Had a lovely family and friends christmas back home in Portadown just the right mix of drunken behaviour with my mates and quality time with the folks. The highlight undoubtedly was my Dad setting fire to himself on Christmas Eve. We had been out for a few pints at the local, on returning Dad sat himself on the chair beside the fire for a doze.
Mum had carefully arranged a few church candles at the side of the hearth. Dad was having a nice nap only to be awoken by the smell of burning rubber as the sole of his shoe caught fire. He quickly realised what was happening and started trying to extinguish the fire with the palm of his hand, on doing so he realised that his shoe must have been on fire for some time andf the rubber welded itself to the palm of his hand. Next he tried to put it out on a wool rug in front of the fire only to singe a hole.
At this point I couldn't control myself any longer and was buckled over on the floor as he hopped past on the way to the kitchen. He was quite badly burned, but in typical fashion refused any help preferring to administer treatment himself. I once witnessed him starting a seagul outboard engine by wrapping the starting cable clockwise instead of anti-clockwise pulling his hand into the engine and breaking two of his fingers, he refused hospital treatment on that occasion too, so I suppose I shouldn't have been that surprised.
On returning to Sydenham after Christmas I discovered the street urchins had been using the section of wall which I normally park in front of as an impromptu set of goalposts, so yesterday was spent repairing the damaged section of fence, which they had very kindly taken away hoping I wouldn't notice the two foot gap in the fence if they hid the bit they had demolished.
Oh and we met our new neighbours, they had a house warming on Saturday night, lovely people, so happy to see nice first time buyers moving in, it's an up and coming area I tell you.

Posted by jaffs at 05:32 PM | Permalink

Happy Christmas faithful readers, I hope you both have a great Christmas. ;-)



'Keep 'er between the hedges'

Posted by jaffs at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Having great fun over at the I Love Northern Ireland wiki, go on add some stuff:
http://green.carisenda.com/iloveni/index.cgi?HomePage

Posted by jaffs at 06:01 PM | Permalink

Fish, Fishing and the meaning of life edited by Jeremy Paxman. I bought it to take my Christmas order over the free delivery threshold on Amazon and it is a little gem. It's an anthology of angling, rather like a very good blog of fishing literature. You get a great oversite of angling literature without having to read any of it perfect for lazy people like myself. Lovely collection of poems, short stories and memoires of days spent by the river side.


Also here's a photo of a Donegal Hooker for your viewing pleasure.

Posted by jaffs at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I never knew they made light up Santas on Penny Farthing bicycles but they do, really odd deformed Santas that look like Monty Mole from the old speccy games.

Posted by jaffs at 04:33 PM | Permalink

Just chatting to Rebecca about work and she mentioned something which I had never thought about. She works in conveyancing, and there never seems to be a lull in the workload, people always wanting to buy and sell houses year round. They are having some standards review this week and she was complaining about having no time to clear files from her desk or to get their work area cleared, but the Probate and Matrimonial departments have loads of time to tidy. She said they will get their 'coming-up-ins' come January when all the people have died and their estates need sorted out, or when the divorce cases pile in. Apparently there is a significant increase in workload relating to these areas of a solicitor's business in January....Merry Christmas!!

Posted by jaffs at 08:12 PM | Permalink

For all you diehard fans at The Odyssey tonight:

____________________________________________
Film: FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING ( LOTR) (PG)
Program Starts at: 00.00 Wednesday, 17 December
Program Finishes at: 03.14 Wednesday, 17
December
Cinema: Belfast
Screen: 10

Film: THE TWO TOWERS (LORD/RINGS) (12A)
Program Starts at: 04.00 Wednesday, 17 December
Program Finishes at: 07.14 Wednesday, 17
December
Cinema: Belfast
Screen: 10

Film: RETURN OF THE KING ( LOTR PT3) (12A)
Program Starts at: 08.00 Wednesday, 17 December
Program Finishes at: 11.36 Wednesday, 17
December
Cinema: Belfast
Screen: 10

Posted by jaffs at 03:40 PM | Permalink

Deep Fried Turkey in Peanut Oil.

