I’m trying to get back on my diet and get off all the chocolate and back to healthy food and more fruit and vegetables.

I’m also trying to dig out my exercise machine.

It’s been six years since my last CFS relapse and I’m getting more than a little stir-crazy.  The past month is the first time I’ve actually felt unhealthy though, so it’s time for a change.

First thing I’ve done is sign up to twitter.

I’ve been getting out of the habit of blogging, mostly because I can’t see the justification for writing a blog for a since sentence thought.  Twitter gives the the opportunity to post them and I’ve got my blog set to do a daily digest, plus they show up in a neat little widget on the sidebar, which is even better.

It’s strange, it’s actually kind of fun, it gives me a new outlet for those stray thoughts that pop up throughout the day, plus the fact I can text them in means I get to use my phone for a change.  I never really text, in the 6 months I’ve had my latest handset I’ve sent 4 text messages, which is slightly shocking in this day and age. 

Anyone wanting to subscribe to inane (and very short) ramblings, the link is http://www.twitter.com/rennie_le_smurf the digest will show up in the rss feed here on my blog, so I’m not going to bother to copy and post over at reezle or myspace, it’s just too much work, it takes long enough having to do that when I’m posting a proper blog!

I’ve “followed” a couple of twitters, just to get the hang of it, but if anyone else has it, give me a “nudge” or a “tweet” or whatever it is they call it over there.

My next plan is to get my room tidied so I can set up my Pilate’s exercise machine, it’s great exercise but doesn’t seem to affect my joints, but it is pretty big when it’s set up, so I need all the floor clear to use it.

Still, I should be able to get that done over the next week and then get to work.

After that once I’ve got food and exercise sorted, I need to dig out my web design and writing courses so I can make a start on them, then maybe I can actually fill my days with something other than TV and computer games (it’s amazing how fast they get old!) and it might even let me start earning some money, which would be nice!

Still, it wasn’t a total waste, while I was trapped downstairs without my usual computer to entertain me it gave me a chance to order a new juicer (I’m trying a new health therapy involving hourly juicing, see if that improves my health any), a new vacuum (I have urges you know… ) and plenty of time to update my journal software to the new version.

It looks good so far, not that I’ve really noticed much difference so far.

*does happy dance*

Now I just need to start twiddling with the designs of the various blog sites pointing to my main blog to tie them in.

Oh and I have a confession to make… I didn’t show post the logo I was planning on the other day when I uploaded all the drafts… Sneaky I know, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise

Oh and in case anyone is wondering where I got such a snazzily designed theme, well you can thank LunaStone Designs and the logo was designed by The Logo Company.

This is my old logo, since it’s a while since it’s been on the blog page:

Kind of sweet, but it never was quite what I had in mind, I always had more a Superhero type of image in my head. A little less dopey looking too!

I also figured I’d post the draft images, let you have a little peak at how it’s going and see which image you think I will have picked, and which image you would have gone with.

The first set of drafts had me whimpering under the desk (and only partly because some of them looked a bit scary and depraved looking!

These were the first 5 samples:

I gave them some feedback, and got a few more options:

So… What do you think of them so far?

Well, last week when the initial drafts arrived you’d probably have heard whimpering and sobbing.

Yesterday You’d have heard wild manic giggling and a little cackling thrown in for good measure.

Looks like they’re back on track again, I’ve picked one to run with, just got a couple of minor alterations to make, like add the tail they forgot (you just can’t have a fraggle without a tail, it’s just not on!)

Shouldn’t be long now…

*bounces up and down like a constipated penguin with anticipation*

It’s the one time in the year thing are guaranteed to go right for a change! (and yes I really am that twisted)

After being down again for most of the day the computer is finally up and running. I have graphics!!!

The poor guy at the computer company must have the patience of a saint all the things he’s had to walk me through to get it going. There’s not much on it, still no email access, no programs installed or set up (except my computer game to test the graphics out… Honest )

Don’t you just love Friday 13th? (the day not the movie).

