Nicked from ifr

Pay It Forward meme: I will send a gift of some kind to the first 3* people who leave a comment to this post requesting to join this PIF exchange. I don’t know what that gift will be yet, but you will receive it within 365 days. The only thing you have to do in return is "pay it forward" by making a similar agreement on your blog.

Note: The "gift" you send doesn't have to be handmade or even concrete. It can be whatever.

Right, as the other who came before me have said I will try and send them out with a month instead of a year, I am a bit slack though so we'll see if I manage it or not.. :o)

Why do dogs love rolling in shit??

I now have a damp, sweet smelling and slightly pissed off dog sat in his bed chewing a bone..

The bathrooms trashed and I'm soaked to the skin..

I swear this is dejavu though.. Feels like only yesterday I had this battle, complete with comedy dog splayed across the shower door refusing to go in..

Oh wait.. it was..

If he does it tomorrow he's having a bath instead, along with a bag and a brick..

Spit-Taker Sought

I am in need of someone to accompany me constantly.You will hold a beverage (milk preferred) and occasionally sip from it.When I make a joke or off-color comment you will expel the beverage in a fine misty spray from your mouth. I am a busy executive and mediapersonality so you must be willing to travel. Resumes should be sentvia hotbovine, or directly to Mike Wallace c/o CBS News.

I'm guessing it may be a different Mike Wallace to the one I'm thinking of?

Why, when he's full of noxious gas, does Henry insist on sleeping under my desk?! 

Think I'm gonna throw up, its like agent orange or something, making my eyes water..

*

Anywho.. Reason I'm posting..

Happy Birthday jen!!!

You're amazing and an inspiration to all of us on your friends list..

Oh.. and you're old.. :oP

I had an interesting drive home yesterday afternoon.. I'd been to visit my Grandparents as it was my Grandads birthday..  I was in a contented mood so just pottering along came around a corner doing 40-45mph when "Splash" I found myself in a river..

You'll have to excuse the quality of the pictures as I only had my phone with me..

This first puddle that I hit was about a foot and a half deep.. You can just about see the 4x4 going through is in deep.. I was in it before I knew what was happening and just had to keep going, got through it fine though..

The road to the left where the Landrover is parked was just one massive river rolling down from the hills above..

The few cars that came through were all 4x4's for a bit..




This is the river/road where the water was flooding down from its already dropped considerably in the time it took me to park up and get out to take photos..




All this crap was washed out over the road by the force of the water coming down.. To the left is another junction and when I looked down there the road takes a serious dip and looked to be about 5 foot under water..
The car you can see had already come through the flood behind me and broken down, he'd got his engine started again but didn't want to drive through the floods again.. I drove past, talked to him then went round the corner to find a massive lake instead of road.. Game for a laugh and as there was a a landrover nearby I went through.. The water was washing over my bonnet and lapping at my windscreen, it was crazy!!




The policeman who turned up on the far side of the floods was quite impressed I'd gone through.. I'm still praising the day I bought my car, a toyota corolla 4wd estate.. Its rescued me so many times now.. I've driven it through several massive floods, over fallen trees, out of muddy glastonbury car parks, up hillsides with caravans on the back, through snow drifts.. People keep telling me I shouldn't get a proper 4x4 but yesterday has sealed it for me.. I'm getting a Landy, I'll just go and drag people out of puddles to justify it..

I defintely think our weathers getting  weirder and more random though.. I've not seen floods like this ever, and the storms we had last summer were odd too..

Someone lend me a grand for this..

Inspired by ruralrob's daily dose of photographic wonderment I've just pulled a couple of images I've not posted before out of the 10gb of unorganised chaos I have stashed..

I've not been putting up many photo's lately.. Partly because I'm very slack and partly because I appear to have broken my camera.. It just doesn't seem to focus properly and I'm driving myself nuts with blurry images..

Time to buy that Digital SLR I've been promising myself I guess..

Any of you photographer types recommend a camera? I currently use a Fuji S5500 and I'm thinking of getting a Canon or Nikon.. Any tips?

