It’s a Blog ! Not a Log !

As mentioned earlier headed across to Chorlton to take Blue round Ivy Green, met up with Luke at Electriks then headed across to Ivy Green, anyways decided to head along the Mersey to Jackson’s boat for a beer, absolutely stunning views with everything totally whited out by the snow, like being in another country.

Met a few other dog owners along the way and just generally enjoyed the walk and then it happened . . . Blue headed for her favourite bend in the Mersey, where she usually goes for a drink of water, but the edge was all iced up and Blue being Blue didn’t bat an eyelid, just went storming onto the ice, well ice and a 7.5 stone dog don’t exactly miss and the next minute there’s the sound of ice cracking and Blue disappears into the inky black water of the Mersey to reappear a few seconds later out of the ice hole she’d just created.

Soon as I saw her disappear I dropped my camera and dived down the rivers bank trying to get to her, she was a couple of feet out, way beyond my reach, but luckily for her and me there was a fcuking big branch log just laying nr the bank, so used this to smash through the ice and create a passage for her to get to the side, scariest 60 or so seconds I’ve experienced in a long time while smashing that ice I can tell you.

So managed to get her to the side and she was back to her normal self in a few minutes, though slightly damp for her ordeal, she soon shook it off, then headed to Jackson’s Boat so she could warm up and me and Luke could get a beer.

Apart from the unexpected dip in the Mersey it was a pretty good afternoon, nothing like trapping through snow and cold bracing fresh air to make you feel alive, finished the afternoon off with some very tasty French Onion soup at electriks, now at home watching Blue chilled out on the bed with Mel pampering her.

Might head out that way again tomorrow, but this time stay away from the ice . .

and all I’ve done is take Blue for 2 walks round Chorlton and chilled the rest of the weekend away, though I have spent about 4hrs geotagging alot of my flickr photo’s, so now at least people can see where they were taken, also started to make a few sets out of our Cornwall and Dorset holiday photo’s as they were a bit messy to be honest.

Also watched the movies Moon and Pandorum, the Moon is well worth seeing, but Pandorum’s just a basic SciFi scarer, nothing special, also got hold of District 9 which I hope to get around to watching sometime tomorrow evening, look pretty good and the reviews I’ve heard of it seem to agree, anyway work in the morrow so sorry its a crappy post, but its been a quiet weekend.

Nite nite

Sky, originally uploaded by BagRat.

Took these photo’s on the way home from work last night, stopped because there was a Rainbow, so took a few shots of that, then as I turned round to go back to the car saw the way the Sun was shining down this road and thought it would make a pretty decent photo

Just got back from an afternoon walk with some friends, had a nice leisurly walk round Ivy Green, took a few photo’s then had a swift one at the Horse and Jockey, closely followed by Bangers & Mash at electriks Bar.

Luke turned up 1/2 way through the meal and got introduced to his younger brother Will and his missus, Will’s down here for a showdown sort of thing between the Cowdry brothers and the Frietags, so should be an interesting afternoon/evening for those attending the bar today.
Would have loved to have stayed, but its Sunday and got work tomorrow so it’s a definate no no I’m afriad, will no doubt see Luke twittering about it later.

Going to spend the rest of the evening watching some more of Cold Case Series 1, did’nt really watch it when it aired on TV, but now I’ve managed to watch a few of them back to back getting quite into it, anyway managed to get hold of  Series 1-4, so going to be some serious watching over the next week or so.

Now this is something I’ve been looking forward to downloading from the iTunes Store, quite a fan of Spotify, use it a lot when friends are round our place, saves me having to dig out cd’s or try and find the tune they want to listen to to download.

It has much the same features as the online version and also allows you to download content to your iphone, which means if theres no connection where your going to be you can still listen to your favourite playlists.

Heres Spotify’s YouTube demo of the app

Looks pretty sweet to me

At the moment its a premium service, which if i want to give it a try I’ll have to subscribe to, so I’ll have to get me credit card out and get myself registered for the Premiumn Service I suppose

Spotify

Went out for the night in Chorlton with John, Myles and Sarah, was a good night until some scally mate who I’d spent the previous 30 mintues having a chat to and had a laugh with, he seemed ok,  got on fine with him and his mate, left them to go have ciggy out front of the bar, came in for a piss walked passed them both and gave them a tap on the back to acknowledge them and say what a good night we’d had and hoped they were having a good night, next thing I’m having a piss when suddenly i get a fist in the back of the head and turn round and its this scally punching me, because i’d apparently touched his arse, being the big man he bitch slapped me from behind, was’nt really hurt, just more in shock then anything

His mate was sound though just dragged him out of the bar, though next time I hope he has the decency to hit me face on rather then sucker punch me from behind

Evening thus far :

Walk Blue round Longford Park

Beers in Electriks

Kebab from Chorlton

Home to watch Grow Your Own

Bed

Enough said . .  nite all

Picture 095, originally uploaded by BagRat.

