Furry Interloper

Furry Interloper
Originally uploaded by snaprails

Deadpool 2012

This year's attempt to guess which famous people get to meet the tall, thin bloke with the scythe before 01/01/13.

1. Margaret Thatcher – former UK prime minister/tyrant/war criminal.
2. HRH The Duke of Edinburgh – Phil the Greek.
3. Ronnie Biggs – Great Train Robbery bit part player.
4. Patrick Moore – Monocled Astronomer & Great British Eccentric.
5. James Earl Carter, Jr. – former US president & peanut farmer.
6. Dame Vera Lynn – English singer, songwriter, and actress.
7. Fidel Castro – Cuban revolutionary leader and thorn in the side of the USA.
8. Georgios Kyriacos Panagiotou – aka George Michael, 80s pop star & sometime cottager.
9. Peter Sallis – English actor and last of the last
10. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela – former South African president.

Nissan Micra For Sale

Nissan Micra For Sale

I have been tasked with selling my mother's car as she has had to give up driving due to ill health.

Details:
Nissan Micra 'S' Automatic 3 door hatchback
'51 reg (01/09/2001)
998cc 
149G/KM
11243 miles (yes, that is eleven thousand and a bit, one previous owner was a disabled gent who hardly used the car, Mum bought it in September 2009 and has only used it for shopping and occasional trips Swindon to Reading)
MOT till 25th August 2012
Red with grey interior.

Car is in very good condition apart from a small scratch on the offside rear wheelarch where she caught it on the garage doorway.

We are looking for £1400 ono which seems to be the going rate for low mileage examples.

The car is located in Lyneham, Wiltshire and viewing is going to have to be by appointment as Mum is no longer capable of dealing with this sort of thing so one of the family will have to travel down there to meet any potential buyer.

Questions/interested parties please email me at snaprails@yahoo.co.uk 




Don Constance

Dead Pool 2011

My guesses for those not likely to last the distance in 2011


1. Thatcher
2. Ronnie Biggs
3. Patrick Moore
4. Jimmy Saville
5. Peter Sallis
6. Fidel Castro
7. Dame Vera Lynn
8. Robert Mugabe
9. Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (Liz Taylor)
10. James Earl Carter, Jr. (Jimmy Carter)

Jolicloud

I've been using this cloud-based operating system on my sluggish old Acer Aspire One A110L netbook for about a week now and so far it's pretty good. Much quicker than Ubuntu Netbook Remix which I was previously using which the AA1 struggled with - mostly because of the dog-slow SSD employed by the Acer rather than any underlying problem with UNR.  Jolicloud is Ubuntu based, with a UI provided using HTML5. And it's open source :-) More at www.jolicloud.com

A little bit of history from 1982

In July 1982 the Viking Venture Scout Unit, part of 1st Lent Rise Scout Group went camping in North Yorkshire. A "log book" was created as a record of the expedition and this has sat gathering dust for 28 years. now with the power of modern technology it can see the light of day again (assuming anyone is interested!).

The log book is hand written and real photographic prints are glued to the pages - no personal computers or digital cameras back then and there are some pencil sketches I made at the time. I make no apologies for the juvenile humour, it was funny at the time.

For the record and for search engines the members of the expedition party were:
Pete Lewis
Bob Ward
Don Constance
Martin "Charlie Brown" Hunter
Dave Chamberlain
Chris Hill
Giles Blundell

Towards the end of the log there is an accounts page which includes the line "51 gallons of petrol - £86.04 (and a ha'penny)". Those truly were "the days" :-)

The log book can be viewed or downloaded in PDF format (assuming Google Docs behaves itself) by clicking the following link:

Viking 1982 Log Book (14MB)

Windows Mobile - I'd forgotten how difficult it could be!

Picked up a cheapish Windows Smartphone on ebay to use at work as I want to sync it with Outlook. I want a password manager for it but have spent 2 hours failing to get one. I've trawled through dozens of sites, downloaded applications that said they were compatible with my phone but the phone disagreed, tried to download open source apps only to run up against the "please sign up so we can spam you for all eternity" scum-suckers, found pages that are sorry that they're temporarily unavailable "please come back later" and fought with the slow and unreliable (over Wi-Fi FFS!) Mobile Internet Explorer.

No success :-(

I have a password manager on my own mobile - Nokia, Symbian S60. I have one on the 10 year old Sony Ericsson T610 I have been using. Both free, both work, both downloaded and installed in minutes. I could have any number of suitable apps for iPhone/iTouch. Not, it seems for Windows Mobile Smartphone. Unless I want to shell out $$$ for something over the top that's not guaranteed to work anyway.

Roll on the day BT sees the light, embraces Open Source (instead of just talking about it) and kicks Outlook/Windows into touch. Then I can use a proper phone again. It'll never happen though :-(