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Sunday 4th June 2006
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So I've no idea what's wrong with the computer. It just keeps turning itself off. I've swapped the PSU, changed the kettle lead, checked various connections . . . loads of stuff. Then M**** comes along, says I need to be 'nice' to it, "There, there, computer. It's all okay. We're in a new house, and it's all a bit weird, but this is your new home now," and then it's fine after that. Hello?
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Monday 5th June 2006
   
M**** kept showing A****** how if you press the button on the top of this toy elephant thing, then the ears light-up/flash and one of three tunes plays. Eventually he figured it out for himself.
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Thursday 8th June 2006
What have I been doing recently then? Well, of course, there's always stuff to sort out in our new house. A******'s room is now done (one down, seven to go) and could just do with a few shelves putting up here and there. Erm . . . our living room (back room) is now fit for living in, so long as you can tolerate the floral wallpaper. Ikea (or the out-sourced company doing the fitting) have designated us a 'priority' case for kitchen fitting, on account of currently having no kitchen, I assume. Erm . . . oh, and I had this horrible dream recently that someone presented me with a Stanley knife blade on a side plate, like I was supposed to eat this thing. But what was worse was that in this dream, I had this clear memory of having eaten several of these things before. I could remember breaking up one of these steel blades with my teeth, into little pieces, and then gradually using my molars to grind it all down into a relatively smooth metallic paste. I didn't like that - the memory of eating metal. So that wasn't good. Oh, and er . . . I think it was Tuesday night that we had our neighbours, Dougie and Christine, round for a drink. I think that went on for about three hours.
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Friday 9th June 2006
      
hello? So yeah . . . I woke up at something like 03:30 this morning. It was so early, I didn't even know where the hell I was or what day it was. I woke up, there was some beeping thing going on, but I couldn't turn it off, or wasn't sure what was beeping (and why) so I hurled myself towards the wrong corner of my bedroom, where resided the clothes rack (temporary wardrobe), before I managed to work out where the door really was. It was too early, like I say. Anyway, Gerry picked me up from my home (after a breakfast consisting of three slices of brown bread and an apple (Granny Smith)) and then we went to Tom's house. I had half a cup of coffee before the taxi arrived, ferrying us to Manchester airport. We arrived a minute or two (literally) after Rob, Geoff, Karlis and Hamish. So, going from left to right (the photographs above): that's my view from my bedroom (a twin room shared with Hamish), that's looking down from the stairs from the second floor, that's Karlis, that's the pool, that's the pool (with Rob in and Hamish about to be in), that's me in the ground floor living room, that's Geoff also in the ground floor living room.
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so, as you can probably tell, I'm still taking pictures of nothing much at all. It took us quite a while to make it to the supermarket, buy all our stuff, my blood sugar levels dropping ever lower, before . . . before . . . I'm not sure how that sentence should end, but . . . yes. Wolf down the banana and drink a litre of grapefruit juice and we're all okay again. From left to right: that's the house where we were staying, that's the pool (again), that's some of us (Tim, Geoff and . . . is that Chris?), more people (Geoff and Richard (Rik?!) playing table tennis and Tom), a strange insect on my finger, the view of the church (thanks for the electronic bell ringing) from our garden, a letter left by a previous occupant (THANKS!)
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then from left to right . . . that's a well I found in the garden; that's our local church; the same; that's Tom, Rob and Tim (from left to right) at one of the bars in the main village square (time: 23:17); and another picture of the stairs (23:39). I think we went for pizza at the nearby pizzeria (or similar), it being just up the road from our house.
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Saturday 10th June 2006
      
Tonight gave us an opportunity to catch up on our sleep, most of us having had between 2 and 5 hours sleep the previous night. I actually woke up at something like half past six or something ridiculous like that, had a quick swim (hmmmm, a bit cold) and then went back to sleep again. Of course, no one witnessed this, and it became a bit of a running joke that I adamantly refused to enter the pool, although the parts of my legs below the knees often did, but hey . . . Again, going from left to right: that's one of these freaky, forbidden rooms in our house (I guess it used by the home owner, house keeper, cleaner and people like that), padlocked shut; that's Geoff and some kind of inflatable sheep affair that came with a stag kit that Richard had bought Rob; that's the sheep aimlessly drifting around the pool, letting the breeze take it where it will; that's the front door to our house; that next picture was taken quite soon after we arrived at some beach or another, me having climbed up this rope/mast affair; more pictures of the beach.
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lots more pictures of beach . . . and that last one was taken at 21:56 that night, back at the house, and there's a cat at the top of the hedge, watching all the swifts (?!) zoom around the church. Some time during today we hired about nine (?!) bicycles from the tourist information, from a charming lady who became known as Morgan (as that's what it said across her chest).
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So, later on, Geoff sniffed out amplified music from somewhere and these last three pictures show the results of our quest for the source of this noise. Lots of people, lots of free (and awful - 'Cotton Eye Joe'?!) music and stalls selling beer and food.
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Sunday 11th June 2006
      