Did’nt really post to much over the weekend as I spent quite alot of it in bed, due to being called out to an alarm call at my workplace, was there from midnight Friday till 5:30am Saturday morning, so spent quite a while in bed recovering.

So seeing as most of Saturday was spent in bed thought we#d better do something on Sunday, was’nt sure what to do or where to go, but in the end we decided on Chelford Car boot.

Got there for about 12:30 and spent a good hour or so just wondering round looking for bargain’s but think we missed most of them, so just ended up buying lots of quaility cheeses instead, more about those in another post.

After leaving we thought we’d best take Blue for a walk and on the way back we chanced upon Styal Estate a rather good dog walking place, we’d heard about it before but never actually bothered to go look for it, really wish we had cause its definatly a dog friendly walk, lost of paths and fields for Blue to galavant in, I’ll stick some photo & videos up this weekend so you can see for yourselfs.

Anyway its close to 8:00am and I’d better start making my way to work, cyas laters
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Been a slightly stressful day and a 1/2 at work for me, had to set up some PC’s in the office and transfer data onto them from the PC’s there replacing, now this may not seem very stressful I know, but when you spend 1/2 day trying to figure out why you cant load an operating system onto the PC’s even though you’ve contacted Dell’s Mumbai Support Centre 8 times and each of those 8 times they tell you that these instructions will resolve the matter and 8 times they don’t your bound to be a little stressed.

After finally giving up on getting any sort of help from Dell I eventually found a response on a forum detailing what was causing the problem (it was the SATA settings for the hard-drive in system setup) and resolving it I finally got round to installing Win XP on the 1st of the PC’s.

So I’ve the got the OS installed now all I need to do is back up the PST file from the PC its replacing, copy any files that the user has stored on their PC onto the Server and than replace the PC, copy all the data back onto the new PC, import the PST file into Outlook and Bob’s ya uncle so to speak . . . well again nothings ever easy. First off the PST file is nearly 4 Gig in size (seems the users kept every single email they’ve sent/received in the past 3-4 years, so after 40-60 min’s of exporting I finally start to look for the data files that the user wants me to copy across to the new PC, kindly enough the user has put them all into a folder on his desktop to make it easier for me, so I copy the move the PST file I’ve just exported and drop it inside the folder and prepare to copy it onto the server . . thinking that its not going to take real long, its 4 Gig file and some word/excel documents, surely that won’t take long, how wrong could I be, seems that the copying over the networks going to take 2hrs ! Upon investigating the folder with all the docs in he wants me to copy I find there’s 11 Gig of data in there even before I add the 4 Gig PST file (yep 15 Gig of data), this explains the long time to copy across the network.

So thats why its been a stressful  day and a 1/2 thus far, I’ve not even finished yet either, still got a shed load of windows updates to download and install yet and I’ve yet to copy the data back onto the users new PC . . oh joy.

You know whats really annoying about the whole thing . . . this could have been so much easier, for a start we have a server that gets backed up every night that this person could have been storing their 11 Gig of data on, which if they had would have saved me a good few hours of work, they could have even maybe occasionally gone through there emails and deleted any they don’t need anymore (we keep a backup of incoming/outgoing emails in MailMarshal so people can delete emails, but nobody does).  If they’d just done one of these it would have saved me at least a couple of hours work, but alas no such luck

Time to put away the bunting, yes the curtain has fallen on this years Giant Bradley Day…..

I arrived home early Saturday afternoon with Mel, Liam and Gemma, after we’d got Liam and Gemma settled in there little log cabin decided to take them for a quick scoot around York to do the touristy thing, though to be honest we did’nt have long there as it was at least 3pm when we got there, had a quick beer in the Roman Baths pub and then took them around the Shambles and such like.

Liam looking all Redneck

Arrived back in Weighton about 6:00pm and then met up with them both for a few drinks round Weighton, actually expected it to be a fairly busy day, but seems that most people were saving themselves for Sunday nights as the pubs were real empty, Bradley day itself was the usual stalls and street performers, was especially impressed by the guy doing the Falconary display, really entertaining and very enjoyable, did’nt see much of the Giant though.

Entered Blue in the Dog Show again this year though she was pipped at the post by a rescue Akita, in all she won 3 Rossetes:

1st Place for Most Looks Like Owner

2nd Place for Best Legs

2nd Place for Best in Show

But hey she cant be expected to win every year, got to give all the other dogs a chance, anyway after that we hung around for a few hours and then decided to head back to Manchester with Liam and Gemma and another Bradley Day was been and gone