Well, yesterday I decided I’d get my car out of it’s garage for two reasons, the first being to see if it still actually started, lol, and the second was to go out for a drive! It’s been a while since I’ve gone out in the car simply for the pleasure of driving it, not actually going anywhere specific. Well, the car did start, hurrah! So, I went for a drive on the loop that I usually go on when I’m just going for a drive, which is from Sancoins to Mornay on the main road, then from Mornay to Apremont on the country roads, then from Apremont to Grossouvre through the forest, and then from Grossouvre back to Sancoins on the normal road. It really is quite a nice loop to drive around …
As you can see below, I stopped on the way for a moment, and took a few quick photos of the car, lol. This was just after the forest by Apremont. Apremont is a fairly beautiful little town, it’s actually rated amongst the top ones in France. If any of you have ever been there, and who play games a bit, you’ll know what I mean when I say it’s like a Medal of Honor town, haha!
Also concerning my car, I finally got around to booking it in at the local garage to get some work done to it. Quite a few things need doing to it, checking the starting and cooling systems, fitting the new breaks, a general service and a couple of other odds and ends. Once all that’s done, the car should be in quite good shape, at last. So I’ve got to take the car down to the garage on Tuesday morning, and they’ll be keeping it for a couple of days while they get all the work done …
Last Saturday evening Jym was over here as usual for some gaming, so we spent most of the time playing GTR Evolution, our new favourite racing game, hehe. So, while we were racing on various servers online, I took some videos using Fraps. In total I got about an hour and a half’s worth of video, hehe. So, out of all that video, I’ve managed to cut together two seperate videos, both of which I’ve uploaded to YouTube, so, here you go, take a look!
The first video is in some Mini Coopers on two different tracks, and the second video is in the WTCC Honda Accord TypeR at Pau. I really do love the Honda / Pau combination, you can have some great racing action there with the WTCC cars! The second video is my favourite, as it has the most action in it, hehe, so make sure you watch them all the way through, enjoy!
Well, I’m glad to say that I have something good to say for a change, hehe. The first thing is that this weekend I managed to update and reconfigure some things on my web server. I’ve updated PHPMyAdmin, zFTPServer and Filezilla to their latest versions. I’m also pleased to say that Dedibox have finally activated the IPv6 routing and extra IPv4 adresses on their network, which means that I could get myself 6 extra IPv4 adresses, 3 going to each LAN interface. I’ve also got myself some new domain names. Yes, even more! haha …
- dcmuzix.com
- dcmuzix.net
- dcmuzix.org
- mad-tec.com
- skullrage.com
- skullrage.net
- skullrage.org
- theteamnoob.com
That bumps the the numer of domain names I own up to 46, lol! The domain mad-tec.com was a domain we used to use at work, which I have now recovered for myself, and theteamnoob.com is also an old domain name that I’ve recovered, as I used to own it myself a while back having bought it for a friend. As for skullrage, that’s new, I just fancied that name, lol. I bought the other domains of dcmuzix for a proper reason though. I plan to host my own streaming radio on that address, as I thought that danielclayton.com was a bit too long and boring to use for that. The radio is another one of the things achieved this weekend, as I’ve now figured out how to reconfigure Abyss and Shoutcast, blocking them both to specific IP adresses, to make it possible to run them both on port 80. This makes things alot easier and neater for Shoutcast. So, you can expect some news in the comming days about the radio. I’ve also reconfigued the DNS settings for all of my domain names, adding the AAAA entry, so now they all ping in both IPv4 and IPv6. Sadly, neither my HTTP, FTP or my Mail server software support IPv6, so it’s kind of pointless for the moment, but I suppose that having it configured ready doesn’t hurt, does it, hehe …
