Well kiddies its been some time since my last post and this one is really random. Last week when I went home from uni me and my friend Kev were bored so with nothing else to do we got the phone out and started recording random videos – here’s one:

Craig and Kev’s Journey from Warkworth to Amble

There might be more to come in the future perhaps, incl. Craig and Kev visit Warkworth Castle & Craig and Kev tour Hadston

Cheerio for now

Hey all,

Lets start by apolofising again for lack of blogging – I’m sorry.

OK moving on; a bit of background info I have a Sony Ericsson K660 on the 3 Network. Now to the nitty gritty – on friday I woke up having had a fully functioning phone the day before to find that my data account settings (for connecting to the internet) had mysteriously disappeared, so I rang 3 and asked them to resend the settings, while I was waiting a tried to send a few texts and make a few phone calls and realised that I couldnt do this – I rang 3 again – but my phone wouldnt let me.

So I took the phone down to my local 3Store where I was told that the network was being upgraded but all work should be finished within a week but in the meantime I should manually set my network. I did find that choosing the network without 3G or HSDPA capabilities did allow me to use my phone as a phone – but the problem that arose was that as my phone is a specialised 3G model whenever it detected 3G or HSDPA coverage it would switch back automatically. This of course meant that I had to manually set my network everytime I wanted to communicate successfully with someone – a bit tedious?

Meanwhile I had been sent my data settings several times and they failed to install.

Today, having put up with the problems for 6 days I got pi”ed off and went back to my 3Store and was greeted by the most unhelpful man I have ever met who did not seem to have the slightest interest in my problems and simply told me to phone customer services. So I left and called customer services only to find that due to an emergency the centre had been closed.

Running out of options, I remembered that SE’s are easy to flash (that is upgrade their firmware) as it can be done with the supplied USB cable and some free software available from SE themselves. So I downloaded this software – fairly slow on a 512k connection (sat and had a can). ran through the process to be told that my phone already had the latest software so it was not necessary to upgrade but I ignored this and tried it anyway.

After some waiting around (and a can) my phone was nice and freshly installed with new firmware which has the 3 data account settings built in

And yay I could connect to the internet again, one problem solved, at first it would only connect when using the none 3G networks but since I started writing this it now works on all of them

So I count this as a small victory for me as I can now view my current spend and stuff on my phone again. Now all I need to figure out is if I am able to send and receive calls and messages.

I shall keep you informed happy bloggers.

Righto happy blog people, well whats left of you – I know I promised to blog more regularly but unfortunately    it’s fresher’s week and I’ve been far too busy to blog. So I’ll say now that I’ll try and blog more from next week and see if I can get the visitor count here on the rise again. I’ll also post any pics here that I’ve accumulated from fresher’s week at sometime in the near future.

Cheers

Craig

A handy guide:

Saw it and thought I'd post it here as it ties in with my piracy posts and because I was boredÂ

Hello,

Its been a while since I last blogged as I have been busy with uni stuff and have also been away from home for the past week. I just wanted to let anyone out there that reads this know that I’m still alive, just a little stressed with university paperwork and related matters.

Now, on to what I want to talk about and this moral of this post to which the title relates: STUPID VIAGRA SPAM (& PORN SPAM TOO).

Whilst I was away I received no less than 9 comments on various posts on this blog to the tune of:

Your site- youreadmyblog.info is amazing site, tnks, owner.
[url=xxxx]Buy viagra[/url]

And other things along the same lines, basically links to different forms with names like buy viagra, watch some porn etc. Its at times like this that I’m glad I did not turn the comment approval system off, sure it gets a bit tedious approving actual comments but it means I can delete all the stupid and pointless ones.

Anyway it got me to thinking….has anyone ever actually bought viagra online…hmm? If you would like to share your experience please comment this post (and wait for me to approve it )

Guess what I’m counting down to? Results ARRGH, yes at 10AM tomorrow my A Level results become available to me and I discover what the future holds for me, kinda nervous, but I’m in good spirits.

Letter from the Student Loans Co. came today detailing my expected payment dates – first one is due to be around this time next month – hopefully I’ll be able to budget wisely and not leave with too much debt (This is ofcourse assuming that I get the results I need to attend uni in the first place )

If you don’t know what I’m hoping to study I suggest you head over to the About Me page – and for those of you that would like to know a little more about the course – here’s a link to Module Information.

Aside from uni goings on there’s not much else to write about. I’m trying to think of some wisdom that I can bothered to impart so that I can write a tutorial that might be of interest to some and then maybe visitors will stay for a bit longer. Google reports that the average time visitors spend on this site is 2 seconds – come on people lets improve that .

The problem I have with thinking of tutorials is that obviously I did not code this site and as such do not need to add random pieces of functionality to it that I can then share with you.

