Off Topic Blogging

As a novice to car repair (can change a tire, can change the oil) it was a little daunting replacing the corroded high pressure power steering hose on my 2004 Hyundai Getz 1.6 Sport. Was a little annoying it had been about a month since the car passed an MOT with no issues. Corroded High Pressure Power Steering Hose We were about 5 miles from home and started the car (been parked for an hour or two) and it immediately made a strange noise. In hindsight the noise was the power steering pump with little to no power steering fluid flowing through it: we had a major leak and presumably most of the power steering fluid had leaked out while […]

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 :-)

Received an email today from the Twoo dating site that I had a SmartMatch with a guy from London. Wahoo, so exciting to see who I was Twoo SmartMatched with, hope he’s hot!!! Email Subject: Decide within the next 24 hours if you like Sergey, your SmartMatch Sergey, 26 Lives in London Wants to meet women aged 19 to 29 I only have a day to review Sergey, as “Your SmartMatch will disappear in 24 hours. Review your SmartMatch before your time runs out.” I better check my Twoo SmartMatch out sharpish then, don’t want to miss out on a real hotty from London! Then I realize, I’m no where near London (about 150 miles away), I’m not aged 19 […]

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 […]