The other day I had an absolute nightmare walking Eddie.

We were half the way around a circlular route in the woods, probably about half a mile into it when this other dog comes bolting up to me barking its mouth off and Eddie, ever dutiful in protecting his owner fled the scene.  2 Women arrived apologising and saying they’ll put their barking dog on the lead ‘cos its in a funny mood.

Eddie was nowhere to be seen so I stood there and waited for him to come back whilst occasionally calling out.  After what felt like forever I gave up waiting and went off running back in search of him.  I caught up with the 2 women, their dog was still yapping at everything and the bitches had gone and let it back of the lead!  Stupid, because obviously Eddie will have carried on running away from it.  So I carried on running past them and Eddie was still nowhere to be seen even as I reached the entrance to the woodland, I thought ’shit’ cos I released he might have aimed to cross a road on the way back home.  So I carried on, ran accross the busy road and this guy calls out to me, “hey, is that your dog?!” and there he was, staring at me from down this school path I use to get to the woods.  When I got to him he cried out desperately as he made a fuss of me.  I bet he had run straight across the road without looking, and I wish there was footage because I wager he will have narrowly missed being run over

I started a Flickr group today called “Basset Griffon Vendéen.”  Bet ya can’t guess what it’s about?  It’s already got 4 members, although admittedly 2 of them are me, one to set it up and one to test that its joinable lol.  Thing is, the 2 people who have joined have already posted enough photo’s to knock poor Eddie off the first page!

The funnest thing about it though is that you can rename “admin” and “member”.  I’ve called them “Grand” and “Petit” (a breed joke), but it’s a little ironic because that means I’m “Grand” because i’m the Admin but the photo’s I’ve added are of Eddie, who’s a “Petit”.

I urge everyone to take a look at this group because this breed is still very much unknown to the extent of being rare and yet every single specimen is cuter than the cutest thing you can imagine! And I wish to spread the word and make this breed more well known because do you know what?  It’s so unknown that some breeders amazingly have trouble selling an entire litter and they end up having to hold on to some of them beyond their puppy years and the older the puppy is the harder it is to sell.  And I dread to think what becomes of them.

I’ve admired Bleep.com for a long time but I never think to check there for music, because their catalogue is far from exhaustive and it’s mainly dance/electronic based, of which there hasn’t been an awful lot i’m interested in recently.

Anyway, today I went to iTunes to purchase “So This Is Goodbye” by Junior Boys and then I stopped for a second to wonder what the alternative online stores are, I checked Bleep.com and am sooooo glad I did. Not only was it a pound cheaper, 6.99 rather than 7.99 at iTunes but it’s encoded at 320kbit/s (almost obscenely high!) and without any DRM, and this isn’t any dodgy Russian thing, the artists get the royalties they deserve. I also bought the new singles/b-sides compilation by Tortoise, it’s 3cd’s of music and just 8.99! bargain. Also, you can pay by paypal so you you don’t have to go through too much torture in the way of registering.

We took Eddie for another country walk, this walk was from bakewell to hadden hall and back and offered plenty of scenery to try out my camera, I’m still far from a photography expert though. Tell you what, what I’ve noticed now that there’s more photo’s in iPhoto made on it, when you scroll up and down through the thumbnails its really really obvious which are from the DSLR and which are from the compact because the DSLR ones through and through have more vivid colour, the ones from the compact look kind of pastel compared.

I bought a registration for FlickrExport a few weeks go and I realised today that it’s a bit silly to have paid for FlickrExport and yet be using a free Flickr account. So I’ve finally paid for a pro one today, however I didn’t upgrade the account I have been using because it isn’t included in public searches and tag pools, I occasionally upload screenshots to it and these are considered copyrighted material, if they notice they flag your account to not be made public. So, i’ve setup a new account, a pro one for photo’s and I’ll use the free one for screenshots and dodgy things I guess.
The Scobe or whatever he’s affectionately known has been praising some beta software by Microsoft, Codename Max (sounds way to much like Mac’s), I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is so I was intrigued to try it out. It has a flashy interface which requires a good 3D card I think, so I have to boot into bootcamp for that. So I booted into Vista to download Max and install it, and do you know what? The Installer told me I need XP! OMG! In fact, even better it told me to “upgrade” to XP.