Posted by jaffs at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Back home in Portadown for a bit of a birthday session with my mates at home. Went to Shamrock Park to watch the mighty Portadown getting trounced by Baaaaaaaaallymena. Drunk copius amounts, met some very odd characters in various pubs in Portadown, including some bloke who told me I had nice teeth and bought me a pint...how very strange. Have a vague memory of two strippers in the last pub we were in. Ended up doing another drunken sleep walk into my parents bedroom, and being told to leave in no uncertain terms. I have a real habit of doing this, once ended up in bed with one of my flat mates whilst sleep walking, woke up to find him holding me by the neck with his fist clenched about to hit me. (this on top of the nice teeth episode, people will talk).
It was that bad last night that I left at 11.30 with three pints sitting on the table, just don't have the apetite nor desire to drink myself into oblivion, the boys back home do it week in week out, and tell me I would too if I had to live there. ;-)
I also have a new telephone numbers in my phone, entitled 'repointing', I remember speaking to a drunken builder about some scam where he'll send someone from the site nearby to do the job on company time if I give him cash in hand...I'll never bother ringing it though but he was my best mate last night.
Someone bought me the new Ricky Gervais stand up DVD, so I am off to give that a rattle, and attempt to rehydrate myself somehow.

Posted by jaffs at 07:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Couldn't wait for my birthday (which is tomorrow incidentally) to get this wireless router ripped open and started up. This is my first wireless post, granted I am sitting three feet from the router at the moment, but I'm about to go for a walk round the house to check it out. I had to do absolutely nothing to get it working, just plugged it all in and it all worked, god knows how many people will find my blatantly open network as I have no idea what needs done to prevent anyone being parasitic.

Just added to this post from my bed, it just doesn't seem to drop anywhere I am amazed.

Posted by jaffs at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

New Northern Ireland blog which is being added to my links:
Notes to self: Things I really should remember

Posted by jaffs at 10:06 AM | Permalink

Friends Reunited have gone through a bit of a revamp, one of their new sections in your profile is your 20 favourite words. I'm sorry to say I have collated mine, stolen from various message boards, but here goes my top 20 nice words to say, for your pleasure:

Plectrum,pavement,lozenge,dimple,turtle,valuptuous,plinth,shrubbery,sorbet,
linament,vestibule,effervescence,quim,scrumptious,existentialism,weeker,
veda,peripheral,accapella,carniverous.

Posted by jaffs at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"Last evening I walked over beyond Fifth Avenue and called at the residence of Edward H. Johnson, vice-president of Edison's electric company. There, at the rear of the beautiful parlors, was a large Christmas tree presenting a most picturesque and uncanny aspect. It was brilliantly lighted with many colored globes about as large as an English walnut and was turning some six times a minute on a little pine box. There were eighty lights in all encased in these dainty glass eggs, and about equally divided between white, red and blue. As the tree turned, the colors alternated, all the lamps going out and being relit at every revolution. The result was a continuous twinkling of dancing colors, red, white, blue, white, red, blue---all evening.
I need not tell you that the scintillating evergreen was a pretty sight---one can hardly imagine anything prettier. The ceiling was crossed obliquely with two wires on which hung 28 more of the tiny lights; and all the lights and the fantastic tree itself with its starry fruit were kept going by the slight electric current brought from the main office on a filmy wire. The tree was kept revolving by a little hidden crank below the floor which was turned by electricity. It was a superb exhibition."
Bills Antique Christmas Lights site

Posted by jaffs at 09:45 PM | Permalink

Was buying some pressies this morning online, gets to the checkout and the checkout has a 'blame it on us' feature. What's this? If you forget your wife's birthday etc, tick the box, they slip a card into the box saying there was a problem at the warehouse and sorry for the delay and take full reponsibility for the delay...a nice touch.
I'll not give the site away in case the recipient reads this blog...unlikely but possible.

