I finish work this week!
At work right now at present, I find myself just counting the hours, and days that go by. I’m constantly staring at the calendar sitting on my desk. Lately I’ve been very reserved and quiet at work. I’m sick of working, travelling etc and I just want to get away from it all. Don’t get me wrong here, I love my job and have one of the most enjoyable jobs anyone could have but lately as the year comes to a close, I just want out. I’m not alone either from my scant observations of my colleagues. Everyone seems to be taking extended breaks, extended loo breaks, and just generally walking around wasting time, just to make the day progress that little bit quicker. Sadly we have another week of work left and break up on the 22nd Dec, so they’ve got another 4 days of boredom to kill. It doesn’t help by the fact that my mates up North in Manchester and Coventry all broke up from work on the 8th of December. It’s my favourite time of the year though, Winter and Christmas is here so there’s nothing that can get me down.
Anyway, the second of four parties was this week. I didn’t want to go to this one, which was at the Royal Spice in London, but went anyway. It was dull, and the moment the drinks started flowing, everyone was kicking back the wine, champers, beer, cider and wotnot like there was no tomorrow. Not too sure what else happened at the party because I was totally wasted like everyone else. I am, however unclear about a few things though:
- How the hell did I manage to bus it all the way home? I looked at the London Bus map earlier and apparently it would take 9 bus changes to reach home from the restaurant we were at. I do recall switching buses on more then a few occasions but how? I was totally wasted after leaving my colleagues.
- I seem to have two packets of cigarettes and a lighter in my coat pocket - I don’t smoke!
- My inner coat pocket seems to contain the restaurant’s menu
- My black shirt is heavily ripped near the lower buttons?!
So if anyone saw a seriously drunk asian guy, with spikey hair, wearing a long black coat on the 140, 282, H14 (that’s all I can remember) buses on Friday night, then I apologise for my actions if I’d done anything stupid! This weekend I really wanted to upload two more reviews, but have drastically run out of time. Instead I ended up fixing some broken parts of the blog after trying to customise the comments forms. Ended up wasting two hours on that, so my reviews on WWE Smackdown and Full Auto have been delayed by a bit. In addition I’ve also been tidying up some existing reviews because of some new fixes I did to the Lightbox plugin that handles the way images are displayed - if anyone spots anything weird, please get in touch using the Contact form on this blog. Ta muchly!
She cannae take anymore!
While I’ve been beavering away in the background of this blog fixing errors and minor bugs here and there, after upgrading the K2 theme, I can’t help but notice a colossal increase in traffic heading my way. These hits are definitely not coming from search engine bots as I’ve blocked most of the more annoying spider bots out there. Most of it seems to be coming from the Xbox 360 Reviews that I’ve been doing lately and I’m quite frankly stunned at the responses some of these reviews have had. I’d just like to say thank you.
The monthly hit rates for November hit 17,891, while October was 5,452. The previous record was 9,991 set in February 2006. The Gears of War review has attracted just over 3000 hits, and the 360 Wireless Headset write up has had 2800. Due to such a large increase in traffic (and I’ve not even started churning out the reviews yet) I can predict things will get a lot busier as I add more reviews. Guess I need to contact my good hosts JSW Freelance and upgrade my current package over the coming weeks. 17k of visitors may not sound much compared to most blogs out there, but for an average blog like this one it’s a lot in my opinion
I’ve also had a lot of emails from readers asking why they can’t comment on my reviews. Well here’s the answer to that - I’m not exactly sure. The K2 theme as I understand it supports Page Comments, and I have ‘Allow Comments’ ticked on the pages I write my reviews on, so I don’t understand why commenting just doesn’t work. I’ve looked at the code and it seems fine too. I am looking into this though but I doubt I can fix it, as it is well beyond me. For now, your best bet is to post a comment on the main review related snippet I’ll post whenever I upload a couple of games reviews.
