I was too, but when I saw him, I cheered up.

He was up half the night playing with his computers, and I haven’t heard language like it since Herself fell into the slurry pit.

I asked him what was up, and he started swearing about hackers and viruses and things.  Apparently a couple of his sites were done yesterday.  He ain’t a happy camper.

One of the sites was the Jack and Jill Foundation.  I admit I was annoyed when I heard that, as I have a bit of a soft spot for them.  That’s why I link to them from this site.

I was thinking about Jack and Jill only yesterday as Mulley wrote about them [fair play to him].  Maybe it was Mulley who attacked the site?

Mulley is giving away all sorts of goodies in return for helping Jack and Jill.

I’d nearly fancy one of those toys.

So get your arses over to Mulley and read all about it.

Say you came from here.

I might even give The Other Fella my prize.

I might cheer the miserable sod up a bit.

For those of you who have joined recently, my friend Ron helped run a web company.  There was an unfortunate incident, where I accidentally shot Ron, and he went off to Thailand in a huff.  Or maybe he flew.  Who knows?  He is now living the happy life addicted to sex, sunshine and exotic smoking, and has no intentions of coming back.

It’s a long story, but I had to form S.H.I.T to cover the accident, and I have been trying to cope ever since.

It’s doing my fucking head in.

Ron designed a web site for a company.  He did a great job, and the company were delighted.  They were able to update their own site and everyone was very happy.  Ron liked them and trusted them so he gave them access to the server so they could set up their own emails and crap like that.

Then this company sold out.  They sold to a crowd from somewhere foreign.

The new crowd settled in and decided to make their mark on the web site.

The first thing they did was to remove the old site, and replace it with a horrible site of their own.  It’s a nasty looking site and it is impossible to find anything on it because it is HUGE.

The next thing they did was to go mad on the emails.  They made dozens of addresses.  Then they made dozens more that pointed to the others.  So now when a mail arrives there, it heads off on a loop of addresses being redirected here, there and everywhere, without actually finding a mailbox anywhere.  It’s like Spaghetti Junction in there.

Now they keep ringing me, because they are in a mighty mess.  They expect me to fix their tangles.  They can fuck off.  I can’t understand them most of the time because most of them don’t speak English.

They rang me this morning.  They aren’t getting any emails from HP.  So?  I don’t get emails from HP, and I’m not complaining?  But apparently this is upsetting them.  If they did get any mails from HP, I would say those mails are on their server at this very moment, flitting around from address to address frantically trying to find their way out of the maze.  I have never felt sorry for an email, but there is always a first time.

Of course I told them to fuck off, but they didn’t understand me, so that’s all right.

I never mentioned what this company did for a living.

They are a computer training company.

Hahahahahahaha.

Oh God!

Sigh.

I was browsing the Blogs last week and came across a blog post.  I haven’t a clue what it was about but I thought I’d try it anyway.  I bought a server.  Well.. OK, I leased it, but what the hell.

I always wanted to play around with Linux, because a lot of people say it’s great stuff, and it’s not Microsoft.  It works out cheaper to get a server than to buy a new PC so here was my chance.  I have also heard that they bundle a lot of games with Linux.

“Have you much experience with maintaining Linux servers?” says the nice man when I phoned them.

I laughed.  “Sure, I dream about Vi every night and then have Grep and Bash for breakfast” I said.  It’s amazing the words I have picked up from the Interweb.

“So you can recompile a colonel?” [I think that's what he said].

“No problem,” says I, wondering what I was getting myself into.

So he leased me the server.

I asked him when it was being delivered, but he said I couldn’t have it, but that I would have to run it over the Interweb.  So maybe it doesn’t exist, and that is why they call it ‘Virtual’?

I dialled into this new server and began to wonder if I had done the right thing.

I poked around inside it, and at last found the folder called ‘games’.  But the fucking thing is empty.  So now I have to upload all of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is going to take a long time.

