I went out last night with a few friends to this cool pub called “The Ventry” in Cannon Street and in a short period of time managed to drink five different beers, a Sambuca and a whiskey. I don’t even like Sambuca or Whiskey so I blame my friends for forcing it down my throat (lol).

Why do we do such stupid things to ourselves? I always ponder this thought too late. Don’t get me wrong, the evening was brilliant and it was really good to see everyone, but yesterday I felt really crap all day. Thinking about it now, I don’t want to have a repeat performance in a hurry. Perhaps I am getting old, although it’s not that because next week I will do the same again even though I know it’s stupid. I guess it’s cool to be stupid once a week. Who needs all those brain cells anyway!

It’s been a while since we added anything substantial on this site, mainly because we have been on holiday to the Lake District. (Work tomorrow, what an unfortunate thought)? I have added some photos to the Photo Gallery. Mainly our week in the Lake District and a few others.

The only positive news regarding the economy must be the ‘Rand to the Pound‘ exchange rate. 17 ront to the pound. WTF is going on there? I guess if you are South African visiting the UK this must be disasterous news. I can only imagine the rest of the world has no confidence in the rand or that idiot Zuma.

With regards to the photo below. Brother “goatie” Pete rudely woke us at 7am last week Sunday to tell us he had landed in the UK on route to Bermuda. So we added another 33 miles to the hired car and met up for lunch at “Ye Olde Six Bells“, a quaint old pub in Horley (near Gatwick airport) to have a family reunion meal.  Quite a nice surprise for mom.

Family reunion

I had a wee problem with my gallery recently which is embedded in my wordpress website using the WPG2 plugin. It’s quite a huge gallery with over 3500 photos. After a recent upgrade I noticed I was getting blank pages in my gallery whenever one clicked through the albums or clicked on the thumbnail in the sidebar. I’ve tried fixing the problem by adding various lines to my .htacess file in the root of my website, but nothing has helped…. until this morning that is, when I contacted the ‘one to one’ help line at Bluehost.com

I explained the problem and in no time at all the technician had made some changes and my gallery is working like it should be. It’s a lot quicker than it was and it looks really good (if I have to say so myself). I’ve been with Bluehost.com for a couple of years now, and it’s because their service and support is fantastic.

I have been mucking around with Adobe Fireworks CS3 for a day or two and after figuring out how to use the various cool features decided to try out what I have learnt on the header.

Inside the header.php I am using a random php script that I found on “a list apart“. It should hopefully show a collection of images that I have created with Fireworks.

Now that Jo is in Nice, I have the house to myself, and my first port of call was the bathroom, where I have LIFTED THE TOILET SEAT. The feeling of power, that I was in control was incredible.

Obviously if you are a single male and live with other males in a house (house share or you are gay or whatever) then this is not normally a problem, but being married to woman who insists the seat must be down at all times, this is a life problem.

In our house, we have an added concern in the way of Whiskey and Tamsin, our two Tonkinese cats. Jo seems to think they will fall in and drown in the 3 centimetres of water. LOL!

Anyway, for the next two weeks, I am going to prove that having the toilet seat up is not going to result in a drowned cat. Sadly though this will not help my cause when Jo gets back, as she will insist the seat stays down for other reasons.

That is Jo Bowen of course! There can only be one mad Bowen in the family. To think we have lived in England for the past 9 years, watched the rivalry between England and France and now she wants to communicate with them in their own language….. “Femme Fou“.

Jo will be staying in Nice with a host family and going to a local school in the city. I believe she booked the trip through Apple Languages who specialize in this sort of thing.

I wish her all the best…

Which means, I am a free man for the next two weeks. So friends and colleagues, if you want to meet up after work,  go out for a drink or three, or have dinner or just a chat then from this coming Monday to the 22nd of August, I am all yours.