Nowt broken yet
I’ve received my Xbox 360 Wireless Headset earlier today, so I’ve done a quick review of that. You can find it in the reviews section. I’ve also upgraded the K2 theme for this blog. It’s taken me a good month or so of tweaking before I could bring it online, so some portions of this blog will still be missing, or dead. Lastly, I’ve re-enabled the Rolling archives feature, so you can seamlessly navigate through the older pages of this blog. Bear in mind that it’s a bit flaky, and doesn’t like the Opera browser one bit (not my fault!), it should work fine in Firefox and IE6/7. Please give me a shout if anything isn’t looking quite right. Ta!
Must not break blog during update….
Those lovely chaps at Wordpress.org have released a new version of their popular blogging front end. You can grab it Here, and for a list of changes look over here.
I’ll be upgrading the blog sometime during this weekend, so should it suddenly die, just blame me good mate Kami, who’s running around dungeons hitting rats, and mudcrabs and stuff with his tiny dwarf in World of Warcraft 
Another WordPress upgrade
I’ll be upgrading this blog over the next two weeks to a newer version of the K2 theme that you see in use at present. Also being upgraded will be Wordpress itself to v2.04. This could result in the blog being a right utter mess over the next few weeks so bear with me here. To be honest, I’ve been wanting to move away from it so I could switch to something less complicated, but since I’ve more or less built this blog around the theme it’ll be hard recoding certain sections of it to another one.
I do have a stunning theme which I have been tweaking for the past couple of months during my spare time and I may possibly bring that online for a couple of days although I’m not sure.
Finally, I have had a few emails asking me to put up a gallery. I had already decided to add one to the blog but ran into problems months ago and I never looked at it again. To add to this, I’m so busy with my job that I hardly take photo’s as frequently as I once used to do anyway. Landscape photography was something I loved doing but I never showed off any of my work!
I’ve had a few emails from readers who have noticed small issues with the icons used on this blog in Internet Explorer 5-6. Namely that the backgrounds of them are blue. This is sadly because IE5.5-6 cannot render PNG alpha transparency properly. They don’t have the filter to do this sadly. IE7 which is in it’s beta stages finally fixes this long overdue issue. Firefox and Opera as expected are a lot more up to date therefore aren’t affected.
Over the next few hours I’ll be bringing the lovely K2 Theme, online with some new plugins. The theme is so far unmodified at the moment.
I’ve been knocked out with the flu for just over a week now and it’s lasted a lot longer then orignally expected, nerf! Feeling way better as of this morning, but still haven’t left the house since I caught it! Woke up today listening to Embrace - Natures Law and feel a million times better for doing so. What really worries me is I’ve lost 5lb’s because of this flu, yep I’ve triple checked too. That can’t be water weight shirley?
Right now I’m just installing EditorMonkey from Raj Prasad, which replaces the built in, but rather flaky WYSIWYG editor that this blog utilises via Wordpress. First impressions are already very good so hopefully this simplifies a lot of my blog writing. It’s also added a nice toolbar to the Post Comment’s feature so people can add MSN smileys and stuff!
Lastly, I shall rejoice along with millions of PC Gamers out there because Ubisoft have finally decided to drop using their copy protection system by the name of Starforce. Namely because they have lawsuits filed against them, due to the protection system actually causing havoc on many Windows based PC’s and rendering them almost useless. Starforce has managed to ruin the twin dvd writers on my PC rig to the point where they refuse to read any dvd, but read cd’s just fine, so cheers Ubi!…dozy pillocks. Thats right chaps, punish those who legitly buy your games why don’t you?
If you’re using the useless browser try switching to the proper ones such as Firefox and Opera which can actually render web pages correctly. Right now there are thousands of blogs out there that seem to have rendering issues in IEx, but are fine on the mainstream Firefox and Opera browsers. Both browsers are free and miles better then the pathetic IE which comes built into Windows. Hmm, now that IE7 Beta is out, I suppose I better install that on my laptop and see how if theres any change.
Edit: Right, did some lightening quick code adjustments and now that sidebar should render properly in IE6/7. If the sidebar should suddenly vanish, just hit the page Refresh/Reload button (F5) and it should reappear