Apart from that, I’m very pleased to say that I’ve found myself a new girlfriend, mouhahahaha! Her name is Ashley, she’s 22 and she lives in San Diego in the States. Well, as soon as I said San Diego, I can see half of you saying ” WTF ?!?! “, haha. I’ve actually known Ashley for ages, we met online in a chat room about 7 years ago, if I remember correctly. We used to chat all the time back then, but then we kind of drifted apart for a few reasons, me having both met Hitomi and also having left for college and not having internet acess all the time. As a result we hadn’t talked between 2004 and now! If you remember from one of my previous posts here, I readded and unblocked a whole load of people in my MSN the other week, well, Ashley was in that list, and we talked again for the first time the other week, quite a reunion, hehe. So anyway, here are some photos of Ashley …
Or should Not bad eh? Anyway, we got talking again, and as usual, one thing led to another, and we ended up becomming boyfriend and girlfriend, lol. I know I swore I’d never date an American, but what the hell, haha. Ashleys got a great personality and is fun to talk, and I’m guessing she thinks the same about me, haha. So, we’ll just have to see how this one goes, hopefully better than the last times! Long distance relationships can suck in so many ways, but they can also have their own little perks, and can work well if both of you are on the same wave length. Hopefull Ashley will be comming over to visit me here in France sometime soon, so I’m looking forward to that, and then I guess it’ll be my turn to go over there to see her, oh god, lol …
To finish off, I finally got relax for a moment and do what I’ve been wanting to for ages. So, a whole pizza and a couple of yoghurts all to myself, along with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, mmm, yummy. Add to that a good film, in this case The Last Samurai in Full HD 1080p, and the comfort of my bed along with some decent headphones turned up nice and loud, brilliant, hehe. Oh well, lets hope the good things keep comming, I really could do without any more bad news right now, lol …
That’s right, Facebook, the social network where it’s possible to both pwn and own your friends all at the same time! lmao! There’s an application on Facebook called Speed Racing, where you start off with a low end car, and race your friends or “real” cars to gain points, and with those points you can buy a better car or upgrade your current one. It’s quite basic, but at least it passes the time, hehe. Anyway, this last week I finally sold my Mini and get an Evo, which I’ve now just finished uprating! It’s now got 702 BHP and it’s orange, haha! Take a look in the photo below …
So there you go, my Evo is pretty über isn’t it? lol. So far, in total, I’ve won 318 races, and also lost 318 races, that’s quite a ratio! The other application I’m quite fond of on Facebook is the one called Owned!, where the aim is to buy and sell peoples photos. I own most of my friends, of course, lol, and as you can see in the photo above, I’m ranking first above all of my friends on Facebook. Wow, how sad is that, lmfao! Well, when you’re bored, what ya gonna do! Apart from that, Sushi, one of my cats decided he’d pay me a visit …
Awww, look at him, how cute is that! Hehe. Both pf my cats seem to like sleeping by my keyboard, I suppose it’s because of the heat generated by my computer, they must like it there because it’s nice and warm. Oh well, back to the real world I guess …
As most of you know, I’m quite a fan of having the latest computer hardware. I always like to keep up to date with the new stuff, and don’t like things to be slow or to not to ba able to do something. The result of which is that most of my money goes into upgrading my computer every 2 to 3 months, hehe. Well, since I’ve lost my job, I guess I can’t do that as much now, at least not until I’ve got another job secured. All of this is bad timing really, as when I was looking around the usual hardware news websites, I came across this …
It’s the new Foxconn Blood Rage motherboard, based on Intel’s new X58 chipset, which is for the new Intel Core i7 processors that are comming out sometime next month. If nothing else, how cool is the name, Blood Rage, lol! It looks pretty cool as well, don’t you think? It’s quite capable as well, supporting upto 24 Gb of DDR3 ram, 4 PCI-Express 16x slots supporting both Crossfire and SLI, and it also has 6 x SATA, 2 x eSATA, even 2 x SAS! Not to mention having 12 x USB 2.0, an X-Fi based sound card, and so on! I don’t know how much this motherboard is gonna be when it’s realeased, but it’s gotta be quite a bit. I’d love to get this motherboard, along with Core i7 and some decent DDR3 ram as an upgrade, but unfortunately, it’d cost me too much, for now anyway. And anyway, apart from that, the PC I have already is not exactly slow, hehe!
