October 2006

If you live in a victorian or georgian house like I do, then you know what drilling holes in the walls can be like.

If it’s not crumbling plaster you have to deal with, its rock hard bricks which even a fully recharged cordless hammer drill will refuse to punch through.  None of this plasterboard pre-fab here!

I was struggling to put up some shelves in my sons bedroom when my Black & Decker cordless drill (glorified screwdriver) decided to start running out of charge.  With a wife watching over me like a prison warden, there was only one option - ask my neighbour if I could borrow his drill to finish the job.  Although I only had 8 more holes to drill I needed to get the job finished within an hour - so recharging the battery on my drill was not an option.

He works as a carpenter/builder/general manly type person and I know that his shed is full of expensive looking gadgets like lathes and circular saws.  He brought round a corded drill made by Makita and set it up for me to use.  Some of the drill bits he had in the case were bigger than my… well, lets just say I felt very envious.

The drill pushed through my stubborn walls like they were butter!  It was totally amazing and eye opening!  I usually struggle to get a 2 inch screw hole drilled - but this thing punched in 6 inches in a matter of seconds.

I think it’s called a percussion drill and after a quick search on Screwfix and eBay I see that they are about £100.

If I get one… will I be a real man? 

Tsk! To think that I have been using that slow Wordpress editor for so long…

I posted a question over at the Wordpress support forums in search of a web based editor I could use to post to my blog from work - without actually ever visiting it.

Not that this blog is subversive or contains illegal material , slanderous comments or items of a sexual nature . It’s just that I have started a new job and don’t want to make it obvious I am a blogger, that I blog and yes, I might be blogging about YOU.

The moderators over at the WP support forums came back with this site: WriteToMyBlog is a web based editor based on TinyMCE which allows remote posting to your blog - but via an excellent WYSIWYG editor. The editor is much better than the ones supplied with Blogger and Wordpress and it even handles a copy/paste from Microsoft Word - the enemy of working HTML!

I welcome my new interface to MegaTao.com and hope you will all heed my advice to start using it.

You can get a TinyMCE plugin for Wordpress too though - but I shall be sticking with WTMB.

Just some funky PHP and Javascript I took 2 nights to write threw together.

No doubt you will be sharing your choice examples….

I finally managed to get hold of The Davinci Code (sans subtitles!!! Argh!) and watched it with “the wife” last night and thought I would write a review for everyone:

Its about this bloke who likes symbols and stuff who gets framed for murder and meets a french bird who helps him escape and discover the supposed location of the holy grail.  Add in a few minutes of meaningless number crunching, characte plot twists and CGI graphics to wow the audience who would have been braindead long ago, and you have yet another crap film.

I am sorry to say this - but I have read it and the book is much better.

It does not seem that long ago that I was watching the X Games on TV and the motocross guys were pulling backflips.  It seemed that the trick was the best and most amazing thing you could do on a bike since an endo.

Whilst comforting my seven year old with a bowl to catch his vomit and a roll of bounty to mop his chin we stayed up until 1am and happened to catch the MotoX best trick bit of X Games 12.  The backflip seemed very “old hat” - until Travis Pastrana pulled a double backflip and landed it like he had done nothing at all.

This was pretty impressive - and totally crazy too!  Not quite as impressive as the other backflip tricks his fellow riders were pulling though!

Hell!  And that guy only came third!
How do they even learn that shit?

Torrents are all well and good, but grabbing something at 3kb a second for 2 weeks does not really float my boat any more.

Someone in TRL (the real world) told me about a forum called Th3Zone (ThreeZone) where links to “stuff” can be grabbed from sites such as rapidshare.

The benefits of places like Rapidshare is that they are quicker than getting stuff on torrents - normally as fast as your little router will carry it!

The only drawback is that they often impose a download limit or daily quota based on your IP address unless you pay for a premium account. Some people say that they might be able to get round this by using proxies

Th3zone is good because people also post links to other copies of the same content hosted on similar download services - but ones without any limits imposed! Ahh… cool. Sign up is free too, with a valid email address (although I was never asked to validate mine).

I like forums now. I did’nt before. But now I do!