Leave it with me and I’ll go back through the archives of other things I’ve coded (or stolen ) and I’ll see what I can share from them.

Check back here tomorrow as I will probably post the outcome of my results – if I remember.

Now, thats a very informative title :-) the reason its’ so vague is because I havent at this point decided what to blog about, I just felt it had been a while.

Life generally isnt going to well at the minute and i’m a tad depressed with goings on and have no motivation to get out and do exciting things – ergo I dont have much to write about.

To continue the Bebo API topic – I’ve now given up with it and to take it a step further I’ve deleted my bebo account, there were some personal reasons for it but mainly I feel that nowadays its just a medium for people to spy on and harass me.

Over on my knock off nigel post we just received this comment:

Hi
Interesting reading. Having been involved in an earlier campaign – http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yXiHlY61Hqk – I know that the campaign was based on research that said a ‘cultural shift’ was needed to change the perception of DVD piracy and downloading from at most a petty and victimless crime and all too often, a principled act putting one over the greedy major corporations. Whether the Knock-Off Nigel campaign will achieve this is for you, and of course time, to decide.
Incidentally, we are currently running a campaign against other aspects of counterfeiting through a blog – www.snideuk.org and related videos on Youtube (www.youtube.com/snideukorg). With a much smaller budget than the video industry has to play with, we decided to stick with an entertaining (hopefully) format, but we have tried not to stigmatise the consumer – we want people to come back to the site and think that if we keep telling them they are criminals/creeps/spongers etc they probably wont do that!
Our site aims at the producer, as it is they who are profiting from the sale of fake goods. In doing so, and over quite a long period, we aim to educate the viewer as to some of the safety/economic/criminal arguments that are part of the overall case against counterfeit goods.
It would be great of you could take a look at our campaign, and if you feel like commenting, great – even if you think we are equally as misguided in our approach as the Industry Trust.

Cheers
Red Planet

You have to commend this site’s humourous approach to the subject – I found that there was actually some entertainment value in the site’s content unlike the knock off nigel site and ads which, as discussed, I found completely useless.

I’m skeptical on the topic and believe that no amount of deterrent will stop piracy in its entirety and I also think that the RIAA and similar org’s or being rather petty themselves when you read stories that perhaps a student was sued for $1000’s because he or she has downloaded a relatively small amount. Myself being from the UK I’m not quite up with the sueing culture that the states seems to have so that might explain why I dont agree with its’ practice.

Last I read, the amounts made by the record and film industry still surpassed the amounts lost (you are welcome to correct me if I’m wrong). I’m not saying that piracy is right I just dont think that minorities should be targetted to make a point when major players can commit acts on a much bigger scale and nothing is done because they have good lawyers to protect them.

Final thought: Drop the price of goods and piracy rates may drop – stop being so greedy

OK I’ve decided the reason there are no bebo WP plugins is because the Bebo API is hard to work with for external apps as I said the external authentication methods are currently in beta so they might improve in years to come.

So anyway, for the minute I’m using

<?php

file_get_contents("MY BEBO URL");

?>

To grab the friends module from my profile page together with a plethora of tag removals and some string and preg_replace’s to try and get it looking how I want, lets see how long it takes for me to get bored

Hey folks,

Just to let you know that I’ve been trying to write a WP Widget to auto-display my top bebo friends using the Bebo API the problem is that the external application auth functions within the PHP API library are in beta and are not working for me so I cant authorise the application to read my data and list my friends.

I’ll keep trying and if I ever get it working and get a decent WP plugin made out of it I might add the package to the WP extend plugins directory as I notice there are currently no bebo related plugins available.

Fingers Crossed

Hey Everyone,

Time for another completely random and meaningless post that you can read if you’re at all interested in my life. It’s now 13:58 so lets tell you about my day so far:

• Was woken up at 08:50 so that my car could be collected and taken for its service. This was promptly followed by me returning to bed :-)
• Few hours later I received a call to say that my tyre was slow punctured (as I suspected) so Kwik-Fit would be coming sometime before 4 to change the tyre – therefore I will not get the car back til later :-(
• Got out of bed at 12-ish and went to gather the post :-D
• Two letters: one from UCAS documenting information which I mostly already knew and the second from invate about some computer equipment that is being delivered *yay*
• Next, I microwaved myself a curry (badly) and made myself a cup of tea with some 2 day expired milk
• Following my letter from UCAS I decided to give YouGo a try its the network for university applicants to meet each other, and my observation is that it’s completely useless, it’s quite a hard site to use and it’s difficult to find other students on your course – I couldn’t actually find anyone.

And thats my day so far, very boring and I’m very bored thats the main reason why I’ve just wasted 10mins writing it all down. There’s noone on msn and noone around and I have no car so for the time being I’m stuck watching daytime TV :-) Oh what fun.