Press "Enter" to skip to content

Richy's Random Ramblings

TV: Cameron Won BB 2003

July 25, 2003
Leave a Comment

Cameron from Big BrotherWell, as expected and as you probably already know, Cameron Stout from the Orkneys (that’s oop in Scoutland) has managed to win £70,000 from the 2003 Channel 4 Big Brother UK TV show (Big Brother 4). Despite initially coming over as a bit boring in the early weeks (a 32 year old, virtually teetotal virgin Christian fisherman who took the Bible into the house to read – not someone you would think could provide good entertainment for 64 days), he’s really been enjoyable to watch and I wish him ever success in the future (PS: if you’re reading this Cameron, all donations are gratefully received).

I haven’t been “addicted” to the show, but I’ve tried to watch it every other night or so (even though my GESF keeps winding me up by saying I sound like the delectable Steph – I’m not from r-ddy Berminghumm).

Now the question is: Will Cameron and Steph Coldicutt (nee Smith) “get it together” (if Davina has anything to do with it they will)? How about Scott Turner and Nush (personally, I think this is unlikely) and will “Songs Of Praise” still be interested in Cameron even after the “Lisa’s Windpipe” comment?

Who knows? You decide 😉 (and I cannot do even a reasonable impression of Marcus Bentley – the narrator of BB 🙁 ).

To think, when Big Brother 2002 came to an end (with Kate Lawler winning), I was just meeting my GESF for the very first time….

Personal: Cat Must Love Me

July 24, 2003
Leave a Comment

Cat PresentAhhh, my puss cat must love me. Why else would she bring me a little present when I was relaxing and watching Big Brother last night. What a shame it was a LIVE mouse: but t’was a nice thought.

Actually, she walked in the back door – through the kitchen – with the mouse in her mouth. She then tried to go upstairs (but the door was shut) and then released the mouse and started “play chasing” with it: let it run a bit, catch it, swat it, wait for it to run and repeat. As soon as I realised what she was doing, I had to distract her whilst I got the mouse trapped in a container – then call Smokey for her dinner whilst I carefully slid some cardboard under the container so I could release the tiny brown mouse. It didn’t look hurt, but when Smokey was chasing it it would try and jump up around 6inches! However, it didn’t seem to look or act scared – it seemed resigned to just being a cat plaything.

Now if only Smokey just wouldn’t ignore all the proper toys I’ve got her…. Darn cats!

Guess That Movie: Scores So Far VI

July 24, 2003
Leave a Comment

Well, another round of images has graced us by, and things have begun to heat a little bit up on the Guess That Movie high score table. Kymberlie is still in the lead (and I now owe her £8.30 worth of Amazon gift vouchers: she’s gained an extra 830 points on top of the 1610 she’s already won!) – however, Angrad is getting quite close to being able to claim a prize as well. He’s got 395 points (two hundred for correctly recognising Murder By Death and Village Of the Damned and another 95 points for being the second person to guess at Aliens).

I was surprised at one point though – nobody managed to recognise SouthPark: Bigger Longer and Uncut within the time limit (i.e. all the points ran out due to time, even after I added a 48 hour extension worth 200 points!).

Anyway – I’ll drop Kymberlie an email tomorrow to let her know she’s won a prize (even though she’ll already know if she’s reading this) – and at the same time get the next image uploaded. I’m currently out of captured movie images so I’m going to have to get those screen shots grabbed again!

Congratulations all!

Techy: New Cpanel Server

July 24, 2003
1 Comment

Cpanel ScreenshotAt work, we’ve got a combination of Cpanel and Ensim Pro control panel based webservers (plus a proprietary system on our very old datacentre). My “personal” dedicated server just has plain Linux (Debian) on it and hosts around a dozen sites – but I’ve decided to go for a more easy to manage solution and I’ve chosen to purchase a brand new Red Hat Linux (I actually would have preferred Debian) server – complete with a whopping 700Gb bandwidth per month (I’m currently on just 40Gb) with Cpanel.

Why Cpanel? Well, Ensim tries to “control” your server a bit too much for my liking: you’ve got to be especially careful what you upgrade/install and if you make any changes to the Apache configuration by hand – then it can really screw things up (and the next restart of Ensim will mean it’ll try and “correct” your amendments). Cpanel, on the other hand, seems to act as a control panel should – it’ll allow me to go right in and forcible change settings without having to worry too much about it overriding my settings.

Plus, the whole system seems lot more “open” then Ensim’s compiled Python mess: which means if I feel like writing an extension to Cpanel, then I’m free to do so. And, it comes with some nifty “one click install” style items – I’ve disabled most of them, but at least if I ever want to have a quick play with – say OsCommerce – I won’t even have to bother loading an FTP client to upload the files! Oh – and it’s support of anti-spam systems looks perfect (my current real email/spam ratio is around 1:500 – yes, I get around 500 spams for every proper email! I deleted 3,500 of them so far today)

On the slightly negative side: I’m having real difficulties disabling FrontPage on the server. I absolutely detest that b–ardised system: it’s a little bit of a web design package, a little bit of “PHP/Perl scripting” and a strange FTP client all muddled together and pulled out incorrectly. FrontPage would have been so much better if it used standard FTP uploads and server admins didn’t have to worry about getting the darn FrontPage extensions to work correctly. 75%+ of our technical support calls are about FrontPage (but, to be fair, some of our customers are such numbskulls that I have to talk them through how to start FrontPage’s inbuilt help system: I wish I was joking 🙁 ).

Anyway, once I’ve got the new server stabilised and ready, I’m going to be moving everything to it – it’ll take me a while though as my current server has a few “exotic” settings made to it which I’ll need to take into account.

Blogging: Free MovableType Templates

July 23, 2003
2 Comments

Neils WorldCool, it appears the a certain ODP editor has decided to release the Movable Type designed template he uses on his blog as open source to download and use on your own site.

I must admit, for the last few days I’ve been tempted to “borrow” his site design (as it’s quite nice looking) but at least I can do it legally now 😉 I have already purchase some other web site templates to use on various websites, but unlike Mr.T, I’m not a designer. I can manipulate the design, but I just can’t get it to “feel right” to me – it doesn’t really help with Photoshop making “fixed layout” HTML instead of the dynamic flexible type. There’s still a chance they you may find that my blog could start looking like Neil’s 😀