Well… another year has passed… and how fast it has gone too.
Im getting through a bottle of half decent wine (for a change) to commemorate the occasion before the more elaborate celebration this weekend.
My main pressie was my phone (yes I got it slightly early) see the below post, and im still having fun tinkering with it 
Yay! Ive finally, after 8 years, managed to get round to investing in a new phone!
After some research, I opted for the LG Viewty, as it was a reasonable price (£136 with £20 ‘free’ credit from Tescos), was PAYG, and had all the features I was looking for.
Im personally not a huge user of mobile phones, thus the 8 years without upgrading, so I avoid contracts like the plague - as they are only of benefit for more intensive users.
I personally find deals like £35 a month for 18 months (a total of £630!) for a ‘free’ iPhone not that enticing. It seems a frikkin huge amount to pay out in the long term. On a PAYG Tesco tarrif when calling one of your five favourite numbers it costs 10p per minute which seems pretty reasonable to me.
So far, it seems to LG Viewty lives up to all the reviews I read… lets face it…. its basically a cheaper iPhone without the apple logo.
Its hard to know what to rave about feature wise cos im so out of touch but it has:
I personally am loving the touch screen… its so much easier and faster to use than my old phone, and a damn site prettier too.
Now… I wonder if I can get a java ssh client on it 
My only beefs so far is scrolling is a little tricky to get used to as the scrollbars are quite small (though you can use what they call the jog wheel), and ive been unsuccessful in unlocking it so far… but I shall persivere. If all fails Tesco will apparently do an unlock for free after 90 days of using their service…. or I can pay them £25 to do it whenever.
The geek inside of me says that ill find a way to unlock it myself or chew my arm off trying.
I kept wondering why my motd file (/etc/motd) kept reverting on reboot… so I took a little looksy and noticed it symlinks to /var/run/motd, which is in turn populated by some lines in /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh.
All you have to do to prevent that is to remove the symlink e.g rm -f /etc/motd and then create a ‘regular’ file with whatever fancy content you want
Personally im a fan of Network Science Ascii Generator for generating some pretty ascii text…
This has gotta be the most amusing LolCat ever
It kinda reminds me of a collegue who is addicted to coke (the drink!) actually…
So long, and thanks for all the (slightly pungent) fish.
Not that I know a great deal about American politics, but Im glad Obama got the ‘job’ over McCain and Palin… is it just me or does she seem really really scary? Anti gay, Anti Abortion… WTF?
As an atheist myself, im glad another religious nut didn’t get in to impede future scientific progress. Obama seems to be a nice modern forward thinking individual, which is just what the US needs as the <cough>’world leader’</cough>.
Lets face it, he can’t do much worse than Mr Bush…
Well, after years of gathering the willpower to start a blog i’ve finally done it!
So, for my first post I shall have a little rant about the media and how they seem to make every single situation 100 times worse than it has to be.
Take the current economic climate. Would people have been whipped up into such an anti spending lack-of-trust-of-banks frenzy if it wasn’t for the gentle guiding hand of the media? Would everyone have instantly wanted to pull their money out of Northern Rock if the media had not reported its ‘issues’?
I think not.
After all, it was only a few months ago it seems that we were all about to die of bird flu and the world was about to end… now we are being sunk into a bottomless pit of economic dispair because the media will do almost anything to get a good story. Sure there are issues afoot (primarily greedy bankers doing some rather silly lending) but in my humble opinion they have been made substancially worse by the media banging on about it.
Personally, I think it should be banned - stiring the public into a frenzy for no reason whatsoever bar getting a few extra coins in their coffers.