Finally, to finish in a non geeky way, here are some YouTube videos I like … 
The first one is Muse, live at Wembly Stadium singing Knights of Cydonia, the more I listen to that song, the more I love it, hehe! What an athmosphere, I wish I could have been there! The second video is the official music video of Slam by Pendulum. This has to be one of the best music videos ever, lol, watch it until the end and you’ll see what I mean, go go fat guy, bwahahaha! lol …
Anybody who knows me will know that I work as a computer technician. What I do is build, repair, and sell computers in a small computer shop that my Dad owns. The shop is called CT Commerce, and we actually live above it in the middle of the town, which is quite convenient, as it means we don’t have to travel every day to work, we’re already here, lol! It’s also very well placed for the internet here, being roughly 300m from the telephone exchange it’s perfect for getting the best connection speed on ADSL, hurrah! I’ve been working in this shop for over 4 and a half years now, and even though it does have the odd bad point, I do enjoy my job. It’s quite satisfing being able to fix difficult problems, or upgrading things, or building new computers with the latest new parts and technologies. Computers are what I’ve always wanted to do, I even went to study them at college, but I quit college to come and work here after a while, for quite a few reasons, but I won’t go into that now. Here are some photos of the shop where I work anyway …
Or should I say, worked … a couple of months ago my Dad decided that enough was enough, and started the process of closing the shop down. The fact of the matter is, the shop just wasn’t making enough net profit to make is viable any more. Put simply, it was limping along, if you will, paying it’s bills, but not actually getting anywhere. The shop has been in that situation for a while now. At the start of the year Dad tried putting me and my brother Martyn (who does the same job as me) on part time for 2 months as a trial, but in the end that didn’t make much of a difference. Then Martyn developed some health problems a few months ago and had to be hospitalized, and subsequently had to be off work from then right up until now, as he’s still recovering …
The fact that Martyn was now off work actually helped a little, as he was getting sick pay from the government so we didn’t have to pay his wages. But again, it wasn’t enough to save the situation, and with Martyn being off it gave the rest of us a higher work load. Basically, I think that in the end my parents just got sick of the whole situation, and decided that enough was enough, it was time to close the shop. So, cutting a long and complicated story short, CT Commerce closed it’s doors on Monday, the 20th of October, 2008, and will not be opening again …
This of course puts us all out of a job, which totally sucks. My parents still have what stock was left in the shop to sell off on ebay and the likes, so they’re ok for the moment, my brother is still sick, so for one he can’t work anyway, and he gets benifits for being sick and for all his kids, so he’s not going to be starving soon. Me on the other hand, I’m just left being unemployed, quite simple. The other day I signed up with Assedic, who are the unemployment benifit people, so I’ve now got a rendez-vous to go and see them and the job center on the 6th of November …
So from December I shout be getting some money from the government, but until then, I gotta live on what I’ve got. At least I did get a small amount of redundancy money, some of which I’ve now saved, so that helps. I don’t know what will happen about getting another job, as to where, when, how and what, and I’m not even sure what I want to do now, if I want to stay in computers or try something different. I’ll just have to wait and see what they say on the 6th I guess. I suppose I’ll have to knock up a CV and stuff as well, eugh, what a pain in the arse, lol …
Apart from the odd argument here and there, with both my parents and various customers, it was quite fun working at CT Commerce. As I said above, it’s quite enjoyable being able to build new high-spec computers, getting to try out the latest stuff, or upgrading and fixing old computers. And that’s not to mention the other little perks that the job had, like being able to be connected to MSN all day long, listen to what music I wanted, getting hardware at cost price, being able to connect to my home computer over the local network, and of course, not ever being too far from the fridge at home, haha!
A while back we even used to organised LAN parties in the shop every Saturday night after closing time. The LAN parties would usually start about 8pm in the evening, and could go on to anything upto 7am the next morning, lol. The people taking part were always either friends or family, so it was always fun. We used to play almost any type of game, but the favourites were usually FPS or Racing games. The games we probably played the most were BattleField 2, Serious Sam 2, Raven Shield, LFS, TrackMania Nations, amongst others. The LAN parties even turned into overclocking sessions sometimes, lol, with people tweaking their computers trying to get the most out of them. And then there was the endless pizzas, pringles, bottles of drink and god knows what else. Great fun! It’s just a shame that all that came to an end …
So there you go, that’s the basic version. To sum things up, I’m now unemployed and looking for a new job, after having worked as a computer technician for over 4 and a half years. The shop where I worked is now closed, and will never open again. So, lets see what the future brings, I just hope that I will enjoy doing whatever job I end up with as much as I did the last one, so wish me luck …
While I was looking on YouTube for the music videos for my last blog post, I came across a video that made me laugh quite a bit. In the video somebody has edited an episode of the cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants to sync it to a Linkin Park song, bwhahaha! Take a look!
