Off Topic Blogging

Received a really funny SPAM email, it was one of those before and after weight loss pictures. Well, I think they got a little lazy on the Photoshopping of this one :-) It almost convinced me :-)

If only there was a stop being added to Facebook groups feature, there would be no need for a rant. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t have a Stop Being Added to Facebook Groups feature, so here’s the rant I’m sending Facebook via their FeedBack Form. Partial screenshot of my feedback to Facebook below. Facebook Feature Suggestion : Your Friend has Recommended this Group Dear Facebook Developers, Please learn basic netiquette and stop allowing your Facebook users to add their Facebook friends to groups without permission. It is unacceptable Internet behavior for forum owners to add people to a forum without their permission, yet you feel it’s acceptable to be added to a Facebook group (a forum) just because a Facebook friend doesn’t […]

Spent half a day trying to figure out Mailman mailing list under Virtualmin (control panel) and Centos 6.4 Apache server. Problem one was turns out the Godaddy VPS Centos 6.4 repository (the one Godaddy recommends) I’m using has not updated the mailman script for YEARS. The Godaddy VPS server this domain is running on was running Mailman v2.1.12 from I think 2009 when Mailman v2.1.18 from May 2014 was available. Should I Upgrade Mailman? I didn’t NEED to upgrade per se (Mailman 2.1.12 works), but since old software tends to have more security vulnerabilities and less features than new versions, I always upgrade when I can. Life is very easy with a server when you can type “yum update” in […]

Desperation for money led me to buy penny stocks over 20 years ago, and fortunately it worked out quiet well, although a small success it is a penny stock success story. When I went to University in my early twenties I was a mature UK student with a wife, one son and another son on the way: didn’t stop there, now have three sons. For the first 6 months we lived in family housing (a small bedsit) on University (University of Sussex: just outside Brighton in East Sussex) and it was disgusting! Before we lived on University we didn’t know what a cockroach looked like, afterwards we did unfortunately! We were living on UK student loans and student grants and […]

I’ve been taking doctor prescribed opioids (di-hydrocodeine and morphine) for pain relief since leaving University in the final year of a 3 year degree in Molecular Genetics on medical grounds (back pain, literally couldn’t sit the ~21 hours of exams) almost 20 years ago (1996)! I updated this article 3 years after failing to completely wean myself off opiates in December 2010 (it’s April 2014 now) which either caused or coincidentally was when I developed pain in my coccyx: another pain that sucks, that’s been hurting over 3 years! Currently (2014) I’m on a dose of 30mgs of time release di-hydrocodeine twice a day, roughly equivalent to 5mgs of morphine a day (morphine is around 12 times more potent than […]

I have lived with long term physical disability for over twenty years, in this time I’ve not been capable of working a typical 9-5 type office job and could have spent all this time on long term disability benefits never working. My health problems became an issue at University over twenty years ago, in the final year of a BSc degree in genetics I literally could not sit the final exams: was around 21 hours of exams away from a science degree in genetics :-( Had to drop out of the University of Sussex on medical grounds in the final year and was never able to finish the degree course, which is why today I earn a living making money […]