Waxing Lyrical

Bah. I've been talking to people about plans for a talk at webdu involving magic tricks (and the odd bit of relevant content) and along with that I was going to rebrand my business and get business cards done up in a deck of playing cards to use for magic / business cards / showbag items etc etc, but I received an email the other day saying I haven't been accepted :( so that kinda kills that! There are lots of international speakers coming I guess and I'm probably not famous enough :) Oh well maybe next year - not sure what I'll do about the cards etc but I'll still be at webdu of course - looking forward to a lot of fun stuff.

After 8 years or so I finally got around to taking the Coldfusion developers exam this morning. I am now an Adobe Certified Advanced Coldfusion Developer and an Adobe Certified Advanced Coldfusion Trainer! So probably in 6 months time I'll be listed as such on the adobe websites...

Flex exam in jan then my trainer certs will all be complete.

There are lots of little stupid things that irritate me. One of the highest on the list has to be people calling Lego "legos". For God's sake people - the plural of Lego is Lego. There is no such thing as Legos. It's Lego. L-E-G-O dammit!

/rant

Bah. I stupidly put a simple password on a temporary user I was setting up for someone to ftp to my server and it happened to be just the right timing for some script kiddie to be running brute force dictionary attacks across my ip range. I've had to rebuild the whole darn thing - lesson learned I suppose. Thank god with CentOS and yum it was very very easy to get back up and running! I didn't lose any data, so that's a plus.

More bloggage coming soon!

Wahey! My little boy just took his first solo bike ride, and did a brilliant job of it :) He had an absolute ball, and it was a real thrill to watch.

I knew it was a special sort of moment but it was very heart in mouth when he first did it, even a short distance. As soon as he did it once he was insatiable - it was "right get off me, I'm riding".

I'm so proud!

A brief escape - kicking the football around with my son, B (real football, you know - with a round ball) having lots of fun I managed to slip over in some dry dirt. Which was fine. But getting back up I overbalanced, being the smooth, suave individual that I am, and managed to fall into a bush, one prong of which gave me a lovely little gash up my back and tore my nice new shirt open :) Of course it's the shirt I was planning to wear on monday to the first day of the flex course! Ah well, Robin will have to settle for my second best shirt.

As you can see I've changed the blog design again - I got this one from open source web design, a fantastic web site giving loads of templates for web layout which are totally free. This one I've modified slightly is called "Deliciously Blue" by Super J Man. Nice and clean, and will allow a little more flexibility.

It seems I'm going to have to give up the online gaming again. I tried it for a while, and even though I wasn't getting heavily involved with online politics and guilds etc, I'm still wasting too much time on the game. It's a great escape, and it's just too easy to sink time into it whenever I feel likke getting away - at least when I'm reading a book or something I'm a little more sociable :)

I love the game and would really like to explore all the detail of it, develop a few new characters and have a go at end game stuff and the expansion pack, but I just can't justify the time. I find myself playing the game when I shouldn't be and I just don't have the time to waste at the moment. So sad to say, I'll be giving up WoW again. Don't know how long for, or if it will be permanent but I just have too many other things I'd be better spending my time on.

So farewell sweet warlock.

Rumblebuffin our new cat, or "Mr FurryPants" as R has taken to calling him, is a gorgeous little thing. Well, he's not really little as he's only 6 months and already enormous. A British Short Hair, he's the classic "blue" colour and has the most beautiful features and markings. He's just such a sweet neatured cat that you can't help but love him.

The thing about the breed is that they're very friendly, very curious and totally stupid when it comes to personal danger. They will as happily walk up to a moving car as they will a small child, or go say a friendly hello to a huge starving dog with not a care in the world. So you can't let them out of the house, or they just get themselves killed.

Yesterday, Rumblebuffin managed to squeeze himself out of a tiny gap in the laundry window, and wander around the back garden. R was out looking for him when she heard a couple of young girls over the fence in the high school grounds cooing and aahing about something. She peered over the fence to find Rumbles happily sitting in the arms of a year seven student and being adored by her and her friend. As soon as R poked her head up and said something he looked around very guiltily :) Cheeky little thing had just wandered through the fence to where the girls were sitting and flopped in front of them, demanding pats. Cheeky animal.

We went for a walk early this morning, R, B and I. We have decided to get up early every morning, and go for a walk around the block together, then shower etc and have breakfast together before going to do our various things. I think this will be a good thing to help all of us get a routine sorted again, and it will be nice to be having breakfast together each day.

Means I'm finally taking regular walks too. Only the first day today (and a shorter walk) but I'm pleased we made it.

Ok so a new blog - please excuse the nasty yellow colour, I don't like it at all but I haven't had time to customize the layout. I have switched from an old version of movable type to the latest version of BlogCFC by Raymond Camden - for a number of reasons. MovableType is no longer free, and I don't really like the software much anyways, but also I wanted to go along with the coldfusion community trend of using ray's blogcfc system, and it allows me to customize it however I like, since it's written in coldfusion.

I will get around to changing the design back to something more appealing but in the meantime here it is. I will also actually start blogging again ;p

-- UPDATE -- Obviously I've fiddled with the styles a bit and it's no longer yellow. If I can be bothered later on I'll add the right hand side pods that I had before, but for the moment I'll leave it.