It’s the one time in the year thing are guaranteed to go right for a change! (and yes I really am that twisted)

After being down again for most of the day the computer is finally up and running. I have graphics!!!

The poor guy at the computer company must have the patience of a saint all the things he’s had to walk me through to get it going. There’s not much on it, still no email access, no programs installed or set up (except my computer game to test the graphics out… Honest ) and there’s a few graphics settings that need tweaking which I have no clue about.

But the main thing is now I know the graphics will work and it’s not going to have to be sent back to the store for in-depth technical work (or a beating about the hard drive with a rubber mallet) I can finally start the marathon task of installing all my bits, then trying to salvage and convert all my windows files.

I can’t decide if that’s something I’m dreading or looking forward to… In some strange way I think it’s a bit of both.

Either way, by early next week I should have everything installed and running (probably less the speed this little beastie works!) and by the middle of the week I should have all the graphical kinks worked out and I can get down to business. I have blogs to read that I can’t get to, (at least I can post in my own still thankfully!) then there’s photos I need to edit, a logo I need to sort out, a blog template that needs to be confirmed, not to mention blog comments to reply to and emails that need reading… And of course a highly addictive computer game that just needs to be played

But for tonight I think a night off, I’ve been up till 2am most nights this week trying to get this thing sorted, so a DVD and an early night for me. Now I just have to decide between Hollowman 2 and Charlotte’s Web, as I haven’t watched either of them yet and they’ve both been sat on the “to view” pile of my desk for about 3 weeks now…

Oh it has to be Hollowman 2, it is Friday 13th after all Oh and it’s shorter to help facilitate my early night

This past week has been one unmitigated disaster after another. Technically it all started about 3 weeks ago once the laptop started breaking down, but this last week has been spectacularly unbelievable.

Monday I was just in dazed stupor and by today I was ready to string myself up from the nearest rafter with dental floss…

Why dental floss I hear you ask? Well it’s easier to obtain than rope, much easier to carry and tie knots in, and more importantly you go to the morgue with a glistening smile and smelling minty fresh

So, Monday…

The computer gave up entirely, a short fizzle, another pop and that was the end of that. I managed to get it on once for about 3 minutes after that, just long enough to discover it had corrupted most of the hard drive on the last power outage. Oh joy… Now I have to trawl through the past few weeks of backups and try and salvage all my files again.

Still that could be worse, I learnt my lesson several years ago when I did a CD backup and only had enough discs for one backup. They had to be wiped for the latest backup, which I found (after the computer ate the hard drive) had been written, but the computer somehow erased the ToC, so that was the last I saw of 4 years worth of work.

I still have those discs in a draw in the hopes I’ll find something that can restore them sometime in the future.

But I digress.

Monday was the laptops funeral, followed by the arrival of my nice shiny new PC.

You’d think that would be good news, right? Erm… not so much.

They made a great job of it, it looks like a grand piano all black and glossy… It’s also about the same size, it’d bloomin’ huge!

So… What order so I catalogue the new computer disaster… Well, it’s so large it doesn’t fit under the desk, it’s too powerful, and the fans work too well that the room turns into a tropical sweat box, not to mention they’re so powerfull it sounds like a small jet engine taking off! :mad:

So now I’ve had to reshuffle all the furniture in the room so I can put it in the middle of the room to try and stop the heat build-up.

Next disaster was the operating system, like every computer I’ve every owned, it didn’t work after the intital set-up, so I had to reinstall the whole thing. No change there though.

Next problem, the graphics, that’s the one thing that always put me off the final move to Linux, trying to get everything to work can be such a chore when the manufacturers don’t know how to play well with others.

So here we are Thursday and I’ve only just got internet access back, no email, no working programs but the basic Linux ones, the graphics card won’t work, the one computer game I own won’t install, I’m going to have to buy another virtualization package to install a trimmed down version of windows so I can use my digital camera, scanner and printer (none of which can be run under windows), plus a selection of programs that don’t have Linux counterparts. I’ve got a virtualization program already, but it won’t work on this system, so I have to spend twice as much again to buy a replacement.

