Ventnor Beach.
The Needles. After taking this photo, we walked round to the old Battery (the building you can see on the top of the headland). However, by that time, the mist had come in, and visibility was lost.
When these little fellas turn and stare right at you, you can feel their eyes boring into you. Terrifying.
Lunch, obtained from the seafront at Sandown.
These words, “Windows XP won’t boot after replacing motherboard”, were what I repeatedly typed into [Google][] many many times, with slight variations (such as replacing “replacing” with “new” etc etc). I had replaced my computer’s motherboard with something rather different, and though my Ubuntu Linux installation was booting fine, Windows XP wouldn’t work. I’d get the following messages from [GRUB][], as usual, and then it would freeze.
[google]: http://www.google.com/
[grub]: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
Not a major problem – I only ever used Windows for playing games, and even that wasn’t frequently. I can’t really justify spending shedloads on a fancy 3D graphics card, so the games in question tend to be things like the original [Half-Life][], [Max Payne][], and [Worms 2][].
[half-life]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000B8U0YC/
[max payne]: http://www.rockstargames.com/maxpayne/
[worms 2]: http://www.worms2.com/
Most of the responses that I got were “Make sure that you have enabled LBA in the BIOS” but I knew that this couldn’t be the solution, as I’d already tried that.
Or… had I?
It seems that I had made some major mistake, most likely only enabling LBA for my master hard drive, and not for the slave drive. For when I was at my wit’s end, contemplating completely reinstalling Windows, it struck me like a lightning bolt. I tried it… and… success!
Four jobs you’ve had in your life:
Four movies you could watch over and over:
Over and over, eh? Well, here are four movies that I like quite a lot. Not sure about “over and over” though.
Four places you’ve lived:
Four TV shows you love to watch:
Oh stop it with the unnecessarily passionate language. No-one really “loves” to watch TV shows, do they?
Four places you’ve been on vacation:
Four websites you visit daily:
Four of your favorite foods:
Four places you’d rather be:
Four albums you can’t live without:
You’re doing it again. Stop it. I like these four, but I would find a way to soldier on if for some reason they were taken from me, never to return. Get some perspective.
Four magazines you read:
I can’t tell whether this is “read” in the present tense or past tense. So I’m opting for the latter, otherwise my answer would be a bit short. I’m also assuming that it is specifically asking about paper-based periodicals.
Four cars you’ve owned:
This survey seems to be aimed at people who have either been driving for a long time, or are quite bad at it. I’ve taken a liberty with number four.
Four people to do this meme:
What do you think I am? Some sort of clairvoyant? Stuff off.
Hormones are funny things, when you’re a pregnant mother-to-be. Karen goes from jubilation to paranoia at the drop of a hat. The jubilation bit is great, of course – I just went into the kitchen, where she proudly declared “I yam making biscuits!” – and I suppose that the bad times just have to be endured. There’s not really much that either of us can do about it, apart from hold tight and hope that it passes sooner rather than later. Generally I find that putting her to bed works quite well too.
All this being said, I think that I detect slight improvement. She is, as I may have mentioned, very worried that the entire pregnancy will be as uncomfortable as these first three months, when she had been “promised” by various literature that the worst should have passed by now. At risk of tempting fate, things do look marginally better with each day that passes.
Yesterday, and I apologise for any gruesome details that you may not wish to hear, as she dressed, I asked her why she was using a sanitary towel. She shyly looked to her feet, and explained that due to various factors, a pregnant woman suffers a slight loss of bladder control, which can result in a small mishap accompanying any coughing that may occur.
I, naturally, am finding great sport in asking “Did you…?” each time she coughs. I got a really painful pinch on the arm yesterday, as a result. But I am not going to stop. Hoh no. Too much fun.
*There was a young dragon
Who lived in a pea
And wore bifocal lenses
To help him to see*
They say that a picture speaks a thousand words. These thousand words are a few weeks old, but I think that there is enough in there to get the rough jist of the message across.
I hear you cry, “does this signal a return to blogging for the Uborka couple?!?”
Well, you’ll have to wait and see. Happy 2006 everyone, by the way.
We need to formalise something. You, me, and the rest of the world.
Okay, so we’ve got Christmas. That’s all well and good – there’s the present-giving, and the Pagan roots, and let’s be generous and say that it runs from the 24th to the 26th, and let’s tie a little bow round that and put it to one side.
And then we’ve got New Year’s, and that runs from the 31st December to the 1st January, being, as it is, comprised of “New Year’s Eve” and “New Year’s Day”.
But for some reason, that’s not enough for us, and they are so close together that we have a tendency to adopt that mentality that one gets when one is ten minutes away from close of business, where you think “well, that’s not long enough to do anything worthwhile in. I’ll just kill time for a bit.”
Take, for example, my local gym and swimnasium. For some reason, they’ve plucked some random opening times out of their arses, printed them out on a piece of paper and slapped it up on the door, and considered that to be a suitable solution. At any other time of the year, it would not be tolerated if a business spent a week opening and closing at peculiar times.
