Kamikaze attack, a Wasp and Wordpress
Man its hot out thar! Temperatures were hitting 28c outdoors and 30c in my room this weekend.
It was so damn hot that on Friday, a rather large fly decided to try and cool off by doing a kamikaze run straight into my left eye and completely knocked me out during a lunchtime walk by the side of the lake near my workplace. It was lodged in my upper eyeball and I could feel the bugger moving around but could I get it out?! Could I heck… I ended up walking home partially blinded, crashing in to random people as a result. I had to take a different route home too - it would be too embarrasing walking through Harrow town. Suffice to say that I eventually removed it, but fark me did that hurt! 
On another note I was woken up on Saturday morning by a strange buzzing sound. It turned out to be a flaming suicidal wasp who preferred my cool pillow to the rather hot air. Needless to say this took me by complete surprise and saw me crash off the bed. A few hours later I was working under my desk rerouting some cables, and guess who I bumped in to down there? The blasted wasp was back and sent me fleeing to the nearest air freshner can. Coupled with a lighter it would be toast! Sadly the bugger had vanished by the time I had returned…
Sunday saw me writing a review for a new toy that I have, when I decided to take a break and upgrade this blog to
Wordpress 2.5.1 and the latest RC6 build of the superb
K2 Wordpress theme. Wordpress installed smoothly enough but K2 RC6 has caused a few issues. Wordpress 2.5.1 works slightly differently now and reads CSS in a different way so it took some getting used to.
Currently this blog fails to render properly in Internet Explorer 6 and 7 - I can’t fix this without further investigation in to this issue. It is fine in Firefox and Opera as expected though. All this faffing about with Wordpress meant that I failed to finish my review by Sunday night. Great
I can’t even adjust to the new look
dashboard…
I haven’t really written much on this blog lately so that is going to change from this point onwards. I’ll spend a lot more time tinkering around and adding new toys yay! 
It’s that time of the month again
Wordpress 2.5 arrived rather quietly overnight last night so it’s time to look into upgrading this blog again. For those who aren’t clued up on how big a upgrade this is take a look-see at the Screencast and the screenshots of the new dashboard interface.
A list of 2.5 compatibile plugins can be found Here. So next weekend I shall attempt to upgrade this blog, with possibly disastrous results. I may need to move to the latest K2 build at the same time I predict. Hoorah!
I wubs u wp!
This blog has been sitting on Wordpress 2.1.3 for quite sometime now as the latest WP releases just wouldn’t work right with my modded K2 theme. However I have just upgraded from 2.1.3 to 2.2.2 with hardly any side effects, which is a tad odd but great at the same time.
So if anything does look out of place or broken, please give me a shout as I’ve yet to notice anything wrong. As a matter of fact the upgrade went surprisingly smoothly as it used to! Taken from www.wordpress.org
As these releases include only security and minor bugfixes they should not cause any plugin or theme compatibility issues, so you have no good excuse not to upgrade.
More Site Updates
Kainzy.org is back from a few days of downtime after moving to Vidahost.com. I’ve upgraded Wordpress to the latest release (v2.1 codenamed Ella), and at the same time I’m fine tuning the latest version of the lovely K2 theme. Everything has gone extremely smoothly and I’ve only got just one mis-behaving plugin at the moment giving me some grief.
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.
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 
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.
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