Then yesterday I had a trip to the doctors for a neurology assessment. Now bear in mind it takes me a week to recover from a trip to the doctors where I waddle in and sit there for a few minutes then go home and lay down.

This involved getting undressed then moving limbs, laying down, sitting up, pushing, pulling, twisting… All in all I got home collapsed in a heap and couldn’t move for the rest of the day, and I’m not much better today… It’s going to be well over a week till that wears off.

To top it all off, all that effort and he couldn’t find anything that would warrant a referral.

Then to give a perfect ending to a “perfect” week, I had a telephone consultation with my specialist who wants to de-worm me

Apparently they’ve been finding more and more ME/CFS patients with various mutated parasitic infections, (I’ve already got the photo of my parasites). But after all this time they’re finally having some success in identifying these parasites.

More and more of these parasites are found to be microscopic worms that clog up the lymphatic system and impair the immune system, allowing yet other parasites, infections and bacteria’s to run around the body unchecked.

He thinks this may be an issue for me, so he wants to have me wormed Not only that, but he said there was no need to worry, it’s the same worming tablets they have given to animals for years, so they’re perfectly safe…

How comforting… Seventeen years we had our dog and not a worm in sight… And now it appears I’m the worm-infested one.

Oh and this discovery was made by an American doctor who is a physicist, medical doctor and some kind of fighter pilot.He also has ME, and at one point was so bad he actually had to give up flying…

How sad, I feel his pain… Some of us were so bad we had to give up solid food, so I can only imagine how bad he must have been to have to give up flying

Oh and to top up my week, I get on-line today to find my journal has got rid of my theme and gone back to the default theme… That’s the third time it’s done that and I have no clue why.

I also got the initial drafts of my new logo, which, whilst it didn’t quite reduce me to tears (and believe me after this week it was a close call) but it did reduce me to a small whimpering heap for several minutes.

I had such high expectations for them, they’d made such a perfect job of the last one. I wanted superhero and coy, come-hither look. I got strange and deformed with a look that was more “come sacrifice your offspring before I head out for a wild night of raping and pillaging” than come-hither.

So now I have many hours of internet trawling to try and find something to explain what I want better and see if I can salvage any of the drafts and find a way for them to turn it into something usable.

Oh if only I’d known on Sunday what I know about this week now… I think I’d have just had myself sedated for the month till it was all over.

Ok, so it’s not quite how the song goes, but after 9 days without proper computer access my computer dependency issues and withdrawal are at an all time high.

Shiny new computer was ordered on Tuesday and was supposedly dispatched yesterday (why they couldn’t have built it on Tuesday afternoon and sent it out for Tuesday night delivery is beyond me… )

Still it should be here on Monday all being well.

Currently I’m now evaluating my finances (or distinct lack of) and trying to decide what to spend my remaining cash on. I can either order myself a brand spanking new blog logo that I’ve been meaning to get for the past couple of months since the one I’ve been using I’ve never been fully happy with…

Or I can splurge out on a customized blog layout.

I’ve had a little twiddle with the coding and CSS, but since I don’t really know what I’m doing and don’t currently feel well enough to try and learn it, all I’ve succeeded in doing so far is breaking just about everything I’ve edited.

Not exactly an ideal situation.

I already know which company I’ll use for the logo, they’ve done one for me before and it was everything I was looking for and then some, so no problems sending them repeat business.

But the blog templates is another matter. There aren’t that many places that do custom blog themes, and a lot of the ones that do aren’t that much different from the default theme. Heck I don’t have a clue what I’m doing and even I could knock something like that together in under half an hour just by tweaking the default theme.

But me being me, I want something more… I want bells and whistles, and maybe a few serving wenches just to finish it off

Well, actually I’m after something more parchment/ancient scroll/Egyptian Papyrus kind of thing, maybe with a Celtic or tribal twist. There are thousands of free themes for this blogging system, yet I’ve not found a single theme with that kind of look, which is surprising, I’d have thought they’d be more popular, olde worlde, tribal and Celtic are all in designs recently.

