Category: Personal

It’s Snow Gone Now!

What weird weather we’ve been having! When we were forecast the worst snow for 18 years I was thinking, “Yeah right, it’ll all be gone in a day!”

It started snowing heavily Monday lunch time, and it was quite thick by the evening when we built a snowman in the back garden. There was a fine dusting of snow during that night, and by Wednesday it was all gone!

During Wednesday night it snowed again! And again Thursday night! Some places had up to a foot of snow!

Driving Thursday and Friday was hazardous, as no roads had been gritted, but the motorways had been ploughed.
There was also a lot of fuss about low grit and salt levels, with supplies in Bristol, South Gloucester, and BANES not having enough grit to grit all the roads, with reports that the supplies wouldn’t last till Monday!
It got so desperate that South Gloucester council had to use table salt instead of rock salt to grit the roads with!

Friday was the worst day of all, as the snow just settled on top of the snow left over from Wednesday night.
Friday was also the worst day for school closures, as all schools in South Gloucester and BANES were closed, as were most schools in Bristol.

During Saturday the snow stayed around, and conditions were icy.

Today (Sunday) it has been raining most of the day which has cleared all but the thickest deposits of ice and snow from the roads, but the forecast is for more snow for either tonight or Monday night.

I have posted some photos on Flickr, but I do have a few more to upload which I will do in the next couple of days.

News stories on the snow:
Heavy snow and low salt supplies may turn UK roads into ‘death traps’ – guardian.co.uk
In pictures: Snow in Bristol – BBC Bristol
Snow latest across the UK – BBC News
Where does road salt come from? – BBC News

From Mr. Peter Wong Executive Director of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd

This has just happened to me, I signed on to my Gmail account, and sitting in my spam folder was 12 emails sent to me from Mr. Peter Wong! All sent within four minutes of each other!

Here is his email in full:

Dear Friend, I am Mr. Peter Wong Executive Director of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd,HONG KONG. An Iraqi named Besem Faruak, a business man made a numbered fixed deposit of (126,336,8299.38 HK) for 18 calendar months, this is valued to Eight million United State Dollars only in my branch. Upon maturity several notice was sent to him, even during the war,four years ago (2005). Again after the war another notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later found out that Besem Faruak, and his family had been killed during the war in Gunfire that hit their home at Mukaradeeb where his personal oil well was. After further investigation it was also discovered that Besem Faruak,did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time we was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank. So, Eight million United State Dollars is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim it. What bothers me is that according to the laws of my country at the expiration five years six months the funds will revert to the ownership of the HONG KONG Government if nobody applies to claim the funds. My proposal, I am prepared to place you as the next of kin in a position to instruct HANG SENG BANK to release the deposit to you as the closest surviving relation. Upon receipt of the deposit, I am prepared to share the money with you in half. That is: I will simply nominate you as the next of kin and have them release the deposit to you. We share the percentage 50/50. I would have gone ahead to ask the funds be released to me, but that would have drawn a straight line in my involvement in claiming the deposite. I assure you that I could have the deposit released to you within a few days. I will simply inform the bank of the final closing of the file relating to Besem Faruak, I will then officially communicate with my Bank and instruct them to release the deposit to you. With these, all is done. I am aware of the consequences of this proposal.should be interested in executing this with me,indicate your interest by sending me the following: 1. YOUR NAME 2. YOUR RESIDENT ADDRESS 3. YOUR OCCUPATION 4. YOUR PHONE NUMBER 5. DATE OF BIRTH 6. COUNTRY OF RESIDENT Your response with the requested information should be sent to reach me at my personal email address below: peter_1wong (like I was going to give you his edres 😉) I shall then provide you with more details on this operation when I hear from you. Sincerely, Mr.peter wong [snqtrtkru2j]

That’s it! Complete with no line breaks what so ever!

I’ve had a couple of these email before, but none of them where this persistent and sent me 12 of them!
Interestingly, that string of random letters and numbers is different on each email!

It seems that Mr. Peter Wong has struck before using different email address and wording the email differently, but they all say that he’s from Heng Seng Bank Ltd, which is a genuine bank in Hong Kong

Details of Mr. Wong’s previous emails:
Mr. Peter Wong director of operations of the Hang Seng Bank Ltd..
Peter Wong, Hang Seng Bank, Hong Kong – Anti-Fraud International

Upgrades & Updates

Has it really been a month since my last post!?

Since then and now, Christmas and then the New Year has been and gone. All the turkey has gone and the Christmas chocolates have been eaten, and the last few Christmas nibbles and pickles are still being shared around!

My sister has moved out and is renting a place with her boyfriend. We’ve not noticed much difference, because before she was hardly home anyway!

 
Last week my trusty 17 inch monitor gave up the ghost, so I had to make do with an old CRT while my new 19 inch wide screen monitor was delivered. Interestingly, the screen is just a little shorter than the old one, but boy, does the width make a difference! 1440×900 pixels baby!

Also, after a forced upgrade to my monitor, I also decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my operating system. I went from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10 in a matter of two days!

After going down the doomed upgrade current installation path, I then tried the old delete-it-and-install-a-fresh route, and it worked!

But like all new things there were teething problems, I would loose network connectivity if I tried to assign a static IP address, but I had no problems getting onto the Internet if I used a dynamic IP address. I found a solution on the Fedora forum, which didn’t work, but I did find a solution that works.