I think I might have to stop visiting ebay unless I’m selling, it’s just way too easy to get caught up in the moment.

I’ve been wanting a DSLR camera for yonks and yonks but always I spent hours on ebay not quite finding a deal to suite, or that was quite cheap enough for such a penny pincher as I am and then my sensible side kicks in and I suddenly realise I don’t need a new camera anyway and what the hell would I do with it?

Unfortunately the other day, my sensible side forgot to kick in and I ended up buying one. I bought an Olympus E-300, and it was a bargain make no mistake, it was actually less than half the retail value. OK, it’s not the latest model but even when I factor all that in I still can’t see how it was anything other than cheap. And condition wise you would swear it was brand new never been used.

My biggest problem, and possibly the one thing that makes me regret the purchase is that this thing is freaking HUGE! I knew DSLR’s were big but I was not prepared for this. Just look at it compared to my mum’s Pentax Optio S45, and the S45 is quite chunky for an Optio, and it isn’t further away, it’s balancing on top of it.
Apparently DSLR pro’s dislike this particular camera because the shape doesn’t scream traditional DSLR, it hasn’t the usual bump at the top where the view-finder is because Olympus decided to come up with a new way of getting the image to the view-finder. But I really like the design, looks wise… if it wasn’t so freaking Enormous!

The camera is 8MP which is high, but it wasn’t really the resolution, or even the image quality that I wanted it for, it was for the speed of a pro-ish camera and the flexibility, and the way you can get away with pictures in low light more than you can with a compact. This photo of eddie was only the second photo I ever took with it! And it’s a work of art! Seriously I think I’ve justified the purchase with that one image. i’ve tons to learn though, I don’t know what half the photography terminology means.

I haven’t posted any photo’s of Eddie in an age, we went on a walk in Derbyshire that was very pleasant indeed.

The walk started at the Druids Inn, or at least I think that was what the pub/restaurant is called, its a swanky place which has recently been taken over the same guy who runs the Thyme restaurant in Sheffield, if the nosh is only even half as good as Thyme it would be well worth checking out, and you couldn’t possibly ask for more idelic surroundings.

There were some Bronze Age stones laid out in a circler manor half through the walk, possibly meant to be the highlight but it just looked like some weathered stones to me, still you do get the eerie feeling that some witchcraft had taken place and Eddie seemed right in there.

More Derbyshire pr0n. Speaking of Eddie, he’s got some mysterious growth in between the pads of one of his paws and he gets vicious if you fiddle with it, I think it might be a blister, but it’s most unlike any blister i’ve ever had. Still, I think I’d have weird growths on my feet if I walked everywhere bare-foot. It’s his own silly fault for being a dog.

After Eddie had an enjoyable little walk around Chatsworth I managed to find a chance to go to John Lewis to buy a replacement Apple Keyboard, handy they had some because i didn’t relish another stressful journey to Meadowhell, and hey, John Lewis sell them for a pound less than Apple themselves. Woohoo, bargin. haha, thing is, I’ve noticed the lettering seems a little different on this one, some labels such as “delete” are written more largely and so are others, after being used to my old one its a little disconcerting, as if this new one is a cheap rip-off. Also the labeling is a little paler than my other. Ah well, despite this its actually always nice to have a new keyboard, you can really feel the difference compared to an old soiled one where the keys have over time gotten a bit of a squeeky friction to them.

Now I just need to demand 19 quid from my brother.

I didn’t really finish writing up the holiday, hmm but even though It’s only been 10 odd days since coming back the memories have already become an incoherent mess inside my head. I’m such a scatterbrain. All mushed up. Lemmie see.