Still, I’ve found a select number of custom designers that have some themes that would actually be worth buying and I’m just collecting quotes together to see what kind of price I’m looking at, and how easy/difficult they think it’s going to be.

But since I’m impatient, if I can’t afford the theme, I’ll just buy the logo instead and I guess I’ll have to start saving again so i can get the theme once the new computer is bought and paid for.

I’ve been a fan of movable type for several years now, ever since I picked up my blog and tootled off to my own web-space. But now it’s time for a change!

Movable type has served me well since about 2004, but it’s just not keeping up anymore. It won’t do email blogging, I can’t access it properly through my PDA, and there’s been a few little things here and there I’ve been trying to tweak for months, but they’re having none of it.

Since the web server has just had a nice overhaul, I figured it was as good a time as any to give my blog one too.

So with some sadness I’ve finally got everything packed up, backed up, exported… Yadda, yadda, yadda…

So now I give you my new blog… new layout, new system, and it’s now powered by wordpress instead of movable type.

It’s actually even easier to write the journal entries, has built in spell checking functions, so no more cutting and pasting into word to check the thing (as long as I remember that is!). Uploading is a breeze, it seems to run from the database rather than static pages, so it’s taking up over 100Mb less server space than the previous version…

All good things.

Like all things there’s a few little niggles, importing was a pain, having to manually split the backup file into tiny segments then importing them individually… Still that’s not likely to be happening very often.

The only other thing I can see so far is the lack of bulk editing/deleting abilities, but again, I don’t see me needing that very often.

Most of the images will be down in old entries till I re-catalogue and re-upload them, but I’m hoping that’ll be done by next week.

Still, I got a good clear out, about 40 entries I’d never finished and don’t even remember starting have now been reduced to 8 left to filter in over coming weeks.

Yep… All in all, I think I’m happy with the change, and it’s a whole lot faster too, which is even better! I can even let visitors register with the blog so they can see private, secret entries! *bounces*

I bought a flash template a week or two back ready to revamp my blog and gallery. Initially I was planning to make the alterations to the template myself, but after several attempts it was pretty clear, left to my own devices I’d be lucky if a single thing was still working by the time I’d finished attempting anything more complex than simple text changes.

So I emailed them today for a quote to do it for me.

I just got the price back… Initial estimate… $700.

I’m surprised they could hear the shriek three continents over!

After reading that, it then said that they would have to check with the designer to confirm the pricing, and that it would take about three weeks to complete.

I still had one eyeball firmly glued to the $700 part, while the other eyeball carried on reading the rest of the message.

When I got to the three weeks part… The handful of brain cells that weren’t still running around the room screaming or requesting electroshock treatments were thinking “Three weeks? No problem, it’ll take six months just to pay for it!”

So I’m a bit undecided what to do.

On the one hand I’m doing a course in web design and another in flash animation, and eventually I’d like to get into the web design business, mostly because it’s something I can do independent of my health and lack of ability to leave the house.

But it seems wrong somehow to be planning that, and then paying what amounts to the annual income of a third world country to get it done for me.

On the other hand, between the various software and scripts I’d be buying to do it myself it probably wouldn’t work out much cheaper in the long run, but getting a professional to do it would certainly bypass my total inability to draw anything more complex than a straight line, not to mention some of the things I’m after are likely to still be far beyond my abilities, even after completing the flash course…

And equally it would then all match and be self-contained in a single flash animation page, and would be exactly what I have in mind. Whereas doing it myself would leave it scattered over several, only partially matching, pages… That alone would bug me, but as I found with the logo I got, if it’s not exactly what I have in mind, I’ll not be happy until I get the whole thing redone the way I imagine it.

So I guess I start saving.

Anyone know of a small bank with a big safe and really bad security I can make a “withdrawal” from?