Category: Life: Personal

After my earlier sale of 35 CDs via Ebay (I sold them for £19 – but since I only charged £3.54 for P+P and it eventually cost £6.16 to send, I lost a little bit), I’ve got a brand new sale on Ebay.

Yep, now available on Ebay are a further 15 Top Brand name Original CDs for you to purchase. I’ve even included a “Buy It Now” option to enable you to purchase the whole lot for £30 if you hurry.

With a low reserve price – why don’t you make a bid on such a bargain? 15 top performers (the total collection has a price of nearly £60 on Amazon) at a low low price – you can surely afford to place a bid (if only to buy it to keep me in food).

Happy New Year everyone! Just before the stroke of midnight I called my Mum to wish her Happy New Year (the rest of my family were either out or in bed asleep) – and, whilst doing so, I tried to send an SMS/text message to my GESF.

Silly me! I’ve been taught about the mobile phone/cellphone network system and its operation over many years (I think my first lecture about how the UK mobile phone network operates was given to me over 10 years ago) and my knowledge about the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network: i.e. the “normal landline” system) should have reminded me of something. From 11.45pm to approximately 1.30am on New Years Eve/Day is one of the busiest times for the networks (“Mothers Day” is one of the other ‘big’ days when telephone network congestion is usually at the highest). If you think that the whole network of transceivers that the mobile phone network uses has been based on the assumption that no more than X number of phones will be using each one at any time – and then you get a whole load of people trying to send messages/make calls at the same time period, then the system begins to fail. If I remember correctly during Christmas/New Year 1998 one British mobile phone network nearly completely failed and engineers had to be called out to a few transmitter points to manually bring them up. 2000 resulted in the networks being practically unusable for around 3 hours.

Neil’s post gave me the idea to do a ‘Year In Review’ summary, so here’s what 2002 presented me with:

• A year truly living on my own (as my fiancee and I split up in Autumn the previous year therefore I’ve been mainly living on my own)
• Got a brand new PC (complete with new printer and DVD drive) to replace my ageing StrongArm RISC PC
• Got really “mentally” messed around by two women
• Had a lodger, she stole a considerable amount of money from me, then she left without even paying any rent (I’m still trying to pursue this)
• Been forced to purchase a dedicated server (from Positive Internet) as my other sites were generating too much traffic for a shared server option
• Met quite a number of ODP editors in Birmingham and (a few weeks later on my birthday) met a few more in London.
• Met my GESF after around 3 months chatting on the Internet (it was 2 months before we even spoke) and really enjoyed spending those 4 days with her
• Lost my job and still haven’t managed to find a new one
• Started a journal over at Slashdot, got fed up of the inflexibility of it and so installed Movable Type and started running my own weblog/blog
• Received lots of spam (over 1,500 a day at one point)
• and Sold my first things on Ebay and Amazon marketplace

Not the most exciting or “best” year (especially losing my job bit), but I suppose it could have been worse.

This coming year? Well, I’m still not sure if I’m going to go out and celebrate it or not (I’m still in my pyjamas/PJ’s and I’ve only nipped downstairs once to pick up the post) – hopefully I’ll also get a good local job (I’ve applied to a local company and I think I fit the job description perfectly, but I’ve got to wait to hear back), spend a lot more time with my GESF (if she wants to – see my Monday night ramblings for why I’m a little bit scared/uncertain), get the house and garden tidied up a bit more and just be happy. Well – that’s the plan…

[Originally posted at 04:07am, Revised at 05.30pm]
When I originally wrote this entry, I was slightly drunk, tired and just wanted to have a ramble – so read it if you want 🙂

Anyways, I’ve just been downstairs eating dinner: 800g (1.76lbs in “proper weights”) of Turkey breast joint, veggies (canned carrots, sweetcorn and peas), mashed potato (Smash instant mash to be exact) and gravy. Quite filling – even after I spilt a little over the sofa (trying to get the meat off the bone) oops!

It was the first “proper” meal I’ve had for nearly a week: I’ve been mainly “snacking” – I think the pizza I had on Sunday night was the largest meal since Crimbo day. But I suppose once all the chocolates have run out (already munched through a 400g/0.88lb box of Mars Maltesers, nearly finished a tub of 461g/1.02lb Cadbury’s Heroes and some Elizabeth Shaw chocolate mints).

Well, Christmas is finally on it’s way! On Saturday, I received my first 3 Christmas cards: one from my Parents (which was a wide rectangular one with ‘beads’ and ‘cut-out’ effects on the front), one from my Uncle and Auntie and a quite cute Giraffe one from The Positive Internet Company (who also have a fun Shockwave Flash game where you’ve got to help a long-necked quadruped land on a ski-jump target with the help of a penguin and a buffalo).

This morning, I received two more cards – one very impersonal one from Telecity (the one from Positive Internet was ‘signed’ by all the staff there: the Telecity one didn’t even have a single human name on it) and the one sent to me by my GESF. It’s a very nice Winnie the Pooh card with Pooh and Piglet sitting in front of a Christmas tree with stars/snowflakes falling around them (it’s actually the picture for this blog entry: the text at the bottom says “little stars glow bright like candle light.”).

Only thing is, it was posted by First Class post last Monday (the 16th), actually postmarked 17th December (7pm) and arrived this morning – nearly a complete week after posting (since it wasn’t posted until around 3pm, but arrived around 8.30am). 7 days for a “First Class” item is currently the record – previously it was 6 days, but looking at an article on BBC News it appears that I’m not the only person that may be loosing faith in the British Royal Mail postal service (currently a monopoly here for “letters and small packages”).