How epic is that? It’s gotta be one of the best videos I’ve been this week anyway, lol. You have to say though, some people really do have too much spare time on their hands, don’t you think? lol …
Hey! I’ve been listening to alot of different music lately … well, I say lately, I’m pretty much always listening to music really, lol. Anyway, I thought that I’d share some of what I’ve been listening to with you, so below you will find links to YouTube for 10 songs that I like! 
Pink – So What
Gabriella Cilmi – Sweet About Me
Kylie Minogue – 2 Hearts
Three Days Grace – I Hate Everything About You
Taïro – Je ne t’aime plus
Rehab – Sittin At A Bar
Muse – Knights of Cydonia
Linkin Park – Faint
Pendulum – Granite
Chase and Status feat Plan B – Pieces
So there you go! What do you think of them? I hope you liked them. I had to resist quite hard not to just put 10 Pendulum songs on the list, but anyway, haha! If you know any good songs, feel free to share the name or links with me by commenting here, email or MSN, as I’m always keen to find new music of any sort! Anyway, enjoy …
I thought I’d write a little bit about relationships today, or my inherant lack of at the moment. I’ll start off with a question, have you ever been in love? I mean true love here, not just having an occasional girlfriend. The type of love where you can not imagine life without that person, you spend all day, every day, thinking about that person, dreaming about that person, you want to spend all your time with them, everything about your life revolves about them and you’d do absolutely anything to make them happy. This has happened to me twice in my life …
The first time happened back when I was 17. I was in a phase of looking for penpals from around the world, when I came across a girl called Hitomi, who lived in Japan. We met through the Japan-Guide website, which has a friends and penpals section. We began to chat by email and then by MSN soon after, and we quickly found that we had alot of things in common, we had the same kind of interests, liked the same kind of music and films, liked the same kind of styles, and so on. We ended up chatting every day, we talked more and more and became great friends. So one thing lead to another and in the end I decided I’d like to become more than a friend to her, and got the courage to ask her to be my girlfriend. I asked her on the 12th of Febuary, I guess I couldn’t wait the two days until Valentines day, lol. Much to my suprise, she said yes!
So from then on we became boyfriend and girlfriend, and as things progressed, we fell in love. In the following summer I went to see her for the first time, all the way to Japan! It was just before my 18th birthday when I flew the 10,000 odd kilometres to Osaka, never before had I felt so nervous, lol! It doesn’t hit you until you’re actually on the flight, you start worring about things like what if she doesn’t turn up, or what if she doesn’t like me, and all the other worst case scenarios, haha. But no, she was there, and we got on brilliantly, that holiday in Japan was one of the best moments in my life! She was lovely, so cute, happy, and sexy, lol. Her parents and family were nice too, and I was in Japan, what more could you possibly want! That first day was pretty epic, being introduced to Japanese culture for the first time. That day was full of firsts for me, my first proper kiss, and I even lost my virginity that night too, lol! Opps, I’m sorry if that was too much information, haha! Everything was so perfect in fact, that I even ended up proposing to her! We were outside at the moment, sat on a bridge on a hill watching fireworks together, it couldn’t have been any better. She was a bit taken back by it at first, but in the end she said yes! I came home to France a week later with an engagment ring on my finger, hehe.