I also copied Head Rambles onto it.  That was fun, because it blew up.  It started whinging about databases or something, so I told it to fuck off and deleted it.

Now I have to find Vi.  I know she’s lurking around in there somewhere, and when I find her, we’ll come to Greps and have a right old Bash.

Anyone know anything about Linux?

I have just taken the site asunder.  Once again, the place was in a mess.  I cut my arm on a nasty protruding piece of javascript and I’m bleeding all over the place.

But I think I have found the problem.

Apparently, every time someone tried to load a page or write a comment, my site went ballistic and had to go running off to its database over four thousand times.  This was strange.  Suppose I asked you a question and you had to read four thousand pages of a dictionary before you could reply?  It’s no wonder it was slow.

So I disabled everything and I found the little bugger that was causing the problem.

I had a wee plugin running called Community Cloud.  It showed up on a page I called “Friends?”.  I have discovered that if I remove that, then the site only goes running to the database about forty times.  So everything is faster.  A hundred times faster?

Community Cloud has been removed.  It is no more.  I put it on a bonfire in the garden, and it exploded with a bang.

I’m not saying that Community Cloud is a bad plugin.

It’s just that I probably have too many friends.

For a while now, this site has been VERY slow to do what it is supposed to do.

I’m not quite sure what it is supposed to do, but it has been very slow at it anyway.

You have all been remarkably polite about it, and I have only had a couple of vociferous complaints, but it was annoying me so I’m going to try to do something about it.

I waited until Saturday, because I know none of you will be visiting today anyway.

If you do accidentally visit, you may find the site doing strange things, or maybe there’ll be bits missing.  I don’t know what you’ll find, because I don’t know yet what I’ll be taking asunder.

I will also be posting lots of comments to myself.  That’s not narcissism.  That’s called testing.

See you later….

I set out early to do a little blog fixing. 

And when I say ‘blog fixing’, I don’t mean checking for spelling mistakes.  I mean taking the back off and getting dirty.

But blogs are like cars.  You set out to find what’s causing a little rattle and the next thing you find you’ve dismantled the gearbox.

I was at it for about an hour and realised I was in a mess.  I had boxes of posts lying in one corner of the room.  There were comments scattered all over the place and there was a nasty pile of code sitting on the table, dripping bytes on the floor.

And in the middle of the floor was a huge dump.  I realised it was my own.  It was massive.  A great big steaming pile of database dump.  What a mess!

Even worse – Sandy got skittish and messed up all the comments, so I didn’t know which comment belonged to which blog, let alone which post.

In the end, I got pissed off and just shoved the whole lot back into the servers and hoped for the best.

So if a few of you open your blogs today and find there are posts there that you didn’t write, or comments from people you never heard of, then I’m sorry.  It was Sandy.

And why is it that when you have finished, there is always a block of code left over and you have no idea where it came from?

And, bless her little cotton socks, she has passed it on to me.

She wants me to write a post that uses every tag. It’s all very well for her – she only has a few. I have loads. The cow!

Now I may be getting old but I find these difficult. I had a hard days blogging yesterday, as I had a good rant on a podcast to America. That was after I did my post on Cully and Sully.

So today I went for a ramble around the garden, trying to think of a topic. No go. There was no inspiration around the house either, and I’m damned if I’m going around the village or around the town for something so trivial.

Back in the 70’s life was a lot simpler. There were no computers or Internet, or even television so there were no memes. I had no irritating daughter in the family either. We found our pleasures in simple things. I remember learning to drive so we could go on holidays touring in the West, with no worries about flying and Global Warming. We had such simple sports as children in times past, like watching spiders spin their webs, and the designs they’d make. We’d go for rambles through the woods and have picnics of tea and spam sandwiches. We were a lot healthier for it.

Nowadays, work is the new religion and people have lost the use of their imagination. People only get worked up over celebrities and smoking out corrupt politicians. They panic over property prices and have lost sight of the soul of life.

No.

I can’t think of anything.

I elect not to do it.

