Gary’s Blog

Well I finally did it, I PX’d my Mazda MX5 and bought a MINI Cooper.

 I’ll miss the 5 a lot, but the MINI is a fab little car and should suit my needs a lot better.

I was bored and did this - http://picasaweb.google.com/garykearley/Mooooooooo

Original

My Effort

woo go me, I’m on holiday with nothing to do, so I tidied my study desk

Before-

After -

I have done a new build of Ubuntu Gutsy, to test the installer and how it works for me.

everything works really well, I’m very impressed.

I also installed kubuntu-desktop, and as such got a good mix of gnome and kde applications

Theme and wallpaper now look like this -

Click for bigger

Well I was told by work to use up my spare holidays, so I took a fortnight off work, and Tom and I went to Scotland for a few days.

It was very nice, but so god-damned cold we stayed at Glen Nevis Campsite, which has great views of Ben Nevis.

Came back on Wednesday and have finally defrosted

I got my hair cut - at last

I think it’s a lot neater

Yes, I know, what a thing to blog about, but it’s really cheered me up, so I thought I would tell ya all.

Today I had a big tidy up, and also moved the living room stuff about a lot. Have a look at these pictures:

A lot tidier eh?

here are some old pre tidy, post painting pictures:

And this is as it was when I moved into the house in Feb

It was Tom’s birthday on Friday, and the family and I had clubbed together to collect enough money for the gift he wanted. 

He had a old Dell latitude laptop, a D400 or something, with the noisiest hard drive ever™. He wanted a macbook, so we drove off to Bluewater (our nearest apple store) to get one.

once there, we finally decided on a white macbook, same spec as the black one, but £80 cheaper. We saw the same sales bloke as the last two times, but sadly he let the impression I had of him down big time by pushing the sale of silly apple support things, ffs if we needed training on how to use OSX we would not be buying our third OSX machine this year… (all bought from the same sales guy btw)

I thought he would have realised the reason I liked buying from him was his no-nonsense selling manner, but maybe they have been told to try to mis-sell support services by management or something

Anyways, we parted with too much money, then went to Costa (lot) coffee, Tom was well happy and opened the box right away to have a play (since apple ship there machines with 50% odd battery life)

The opening of a apple product is like so cool, you cannot believe how cool apple products are packaged. So he opened it up and went through the setting up sequence and had a play with it, all the time with a massive smile on his face.

Since then, he did a rebuild, as we are both geeks and like doing that kind of thing, and has hardly left it alone

The dell laptop has not been switched on once, not even to copy data over, which I think is cool as I got a bit of peace from the clunky hard drive.

He even found some OSS book writing software and has been busy writing his mathematics book.

Lets end by saying tom is very impressed with the build, fit and finish etc of the apple macbook. we will probably be installing ubuntu on it at some point, as the ubuntu install is a lot easier on that than my macbookpro (which I am waiting for others to write ubuntu install guides for first)

My Mum sent me a MMS, with this attached

Now I “think” she was going to a party, but who, at the age of about 60 (eek she will hurt me for not remembering her age) goes as a school girl?

What sort of party was it?

Maybe old age is catching up with her?

Maybe if she ever sees this she will hurt me?

Tom and I were facing our last “workday” off work, and were wondering what to do last night, for some unknown reason we decided to go off to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast to see in the sunrise. Aldeburgh is a very nice place, lovely shops, fabulous fish and chips, but sadly at 4am these nice conveniences are all shut…  

So we had to see in the sun rise with only midges and seagulls (which are very very noisy)

Sunrise at aldeburgh 

Proof I was there :-)