So here’s what I propose. We need to close the gap to something a bit more workable.
Scoop up all the National Holidays from the rest of the year and use them to fill in the space between the 26th and 31st December, like a kind of solar grout. Everywhere is closed, and if you didn’t stock up properly on lentils and other pulses, you’re fucked.
Shunt Christmas a bit later, and New Years a bit earlier. I know it sounds madness to interfere with tradition, but why not? We all accept that we don’t know exactly when Jesus was crucified, other than “it was a Friday” so we move Easter around within a 4-week period. But for some reason, our knowledge that Jesus was probably born sometime in March means that we have to celebrate his birth on the 25th December?
In fact, I’m going to set the ball rolling on this one. I’m going to stop celebrating my birthday on the xth of August, and instead celebrate it sometime between the 1st and 5th of May. Let’s see if Jesus can follow suit.
Change the calendar. If all 12 months had 27 days, then we could have Christmas on the 25th, Boxing Day on the 26th, New Year’s Eve on the 27th and then New Year’s Day on the 1st January. The only downside to this is that 12 months at 27 days each only gives us 324 days, so we’d need to add a new month, called Plongbrambler, with 41 days in it. February would then have 28 days in Leap Years.
Anyone with an existing birthday on the 28th to 31st of the Month would then get to choose a random day in Plongbrambler to celebrate their birthday on. Plongbrambler would be slotted in somewhere in summer, so that we can all go off on our summer holidays and not be forced to buy presents for those annoying gits with birthdays in Plongbrambler.
Stop slacking. You’ve got two holidays on that side, and one holiday on the other. Who the hell do you think you are, you lazy sod, shirking your duties and expecting someone else to foot the bill (or, in my case, walk all the way round to the gym only to find it in darkness, and subsequently have to walk straight back again)?
Holidays are great. Holiday Seasons make me want to stub a cigarette out in a squirrel’s face.
Karen is having a hard time dealing with the various symptoms of pregnancy. She’s still suffering from morning sickness, and has decided that this means that it will continue for the next six months. I can understand why this worries her – it can’t be very pleasant. However, at least now we’ve told everyone, there’s no need to tiptoe around – if she needs to run off to barf, no-one’s going to hold it against her.
She’s enjoying shopping for maternity clothes and other such nesting activities. If we owned our own palace, I’m sure that I’d be decorating the nursery right about now, but as we are renting a house I find myself twiddling my thumbs trying to think of something productive to do. I draw a blank, and do the washing up instead, irrespective of how small the pile of dirties is.
She’s also a bit hormonal at times, which can be hard work, as I’m never quite sure what her mood is going to do next. It keeps me on my toes, but I can take it.
Telling the families at Christmas was about as much fun as could be expected. We had it all planned out, with champagne corks popping and hurrahs, but inevitably circumstances would leap up and everything would go topsy turvy. I dunno, I’m not really the centre-of-attention sort – I don’t like being asked all sorts of dumb questions. And the inevitable moment where everyone has said “Congratulations” but can’t think of what to say next… gah. Thank God it’s over.
I’ve tried talking to the bump, but I can’t really think of what to say. I can imagine the little foetus in there, tapping its toe, grumbling “Come on, quit it with all the baby talk. Say something worthwhile, or shut the fuck up.” Perhaps I should grab a good book and read it stories.
It’s been a good year for music, but I’m struggling to put together a “Top 10 albums of 2005” list, for the following reasons.
Firstly, lots of albums which I would have wanted to put on the list were actually released in 2004 or sooner, and I felt that including them would be dishonourable.
Secondly, there are a few albums which I haven’t really listened to enough to be certain of my opinion, so trying to slot them into the order would be hit and miss.
So I’ve decided to make a list of albums what I have liked, and very vaguely categorise them as follows:
**The Best**
* Arcade Fire – Funeral
* Rufus Wainwright – Want Two
* Hard-Fi – Stars Of CCTV
**The Good**
* Foo Fighters – In Your Honor
* Maximo Park – A Certain Trigger
* Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
* Elbow – Leaders Of The Free World
**The Rest**
* Beck – Guero
* Doves – Some Cities
* Franz Ferdinand – You Could Have It So Much Better
* Ben Folds – Songs for Silverman
Looking out of the window, it appears that the whole world is still on holiday. My car, and those of my co-workers, are alone in the car park which normally holds vehicles for half a dozen different companies.
Looking into my coffee, little white flecks of ugliness stare back at me, causing me to question exactly how long a life long-life milk is supposed to have. It possesses a slightly peculiar scent, but I try to show it that I am not scared.
A terrifying pile of email has been smote with my mighty delete key. I tidy the christmas detritus from my desk, and crack my metaphorical knuckles, poised to embark upon my tasks, in a very “last three working days of 2005” kind of way, whatever that may mean.
I take another sip of coffee, wince at the spiciness of the milk, and probe my brain to try and reawaken the memory of that exchange on Sunday where Nick and I decided what our New Years Resolutions were going to be. The curtain of beer outfoxes me yet again.