Ultimate Gambit

Those of you with any kind of interest in my site may have been wondering where i’ve been for the past couple of months, and why the lack of posts. Well, I moved down to London and have been messed about by Bulldog Broadband something rotten.

I wont go into details on the problem (at the moment), as i still have a backlog of about a billion e-mails, but when i get a chance i’ll have a bit of a whinge!

Other than that, things have been going great and i’ll post about other things when the opportunity arises! For now, this will have to do you tho

Hope to catch up with many people soon!

So, i’m in the process of finalising my NesPc (more to come on this when i finally get it finished), and the house gets hit by lightning!Not only does it scare the crap out of me, cause me to drop my dinner all over the floor, and miss the start of Neighbours, but it causes me to worry sick that all the computers may have been blown up (it’s happened to us before, so i was a little nervous).

So i was quite relieved when i got upstairs and saw all 4 of them humming away merrily. It was only when i got close that i realised that the network had gone down. After much playing, i realised that the router had blown up (after a pretty serious blast to the phone line i imagine), but not only that, the ethernet port on my NesPC had blown too

This was pretty wierd, and the other physical connection to my parents comp was fine, but that was a shorter distance :s
The port shows fine in windows, i’m just getting absolutely nothing from it. This screwed my plans of setting up my NesPC, as i’ve been doing it all over the network using VNC and was streaming all the media to it as it only has a 2Gb HDD.

I hate lightning…

Just came across this amazing ‘domino’ run using pretty much everything that you can find in the house – cd’s, videos, soap etc etc!
Its so cool i just had to post it!

Enjoy

I’ve just added a photo gallery to the site where I will put up personal photos of events etc that I think people might want to see. They are probably only of interest to my friends, but they have to go somewhere!

Photos that arent here will be found on my Flickr account.

The gallery can be found by clicking Photo Gallery link in the right hand bar. Enjoy

It’s been in the news a fair bit recently, with people wanting to teach intelligent design to school kids as part of science lessons. This really angers me, so when I came across this, I thought it was time I wrote something about it.

For me, while evolution is just a theory, its one of the most obviously true theories in science today. The sheer amount of evidence available should far outweigh any doubts that people have. However, some blind people still seem to believe in Intelligent Design. It’s generally these same people who so fundamentally believe in many religious doctrines which have absolutely no evidence to support them, and lead to crazy people like this.

Anyway, in my opionion Evolution is as close to scientific fact as you can get. As I have said before, everybody is entitled to their opinion, and I am not going to try and change the opinions of people who believe in ID, but seriously, it does make me worry about the world when something so glaringly obvious (evolution) gets overlooked by people in favor of something that has absolutely no scientific basis or any hint of proof about it (ID).

As for teaching it in science classes, what an absolute pile of crap. R.E. classes maybe, although, personally I think teaching something so clearly wrong is a waste of time, full stop.
Anyway, back to the orignial thing that prompted me to post this, in perusing the web today, I came across a pretty convincing arguement for evolution on Google Groups. I’ve posted it below for completion, and it continues after the break…

“I was recently fortunate enough to witness a high school biology
teacher get hit by a question about Evolution…

(more…)

I’m going to go into rant mode now…

I bought an item on ebay a while ago. It was a model delorean car from BTTF, (from seller retrotoys2004), and was described as being in good condition. I got it for a good price, but i was a bit miffed when it arrived and had a number of problems with it.

It was no longer screwed to the base, a wingmirror was broken off and had clearly tried to be fixed a few times because of glue marks, a windscreen wiper was missing, one of the wheels didnt raise properly with all the others, and a number of the fins on the back were snapped.

So, i e-mailed him to ask for a refund. The seller offered me one, but said i’d have to pay postage. Since the postage was going to cost me almost as much as the item, i decided not to bother.

So i left him Neutral feedback, since the item was not what he described, but he did offer me a refund in line with ebay’s T&C’s.

Then he leaves me a Negative feedback (my first) saying I was bad for eBay.

This really PI***S me off… I paid well, he got exactly what he should have off me, I DID NOTHING WRONG. He on the other hand falsely advertised, and in reality should have got negative feedback. The only reason i didnt was because of fear of getting a negative.

This is not how feedback should work. It SUCKS.

Now, in my opinion, neither buyer or seller should be able to see the feedback left for them until after they have left their feedback, that way the whole system is fair.

Am I wrong in being pi**ed off!? Does anyone else have a problem with the eBay feedback system? The whole system is open to manipulation and vindictiveness.

RANT OVER

I saw the video below this afternoon and it reminded me just why I no longer believe in God, and why I dont want to. Religion does some crazy things to some people, and the woman in this video really scares me! Religion seems to be able to give excuses for nearly everything, and quite frankly, I dont want to be associated with anyone as crazy as this woman.

I’m not saying that there arent millions of people who have a perfectly healthy connection to their religion, and I would never try to force my beliefs (or lack of) onto anyone else. I fully respect decisions people make in their beliefs, however when things go as far as they do in this video, i have to draw the line. I’m sorry lady, but as the reporter in this video says, you’re a nutcase…

When i was back home recently, i went to Ikea and bought a Detolf cabinet to display my recent purchases of toys and busts. Afterall, what would be the point in buying them if they werent going to be on display?!

Now, i know many of you reading this will not appreciate the beauty of these items, however its an addiction that i cannot cure (and actually quite like). A bit like cocaine… but cheaper and less harmful to my body…
Anyway, onto the photos This is not my whole collection, rather a selection of the ones that are still at home (i have some on display up here in Nottingham too). Enjoy

It was the first night of the Gilbert & Sullivan Society production of ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ last night. Overall, it went very well and the reviewers we had in the audience also seemed to think so! For those who don’t know, i’m playing in the part of Major General Stanley, and was very chuffed to get the following review from the Nottingham Evening Post:

“Andrew Griffiths is a delight as the Major General and his rendition of the tongue-twisting I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General is delivered with confidence”

The whole cast performed excellently last night – i hope we can do as well and better in the rest of the performances!

For tickets, please contact the Nottingham Arts Theatre.

I was browsing the web this morning, and what should i stumble upon but Stumble Upon! This cool little toolbar for Firefox is brilliant – if you’re not already using firefox, then for starters, why not and secondly, you may want to get it for this!

Stumble Upon is basically a toolbar that gives you a button which when clicked, links you to a random website that other people have rated, along the lines of various categories that you choose. If you yourself come across an interesting site, you can tag and rate it so that others can come across the site that you found.

I was going to say this toolbar was useful, and great, but the fact of the matter is, you may end up wasting a fair bit of time with some of the sites it links you too!!

Well worth checking out! Get the extension here