The first picture was the guy singing 'Cotton Eye Joe' at OM (stands for something like Orchrestra Musique, but maybe it's a reference to meditation), and then the next three are other blurry pictures taken that night. The fifth picture along was taken when I went to bed (I seem to have a bit of thing about those stairs), and had the time stamp 04:08. So yeah . . . hideoous hangover the next day, and only started to feel human around 3pm, or thereabouts. Fortunately, I didn't seem to be the only one, but it may have taken me the longest to recover. Those last two pictures saw us about to set off on our mammoth cycle journey. Those pictures were from 16:36.
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Various pictures taken during our cycle ride along the local canal, the Canal du Midi.
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Monday 12th June 2006
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Tuesday 13th June 2006
Got back from France today. There's loads of pictures in the days immediately previous to this one. At time of writing, I don't have time to explain the photographs (as usual), but this may change later.
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Thursday 15th June 2006
Hello. I've been trying to make some kind of meaningfull text amendments to all the pictures uploaded recently, but I'm not sure . . . not sure if it's quite right. Anyway, tonight we did have our other neighbours round tonight, Tony and Alison. I need pictures, really. "Hey, Tony! Alison! Smile for the camera! The whole world can see you!"
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Sunday 18th June 2006
 
Erm . . . yeah, probably. Not much happened today, or yesterday, or the day before . . . or the day before that, come to think of it. The air pressure changed, and that made my left ear hurt. I think that's the correlation, but I got no proof. It seems that way. Seeeeems. Right now, I'm getting my computer to do loads of stuff at once and it ain't too happy. I'm 'backing-up' several CDs, downloading something, running some Perl script I wrote (copies a random selection of files from a certain directory on my hard-disk onto my portable music player thingy), occasionally running Google Earth, moving several megabytes of files from one partition to the other and doing a bit of internet browsing . .. it manages, but it's all a bit slow. So yeah . . . what did we do today? Today was Sunday. Visited my elder sister's house to check out broken computer (yep, it's broken) and borrow travel cot; visited M****'s mum . . . to drop something off? A birthday present? Yes, that was it. Then we went to my parents' house for dinner. Today I did also put up a shelf in A******'s room, ruining several masonary drill bits in the process (and getting another to glow red hot - that one's probably ruined as well). The brackets seemed to go up okay, but then the shelf itself is warped, making it all look stupid. Grrrrrr.
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Monday 19th June 2006
  
