Ben Shephard

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything so I’ve got a bit of catching up to do. I’ve been spending a lot of my time with Janine lately especially with it being Christmas. I’ve been I’ll for much of December which hasn’t helped much either. There just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day any more. I started the month with a bad throat / cold I picked up at work and that went away after a few days and I picked up another cold one of the kids brought home from school. This time it was on my nose and sinuses but it proved much harder to shake than the last one and I ended up going to the doctors just before Christmas and they gave me some pills which seem to have done the trick.

I wanted to be better for Christmas since me and Janine had all manner of family occasions to attend most of which would mean one of us being introduced to more of the others family and I think we both had our worries. On Boxing day we went to my parents and took the kids and it was the first time they had met any of my family but they had got a Nintendo DS and a Sony PSP for Christmas so Janine made sure they were fully charged to keep them entertained for the evening. There were a few minor bumps in the road but all went pretty well really. On the way home Janine let the kids play with their games in the car and this turned out to be a bad idea as they can get travel sick. Thankfully they weren’t sick in the car but as a rule now I wont allow them to play games in the back of the car if they can get travel sick on a two mile journey.

I think I’ve now met most of Janine’s family and friends but now I’m being introduced to some of the more distant relatives and it’s getting hard to remember everyone’s names. I’m usually pretty nervous when put in a new situation with people I don’t know but so far I seem to be doing OK. It’s definitely been a different kind of Christmas to what I’m used to and trying to split my time between two families feels a little strange. Christmas with kids is a whole new experience for me but it appears they can be as happy with a new toy gun as they can a Nintendo DS. People keep telling me Christmas with kids is great but perhaps things still feel a little too different for me for all that to sink in for me yet. It’s been an experience that’s for sure. Meeting the family for me wasn’t a big deal until the kids came into the equation which made me a bit nervous because they can be so unpredictable.

In other news just as I came home with my Christmas food shopping I realized my fridge had broken down. It’s been working intermittently since but I think I’m going to have to invest in a new one in the January sales. I’ve also attempted to fit the hard drive I bought for my net book but I failed miserably as the cable is the wrong type and I’ve had to order some more off E-bay since I managed to chew up the end trying to fit it into the hard drive. This now leaves me without a laptop as my battery has packed up in the Lenovo and my net book has no hard drive. I also managed to have a minor disaster with my Android phone today. I flashed the firmware and accidentally flashed the recovery image too so I had to re root the thing to get the right recovery image back on to it and restore it to where I started. I wanted to re flash it to get rid of the speech synthesis data I installed but couldn’t remove and it was sapping all my space for apps on the thing. I’ve got it all rebuilt as it was now minus the speech data meaning I can now install CoPilot sat nav. I decided to stay behind after work and use my work PC to try and fix my phone since laptops are getting a little bit thin on the ground in my house.

I just hope nothing else manages to break. It’s been an expensive month as it is so I’ll be spending the next six months or so trying to put back what I’ve spent this month. I don’t think there will be any fancy holidays in the summer of 2010 anyway not that there is anywhere I want to go. I’ve not been to one gig this year so perhaps I can manage to go to one or two in 2010 but I’m still avoiding the festival thing for another year.

Hope you all had a good Christmas

Ben

= 6.6

I’ve spent most of the weekend with Janine apart from a few hours spent finishing my Christmas shopping and this afternoon while I got a few of my jobs done at home. We went to a couple of parties last night. One for the kids at a local kid friendly pub then on to a party at one of Janine’s relatives. I wasn’t drinking because I was driving but Janine had a little bit too much and it snowed quiet heavily while we were there and on the way home every time she saw some snow that hadn’t been walked on yet she asked me to pull over so she could get out and walk on it. I didn’t stop until were were close to the house because the roads were pretty bad but I stopped a few doors away from the house since there were no foot prints on the pavement and Janine got out and weaved her way drunkenly up the the front gate. I pulled up along side so she could get Mat out the back of the car and we ran inside to get warm again. I get on really well with Janine’s family and we had a really good night. We got up really late today so Janine could sleep off the booze.

