It’s A Knockout was a success on Friday. It was a bit annoying to be told to be there for 11:30 and to then have to wait until 2pm for your turn though. Oh well.

There were lots of games that all went really well. We had a pretty good team, but somehow managed to come in 5th place. Not sure how that happened because we seemed to be doing really well while I was keeping track.

I’m keeping track of as many pictures as I can in a gallery on Facebook at the moment. Here’s a little taster.

Gordon and I dressed as the 118 188 guys. 😀

I managed to get sunburned on a mostly cloudy day. My shoulders are absolutely killing me when I knock them with clothes or my laptop bag or when Lizz taps me on the shoulder or something. 🙁

On Saturday Lizz and I went to Natwest in the morning to talk about mortgages. They said we could lend up to £145000 for a house. That’s a fricking huge amount of money, so we won’t bet taking that much. It is really good news though because it means we’ve been fine to look at the houses we’ve shortlisted and stuff. We’re going to view one at 5pm after work in fact. After half of the day had passed we went to a wedding reception. It wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, to be honest. I sat and chatted to the husband of a lady we work with. He’s pretty cool. 🙂

On Sunday I went for a carvery with JonP and Dave at The Red. It was pretty damn nice. We went back to Dave’s and ended up watching Anchorman and then going to The Talbot to watch the final of Euro 2008. Spain beat Germany pretty convincingly even though it was only 1-0. We stayed and did the quiz after that and got the fantastic score of 38 out of 60. We got laughed at by one of the barmaids. 🙁

I finished making the clothing part of the costumes for Gordon and me this morning. I decided that using laminated paper and cut up regular paper was a bad idea and drew it with pen instead. A little while ago Gordon drove us to Oodle’s Joke Shop to get wigs and moustaches. 🙂

We’ll both be getting ready in a little while and then the games can commence! 😀

Tomorrow is the last day of term at college. As a celebration there are several teams of staff members who are taking part in a little competition called It’s A Knockout which is based on a ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s TV show by the same name.

I’m in one of the teams with Lizz, Claire C, Gordon, Emma, possibly Marc but can’t remember, and possibly Tim (if he’s not a wuss). The thing is half set up on the field at the back of the college already. Assuming nobody comes and wrecks it in the night we should be good to go in the morning. There is one fairly large problem though. It’s raining right now. The forecast suggests there will be more rain just around the time we’re supposed to begin.

I really hope it goes ahead because Gordon and I have costumes planned and everything!

I’ll update after the fact tomorrow. Hopefully it’ll be awesome and I’ll have some ridiculous pictures to post. 🙂

There are going to be about a hundred zillion new TLDs allowed to be registered because of new registration rules from ICANN. 🙁

What an absolute waste of time.

I’ve spent the vast majority of the day drawing various things on Facebook Graffiti walls. 🙂 It’s been quite a lot of fun.

It started out with this one to Lizz because I wanted to draw something. I entirely copied the idea from the address in the image.

Then I drew another one for Lizz which is also based on an xkcd comic.

Lizz drew me this masterpiece.

Then I taunted Dave a little bit.

Dave responded like for like.

I drew a little picture for Gordon.

I recreated the first level of Lemmings for Paul.

I then decided to respond to Dave’s picture.

I tried to draw a picture for Gordon, but ran out of space both times. It’s a picture by the artist Banksy. Gordon deleted the first attempt… Thanks Gordon!

I tried to redraw an image that someone else created with the Graffiti application, but I didn’t do as well.

So that was my day in pictures. I think I’ll draw some more over the rest of the summer. I’ll have quite a little gallery going by September if I continue at this rate. 🙂

For the first time in months I played Wii Sports yesterday. JonP and Dave joined in too. We had a few games fo tennis and some bowling before JonP went home. After that Dave and I played some golf, ate a Pot Noodle, had one round of boxing and about a thousand games of tennis. We finished up playing at 3am. Dave says his arm really hurts now, which is probably because he was swinging for the ball like a madman.

We’re supposed to be going real bowling later on tonight. I think we’ll probably only play a couple of games, but it should be a lot of fun. Hopefully I’ll get closer to my goal of scoring 200. 🙂

Drupal was not really what I was looking for. Everything I wanted to do seemed to take too long, or be too complicated to bother with. I managed to find a quick MySQL command to convert my posts into WordPress format and so I did it. It took 0.24 seconds the first time, and 0.25 the second time. Half a second well spent!

Hopefully now things will be a bit quicker moving. I’ve just got to work on a few things! 🙂

I’d forgotten to set up mail handlers on the server, so nobody was able to comment or anything. I’ve (hopefully) fixed that now, so feel free to give it a go.

Now I’ve set up the server I’m kind of struggling to remember what I was doing before it all went tits up. How was I passing the time? What project was I working on? :\

I’m on my own at work this morning and I’m finding it quite difficult to pass the time. setting up email took a grand total of about 10 minutes. I should have loads of things on my todo list, but I’m really struggling. I guess I could work on personalising this theme a bit more. I don’t really want a fountain pen nib at the top of my website. Lizz tells me the font is pretty crap, too.

Meh.

I’m sitting at work writing this blog entry into a Google Document because I don’t have a fully functioning blog at the moment. In fact, it’s been over 2 weeks since the server crashed. I lost access to my code, my database of entries and comments, and my DNS control too.

Since then I’ve started renting a dedicated server for $50 a month and I’ve been setting it up. Shaun has also bought a VPS which is one of several fake computers running on a very powerful real computer. I’ve helped to set that up a little bit too.

It’s taking so long to get everything back because I’m a bit stupid and I didn’t backup my database regularly. Not since 2006 in fact. I spent most of Saturday writing a script to import my old blog entries from that backup into a new isntallation of Drupal. Unfortunately that’s only given me 951 out of the 1345 blog entries I’ve made since January 2003. All the rest are being entered by hand. As you can imagine it is absolutely mind-numbing in every imaginable way. It’s repetitive, menial, stupid work that I could easily have avoided if I’d only made regular backups.

I think I’ve learned the backup lesson well and truly now. I will have to sort out a decent backup method for my entries from this point. I just can’t be bothered with all the work again!

Welcome back to my new and improved blog!

Edit
Shaun managed to find my database on the old server. It was recoverable enough to get every remaining post! 😀

Now I’ve just got to work on making this site look a bit better and I should be ready to get on with my regularly scheduled blogging. Woohoo!