Hallelujah!!

Well, apart from feeling slightly like throwing up because I got up early, things are good..  The BT engineer came and swapped my line over.. I now have a completely different line all the way from my house to the exchange..

My broadband is now at 2meg!! And its only at that because my IP profile is stuck on that. Come monday when the BT guys are back in the office it should go up to around 4mb hopefully.. At least thats what the stats on my router are telling me at the moment..

Anythings better than being stuck on 250kbps (or even 135 kbps for a bit)

So there you go, with two months of gentle cajolling and persuasion you too could have the broadband service your paying for..  And it turns out it wasn't oranges fault too! Go figure..

Right.. Now I have 2.5 months worth of YouTube to catch up on..


( Starting here.. )

Well.. Still haven't got round to that Glastonbury post.. Don't know that I ever will either.. I'm being my usual slack self at posting lately..

Jen insists I tell you about one of the things that happened while I was at Glasto though so here goes..

As I was working doing security at this years Glastonbury I had the added bonus of a Red Wristband. Although I didn't realise it at first this was an Access All Areas wristband and combined with my security wristband got me in to places that the general public never get to see at the festival. I took full advantage of this and went backstage all over the place and had a good nosy around.. On the saturday evening I ditched my mates after seeing a local band from dartington college, Sellors and the Scientists.. I was off to see DJ Yoda in the dance field and I wasn't going to let anything get in my way.. I've been a huge fan of DJ Yoda for a while now.. I'm not hugely into dance stuff and would normally avoid the dance fields like the plague but this was one exception I was willing to make.. So anyway, I headed over early to get a good spot.  After acquiring a bit of food (giant yorkshire pudding, roast pork, peas n gravy) and a cuppa I wandered back stage and sat in the canteen there nursing yet another cup of tea.. The bloke next to me struck up a conversation asking how I was enjoying the festival so far and what I was up to. I told him about the security work I'd been doing and some tales of things I'd seen so far. He asked what I was up to next and I told him I was waiting around to catch DJ Yoda who I looooove and desperately wanted to finally see, telling him all about DJ yoda and how great he is, etc.. All the time I'd been talking to him I'd had a nagging feeling that there was something familiar about him and it was as I told him this last bit that it suddenly dawned on me..

"Actually, you look a bit like.. you're not.. are you.. you're.. DJ.. Yoda?"

"Well, yes.. I would look a bit like him actually", said the chap.. "As I am DJ Yoda.."

"Argh.. I'm a twat! I can't believe I've been raving on about DJ Yoda to DJ Yoda!"

"Yup, pretty much.."

And the worst thing.. After making a twat of myself I was too chicken to ask him for his autograph.. He was really sound too and said he'd catch me later if I was around but he had to go and get ready for his set.. Which, by the way, was absolutely "banging" as the youths say..

So anyway, I hope you're happy Jen..


*

Today I have been waiting for my third BT engineer this week to come out.. I've been meaning to post about this.. Finally after 2 and a half months I was able to get Orange Broadband to instruct BT to send an engineer out..

The first BT engineer came out the other day and after a quick bit of testing told me my line was fine and I should be achieving 5-6mb on my line and I need to contact orange.. I called orange after he left and after a bit of checking they told me BT wanted to send another engineer out as there was a fault with my line..

The second BT engineer came out and after a bit more testing told me my line was fine and I should be achieving 5.6mb on my line.. Deja vu..  He replaced my box on the wall with one that had a built in microfilter and went away.. So I called orange again and relayed the information.. They called me back shortly and told me that they'd spoken to BT and apparently they didn't think their engineer had done his job properly.. The guy from orange admitted this was a little bit of a suprise as usually BT try to lay the blame on them and its not often they come straight out and say they're at fault.. So, anyway..

The third BT engineer came out today and after doing the same tests and admitting it looked alright he went off to fiddle with my line.. He did tell me that "he was the person who'd solve my problem and he would replace my entire line all the way to the exchange if he had to."  This sounded far more promising than the last two..