North Devon has lovely country walks and such but it doesn’t tend to have those charming cobbled harbour towns that you get a lot of in south devon and cornwell. Still, the nicest town we visited was Ilfracombe, really pretty town, lots of pensioners about and its really well kept and has some kind of homely quality. Strange claim to fame there, they have a restaurant called The Quay owned by Damien Hurst, we did happen to pass it but there wasn’t anything in formaldehyde on the menu so we didn’t bother, plus it wasn’t dinner time. Nope a more incredible thing was, we bumped into a PBGV!!! The first fellow PBGV Eddie has seen since the kennel and he couldn’t give two hoots lol. It was a bitch and was the colours we actually wanted originally (sorry eddie lol), it was white + blonde/going on ginger. Ack it had a really adorable coat. But OMG, her folks had a heartbreaking story to tell us! When she was 4 they discovered she’d developed glaucoma and it was too far gone to save and at 6 she had to have her eyes taken out! The gits got us all round up as well, they actually said to us, (paraphrasing) “You know, with this breed still being quite uncommon we’ve always wondered if the risk of glaucoma is in the breed but hasn’t been publicised”, Well thanks! What a thing to say to get us all worried about Eddie’s future. LOL, also they kind of implied to us that Eddie’s over-weight, just cos their’s was quite svelte. Hey, its a chubby breed I swear, theres was just freakishly thin!

Stupid car on that photo.

Well I’ve had a downright annoying week, so I let myself have a week off blogging duty. Last Saturday was the main culprit, I think i’ll put it in a list in order of events.

1. It was always going to be a sucky day because it was the day we had to return from our little holiday. You know what, even though it was only devon, not the most exotic of locations and not even abroad, it barely seems a holiday if it isn’t abroad in this day and age of cheap travel. But d’ya know what it was one of the most enjoyable weeks i’ve had and its all because of Eddie. Holidays with dogs are soooo gooood! It’s worth getting a dog just to go on holiday with them. So yeah, I was quite down at having to leave.
2. Being in the car for such a length of time isn’t much fun for a dog so we made stops at every service station on the way to give him a potty break and stretch our weary legs. At one such break I noticed something in the fur on Eddies forehead, it was sort of a faint orange small pea sized thing and when I took a closer look found it to actually be attached to him. Then I noticed it had legs! I was horrified! I didn’t know at the time but it turns out it was a tick, would you believe I’ve never seen a tick before? You don’t tend to see them in this country and what with the the heatwave at the time. I almost died though, I was shaking and all sorts was racing through my head of what diseases it might have passed to him and it was quite close to his eyes so I was all OMG what if it makes him blind?! Eddie was no use at all, he hadn’t brought it to our attention, no whimpering or anything, it could have been there for days. I cursed nature and all her evil insects.
3. We made an early start so that we would get home in time for the england game, we only just made it, immediately having to grab a beer and jump on the sofa, no time to unpack. Oh and wasn’t I so glad to have made the effort? Yeah. Never liked rooney. Twat.
4. I’d missed my wholesome iMac, and straight after the long long punishment. 120 minutes + penalties of slow torture I figured I’d say hello to him (lol most people call their mac’s her’s, not me I guess). I knew that during holiday apple released 10.4.7 and some other paraphernalia so the first thing I did on logging in was to check for software updates and tthere was a ton of the bleeders. They downloaded quite swiftly thanks to 10Mbit cable and installed one by one, but half way through the actual 10.4.7 (intel) update it failed, telling me its kept the update so I could try again later and would I like to restart for the others to complete. Sure I guess, and it did and it sadly passed away.

All that suckiness in one day can’t be good for ones health, surely suckiness should be spread a bit more thinly, not all thrown at you in one go. Regarding the mac thing, what happened was that it would boot to the login screen fine but afterward only part of the menu bar appeared and that was all, no dock or clock or even most of the menu. And the beach ball span indefinitely. Even the force quit menu wouldn’t appear when doing its keyboard shortcut. As luck would have it (the only luck of the day) enough of OS X was working for File Sharing to have started in the background and I was able to log in via the iBook and get my files off. It took me the rest of the day and most of the next to get all my stuff off though, I’ve just way too much stuff. And with the spare 240GB HD still out of action I haven’t got 1 big storage device to backup onto. I had to do it piecemeal style onto a spare 60GB HD (doesn’t even cover my MP3 Collection) and what’s left on the iBook, neither being quite enough and so had to resort to a load of cdr’s as well. Took freaking forever and its so messy having to do it bits like that I’m always worried I’ll have missed something.

It’s inconclusive but I’m 75% sure the update failed and fucked the os up because of my Vista misadventure, that is, having deleted the EFI partition and causing a little confusion to the partition tables. I knew it would come back to bite me, but I was hoping it would happen after my 240GB Backup HD had been fixed.