I’m going to file this under Uncatagorised.

Maybe Sixty should have a bash at this?

Or how about Kirk at Just Thinkin’? I haven’t tagged him before.

And it’s a while since I annoyed Grannymar!!

F*cking memes….

I’ve been dreading this for weeks.

“Where’s Ron?” says he.

I had been mentally working on my reply to this for a long time and had a nice excuse about him going West to a wedding. Of course I blurted out the truth.

“Thailand, I think.”

“What in the name of f*ck is he doing in Thailand? When did he go? When’s he coming back?”

“I don’t know. Weeks ago. No idea.” says I.

So I explained how I had accidentally shot Ron, and that he had gone off in a huff saying that he was sick of the weather and being shot and how Dick was a pr*ck to work for. The last bit wasn’t true, but Dick is a bit of a stuffed shirt, and needs the truth from time to time.

“But he’s been churning out the web sites.” says Dick, “He has been doing some great stuff and business has never been better. How could he do that if he’s in Thailand?”

“That was me.”

“But you know f*ck all about web design or web development!”

“True” says I, “but it’s dead easy once you get the hang of it. I just got a couple of books.”

He wasn’t pleased with that. There was a long silence.

“I liked that last site” says he, at last.

“Thanks. It took me two whole days to do that one”

“F*ck! It would have taken Ron a couple of weeks”

“Could you keep the language down a bit” says I, “as I’m recording this for my blog”

“You and you’re f*cking blog” says he. “I suppose you redesigned that too?”

There was another long silence.

“Want to take Ron’s place?” says he.

“Can we rename the company S.H.I.T.?” I asked.

“We’ll talk about that…”

So we decided to stroll down to the pub. We brought the guns in case there were any tourists around.

“What’s all this sh*t about Jedi?” says Dick as we walked.

“I don’t know. They suddenly started attacking me for no reason. They’re some bunch of weirdos. They have some obsession with Ewan McGregor, but they won’t say why. I looked them up on the Net and apparently there are thousands of them. In fact they have officially been added to the culling list.”

“Fair enough” said Dick.

Shortly after that two hoodies jumped out of the hedge in front of us.

“We are Jedi that have been sent by the Council to put an end to your wickedness” they hissed.

“The County Council?” I asked.

“The Council of Morm-Jordil” they muttered.

They whipped out two Maglite torches that had red cellophane wrapped over the lenses and started waving them at us.

….

If anyone wants the hoodies, they’re up in the landfill.

May The Force be with them.

The S.H.I.T. Awards.

Now to be known as the Golden Crabs Awards.

This award will be granted in recognition of excellence, incompetence, good design, bad design and general all round indifference.

The award scheme will be launched in full next week.

We at S.H.I.T will be announcing the reasons behind the awards, the categories and the criteria.

We hope that the Internet Industry, and in particular the Irish Internet Industry will see the true worth of these awards.

Watch this space………………..

For those of you who are new to this place, I have [had] a friend Ron, who with our pal Dick runs a web design business. I shot Ron [accidentally, I might add] a few weeks ago but couldn’t tell Dick. So I had to lash off and buy “HTML for Dummies”, “MySQL for Dummies”, “PHP for Dummies” and “CSS for Dummies” and then pretend to be Ron. They are incredibly boring books, by the way. Don’t get them if you want a laugh.

My problem is that I seem to be a better businessman than Ron.

My first site was a great success, and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.

I now have lost count of the number of jobs I’m working on. I think it’s six or seven. And they all want me to finish yesterday. I had two phone calls yesterday – two more jobs…..!

I am now slowly sinking in a morass of dollar signs and curly brackets. I have nightmares about pixels and database updates. I have resurrected S.H.I.T.

I want to sit here and smoke my pipe and drink my tea. I want to write rude posts on my blog. I want to visit other peoples blogs and leave rude comments there. I want to relax and enjoy my retirement. But I don’t have the time any more.

Mind you, the money is f*cking good!