For the first couple of years that we were together, things were going perfectly, life was great. Hitomi came to stay with me here in France a few times, for quite long periods as well, anything between 2 and 3 months each time. We were happy together, when we couldn’t be together in real, we’d chat every day on MSN or on the phone. Unfortunately that didn’t last forever. I guess it started when I started college, and we couldn’t chat as much as we wanted to, which caused a few arguments, but we got over that once I’d left college and we could chat more again. At one point I suspected her of having an affair with another guy, which caused alot of fights for a while, but in the end that got resolved. The biggest problem was once she started working at a convenience store, as that meant we couldn’t chat alot, much like when I was at college. In a long distance relationship you need to be able to talk, and if you can’t do that enough, the relationship can suffer alot …
In the end things came to boiling point around Spring 2007. We had started plans to get married that summer, and I guess I was dragging my feet a little about sorting out paperwork and so on, which she got annoyed about. What really started the fight though was Hitomi not booking a flight to come over to France as she was supposed to. I got pretty pissed off that she didn’t seem to want to come over, and her giving stupid excuses. All of this ended up in a massive fight, where quite alot of not so nice things were said, and then we parted ways, each of us totally pissed off with the other. Looking back at it now, I do accept some of the blame, as I could have handled things better than I did. As some of you know, once I get annoyed or upset, I do tend to get a bit hot headed and go off on one …
We did speak once or twice a few months after all that happened, where I found out that she had already found another guy less than a month after we had broken up. Gutted. After 5 years of being together, being engaged and almost married, that’s pretty quick to jump into another relationship! I was wondering if something was going on even before we broke up, but I guess I’ll never know. These days she hates me and refuses to speak to me even as a friend, which kind sucks, but I guess it’s understandable. Do I regret what happened? Yea, totally. Do I wish I could go back and do things differently, saving our relationship? Again, yes. Am I still in love with her? No, I don’t love the Hitomi I broke up with, as she had gotten very miserable from working all the time, amongst other things. I do however, still love the old Hitomi, the cute, happy, sexy one that I originally fell in love with. She will always have a place in my heart, such wonderfull memories, but that’s all gone now, the old Hitomi was replaced with the new miserable and depressing Hitomi. It’s a real shame, but that’s life, people change over time I guess …
The second story started on website called WAYN, a kind of travel community website. A girl from Wales called Gemma added me as a friend, at random I guess. It certainly made a change to be added by somebody else for once. Not much was said on WAYN at the time, as we went more or less straight to MSN to chat directly. To be honest, she seemed quite boring when I first met her, she didn’t have much to say and was fairly quiet in general. But as time went by, a couple of months I think, we started to chat more as we got to know each other, and I actually started to enjoy talking to her. Much like before, it got to the point where we were chatting daily and having a good laugh together, one thing led to another and I ended up asking her if she wanted to become my girlfriend, half jokingly, half seriously, and to my suprise she said yes. I guess she liked me more than I thought she did, hehe …
As time went on, I guess we started to fall in love. At least at the time it seemed like it. Looking back now, I can see that it was nothing like what I had with Hitomi. I’m not saying it was bad what I had with Gemma, I just guess that nothing can really match your first love, can it? We got on well enough anyway, I tried on numerious occasions to get Gemma to come over to visit me, but she always gave some lame excuse as to why she couldn’t come, but maybe soon! Yea, sure. In the end I got sick of waiting and decided to go and see her myself for my holidays from work. Gemma lives in Wales, so it’s close enough to drive there by car, so I went on my own in the Sierra. It was my first long distance trip in the car all by myself, and I quite enjoyed it, its was good fun bombing up the motorway, at, lets called it, a reasonable speed, lol …
I had planned my trip to make the most of the occasion. Pendulum, my favourite band, were doing a live concert in Cardiff on the first of May, so I decided that it’d be a great idea to go and see them at the same time. It was their first live performance for the In Silico tour in Europe, so it was bound to be pretty damn good. I decided all of this quite close to the date, about a month and a half before, so it then prooved to be next to impossible to get the tickets for the concert, as by the time I had decided that I was definately going they had all sold out. Luckly in the end I managed to get some from a guy on ebay, so that kind of saved the day. Luckly my sister Debbie said I could stay at their house while I was over in Wales, which was perfect really, as she lives in Cardiff. I also decided to go up and visit my Grandad while I was in the UK. So not only was I going to meet Gemma for the first time, I was also getting the chance to meet my sisters for the first time in years, to see my grandad and go and see my favourite band as well, all in the same trip, excellent!