Yeah . . . these pictures are timestamped 19:46 (or thereabouts), but I'm wondering if it was actually an hour previous, me not having remembered to adjust the time on my camera following recent holiday in France. Anyway, we set off at something like 11 o'clock and didn't arrive until about 6pm (I can't remember exactly when). We had to make a couple of stops, as A****** was not enjoying being sat in the car for that long. We were staying in a little two bedroom 'villa', as can be seen in the background of these photographs. Judging by the cars in the car-park, and the number of people we bumped into, there were about five or six other people on the complex.
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Tuesday 20th June 2006
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Today we did visit Tintagel and also Waybridge. Tintagel was funny; almost everything was themed around King Arthur, Excalibur, Merlin and stuff like that. An English Heritage (or was it National Trust? I'm always getting these two mixed up) sign pointed out that there was little or no evidence linking Tintagel and the legend of King Arthur. But hey . . . why spoil the fun? We wandered around the ruins of the castle, wandered around the coast a bit, had lunch (served by a strangely stroppy old man) and then visited Waybridge for creamed tea and cake. Mmmmmmm.
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Wednesday 21st June 2006
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Today we visited Newquay Zoo and then some kind of Cyder farm/factory thingy (god knows). We drove through Newquay but didn't stop due to its likeness to Morecambe and also the lack of sun and strong winds (presence thereof) didn't help either. So yeah . . . just the zoo and the cider place. Those last two pictures were from the cider farm/factory.
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Thursday 22nd June 2006
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The top line was taken at the beach over at Polzeath (?!), which is probably pronounce Pull-zurt for all I know. We stayed until A****** got a bit grouchy (he was getting tired and a large cloud over the sun had dropped the temperature noticeably) and then moved onto Port Isaac where once again we had scones, whipped cream, jam and coffee.
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Friday 23rd June 2006
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Before driving off to Oxford, we popped into the grounds of our local church (I don't think I've ever heard of the word 'practicable', but M**** seemed to think it was okay) before having an explore of our local village, Camelford - those are the top two rows. We spent a couple of hours at Stone Henge, never quite daring to run beyond the flimsy rope protecting the National Trust's precious stones from the unwashed hands of the proletariat. The security guards looked a bit flimsy (a couple of bored looking girls), but given the extortionate entry fee (it ain't no Castlerigg), the last memory of a Stone Henge toucher could be the sight of a red dot on their chest . . . or maybe three, in a triangle formation . . . now that would be scary.
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Monday 26th June 2006
As may be evident from the photos recently taken, we were on holiday last week, down to Cornwall. We went back via Oxford (via Stonehenge), staying at Anna's place, thereby breaking the journey up a bit for the sake of A******. Today at work something weird happened: one of the team leaders (unfortunately not mine) brought in a few Linux distributions, SuSE 8.0 amongst them. I've no idea why and, had he instead brought in some kind of maggot-infested road-kill (freshly scraped off the tarmac this morning) then I don't think the reaction from his colleagues would have been much different. So that was kind of weird. I would have investigated further, but I had quite a bit of work to catch up on, having been away last week.
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Thursday 29th June 2006
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Oh dear. Something's gone wrong with the computer again. So I'm quite happily playing around with Google Earth (I think I was in Brisbane at
the time) when it all gets a bit too much for it, so I go back to my maths assignment and leave it for a bit. Half an hour later, and it's pretty
obvious that the poor thing's completely locked-up, so I do a reboot. However, during the reboot, the computer spends ages and ages on the
motherboard boot-up screen (the bit before the operating system kicks in), as if it's lost something. Eventually it boots-up as normal, and
everything goes fine, only the graphical log-in screen doesn't start, something to do with no valid graphics card configuration existing,
except that I haven't altered this recently, and nor would I have any cause to alter this file, even if I could find it. Trouble is, I've had
problems in the past both with this motherboard, the BIOS and the video card (the on-board fan just stopped working) so I've no idea who to
point the finger at this time. Anyone would think I bought really cheap, rubbishy parts for my computer. The motherboard is an Asus A7V8x (I think) and the graphics card is something like a nVidia GeForce 440MX - hardly the kind of things you would pick up at Aldi/Netto on a Saturday morning. Help.
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Ah well, looks like the video card is gone then. I asked my neighbour to try it out in his PC and he got nowhere with it, which begs the question why it failed in the first place. Hmmmmm. So for now I'm using some ancient 16MB Voodoo 2000 (?!) graphics card. Maths assignment now complete.
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Friday 30th June 2006
So what's this my solicitor has sent me (sorry for the poor quality image - I don't think my camera was really in the mood)? God only knows . . . a whole of heap of official looking documents from when the previous owner(s) of my house bought the property, and some stuff beforehand . . . most of it type-written, some of it hand-written, crazily-enough. These are all originals (obviously), which makes me ponder about asking my bank (or someone) to put this is in a safe (?!). Maybe there's some weird Lancaster/Lancashire law stating that I have a right to all these documents. I was certainly never given similar ones for my house in Leeds. Hello?
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June 2006
other months
other years
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Erm . . . yeah, probably. Not much happened today, or yesterday, or the day before . . . or the day before that, come to think of it. The air pressure changed, and that made my left ear hurt. I think that's the correlation, but I got no proof. It seems that way. Seeeeems. Right now, I'm getting my computer to do loads of stuff at once and it ain't too happy. I'm 'backing-up' several CDs, downloading something, running some Perl script I wrote (copies a random selection of files from a certain directory on my hard-disk onto my portable music player thingy), occasionally running Google Earth, moving several megabytes of files from one partition to the other and doing a bit of internet browsing . .. it manages, but it's all a bit slow. So yeah . . . what did we do today? Today was Sunday. Visited my elder sister's house to check out broken computer (yep, it's broken) and borrow travel cot; visited M****'s mum . . . to drop something off? A birthday present? Yes, that was it. Then we went to my parents' house for dinner. Today I did also put up a shelf in A******'s room, ruining several masonary drill bits in the process (and getting another to glow red hot - that one's probably ruined as well). The brackets seemed to go up okay, but then the shelf itself is warped, making it all look stupid. Grrrrrr.
Yeah . . . these pictures are timestamped 19:46 (or thereabouts), but I'm wondering if it was actually an hour previous, me not having remembered to adjust the time on my camera following recent holiday in France. Anyway, we set off at something like 11 o'clock and didn't arrive until about 6pm (I can't remember exactly when). We had to make a couple of stops, as A****** was not enjoying being sat in the car for that long. We were staying in a little two bedroom 'villa', as can be seen in the background of these photographs. Judging by the cars in the car-park, and the number of people we bumped into, there were about five or six other people on the complex.
So what's this my solicitor has sent me (sorry for the poor quality image - I don't think my camera was really in the mood)? God only knows . . . a whole of heap of official looking documents from when the previous owner(s) of my house bought the property, and some stuff beforehand . . . most of it type-written, some of it hand-written, crazily-enough. These are all originals (obviously), which makes me ponder about asking my bank (or someone) to put this is in a safe (?!). Maybe there's some weird Lancaster/Lancashire law stating that I have a right to all these documents. I was certainly never given similar ones for my house in Leeds. Hello?