Posted by jaffs at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nice work Stephen.
I much prefer it to the last one, although the subtle architectural references were probably lost on me.

Posted by jaffs at 09:01 AM | Permalink

The weekend has landed.

All that exists now is clubs, drugs, pubs and parties.

I've got 48 hours off from the world, man. I'm gonna blow steam outa my head like a screaming kettle and talk cod**** to strangers all night.

I'm gonna lose the plot on the dance floor; the free radicals inside me are freaking man!

Tonight I'm Jip Travolta, I'm Peter Popper - I'm going to Never Never Land with my chosen family man.

We're gonna get more spaced out than Neil Armstrong ever did. Anything could happen tonight ya know!

This could be the best night of my life! I've 73 quid in my back burner, I'm gonna wax the lot, the Milky Bars are on me. Yeah!"


Well maybe not but it is the staff Christmas do today, we have a few dodgey characters rattling around the office, two in particular; one girl who cries when she drinks Gin, one bloke who punches mirrors when he drinks vodka, and many other members of staff who don't really want to socialise with each other but will be forced to tonight...it's gonna be fun.

Posted by jaffs at 08:54 AM | Permalink

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/music/B0000DJE9R/advice/002-3974237-8626458

Posted by jaffs at 10:43 AM | Permalink

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3256420.stm

Posted by jaffs at 05:26 PM | Permalink

I can't work it out, is it or isn't it?
http://www.eastpointpolice.org/SelfArrestForm.htm

Posted by jaffs at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Anyone have any bright ideas about this one? One of our placement students is developing some javascript quizzes that are built via perl based on input from a user. They are aksed how many questions in the quiz, the questions details etc and when they click submit, perl builds these javascript games and outputs the raw code to a textarea so the user can cut and paste the code into their own webpage. This works fine, until the latest widget outputs textareas, so if the script displays html into the textarea, the brower closes the textarea at the first </textarea> tag. She has asked me how to display html/javascript code to a webpage without rendering it, and I am stumped. I thought about all those sites which display code. but all the ones I have checked use textareas.
I was hoping for a stylesheet tag such as <div class = "dontrenderme">. Or by using <code> tags, or <pre> tags but none of those work consistently.



How we fixed it. We firstly tried printing a content type text/plain, but IE rendered the text as html anyway:


Here's the problem and it's blinking annoying:

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/content-type.html
Note that Internet Explorer incorrectly ignores server-provided MIME types, so it sometimes "does the right thing" when the server is misconfigured. Other browsers correctly heed the server-provided MIME types, so they will reveal server misconfigurations.



Solution

Thanks to the comments section and a stroke of luck that today's Perl Advent Calendar entry was HTML::Entity. If you convert the whole string to numeric entities you can print the html straight out to the browser in a textarea but probably to the html page, I have only checked this in IE 6.0 and Netscape 4.8.

Posted by jaffs at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Where did that day materialise from? Feeling worse than normal for a Monday morning, due to excessive intakes of alcohol on Friday night and some DIY mahem. Went to the rugby at Ravenhill on Friday, was in the hospitality tent afterwards and there was loads of free wine, which must have been dodgey, haven't had a hangover like it in a long long time. Then on Saturday I added to the pain of my hangover by removing some fitted wardrobes in the house.
Yeah I know it's retarded to remove the walls before the roof of the wardrobes, thus ending with a large slab of MDF scraping down my back and legs leaving me with some rather impressive wounds if I do say so myself.
John McBlain was providing the entertainment at Ravenhill on Friday night, very funny character, not going to win any prizes for subtlety, but he hit the spot with some very coarse, straight to the bone, satire concerning the elections.

Posted by jaffs at 09:19 AM | Permalink