He came back a bit later and told me he'd tested my line from the box at the end of the road and couldn't even get his modem to connect so he'd swapped my line to another and straight away got 6.5mb on it.. He'd then checked out the exchange and sorted a little problem there.. When he returned to mine though we still weren't having much luck.. My connection was still stuck at 135kbps.. Yes, thats double dialup pretty much.. After a phone call he'd managed to get my IP profile for the line reset a bit higher and I was connecting at 1mb which was double the highest I'd achieved so far and a little better..

By this point he'd run out of time so he's coming back tomorrow to try swapping me over to another line from the box down the road to the pole by my  caravan.. Hopefully this'll do the trick and tomorrow I'll be on the connection I've been promised..

Not bad going really.. I ordered my phoneline in January and with BT and Orange's cock ups combined with their nightmare customer service I'm finally getting things sorted out.. Not to mention BT giving me a £200 phone bill  that turned out to be £175 over.. Makes you wonder doesn't it..

Oh well.. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.. Better go to sleep, blooming engineers coming early.. Argh, I don't do early..

*

This week I 'ave mostly been listening to Hayseed Dixie.. The novelty however is wearing off a bit now.. Wouldn't mind learning a couple on guitar though..

Well, a few people had a go at that meme.. Not as many as I hoped but more than I expected.. Good effort those that got some of the songs.. Especially popsock who wasn't even on my friends list..

( Anyway.. here are the songs, just so you know.. )

Right, blame jen for this one.. She gets me with the music meme's every time..

Its a pretty simple idea but I'm intrigued to see how many of you actually get the songs from the lyrics..

A few of them are a little obscure, maybe..


The rules of the meme are :

Step 1. Put your playlist on random.
Step 2. Post a line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrasing.
Step 3. Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly. NO GOOGLING.

The only cheating I did was skipping the instrumental songs.. Mainly cos they don't tend to have many lyrics..


( Anyway, lyrics are under here.. )

Well.. So far so good.. I've had my messenger running for half an hour now and it hasn't tried to infect anyone..

*Touches wood..*

My hard drive is still on its way out.. Which is really not good.. Trying to fire up a couple of old hard drives to backup the important stuff.. I've ordered blank dvd's but they won't be here till tuesday..

Anyway, the virus seems to be gone.. I've deleted a shitload of copies of files.. It was making copies of itself all over the place.. Loads of little .exe files and self extracting .zips.. Took me all day and gave me a mondo headache..

In the end I got rid of it with avast.. (Thanks for that ali, you rule..) Along with a combination of AVG, spybot and adaware.. And a bit of RegistryBooster2 thrown in for good measure..

Thats one battle I don't want to repeat and have learned my lesson on opening stuff from my friends.. Even ones I trust..

*

I know I haven't got round to writing a glastonbury post.. To be fair I haven't got round to a lot since I got back.. Lazy, lazy ben.. Might try and put something up at some point though.. All the pics are on my myspace..

*

One good bit of news though.. After requesting my MAC code the other day from orange broadband they rang me back and told me they'd found a definite problem with my line.. They also wanted to arrange an appointment for a BT engineer to come out on site and check it out.. The engineer comes tomorrow afternoon so all being well I might have a decent connection after that.. Heres hoping he can fix whatever the hell it is thats wrong with my line.. One day I might get the 3mb they keep telling me my lines capable of..


Edit : FUCK IT.. I spoke too soon, the bloody things back again!!

Guess who foolishly opened a random .zip file sent by one of his friends!!

Guess who has a virus that will not die and keeps sending random .zip files to all of his msn contacts..

Yup.. me, you guessed it.. ARGH!!!

I've run avg, spybot - search & destroy and adaware so far.. They've all got rid of stuff but its still going.. Everytime I think I've sorted it it sends more shit to my contacts on msn.. Not good, not good at all..

Oh.. and also my 300gb sata drive is making horrible clicking, beeping, whirring noises and appears to be on its way out..

It never rains but it pours!!

Just watched The Big Lebowski for the zillionth time.. Great film, what a classic..

