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a hint about my brain

Well it's now a real live blog (well might be ;) )

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Fed up with blog spam

Right as I'm getting more spam comments than real ones I've turned on word verfication. Hopefully this won't stop any real people from commenting.

Half dog half grizzley bear all Lenny

A few days ago Ness heard from a friend that someone she knew was going put down a Rottweiller dog they had because they couldn't handle it. There was no attempt to re-home it, that was it unless something happen by 5pm on the next day the dog was going to die. (Vets are not supposed to do this on healthly animals so we're not 100% that this would of happened)

So Ness drove to Bristol after checking out various people who said yes they would be interested, and picked up this small pony of a dog. The owner was completely crap and unable to do anything. Ness (still on one crutch) walked in and got the dog under control within minutes.

Needless to say a good deed never goes un-punished, and all the people who had shown interest including one couple who had experience of Rotties and said they were deffinatly interested, dropped out.

As you may know from my flickr page we have two kittens (well they have just turned one so cats really) and the arrival of this huge slobbering dog wasn't going to go down well. But we didn't have a choice. Lenny got talken for a walk (there wasn't too much him talking me for one :) ) and then stayed in our smallish back garden until we shut him in the bathroom for the night so the cats wouldn't feel threatened.

After discussing it we realised that we really couldn't keep him as it would be cruel to both him and the cats. Our house and garden is just not big enough for him. We would have had to tie him up outside, the bathroom was ok for one night. So today Ness took him to Battersea Dogs home. They are going to look after him until they can rehome him.

He's a wonderfully even tempered dog, fine with other animals and adults. He does have an issue with children, apparently he was abused by some at his first owners. As he's hasn't been walked for about 3 months he overweight at the moment. But he did have three very long walks while we had him so I don't think he wants walks ever again. :)

I hope that his next owners treat him well.

Monday, October 24, 2005

Geeky stuff

Well cut down my number of os's to two. Win XP and SUSE 10.
And got World of Warcraft working under Suse so happy there. And it appears to run quicker and at a higher resolution than under XP.


id and Raven have also released Linux binaries for Quake 4. So that'll be fun as well ;)

Still need to finish Half Life2. Currently stuck on the bit where youhave to position the sentry guns (not really from Aliens special edition) but will hopefully sort that bit out soon.

And met a guy called Nephilim on WOW playing an undead character. So we chatted about being sad old goths for a bit ;)

Turning Japanesse

Not all prompted by Dan's reminder that it's been over a month since my last post, here's a new one.


Congratulations to the afore mentioned Dan for getting a new job in Japan, and also redesigning his blog to it looks lovely.

So since last time, Suse 10 has come out, and the entire county seemed to be out of stock of World of Warcraft (apart from a nice person on eBay who got a spare copy as a gift). Myself and Ness went on holiday to Spain. It's a bit sad that the best bit was a road from the resort to a town. It was all switch back turns up a mountain. Very fun ;)

As Serenity came out in the UK while we were on holiday (as well as missing two New Model Army gigs) saw that last week. Really, really really good. Best Science Fiction or genre film I have seen in ages. So much better than the lastest Star Wars films. Hopefully more will be coming.

Also went to the theatre in Woking last saturday. Basically Richard E Grant and Anthony Stewart Head were in it, so thought it would be good. It was called Otherwise Engaged. Not hugely sure about it. Apparently it moving the London so I really wouldn't spend lots on seeing it but it was ok.

On the book front, as usual on holiday anywhere I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on.

So Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys,
Terry Pratchett's Thrud
Kathy Reichs' Cross Bones
Hal Duncan's Vellum
Manual to World of Warcraft.

Funnily enough I enjoyed the manual more than Cross Bones especially as there wasn't a pirate in sight. Kathy Reichs seems to be falling foul of the same issue Patrica Cornwall did (before I got bored and stopped reading her stuff) ie loads of plot lines and confusion and then the guilty party basically grabs the protagonist at the end (in the last few pages) and says "I did it" Not impressed. This one did try in grab a bit of Da'Vinca Code's fame by maybe having the bones of Christ. She did try and excuse it with a, in the end all murders are done for the same reasons, type comment, but still not impressed.

Thrud was great. And not at all about the current issues in the middle east/US/ just about anywhere else where there are two people who disagree on things. It does amuse me that some people still think Pratchett writes "fantasy".

Anansi Boys was also great. It's odd reading the comments that Neil Gaiman put up on his blog while writing books and then remembering them ages later when you read what he's talking about.

Vellum (which I'm still reading, about a third of the way through at the moment) has huge potential. So far I'm getting elements of Storm Constantine's Hermatech, bits of the Wreaththu trilogy and the Grigori trilogy, Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, and bits of Clive Barker's less horror stuff. I suspect reading it while listening to Elizium by the Nephilim would start some sort of cosmic rift. :)
Of course it could just end up as post modern Sumerian-cyberpunk gibberish.