Mutterings for the Minority

Bear with a sore head

I still feel grumpy, like a “bear with a sore head” as Mrs DDWT would say - so you’ve been warned. I don’t know what it is, perhaps it’s sleep deprivation or the impending end of summer making me feel this way or maybe it’s just blokes ‘time of the month’ - is there such a thing?

Not event a 10 mile odd spin on the bike lunchtime could raise my spirits above the height of a door knob. I didn’t even enjoy it in all honesty, the very strong wind in my face put paid to that. Although I was mightily impressed with my 28.7mph sprint finish at the end *smile*

I’m off down the Liberty tomorrow night to see the Swans take on the Glovers of Yeovil - so gawd help them if I’m still in this mood. In fact steer clear of the DDWT house if the Swans lose as I’m unlikely to be in the best of hwyls.

Web related boredom

After the shock of seeing the route for the BikeWales West ride yesterday, I decided that I needed to pull my finger out and go for a lunchtime ride. I opted to venture along to Gowerton via the Clyne Valley cycle path, taking in the pleasant woodland that surrounds most of the ride along the way. It was a roundtrip of around 14 miles but going at a steady pace it gave me the workout I was after.

I’ve been potching around with loads of different web-related things of late (Ubuntu, Debian, RT, Phplist, RSS, etc) but for the life of me I can’t be arsed to write about it. Perhaps it’s just that I’m bored of blogging about techy bits, especially as most people find it a rather mundane and boring subject. Maybe it’s becuase I’ve been fiddling around with so many different bits and bobs that I don’t know if it’s the front door - back door or even if it’s upstairs or downstairs. Anyway, I’ll get my anorak and go and lie down.

Linux for human beings

Known as ‘Ubuntu‘ - that’s an African word meaning “humanity to others” - this linux operating system is somewhat of a newbie in terms of a distribution, but users of Debian will be familiar with it as that is where it’s roots are.

After dabbling with Debian the other day and trying to get RT to work with it (unsuccesfully) I decided to try another linux distro, in the form of Ubunto (server version 6.06) and hey presto it worked after a bit of tweaking. So having wasted the best part of a day and a half with plain and was now up and running with RT within a couple of hours. Oh well, at least I learnt a great deal about CPAN and APT along the way. I just hope the bossman thinks it’s a worthy piece of software now.

I finally managed to find out today the route (albeit very vague) for the BikeWales West bike ride on October 1st. As I’m going for the ’silver’ ride - 50 miles - the route starts at the National Waterfront museum in Swansea before going via Pontardawe, Ystalyfera, Brynamman, Glanaman, Ammanford, Pontarddulais, Gowerton, Fforestfach and back to the museum to finish. I used the AA route finder system to get a rough map and it gives the distance as approximately 48 miles. Anyway, it looks like a tough, challenging ride but exciting all the same!

Double dutch?

Anyone shopping in Pontardawe recently might have noticed a new product range that has been launched by Tesco.

I mean have you heard of “Ducth Skinless Breast Fillets” before? No me neither. All very amusing really and perhaps more important they tasted ok - not that I’d know the difference in taste between a Dutch chicken or any other nationality of chicken to be perfectly honest.

For the health concious amongst you who are wondering why I’m only now eating them - even with a best before date of 13 July - it’s because they’ve been in the freezer!

Weight update

I’ve managed to lose another 1lb this week and am now down to 16st 10lbs, so I’ve only got another 3lbs to go before I’ve reached my target weight.

Haven’t been up to a great deal today, potched about in the garden this morning prepping it…..for the turf that I haven’t even ordered yet! The rest of the day has been spent with DDWT Junior having lots of fun playing with his play dough, painting and dancing to all kinds of music. In fact it’s the most fun I’ve had in ages and it was great to spend so much quality time with him.

Mas carnival

We popped along to the Mas carnival in Swansea today for what is always a colourful and noisy occasion. There are loads of dancing/drum playing groups from the various multi-cultural communties of Swansea present and they certainly make the carnival a great place to be - especially at the end when they congregate in Castle Square for one big party.

DDWT Junior certainly enjoyed himself again (as he did at last year’s carnival) and has really taken to bopping away to the various drumbeats (which happen to be very catchy).

