Mat Bowles

Gah, I hate April 1st, you get far too many wacky stupidities going on. What on earth made them pretend Nation States is a dating game? On the other hand. silentgreeneyes? Using a very complicated formula, we have determined that your ideal mate is The Rogue Nation of Dot-topia


( Busy and exhausting day at work, a rare good one )

( I left the flat and went to town, to go shopping!  )

Still utterly exhausted; if I go to GameSoc tomorrow in Exeter, what's on (apart from Fred's offer of FluxX)?

First, many thanks to everyone who said stuff, however, I think dainul says it best:

/me is slightly confused by the people congratulating you. I mean, I'd hope you didn't have a particularly direct role in the proceedings.

I did nothing, all I did was turn up at the hospital. It seems weird to be congratulated; I guess it's just something to say I guess.

Still, mother and baby fine, he's quiet and behaved so far, apparently, and she's quite happy on the morphine.

Buy a peerage! . Pledgebank pledge is here. Just really a follow up to this and this from last August.


Also, although mapp beat me to it (saw the announcement on draich_goch's PC), GW announce a 40K RPG. If any one game is going to get me roleplaying again (given that the new WFRP failed although it does look very well done), it's the same system but set in one of the best realised gothic sci-fi backgrounds out there. Let's face it, it's more OTT that Dune, and better realised with better internal consistency.

Today, I slept until after 12, had a shower, drove to Jason's and played LoTR Warmaster (Battle of the Five Armies). I bought it when it came out (a year ago), and we've never actually played it. Given that a painted set went on eBay recently for over £150, we thought we'd give it a go with a view to painting the figures, playing it a few times and selling it off. We liked it so much we decided to paint them up, sell them off, and use the proceeds to buy a new set. However, in order to get me painting, we're going to arrange a time to do it at his, painting is something I can only do in a social situation otherwise I get distracted. Haven't painted more than a Formule De model for years...

Tonight, Radio 4, 23.00 GMT. Small Gods. That would be all. Except...

Linda Smith, comedian, performer, campaigner and President of the British Humanist Association, died today. Tributes going to be on Radio 4 a lot this week. This one from Jeremy Hardy is especially good. She'd kept the illness quiet; I was laughing at her jokes so recently.

Someone remind me to join the BHA when my finances are sorted? (approx May I think).

Right, paulatpingu persuaded me to finally install Ubuntu. It's nice and shiny. Unfortunately, it corrupted my windows install, and won't make a dial up connection.

So that's a formatted hard drive and another start again. Fortunately my data partition remains, so I've got all my stuff. Unfortunately, bookmarksbackup was backing up into the wrong folder, so my last bookmarks are from October. I just spent ages sorting them all out as well. Feck.

If anyone out there knows how to tell a Linux distro, specifically Ubuntu 5.10, how to connect via my USB modem, greatfully received. In the meantime, I'm going on a trawl to get my favoured sites back. Oh, um, wait, I've been linking to most of them anyway. Just the webcomics then...

Oh, last two days, I've been getting a 'busy' tone a bit too often when I try to dial, so I may be forced offline at times :-(

But if they look like this...
( can I have one? )Yup, it's a silly quiz meme, from lithium_doll; here was me thinking Whitelighters were just a silly idea from Charmed. Am a bit better today mood wise, still not in the mood to do much, ah well. Did drink an entire carton of co-op Orange juice and mango pureé, so that's my vit-c quotient for the week fulfilled.

By way of tyrell, this is rather amusing. Oh, and this is one of the better blog posts I've read in the last few months, rather amusing, and been awarded a bloody devil award as well. Bit like one of mine. Yay!

OK, awhileback I switched off my postmaster accounts on the domains, and got everything to forward to one inbox. I check the spam folder every hour or so anyway, and just delete whatever is in there, haven't had a false positive for ages now.

Today, I decided not to bother deleting stuff, I just marked all as read to see when new stuff came in.

So, tally from when I logged off approx 24 hours ago and now? 253 spam emails.

The moral to this story? Meh, I've never tried hiding my email addresses, but I suspect putting it up unscreened on a domain name owned by a friend hosted on Geocities when I redesigned it for him was probably a bad plan. Also, owning two domains, one of which is being spoofed for outgoing by at least one spammer is really annoying. I think I may switch postmaster back on. Oh, having the admin account being also my main contact account was stupid as well. Learnt the lesson on that one. I'll probably switch the fuzzyduck email address from MatB to MatGB at some point, and at this point I'll let TaKtix lapse, not using it at all, and it's not a cheap hosting package like fuzzyduck...

But, dude? 253 spam emails in 24 hours? FFS. Only 2 got into the inbox though, they're right, spam is going to die soon, the filtering is too good. If people stopped buying the crap they advertise we'd all be better off as well. If I want viagra, or cialis, or even \/146R4, I'll go see a doctor. I can't afford stocks or shares, there is no way I'm taking out a US based home loan, and if I want to look for Euro porn I'll just look for it, it's not like search engines can't find porn easily. Yet, somewhere out there, blithering idiots respond to these mails and make the spammers money. Stop it. Please.

So, confused by all the stuff happening with LJ over the last few days? Well, azurelunatic has put up a great summary, which was funny enough to be metaquoted, but I got to it via a comment in daweaver, and it's being linked to everywhere. So, for the benefit of those who don't read nearly_everyone, I thought I'd link it.

But, of perhaps more use, why secure passwords are essential for everyone and why they can't just log you out if you get it wrong a few times. My password was the same as that for one of my domains. That was, well, stupid. Especially since I'd been using it for various sites for years.

I'm pretty much over the cold now, but the finances are still screwed, so I'll be doing cheap things that don't require travelling for a bit longer I suspect.

OK, if paulatpingu and mapp are going to be there, I suspect I can drag myself along and play a game of some sort; it's at Steve's, right?

( So, opinions as to what we should do? )

In other, blog related news, yesterday saw our highest individual number of page views and unique visitors since I started counting about a month ago. Why? Well, lots of people linked to a post I made.

Spread the word

posted by MatGB on Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Don't you think Blair looks tired?

This Dr Who based meme brought to you by a fatigued blogger suffering from writers block again...

Technorati tagsearch: Blair, NuLab, Labour, Dr Who

That's it. In it's entirety. Double the normal readership because I make a Dr Who joke. Should that impress or depress me?