Today Pub Night Council are off on a pub crawl round Gloucester. We are only planning to do a handful of pubs, but those we have picked have a wide range of ales – which is more important than the number of pubs as far as we are concerned.
Author: Steve
Combining blogs
Well today I decided to pull over all my old posts from the blog on Camsigh.
Using the export and import features of WordPress made it a breeze.
Now all I have to do is go through all the posts, remove a few that are now redundant, put each post into the correct categories and then tag the posts with appropriate tags.
Colds and stuff
Well after the trip on the boat last weekend I went down will the mother of all colds. I was OK on Tuesday but by the time Wednesday rolled out I was feeing stuffed up and my throat was hurting.
Woke up on Thursday morning feeling like a train wreck : tonsils all inflamed, no voice, stinking headache, hot and cold sweats – the works. Spent half of the day asleep. Went to bed early and got up on Friday still feeling pretty ropey and all sweaty and clammy.
It seemed a shame to waste the weekend – its the first good one we’ve had for a bit and so many things needed doing: the front lawn needed mowing and there was stuff to do round the house but frankly I just didn’t have any enthusiasm.
Last night we went out to celebrate Richard’s Birthday – started with drinks at Laze Daze and ended up with a curry at Mahek’s which has become, amongst our friends, the favourite place to go for a curry.
A few days on the boat
Well if all goes to plan we are off to the boat on Thursday night for a few “relaxing” days away from work. I say relaxing because we haven’t quite decided how much to push. If the weather is lousy too hot me might not go far, if the weather conditions are just right then we’ll push on a bit.
Smokey is coming with us as are Bandit and Pixie because we can’t leave Smokey at home by herself due to her diet and Bandit and Pixie would just reduce the house to a complete wreck if we left them for 4 days.
Here’s a picture of Bandit and Pixie looking innocent:
Cable
When we first moved into the house back in 2002 there was a Telewest cable installation. We had it re-activated and used it for a bit. When we came to re-arrange the living room we asked Telewest how much it would cost to move the isolator box. They told us it would cost approx £100.
So we told them where to go and moved to Sky.
Sky installed the dish and everything was OK. Then over time the picture deteriorated. Sky came out and looked at the install – their response was basically “which idiot installed this – the dish is in the wrong place and the cable run is all wrong”. It was all ripped out and re-installed with the dish wedged right under the eaves and the picture got better.
That was a couple of years ago and the picture slowly deteriorated – blacks got very pixellated, signal went whenever it rained heavily, box kept crashing and rebooting.
So we ‘ve moved back to cable ((and having been told that I was “cutting off my nose to spite my face” by Sky I’ve no intention of ever using their services again)) … picture quality is spot on – no pixellation of blacks, no visible artifacts…. bliss.
We’ll probably take the dish and the box and see how well it works on the boat… will give better reception than the aerial! 😉
Smokey – a cat on a diet
This is Smokey – a middle aged Manx cat.
Smokey’s lifestyle seems to be based on that of Bagpuss and she loves nothing more to lie around all day doing nothing except eat, sleep and, of course fluff!
Anyway she was a bit overweight – OK so she was a lot overweight, like overweight by a couple of Kilos.
Today I took her along to her regular monthly weight check in out at the vets and she’s now under 5Kg : weighing in at a mere 4.9Kg.
The photo above was taken when I lived in my flat – which means its at least 5 years old now. She put on weight after that photo but now she’s much more svelte and I suspect she now weighs less than she did when the photo was taken.
Updated:
Here is a recent photo, taken when she reached her “target” weight:
Shes now decided that my side of the bed is one of the comfiest places to lie. The other is, believe it or not, on the back of the chair (often when I’m sitting in it)
Can there be too many Online Fora?
Over the weekend, when I was moving the boat, I was sitting on the back deck thinking about a lot of things. Camsigh has gone quiet over the past couple of years, and other boards that I’m signed up to such as Ghostly Stay , PhantomFest and Café Phoenixx all seem to have similar cycles – a flurry of postings and then it all goes quiet for a bit, then some more come along and then it goes quiet again.
So why should this be? Is it part of the normal cycle that forums go through or is there something else happening?
I think its the latter – When I set Camsigh up back in January 2004 the only way to get a forum was to either pay for one or run your own server (either from a hosting company or if you were really sad – yourself) and run a forum on there.