Unfortunately I managed to miss most of Jet Li's The Legend at the same time.. Damn.. thats another amazing film.. Gotta love Fong Sai Yuk, and the musics quite catchy too..

Well.. I'm trying to write a return from glastonbury post but failing abysmally..

Even following a good 8 hours sleep last night I'm still a bit discombobulated..

I have succeeded in getting my photos off my camera and iPod but thats about as far as I've got..

I picked up Henry earlier from the kennels and he was ecstatic to see me.. I think a week in there has actually done him some good, he's a changed hound and seems to really be behaving himself.. His obvious delight at being let out of the car and into the field next to my caravan was a joy to see.. He galloped around kicking his legs up stopping only briefly to pee on a few things.. He's now out cold in his bed and his tail is still wagging..

Expect a post soon telling you about working for the Glastonbury Gestapo, bands seen and missed, strange sights and of course some photos.. (As well as tales of mud, drugs, debauchery and chaos)

Got to fill you in on all the details, if only to rub in the fact that jen missed out on some crazy times.. :o)

Tsk Tsk..

At least I have an excuse for not posting for once.. :o)

I'm heading out the door to Glasto now.. Will be back on monday.. I imagine l'll probably be very tired and happy to be home when I next see you..

I'm taking my camera and as I failed to buy a big memory card I'll also be taking my iPod with camera adaptor to store a load of pics on.... Loads of photos to follow on my return..
I'll wave to the TV cameras so keep your eyes peeled..

*

Oh, and before I go..

Right.. Well having avoided it all day I've just packed for Glastonbury.. Repeatedly..

I was so relieved when I finished packing my bags until I looked down and realised I'd left out all my food.. Imagine my annoyance when after a reshuffle I stepped back and realised I'd done exactly the same thing again.. Bag packed beautifully, food to one side.. Definitely tired..

I've just finished repacking it again.. Its not too bad.. One big rucksack crammed with stuff and one small one, also crammed.. What with those two and my tent, sleeping roll, coat, its gonna be a reasonable load.. Luckily I don't have to take it too far though.. I get to drive right to my secure camping area and drop stuff off before parking in a staff car park and coming back to pitch the tent..

Its going to be a long day tomorrow.. I have to get up, have a quick shower, drive henry to the kennels, drive to a shop that sells waterproof trouser n stuff, drive to bath & west showground to get car and personal passes, drive to the festival, set up camp, get briefed on my work..

The one I'm least looking forward to is dropping Henry off.. Its quite sad but I'm gonna miss the little feller.. He's just always... there.. The fact that I don't work in the conventional sense means that I pretty much spent 24 hours a day around my dog.. So when he's not there its really freaky.. At the festival the other week I'd reach down every now and then to stroke him and he wouldn't be where he always is..  I'm also feeling slightly guilty about putting him in kennels.. I'm sure it'll be fine and he'll be ok but its a bit like I'm sending him to prison.. I considered leaving him with someone but although friends offered I either had lack of faith in them or in henry to behave.. Kennels seemed the only option and will stop me worrying.. Poor bugger is blissfully unaware and asleep on my bed, normally I'd tell him off but I'm feeling soft at the mo..

Ah well, he'll be survive.. Its me I should worry about.. I haven't got much money to take to glasto.. Should be alright with the subsidised food and stuff I've brought though.. The weather forecast is looking pretty bleak too.. Rain mentioned most days with either, light showers, light rain, intermittent rain or heavy rain as variations.. Although stormy weather is possible on Friday..

Anyway, enough of the waffling, I'm off to get some sleep before the circus begins in the morning.. Night all..

Just got a letter briefing me on my Glastonbury stewarding job.. I think I might accidentally have joined the Gestapo..

Its pretty hardcore stuff.. I'm assured by a separate email from Green Stewards that its not as bad as it sounds.. Still scary though..


*

The weather for glasto is not looking good according to the long range forecasts although the weekend is looking like it might be dry.. Thats a small blessing I guess..






( Scary letter can be found under here.. )

Tried to post this last night but the blooming internet died on me! Curse you Orange!!