Have a good time Jo, stay safe, enjoy the lovely weather, relax, rest, and come back speaking like a true French woman.

xxx

Mike
P.S. I hope you have left instructions for the cats, dishwasher, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, cooker, iron, kettle etc.

ha ha ha - only kiddin’

I was recently trying to install Umapper but couldn’t because it only runs on PHP5. I started reading up on PHP4/5 and how a lot of hosting companies are now moving to PHP5 because it’s better, faster and eliminates the overhead of loading the PHP interpretor on ever hit, and they are not going to support PHP4 for much longer.

I checked my hosting company (bluehost.com) and discovered this was true for them as well.  They have a panel where one can go and with a few simple steps, the change can be made easily.

As you can see I made the change to PHP5 (FastCGI). Then I discovered my website would not work correctly. Parts of the page would load, but the rest was missing. I also noticed that my permalinks, or category pages were not working at all. (how frustrating)!

I contacted the Live Chat Support Team, at Bluehost and they were very helpful, although they did everything I had already tried. They didn’t mentioned adding an Apache Handler, which I did later. (whether this made a difference I am not really sure).

But, I am sure of the following. I did a search in the Wordpress Forums and found exactly what I was look for. There is always someone who has come across a similar problem to yours, and I found the following advice from a chap called Woordenaar:

This code needs to be added to your .htaccess file that sits in the root of your website. I had one, and mine was slightly different.

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Going back to the Apache Handler. The only reason I made a change to mine was because I was reading up on the Gallery 2 website, and noticed the “LoadModule php5_module. So I copied application/x-httpd-php and added it as a handler, and added the .php as the extension. (If you are a Bluehost customer the Apache handler configuration screen can be found under Advanced).

So it has taken me about four hours to figure this problem out, but it’s been worth it, and I’ve learnt a few things about PHP5 and Apache. I was determined to solve this problem and make my site faster (since it’s been snail pace recently). Now I can install the Umapper Plugin version 1.3.95.

It must be a sign of maturity when you drive across the countryside to photograph a few pretty looking flowers….. or a sign of complete madness. You decide!

Anyway who cares. As mentioned in the previous post, the lovely Mrs Bowen and I went to Cornwall for a couple of days. Of course you can’t go to Cornwall without going to "The Eden Project". This great big weird semi dome like golf ball dug into a old dis-used clay mine. The use of the space is very clever, much like the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent. The whole project is an educational charity where their aim is remind people what nature gives to us and to help people to learn how to look after it in return.

They have some stunning gardens, rain forests, crops and landscapes and plant species from around the world, with each emulating a natural biome. Some parts in the dome were so humid, that it was impossible to take a photograph without the camera lense fogging up. The different species of flowers were amazing. As you can see above and below it takes a lot of care and dedication to get plants and flowers to look this good.
 
Now all of this would be equally impressive if I could tell you the Latin names of theses flowers, but I can’t. There would have been no time to take photos if I was remembering the names. So just savour the beautiful colours.

I have just upgraded my Wordpress websites to the latest version 2.6. It is awesome the changes they have managed to produce since 2.5. Check out this short video of the changes.
1.

So we awoke this morning to a garden full of white ash, and a street full of cars covered in ash. No explanation for this sudden transformation, just a very big mess!

And here is why: The remains of the lorry caught in the blaze. Picture by : Keyan Milanian

As reported on Kent Online: (http://www.kentonline.co.uk/kol08/article/default.asp?article_id=43248)

More than 50 firefighters tackled a blaze at a business park. Firefighters from across north Kent fought the huge blaze at a Swanscombe business park.  Crews were called to the unit at the Manor Way Business Park Swanscombe on Monday morning at around 12.45am.

Two crews from Thames-side, two from Dartford and appliances from Swanscombe, Cliffe, Horton Kirby and Swanley discovered a large quantity of baled paper, a car and a lorry on fire.

At 4am the fire was scaled down to three fire appliances but crews were still at the scene this morning as they continued to dampen down the area.

An investigation is expected to be launched.

No doubt our local hooligans are responsible for this, as burning things is just another night of fun. Here is a list of their recent achievements:

• Cars burnt in the middle of a football field.
• Portable Toilets
• Telephone Booths
• Trees
• Wheelie Bin
• Glass Recyclable bin
• Paper Mill / Truck (new).