Category Archives: Geek Heart & Tech

Valentines Day & Random Doodle 2

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Another year and another day for the card industry and the love sick puppies to enjoy and get fatter. For the un-popular, socially banished, misfits who cant get a date if their life depended upon it, (ie me) its another miserable day full of what were previously normal people acting like their on a mixture of too much cafeine and helium trying to tell you what a wonderful day it is. Well sorry, but “baa humbug” – and kindly do that somewhere where I’m not. When your single, theres not much worse than having everyone else come over and tell you what “hunny-wunny” got you for Valentines. It is however nice to remind these nutters of how many calories are in said little sweet red gift. After they have eaten it.

Been another very tiring week, not had any time to post anything either, today has been the worst so far, seemed to get all the crappy calls today, and very little time between them as well, end up playing catch-up the whole time – talking about how to fix problem Z while still trying to write the email for problem Y and fill out the call log for problem X.

Would have been a good day for a few drinks in the local with some work mates, except they all went and ‘forgot’ to tell me. Thanks alot. Not a problem really, this un-popular, socially banished, misfit has plenty of much better beer at home anyway, and its a fracton of the cost.

To complete todays random splurge, I present Random Doodle 2 – Big Hair – this actually started with a big random swirly wire ball doodle, then I added a face to it for no apparent reason.

Randon Doodle 2

Happy Chinese New Year!

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Happy Lunar New Year to everyone!

Its now the year of the Rat, previous years for the Rat have been 1912, 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984 and 1996, the next will be 2020.

The following is an extract from Wikipedia…

Being the first sign of the Chinese zodiacs, rats are leaders, pioneers and conquerors. They are charming, passionate, charismatic, practical and hardworking. Rat people are endowed with great leadership skills and are the most highly organized, meticulous, and systematic of the twelve signs. Intelligent and cunning at the same time, rats are highly ambitious and strong-willed people who are keen and unapologetic promoters of their own agendas, which often include money and power. They are energetic and versatile and can usually find their way around obstacles, and adapt to various environments easily. A rat’s natural charm and sharp demeanor make it an appealing friend for almost anyone, but rats are usually highly exclusive and selective when choosing friends and so often have only a few very close friends whom they trust.

For all you rats out there, heres a picture of Yuki Sohma in animal form, Yuki is the rat in the Anime Fruits Basket.

Yuki Sohma as the rat

Veoh Blues

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A gentle warning to fellow Veoh users…

Today I was notified by my Veoh TV client of a new version of the client to be installed – I was given no option to choose this version btw, it just auto updates, but that although annoying, is not the reason for these blues…. The problem is that the new version has managed to totally screw up the database, its lost about 4 entire series of Anime that I had 🙁

Worse still, is that removing the client and installing the new one, lost the rest. Luckily I had copied the db file off before, I then had the task of trying to re-import it – oh but wait – there are no advanced controls that actually do anything in Veoh. Afther several hours, I finally figured out how this rather crap piece of software operates – it makes a randomly named db file, which on a new install is placed in the /Program Files/veoh networks/veoh/ folder. The trick then, is to copy the name of this file, usally some random numbers then .db at the end, rename your original db file to this name, then copy it over the one in the veoh folder. When Veoh starts, you might have your library back. I’m still missing 4 whole series, but atleast the files are still physically present in the Veoh folder, but re-importing the files dosnt work, as it looses the meta info in them, so it just comes up as unclassified. Oh and it now contstantly keeps trying to download some random episodes that I already have.

Great, well done chaps at Veoh Dev. Dont bother looking through the forums on Veoh for help, I spent an hour in there, and its all people just shouting how much they hate Veoh, with no info on why or what their problem actually was, and then they scream no one helps them. Alot of the screeming is still about their move to convert stuff to FLV, which yes is really rubbish, but its still watchable, apparently it was to save bandwidth costs. Veoh could save a ton of bandwidth however if they stopped making EVERY page on their site auto play a video, if I open a channel, I want to see what it is, I dont want to watch every video straight away. Also I’m one of those annoying people who open all the links I want to see in a new tab when on a page, and go to each tab in order – do that in Veoh’s site, and its trying to play 20 videos at once.

Will update this if I actually manage to fix the problem with the client, however its looking like I’ll have to re-import them or re-download if I want it in channels again.

Random Doodle

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Another week gone by, nothing overly interesting happened this week except for getting more anime from Veoh. Did this little drawing while on the phone the other day which has got me drawing again, will post some of the drawings at some point, there not fantastic or anything tho.

A random doodle

Back to work and visiting the family…

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First week back at work over, I left on the Friday and spent the weekend with my parents, after a month away and a week or so either side of the holiday its been some time since I been up there. I also needed to continue the mammoth task of sorting out my stuff which has been stored there since I finished Uni back in 2004. Its incredible, the amount of crap I managed to collect, mainly computer junk which was used, or intended to be used while studying.

Back then some of those things were like gold dust, so rare, so unique, and on student money worth a fortune. In reality, its nearly all just junk, and especially now after so long, totally out of date and useless. I know some of my ex-class mates will hate the idea of getting rid of it, but its just not practical, and its all in aid of my latest “dream”, part of which involves moving abroad, and therefore means having to reduce the amount of stuff I have – and I have a lot of stuff, way too much, no matter how much I get rid of, more just seems to appear.

Besides, I’ve never been a geek – I studied computer networking, and I work in IT, but I cant be involved with it 24/7, computers annoy the hell out of me, the dents in my desktop pc case will testify to that, when it really plays up it gets a hell of a kicking. There stressful, “fun” is not something to be associated with them. So why do I do it? Because I’m good at it, and its just been what I have been doing since college. Computers are not my life, there just in it.

What I love is travel, seeing the world, new places, meeting new people, doing different things, just spending time with friends. I love music, and even play the guitar really really badly, but that doesn’t matter, its making the sound yourself, putting the feeling and emotion into what your playing (or trying to) and just enjoying that, and also photography – as this blog shows, quite a bit is travel photography, which brings me back to the main point, you cant travel with a tons and tons of junk weighing you down. Just now I wish I hadn’t got quite so much stuff!

Here is a picture of my metallic blue Yamaha Pacifica, I love this guitar, one of my favourite possessions.

My Yamaha Pacifica 012