After we all got home I did some more work in the graden - i.e. demolished the pergola we had - so now the garden is even bigger and our dining room gets more direct light into it than before. Whilst I was busy doing this, Mrs DDWT was busying making a lush prawn curry (which was certainly worth working up an appetite for).

Dabbling with debian

Being a fan of open source software, I decided to give an old laptop a new lease of life today by installing Debian GNU/Linux on it. It installed in a breeze having only downloaded the mininal bootable CD version (and burned it onto a CD of course). The rest of the install was done over the net - with me choosing the components I wanted. Nice and easy, just the way I like it and hey presto I had a networked laptop with internet access.

Now your probably wondering why on earth I’d want to do something as seemingly random as this. Well I decided on this ‘flavour’ of linux in order to try out a cool piece of software from Best Practical called ‘Request Tracker‘ - more commonly known as ‘RT’. Unfortunately this wasn’t as easy to install and the wiki-based documentation was rather out of date - so it was a little bit like trying to feel my way around in the dark.

I’ve almost completed the installation now, but decided to call it a day and come home early from work as it is the bank holiday weekend after all. Besides, I know if I’d stayed on I’d want to play with the system and then end up being home late again!

With the weather not being up to much, DDWT Junior had another go at finger painting today - with the following wonderfully colourful results.

Exercise lurgy

No it’s not something I’ve caught during one of my lunch hour fitness routines, it was a business continuity workshop I attended today - based on a flu pandemic. All very useful up to a point - but as is the case with any “disaster” a lot of the pre-planning goes out of the window, purely due to having to respond to the situation as it unfolds in front of you. Anyway, that’s just my opionion and I’m no business continuity expert, far from it.

I’m came across a funny little disclaimer from the BBC today whilst using their ’send it to a friend’ email service - which let’s you send a hyperlink to a particular article you’ve read on their website. I took a screen dump to capture it, which you can see (hopefully) below…

For those of you who can’t see it or can’t be bothered *wink* here is the text of the disclaimer…

The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything
written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC’s views or
opinions.

Well hello, but aren’t the BBC the ones who wrote the article that you’re sending to your friend? Whilst I understand that you can obviously send a personal message with the email, it still doesn’t detract away from the rather contradictory opening line.

It amused me enough to send it off to the Register and Plain English campaign anyway, as they’re into that sort of thing.

After chilling out yesterday lunchtime, it was back in the saddle for me today with a 12 mile blast down to Catherine Zeta-Jone’s place (in Plunch Lane) and around Mumbles for a change. Am really flying along with my new slicks on, but I am noticing that my backside is - how shall we say - feeling the bumps far more and as a result is a wee bit more tender at the end of the tour.

Analyse this then!

I came across the wonderfully useful and free Google Analytics service today - which, in the words of Google …

… tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.

I was so intrigued that I’ve now set it up to analyse all the traffic on this blog (not that I get a lot mind you) - the results of which I’ll feed back to you all in due course. You can read even more about the service from the dedicated Google Analytic blog.

It’s quite a novelty today NOT to be going out on my bike for a lunchtime ride. I decided to take the day off as I think the skip-filling events of the weekend have finally caught up with me. I’m in desperate need of some zzzzzz’s and some lenghty ones at that.

DDWT Junior has been busy today finger painting and here are the fruits of his labours. Bless him, he’s only 2 and a half and obviously has artisitic talent (but I’m bound to say that as I’m a proud Dad).

Choirboys put Swans to the sword

Well I tested my slicks out on an 11 mile lunchtime ride today and I’m glad to report that all went well, very well in fact. Whilst there was probably only a 1 or 2 mph increase in my average speed, the loss of the treacle tyres I was using made all the difference when it came to climbing the hillier parts of the ride.

A disappointing 3-2 defeat (after extra-time) for the Swans against the Choirboys of Wycombe tonight in the 1st round of the league cup. Oh well, at least we can concentrate on the league - yes I know it’s a well known cliche, but it’s bloody true in my opinion.

My Dad who went to the game said that the Swans were a shambles (again) but credit to them for battling back from 2 goals down. Interestingly, he said that things improved when Bayo came on for the ever increasingly lazy and lacklustre McLoed.

I’m personally beginning to wonder if Kenny Jackett should revert back to Trundle and Bayo up-front as we did at the start of last season - as the Trundle & Fallon partnership doesn’t seem to work. Then again, what do I know - I used to play rugby not football!