Oh yeah here’s a little warning. After erasing my drive and re-installing the OS I wasted about 6 or 7 hours because I had chosen to format the drive as case-sensitive. As seen as all Unix based OSs that I know of use a case-sensitive FS I figured it would be best and a no-brainer option. Well it turns out that Case-Sensitive was only introduced with Tiger and is incompatible with some software. Thing is most of my software worked fine, it was only after installing Adobe CS2 that problems started, none of the Adobe apps would load, they’d just bounced in the dock a split second and buggered off. I had not a single clue what was going on and it was only after trying out a million different things, reinstalling the OS another time and spending what felt like hours staring at google not getting anywhere when I discovered the Case-Sensitive FS issue.

Reinstalled yet again without caseness and everything was fine. So, thanks apple for not being arsed to put some kind of warning into the install dvd. Humph. Actually I was quite surprised to discover that OSX hadn’t been sitting on a case-sensitive FS all this time. I’d always just presumed it was, I figured only windows was crap enough not to be.

Still here in North Devon for one more day after tonight and then off back to sheffield saturday morning in a mad dash to catch the footie.

I think I’ll run through some of the towns and wot not we’ve visited. After Westwood Ho! came Appledore, which wasn’t much better frankly but becomes interesting slightly when you weigh in the bizarre factor, i really was quite weirded out. It’s a small harbour town, and most of it is all bunched up like a rabbit warren on a slope going up from the harbour. The streets were so narrow that all the inhabitants seem have given up trying park cars up them and so they’re all running along the harbour, and some homes seem to be wedged between the back of others. The people who live there are rather odd too. One home had the recipe to fish stew attached to the door all decorated with some painted pottery of fish on a plate and something like “Gary’s Fish Stew” in huge lettering above it. We looked for somewhere to drink but the only pub was empty but for a folk trio who had set up and were waiting for a least one person to play to, because we gawped at the window and carried on walking someone pocked their head out and shouted something at us, obviously frustrated. “Save our library” had been plastered on every spare window, so many that anyone would think it was insanely popular, but ifs its closing that cannot be the case. Strangest of all the place seemed abandoned, no one at all were out that night.

Clovelly is a real curiosity. It’s a village, sort of built on the side of a coast, the whole thing being quite steep down to the beach, its very isolated but the really nice thing is that the whole village is now owned by a family and they’ve kept it as it’s always been, so to be totally unspoit and in good condition. In a way it’s a little like Portmerrion, but different because it wasn’t purpose built and there are people actually living there, although I can’t imagine how they cope with all the tourists gushing past every day. Cars can’t get around it and in a odd twist they have donkeys to cart things on sledges (why sledges and not carts i dunno).

Oooh, whilst leaving clovelly an Australian couple approached to take a look at Eddie, they said they wanted a PBGV but couldn’t get hold of a single breeder in Australia. Hehe, i dunno why but that made me feel quite chuffed.

This place is Abbotsham, i dunno why I had forgotten that last night. Hmm, I dunno if the Abbot is a sham or if Abbot’s like ham. I don’t suppose it matters.

So after failing to get Eddie into the sea yesterday we thought we’d try again today. There’s a beachy town just along the coast called Westward Ho!, how can you resist a place called Westward Ho!? So we followed the sign posts along the public footpath which follows the contours of the coast. The first sign we came across pointing to Westward Ho! said 2 miles. Well thats not too long a walk now is it, especially with such pretty scenery. Thing is though, after about an hour and half of walking along the coast in Westward Ho!’s direction we came across another sign pointing there, this one said… well we’d been walking all that time so what would you expect? Half a mile left to go? probably even less actually, well this sign said 2 miles… still. So I figure that Westward Ho! is a magical place that is always 2 miles from where you are. Even if you live in say California, Westwood Ho! will be 2 miles from you. I reckon to actually reach the place you need a magic pendent which emanates a glorious glow in Ho!’s direction.

We decided to walk back, watch England make it to the quarter finals and then drive to this hooker town… which wouldn’t be surprising as it was an absolute dump lol. Yeah, great name but don’t bother going there.