Then along came proboards, myfreeforums etc. etc. and the “free” forums phenomena took off. Running costs are recovered through the placing of adverts (over which you have no control) but in return for that you get a good uptime, a responsive server and it would seem some pretty good anti-spam measures.
So now there is a forum for everything – a forum for bunion sufferers, a forum for people who collect pictures of buses, a forum for every conspiracy you could ever imagine (and then a few more). The list goes on and on, it is endless. The Internet is full of forums.
But something is going on with these free forums. Running this site and doing admin on a few others there is a rising level of spam advertising forums (hosted on various free forum sites). These forums aren’t real forums – they contain nothing but a URL redirect to another site which will then try to sell you dodgy drugs, iffy insurance, or manky mortgages. These sites bring no money into the coffers of the companies hosting the forums and give the scam merchants yet another marketing vector. Sooner or later the free forum hosters will have to clamp down on the processes needed to create a forum and put more stringent controls in to stop their services from being abused.
Of course the spammers are well ahead of the game – they are now spamming free Blog services which they using in a similar way to the way they abuse forums.
So who knows what will happen – maybe a couple of free forum providers will go down the tubes, maybe users of the forums will get sick and fed up of the continual stream of spam being forced down their throats.
The Web should be a great place for people to learn, to communicate, to share. But the problem is that the spammers just don’t give a shit : they don’t care who they annoy, who they abuse, who they peddle their shit to. They have no morals at all – I’m sure they spam cancer support forums and such like with their odious filth.
Of course the spammers are just doing what they have been paid to do. At the end of the day its people like Visa and MasterCard who could put a stop to a lot of it. If they refused to do business with companies who spam or who deal in products like “Generic” counterfeit drugs then the money flow would stop. Mind you it would stop if people out there actually stopped believing the crap they are being spammed with.
Was it all Worth it?
Well I sat down the other day and decided that I wasn’t happy with how Camsigh looked. I’d bolted a Blog mod onto the PHPBB forum and it was having problems with spammers and the code was rather messy. I’d also got functionality in the main board that I didn’t actually use – basically because it had been superceded by RSS feeds.
So I looked around and found that I liked WordPress and someone actually did a plug in that integrated it into PHPBB.
So some hacking around of WordPress and PHPBB and some tidying up and it all looked good.
To finish it all off I moved the board. Camsigh had been sitting in /board/ on one of my domains and I wanted to tidy things up so I registered another domain through DynDNS and made the appropriate adjustments inside the Board to get it working. I then put a rewrite command in the .htaccess file in the original directory to do forced re-writes to the new domain. Finally as I’d been doing all the reconfiguration work in a new database I had to export the user posts and private messages, search and replace any domain references (I use a PHPBB mod that allows you to upload and insert pictures) which had got buried in the posts.
Did I say that was it? Well it wasn’t: I then moved the posts from the old Blogging system into WordPress. Its not 100% correct but its near enough. There also seem to be a few navigational issues… which I’m looking into
Ahhhh – Life Returns to Normal
Well life in Cheltenham returns to normal. All the race goers who piled into town for the Gold Cup have now left, or are in the process of leaving. There were 52,000 for the first 3 days and 65,000 on the last day – still they had good weather for it, and I’m sure they had a good time. But I for one, am glad that they have gone.
The houses behind us are coming on at a speed so it will only be a couple more weeks before the excessive amount of light pushed out by the Sainsbury’s store, which currently lights our bedroom up like there is a full moon outside, is blocked by the new development.
PHPBB Mods – why the hell do we bother?
I’ve coded up a couple of mods for phpbb
and
The total down loads of these two mods is not huge but its not zero.
There was a bug in the Registration Variable MOD that no-one noticed.. or if they did notice they didn’t think to tell me.
If I download a MOD, especially a new one, I always try to comment on it, even if there aren’t any problems.
The people running PHPBB are wondering why people aren’t submitting MODS to their MODS database.
I suspect the answer is apathy. A lot of mods are coded up by people because they want to fix a specific problem or add a specific feature to their board. As an act of goodwill they release the change as a mod so that others can benefit. Those others take that code and then don’t bother getting back to the author if there are bugs or obvious enhancements.
Maybe its about time a lot of people using PHPBB put something back into the PHPBB community rather than just leaching off it all the time.