BDV-676788-BDV

Was compressing my Hard drive on vista and this is the message I got. Think I may have time to make a coffee don’t you

A friend sent me a link to a site he saw advertised on the TV, because the small print at the bottom caught his eye. He was amazed to see their website had the same figure.

Went to Aber to get me a stripper, whole different story, but anyway, when we were there we found out that a special train was going to be running that evening, so I went to Machynlleth Station and filmed its arrival and departure.

Its a bit of a wobbly cam, due to me only having the camera a few days, its small and will take a little while to get used to, I hope to get better the more I do, so please be patient with me.

I’m trying to get brave enough to start recording myself talking as I am doing this, I hope to put more video’s up and get better at doing so.

When gardening last week I noticed a lot of smoke coming from over in the direction of the Mach Golf course. We usually go for regular walks over there, so when my new camera arrived I decided to take a look, and film the damage. Its weird how the fire skipped the path, burning both sides but leaving the middle perfectly ok.

Was a nice day so we went for a little walk. My wife takes some fantastic photographs and my favourite of the day was this one

Isn’t that a great view, the bench just shows you the sort of view we had. We sat up there for quite a while talking about things, watching the town go about its business below. Priceless. The only thing missing was a few cans of beer, but I had the best lady in the world by my side so who needs beer. (Wow! Did I say that out loud, lol)

One of the biggest complainers about bit torrent downloading of movies, the company that cracks down and sues more than any other, in fact the company that changed most countries copyright laws, is Disney. They hate illegal down loaders, and I understand that, I get that also a lot of game companies hate them for similar reasons, they cannot continue to provide us with the best quality movies and games if people steal their work.

The problem is though when they try to fix this problem is they punish the wrong people. If I buy a Disney DVD from the shop, bring it home and put it on to settle down with my daughter to watch it, I get a warning about piracy, then about 2 minutes maybe more of adverts for future releases, then another warning about piracy or even a advert showing me the dangers of piracy, yet I paid, I bought the DVD, I didn’t steal anything, I did the legal thing.

If I had downloaded that movie from a bit torrent site, I’d have been able to watch the movie, without the ads, without the warnings, without the don’t steal or else stuff everywhere. I’d just watch the movie and that’s an end to it. So where is the incentive for me to continue buying their movies if they are going to reward the pirates and punish me for paying.

The same with the games industry, if I torrent a game I add a key or something and bam, I’m playing. If I pay I have to wait for my game to be checked to be sure its legit, I can only install it a certain number of times before it won’t allow me anymore, and in some cases I cannot use the game if the DRM server is down. The pirate though gets none of this, they get to play when they want any number of installs.

They really need to find a better way, stop punishing us legitimate users who time after time pay for stuff only to be screwed over by stupid DRM methods that punish us and not the pirates.

So I sat down in front of my PC and fired up wordpress to type this blog. Wasn’t sure what I was going to write about but I did it anyway. In fact I still don’t know, I’m totally blank, but at least I have words spilling out of my fingers, so any block that may be there is temporary, or terminal, which ever you decide first.

Did a little work on the server files today, wasn’t sure if I could make any difference, but so far my changes seem to have made the performance a little more consistant. The server has been running now for a good 18months with a few service restarts etc but like all things OS it starts to slow down after a while as the clutter piles up. Hopefully its sorted now for a few months. I still have a website of stuff I can still try, which I will later today just to see.

There I did have something to write after all, phew!

So the last few days have seen the gas providers in the UK reducing their prices by from 4% to around 8%. Nice its about time things began to get cheaper rather than going up in price. Don’t be confused though, these companies raised the prices in the first place by about 200% last year, so they are not giving us much back, just enough to persuade us to switch to them rather than staying with our current provider.

Its that time of year see, Winter almost over, we have our bills for the cold period of the year and we are angry, as we should be. Never mind the banks paying out huge bonuses, these companies do it too, in fact most of the companies that raise prices are not doing it because of some market force that makes it less cost effective to sell to us, but because of greed. They need to make a profit, as that profit needs to be given out in bonuses and dividends to their shareholders.

Screw the customers to pay bonuses and dividends to the people they really care about, their investors. The price of oil fell within weeks of its hike, yet they used that as an excuse to screw us of our money.