When I first met up with Gemma at Cardiff’s train station it was a little awkward, she was obviously very shy and nervous, and as expected, very quiet. We went off to Burger King to have something to eat, where we finally got the courage to talk to each other. Then in the evening we met up with my sister, Tony, Mike and some of their friends at a pub, which was nice. We met up again over the next few days, and she started to loosen up as we got to know each other better. We had some quite nice moments together, going out to various things and places, holding hands, cuddling, first proper kiss, not to mention the odd good fucking, lol! Things went pretty well really, although I did feel somewhat kept at a distance, but I put that down to her being shy and nervous. At least she liked the Pendulum concert!
However, once I got back home, things didn’t really improve, Gemma was still like she was before I went over there to meet her. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, I always felt like she never really let me in, she wouldn’t share her problems or her opinions with me openly, and we didn’t talk often enough for my liking either. I dunno, despite the fact that I felt I loved her, her attitude just anooyed me a bit too much. In the end I thought enough was enough, as she did nothing to help the situation after I told her how I felt, so I broke up with her. She has always claimed that she loves me, she does still, and she says she wants to get back together, but again, it’s all words, I see no actions or feelings to truely back any of it up. What’s the point in being in a fairly one sided relationship? At least that’s how it felt to me. Maybe she has a different view of how a relationship should be than me. As much as I tried to make it work, it just didn’t, unfortunately, and not through lack of effort on my side! There was no point in pretending, so I put an end to it all. We did try the whole friends thing after, but I found that hard, still having feelings for her, and still having to deal with her annoying attitude. I guess this time just wasn’t meant to be, what a shame …
So where does all this leave me? Single. Bored. Lonely. None of those three and enjoyable, so it pretty much sucks at the moment, I really miss being with somebody. So, here’s hoping that the third time lucky saying will come into play, as I really don’t want to go through all this heart break again any time soon. I was epically depressed about the breakup with Hitomi, as some of my closer friends will testify, and breaking up with Gemma as well certainly doesn’t help matters either. Just for information, I will also say that I have left out a few details in the stories, as they are a bit too personal to put in a public place. So anyway, who knows what the future will bring, true love is hard to find, but it does exist, and as the saying goes, there are plenty more fish in the sea! It’s just a shame I have difficulty swimming in it, lol …
Well, last Saturday I decided I’d go shopping for once, to do something different. After all, it’s about time that I got some new clothes and stuff, instead of constantly buying myself new parts for my computer all the time, lol. I took Mom with me, as it would have been a bit boring alone …
I’m a big guy, as most of you know, lol, so it’s quite hard to find stuff that fits me properly, but after a bit of searching we did find some things, both that I liked and that fit me, lol. Check out the photo above, big arse size, mouhahaha! lol! I ended up getting two pairs of jeans, a couple of long sleeve t-shirts to wear under other t-shirts, a few other bits and bobs, and a new pair of shoes as well. The shoes are quite similar to my old ones, but they’ve got a red design on them instead of blue, and they’re not falling apart like the old ones, lol. It’s funny how the same size in different makes of shoes can so different, like a Nike 47 seems much smaller than an Oasics 47, so I ended up getting the Oasics, as they were the biggest I could find, that wern’t totally awfull, lol …
We went in the Sierra to Nevers for shopping. As some of you know, I’ve been having trouble with the Sierra not starting, randomly. You turn the key, the lights on the dash come on, you can hear the fuel pump come on, but nothing starts. It’s not the battery, as it will at random start perfectly well again after a few tries. The cables looks fine, so my guess is that the solenoid or something like that is crapping out. I’ll get it looked at sometime, I can’t be arsed myself, lol. So we went shopping, the car started fine, in fact it started prefectly for the next 4 or 5 stops we made in Nevers as well, but sods law, just as we were going to head home, it started playing up, the bastard! Cutting a long story short, it did start eventually, after a little twiddeling and about 15 tries to start it, lol. Lucky really, don’t want to be stuck in Nevers all night, I want my dinner, lol!
So I leave you with a random photo of my very self, that’s me sitting at my desk with my computer in my room, nothing special really, lol. *sigh* … Righty, back to work in a minute …
