd already eaten her leftover breakfast....stupid cat!
Dancin' to the dub while we await CAKE!
"Look dad, I am a picture!"
Communing with the cats
Esmae is rowing the "boat" to America....Just did that Freeskilling thing about FOSS/Linux. It went very well...
...but...
...the 1st thing (apart from "Hello") said to me was "I saw you in purple spandex and green y-fronts the other week...dancing like a loon".
This may be my legacy.
I'm doing one of these here Freeskilling things tomorrow evening.
I'm really looking forward to it, but hoping it doesn't just turn into me ranting about closed/pay software (OK, I'll say it....MICROSOFT & APPLE), where Linux/FOSS lets us down (because it does in places)...I have some (hopefully) cool shit to show off and for people to use though:
Flo was off on one of her verbal diarrhea diatribes on Saturday evening...I couldn't get the video recorded fast enough to catch the beginning, but it began along the lines of "When I am bigger I am going to be a..."
Mr Oughton, this one's for you!
Just sayin' ;-)
oh shit...fuck this post!
I just remembered I can apparently run Doom on Chumby! Need to look into various FLV transcoders and I would LOVE to get BBC iplayer chumby widget!
Focus!
EDIT: Got Quake running on the Chumby last night :D
Friday night's Microrave at Carnyville was mind-blowing, as soon as Jen manages to get me some of her photos I'll post 'em.
It rocked!
Savagely!!
"Look at my chocolate beard dad!"
I managed to convince Flo to at least put some trousers on for dinner.
But it didn't last long...I had sushi and/or sashimi for breakfast, lunch and dinner today.
My stomach is currently making hilarious gurgling noises...
Something I feared would go terribly wrong today went 99% right, and that was before 10am! It has almost literally blown my mind! In my worst imaginings it's been like some kind of sci-fi "self-aware nanobots infecting your system" scenario (very Alastair Reynolds!)...but turns out, it worked!
Loads of other stuff is still fucked though...And I really need to fluff-out and prettify my "Duh-du-Duuuh 2010 Ideas!" thing tomorrow...I shall unplug everything except that document, my eyes, and my ipod. I will...I will...
Took Mosh for her checkup...all is well...came back to catch the "new little dude" cat eating her food...she later had a fight with "aggressive annoying cat" (aka 'Cheeky')...but it's nice to know there's a whole feline ecosystem going on...
On the way home (past Flo's "school") the teacher was putting up their contribution to the St Werburghs Art Trail...I stopped for a chat:
[blah, blah, pleasantries]
Teach: ...so we got them to do self-portraits...
Me: Hey, is Flo on there?
Teach: Oh. Yeah...she's next to her friend 'A'. Here...they got to...choose their...own..."look"...
Me: That's the best picture ever!
Teach: She wanted to have a big red nose apparently.
My "art" project got rejected a year ago....Flo wins by default!
:D
If I let Flo listen to TMBG it is officially morning, but if (as she just requested) I put a bit of Belle & Sebastian on she almost immediately goes to sleep.
She's right!
The new TMBG album seriously fucking rocks! And B&S are boring as fuck....but whatever works....works!
So. I cheered twice today. I literally shouted "Hooray" involuntarily on 2 occasions...
Remember the really sweary post from Friday? Well, guess what happened today? Well...
The agency sent someone round to look at the freezer. Yep, it is broken! But, they accepted my argument that rather than go through the long-winded process of me asking them to ask the landlord to get a new one (and the commensurate weeks without a freezer) I could by my own (probably better quality) and they'd amend the inventory.
Yay!*
Also, the fucktard that wouldn't increase my timeout? Seems that if I threaten to use a different proxy service, they can suddenly increase the timeout!! Who'd a thunk it?
On the minus side whatever the fuck was stuck under my P key of my AAO is now stuck under the O key...but that's just another reason for me to buy an Eee Keyboard PC when they come out next month. Which I'd be getting anyway because it will become the HTPC for the front room (streaming media off the NAS to the TV using it's wireless HDMI (how fucking cool is that)) so the Mini can replace TehBehemoth server...and TehBehemoth can go into the PC Recycling project stream....the upshot of which is my electricity bills should go down (not that there mental or anything).
This means "the gurinet" will get a general overhaul and should then be:
It was like summer this weekend!
Finally.
Flo and I went for a lovely walk through her kingdom in the morning and spent the afternoon messing around in the garden. She wore a summer dress....and I wore shorts and a t-shirt!
I made her a "laser gun" (CR2032 + RGB Flash LED == Laser Gun) here she is returning it to me for "safety, so Mushka can't kill you"...in her kingdom.Fucking fucking fucketty fuck!!!
I did not expect the volume...nor the dirty dirty noisez.
But I love them!
It started out quite simply...
But then leopard spots were added...
And then "claws covered in blood from where I killed a baby animal"...So. Ian and I finally got round to taking the girls to Cotswold Wildlife Park after saying we would do so for almost a year...couldn't have picked a better day for the weather, and despite my google based insistence that we basically "go to Winsworth (or something) and turn left" [turns out you can't really base a car journey on those kind of directions], we got there OK.
Apparently, Esmae was underwhelmed by it all but they certainly enjoyed it at the time. Flo insists that all Lemurs are called "King Julians", Es apparently knows "all the birds there are, so these just look a bit different"....Ian and I know that if you can stand the whining then Ice Cream promises are worth it in the end.
Here's some pictorial evidence...Pics or GTFO!!
