Gearing up for NaNo and stuff

Well, it’s nearly the end of October and NaNoWriMo is all set to get cracking again. There is a pre-Nano meet-up tomorrow in the city (there was an unofficial one today for those that can’t make it tomorrow, not sure how many attended), and I intend to be at the meet-up.

NaNo is awesome fun and quite hectic. I’ll be having a few problems this year as mum goes in for surgery at the end of October.

That’s the other bit of news. Mum is having her gall bladder removed. Hopefully the doctor will be able to remove it via keyhole surgery, but they say that they may have to open her up. If they cut her open, then she has to stay longer in the hospital and will take longer to recover.

Hopefully all will go well. I’ve booked a few days off from work (I wanted to take two weeks off, but they would only allow me three days), so hopefully between me and my brother we’ll be able to make sure she gets better.

The last thing is that my dog tags arrived. I had to wait until I knew my blood type, but they are now around my neck. I put my name, blood type, drivers license number and emergency contact details on there.

They are supposed to be military grade stainless steel, but we’ll see how long they last…

Also, I saw Up today. I liked it.

Bee Positive

Well, got the results back from the blood clinic and it turns out that I am B+ bloodtype.

I’m not sure what to say. I don’t feel any different and I don’t think it’ll make a whole lot of difference in my life (unless someone gives me the wrong blood type at the hospital).

In an effort to head off that calamity before it happens, I put in an order for some dog tags. We’ll see how long they take to arrive.

Also ordered more flashes and some stands. Hanging out for those to arrive…

Shoes!

Well, since I am now gearing up to run more often, I figured that it would be a good idea to get some proper running shoes. Something with support that would help me.

Picked up some Adidas shoes for about $200 (ouch). Hopefully they will be 10x better than the $20 shoes I am running with at the moment.

The main drama being that with the old shoes I was getting ankle pain which might have been due to a lack of support.

I’ll be trying them out on Monday. I’ll share how it goes!

Trying out Coppermine

Well, I wasn’t able to find a different image gallery program so I went ahead and decided to install Coppermine (it is available as a one-button install option provided by my website host, Jumba).

So far, it has gone reasonably well. The learning curve isn’t too hard, I’ve been able to sort things out and get the ball rolling (15 photos uploaded thus far) and it looks like it will be much better than my original photo gallery which was just a basic page with links to photos.

 

The new one looks pretty crappy at the moment (default theme) but I will be trying to change the look of it to fit in with my website a little more.

If I can get it to look like it is part of the site, then I will be very happy with it.

Site Rebuild

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but it’s about time that I re-built my website. It’s been floundering around with little aim and has outdated code.

Plus it was built when I didn’t really know that much about building websites.

Onwards and upwards.

Going to the Rise

It's been sooooo long since I went out on a friday night. I don't think I'll have the energy to dance til dawn any more, but I'll see if I can make a good showing of it.

Should be fun, unless I end up in a random fight with some stranger who thinks I'm trying to hit on his girfriend whom I don't even see and end up getting punched, kicked, glassed, stabbed, shot, killed or some other horrible thing.

Oh well, no point in living if there's no chance of dying!

Yes!

Oh, I can’t believe it – those dvd’s I ordered actually work!

I’m so excited – and I just can’t hide it!

I have so much other stuff that I should be doing – but noooo – I’ll be wasting time watching dvd’s. Oh well, I knew how the game would play out when I signed up for it.

*squee*

Goodies arrived!

I found a site a few weeks ago that sold old series and stuff that aren't available. The package arrived today - yay!

I'll be opening it up and having a look in a minute. Hopefully, they'll play on my dvd player. If it does, I'll definitily be leaving positive feedback for the chap who sold them to me - not to mention spending hours and hours watching them!

And I thought I had a book to write! Well, I did order a book that arrived a few days ago which I haven't looked at yet.

There must be something wrong with me that a new book arrives and I don't start reading it and a package arrives with stuff for me that I've been waiting for and I jump online and blog about it rather than opening it up...

Okay, off to watch!

Writing again

Whee, finally sat down and wrote some words.

Not just in a generic sense, but in a “I’m writing a story” type sense. Now I just need to keep up the pace in order to get into the groove and ready for NaNoWriMo 2009.

Of course, if I was doing it properly, I would still be writing the story rather than writing this blog post about writing the story while not writing the story.

Wait…

Night Photography

Not a whole lot going down at the moment. Went out the other night to take a few more pics of the streets at night. Didn’t get anything particularly exciting, but there were one or two that were good enough.

This is one of them:

There must be a story behind this shoe, though I do not know it.

I was walking back to the car when I happened to notice that there was a shoe lying by the side of the road. It is pink and not very large. There is only one and the straps are done up. Like I said, I have no idea as to the story behind this shoe.

Maybe a young girl was happily playing the park, went back to the car to go home with the family and dropped it by the side of the road. Perhaps an annoying little brother threw it out the window as they were leaving.

I don't know what happened, but somewhere there is another little shoe, sad, and missing it's twin…

In other news, I put in an order for some business cards. I have no idea if or when they are going to show up, but I’ll wait and see how they turn out.

Updated website

Wow, it has been way too long since I updated my website.

Well, at least I don’t do frivolous updates for the sake of an update. Put up the latest “essay” (if you can really call it an essay). It’s a short article about upgrading my Extensa 5220 laptop with more RAM and a bigger HDD.

Didn’t go out on the weekend to do any photography (wanted to save a bit on fuel) but I did take a bunch of photos of the flowers and stuff around the house.

Mood: Anxiously waiting for stuff I bought on-line to arrive.

This time with a photo

Okay, we’ll add a hyperlink to Google and a photo:

That’s a photo of one of the guys I used to work with in his race car.

I’m reluctant to use the other “insert” options as I’m not sure what they all do but I am liking the fact that this thing has spellchecker built in and that it seems to be handling everything pretty well.

I wasn’t too sure about all the extra stuff that it installed when I first put it in, but we’ll see how it goes and if I can keep myself trained to do more Blog posts.

I don’t tend to write too much. Whee. Word. Heh. Lol.

Okay, enough of that…

Trying out Windows Live Writer

Okay, so this is the fancy new Windows Live Writer.

Didn’t seem to hard to set up, now let’s see how it works. Post Number 1 from Writer – away!