I had another problem with Firefox, or more specifically with Fast Dial. When getting a website preview, it would cause the whole system to just hang.

My problem with Pidgin was solved by setting my public IP address, or I could of solved it by configuring a STUN server, strange how this didn’t affect the last version!

I still haven’t been about to mount CD’s, but I’ll work on that when I get more time, I just need to edit the fstab file, I don’t know why it wasn’t set automatically!

Other than that its been great, KDE 4 looks and works great, I’m still getting used to the changes, the main menu set up is a little weird, but it’s cool!

I have a spare partition on the hard drive which I was going to install Windows XP, but I might install another distribution I was looking at, Foresight Linux.

 
I have also updated my website, last year in December I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.7, and moved a few things around so that (eventually) the whole website (will) run on WordPress. The only two pages not currently running on WordPress is links and photos.

I have also updated the design, but there’s still a couple of areas that I need to sort out, like the home page, comments and the footer, but, overall I think the design is all finished, it’s not a complete redesign, but I think that it improves the overall look and feel of my site.

Transfer of Domains

This past week I have been trying to transfer both of my domains away from Lycos and to a new provider.

I found a new provider, OVH, its a French company, but at least they do have an English website, and I know a few other people who have their domains with them.

I checked all information was correct with my domains, and I unlocked them so I could transfer them out.

I signed up with OVH last Tuesday, and asked Lycos to change the registrar tag.

On Monday I received an email saying that my domain roganty.co.uk had been transferred, that’s one down, one to go!

Today, and still no news on linux-links.co.uk.

I emailed OVH asking what email address was associated with linux-links.co.uk, and it was a Lycos email address.
I have emailed both OVH and Lycos, and now I am just waiting to see what happens.

Aside from waiting, I have been quite busy, mainly with work, but I have been making some changes to my website, the main one is having it all powered by WordPress instead of just the blog.

Fireworks in the Rain

Ok, the rain’s falling harder now, but about an hour ago there was still firework’s being let off!

Edit

The rains stopped, and the fireworks have started up again! We’ve got two houses at the back of us letting them off!

Message in a Bottle

This weekend my dad lifted up the steps from where the greenhouse used to stand, and found a message in a bottle that I put there when the greenhouse was put up

Here is the message, reproduced with bad grammar and spelling mistakes!

DATE: SUNDAY 9th AUGUST

HELLO,
My name is Anthony Rogers and I live(d) here with my sister (B****), mum (C******) and Dad (K**). I’m 13 years old and I have one Rat called Clover My sister has a pet Hampster called Harry.
I have had two other pets called Milky and Coco (Mice) and an adopted one called Hercules (also a mouse). My Sister and mum both have horses called Merlin and Chance (My sister has had two others called Brandy (2nd) Sox/Socks(1st).
I have brown eyes and dark brown hair and I was born 3rd May 1985.
When I’m older I plan to be an artist
From
Anthony Rogers

I didn’t write the year on the message, but from my calculations it looks to be from 1998.

The message was put inside a plastic wallet and then rolled up and secured with an elastic band. It was then put inside an old tomato ketchup bottle.
The metal lid had rusted, and the outside of the glass was cloudy, but the paper had survived with slight browning in a couple of places!

Now, what should I do with the message? Put a new one in the bottle and bury it again?

Has anyone noticed?

Lol if anyone is subscribed to my blog, then you may of recently received about 144 new emails from this blog.
That’s because when I imported all my posts in to my blog, I forgot to disable the Subscribe2 plugin!

Of course why!?
I have moved hosting, I am now no longer hosting my website and blog on Lycos webhosting, I have moved to Hostgator!

I was with Lycos for about six years, and three of them was using Tripod, Lycos free hosting!
I have been meaning to move hosts for a while now.

I have had no trouble with the service provided by Lycos, and the times I have had to contact their support I got quick answers!
But, there was some limitations with the way the server and PHP were setup.
For example, to get my blog working correctly I had to have two additional plugins. One of them changed the default compact WordPress rewrite rules to the verbose type.
And the second was to disable canonical redirects. The server was setting an incorrect $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] value, which sometimes caused some pages to time out with constant redirects.

I contacted their support staff and they said that they were unable to support a 3rd party product.
I installed their One Click Site install of WordPress, but it was version 2.3.2, which doesn’t suffer from the same problem. They told me that they had no plans to upgrade their version of WordPress.

I can’t remember where I heard about Hostgator, but so far its been good!
The control panel is a little confusing, but that’s only because I’m not used to it yet.
They allow you to have multiple databases, so I have separate databases for my blog, website, and linux-links.
I went with their baby package, which still works out cheaper than Lycos.

And the best bit!?
I have been able to ditch the two plugin’s, and all parts of my blog still work!
But I am still using Lycos to serve my domain’s from.

Toothache gone!

It had to happen! After posting about having toothache, it was gone the next day!

When I went to bed that night it wasn’t that bad, and in the morning it was all but gone!

I can’t see if anything has emerged, so I haven’t got any wiser! Lol!

Aww! Toothache!

Since Sunday I’ve had toothache! And I’ve been regularly topping myself with paracetamol 🙂 lol!

I believe it is one of my wisdom teeth, I didn’t realise I had any wisdom! Lol!

The pain goes down to the bottom of my jaw, and it hurts if I open my mouth too wide, and swallowing is a different story altogether! Lol!

I’m so glad for paracetamol!