Yeah, so. I have this blog, like, yeah? Where I write stuff like all the time, yeah? And I'm kinda religious about it, know what I mean? Not, Religious religious, like, regular religious?...Yeah, like ONCE A MONTH!! Like church, or... "The Visitor" or some shit, yeah?
Woah! Sorry about that, regression...terrible thing.
So. I haven't blogged for a while. Sorry about that.
Work's been busy. I've also been running round like a loon trying to solve some particularly tricky PC hardware issues for a freeconomist (and a new one tomorrow evening), reading a whole big bag of awesome new books and planning for the winter!*
Flo and I went down to Devon for her Birthday last weekend (favourite quote [day after her birthday]: "Dad? If it's not my birthday today, why are people still giving me presents?"). We had a brilliant weekend: "Hi Ma, Hi Pa...here is your grandaughter...I'll be reading my book in your comfiest chairs..."....Also, Rosemoor is almost as good as I remember the RSPB** when I were't'lad.
Also, MicroRave! I've been working on some lowly lo-fi hi-fi portable musical performance...I may well post up a mix for criticism next week (ha!)...Final plans for Level4 costume are crystalising also...I was going to list some spoilers but I may have to let the pictures speak for themselves! Let's just say it features spandex, a "cup", y-fronts and some moon boots. I got talked out of the adult nappy concept (quite easily, as it happens), but I do need a cape I think.
Stay tuned for the next exciting installment of...MEH!
Off to see either puppies or horses, I forget which...note this dress was the only thing she would wear for 3 days straight...same goes for Granny Jan's outfit. ;-)4.
Just let that number sink in a moment....4...Four...Fffooooooorrrrr....It's a pretty small number, right? Nothing like, oooh say 35, or even 25, 10, 7...or Planck's Constant (which is a cool number....well mexico!)...Nope. 4.
4.
So, yeah. Flo's 4 tomorrow. 4 years of shaky part-time parental skills on my part and she's still here*....and consistently more amazing than I'd ever dreamed she'd be! There seems to be some kind of logarithmic scale between the time she's been in my life and the joy and wonder (and LOVE) she brings.
I'm writing her a letter...It's too fucking good for you to read it!
That is all.
* My own abilities are obviously foreshadowed by her mum's...I'd be a fucking lunatic by now...wait....what?
...small minds...This is how I amuse myself....
I have no words...probably because I just cycled to Clifton via Easton and back...nothing to do with falling down some stairs and fending off "the youth of today"...maybe more about that another day....
30 seconds after entering the house after a week away...
...5 seconds after that...
Gotta love the ginger eyebrows!
"Up here dad!"
...are just that. Rumours.
Unless you follow me on twitcock or facebunch you may not know that Moshi was found. On Friday. In my nearest neighbour's "shed" (basically an outdoor wardrobe).
That cat owes me so much printer ink and a fuckton of handcramp from cutting out the ~1000 fliers I didn't use!
On the other hand, I have been running round like a loon for the past week or so. And will continue to do so for the rest of August, I fear....did you know France (yes, all of it) basically goes on holiday during August? I do...fuckers! I've also managed to revert to my studentesque style of procrastination with a "paper" I have to write...you know that "well, I've got 4 pages of notes. now to type it into 14 pages of awesome...oh look, [insert anything here and a 2 hour lack of focus]" feeling?
No?
Retard.
Moshi is MIA. Still!
Last time I saw her was Monday evening when I got back from work, after she'd had the minor "episode" at the weekend (see previous post). Another cat, Gilbert, has gone missing from the next street along...Have they eloped? Been catnapped? Is she trapped somewhere?*
I flyered my own and the 2 next streets this evening, but I wildly underestimated the number of flyers even though I thought 100 would be enough. It's crowded round here man, so many houses!
I learnt something though. I would fucking hate being a postman!
...No sign of multicoloured roadkill either (I went out on The Steed and checked)
BASTARD. CAT.**
Where am I?Oh, Hi! I'd forgotten about you, had you forgotten about me?
What the fuck is up with the local feline population? Moshi had one of her episodes* Friday evening and then wasn't to be seen until magically appearing fast asleep on a soft toy** in Flo's room at lunchtime, where she stayed until this morning. She's MIA again since, and so, apparently, is another local cat***.
Stupid cats.
Nothing interesting has happened other than:
I have to pass on huge props to Jen, Rose, Laurie, Logs & the MicroRave crew in general for a truly mind-blowing time....I was too busy enjoying it to take photos and a giant cardboard box on your head does not lend itself to using a camera (unless I build one into the next version!)...I give you my 500th post and "Doctor Roboto visits The Bit Pit!"
Odo = 38.6 Miles in 5 days. Longest Trip = 15 Miles. Max Speed in trip = 27.1 mph.
Grazes = 3. Cars annoyed = 40. Annoying cars = 35. MTBs overtaken = 8.
Fear of inbox = 100%.
Apart from the 3 day sojourn to Devon, where M&D helped out, it's been me & Flo against the world rain for the past week.
We did a lot, but here's some highlights.
Playmobil: Pirates vs Horses (and ubiquitous Fairy)
We went to look at the stream at the bottom of the lane...apparently it's now a lake (as are the fields either side of the road..."it's a beach!", Flo declared)
Hell'a'Yella!
Moar Yella....and proof it didn't always rain.
Flo was so excited to get into the wetsuit and in the water that nobody noticed it was on backwards...
and RAN!