I dropped Janine and Mat off her mums and came home to get my house work done. Since I didn’t have a single thing in to eat I decided I’d better go shopping. I got plenty of stuff in to see me through Christmas but as I was putting it away I noticed the fridge seemed a bit smelly and on closer inspection I noticed it was also warm. Not a good thing for a fridge to be really I had a quick look at it but it seems like the compressor has packed up. I don’t know if I’ll manage to get it going again but I’m going to leave it unplugged for a few hours and try it again. In the mean time I’ve put most of my perishables either in the freezer or in my pressure cooker which I’ve taken out side and buried in the snow in the back yard. Hopefully I’ll get the fridge working aian tonight but if not I’ll be borrowing my parents cool bag until I can get a new fridge. It’s probably best to wait until the January sales now but I’ve really over spent this month since I’ve had to buy Christmas presents and I’ve also been furnishing my dining room. I could have done with out this right now but I suppose it’s just one of those things.

The only thing I’m waiting for now is the results of the Christmas charts. I really want Rage against the machine to beat X-factor to the Christmas number one spot. I was in HMV yesterday while I was christmas shopping and I noticed they had the X-factor single in front of the tills but no copies of RATM. I only hope it was because they had sold out of RATM singles

Ben

= 6.8

Today was the kids nativity play at school so me and Janine went up to see the kids. This was a whole new experience for me and made me a little uneasy but I was ok with it. I remember when I was at school everything seemed normal to me but having not sat on a school chair for 15 years or so I realised how much I’d grown myself because my fat ass needed two seats and I wasn’t very comfortable. I’ve never had much experience with kids. I don’t have any of my own and there aren’t even any in my family right now since the youngest is about 16. I was like a fish out of water but it was a good experience. At one point one of the other parents and a friend of Janine’s handed Janine her three month old baby to hold while she took a few pictures of her older son. Seeing Janine with a baby made me feel a little bit funny because it is something we have discussed together. We have both said that now is not the right time but that we might have one together one day if we ever decided to and I was thinking what life would be life if we did. It’s a scary thought but I think I’m a little more willing to face it now than I would have been five years or so ago.

I feel like I’m at a strange cross roads in life and as I sit writing this with Janine by my side I can’t wait to get on with things.

One of the first steps towards our future together is to try to give Janine a bit more freedom. Since she doesn’t drive I’m want to try and teach her and today I bought a set of L plates to go on the Honda and I’m going to try and add her as a named driver to my car insurance. Proper lessons will still be needed since I might be able to drive but I highly doubt most people who can drive could pass a test today. It’s gotten a lot harder in the ten years (almost to the day) since I passed mine and there have been lots of new things introduced like the hazard perception test and they can be pretty picky on the practical side anyway and I have developed a lot of bad habits over the years. This should prove an interesting experience as I’ve never taught anyone to drive before.

New experiences often feel a little bit strange and that’s usually enough to put me off and send me running back to the familiar surroundings of my lonely computer room but this time I feel like it’s worth hanging around. Kids are the thing that worries me most. I’ve never had to play an active role as a parent and there is a lot to learn. Kids are complex things. I find my mind works best when I’m working with electronics or technology. A computer is very predictable and kids just aren’t. sometimes it’s hard to know what to do and what to say to them but Janine is a good mum and I’m watching and learning all the time. I couldn’t be a teacher, I’ve got a lot of respect for anyone that works with kids because I just wouldn’t have a clue.

In short never work with children or animals. I will say that when they are good they can be the best thing in the world but when they are behaving like little brats I could tear my hair out if I had any left.

Ben

= 7.6

Sometimes I like to listen to some music that’s a little bit less main stream than all the stuff that makes it on to Radio 1′s play list. There is a lot of stuff out there on line but finding the good stuff can be pretty difficult. There is lots of good stuff on sites like Jamendo but still it’s hard to choose what to listen to from just looking at search results. I’ve got a pretty varied taste in music but I know what’s good and what isn’t. A good way to find the good stuff is to listen to pod casts like RatHole Radio. A few months ago Professor Kliq played a live set on there and I seems to have stuck in my head and I’ve found myself going back to listen to it again which is always a good sign. See for your self.

At the weekend I brought Janine’s computer home to rebuild it and beef it up a bit. It’s a HP Pavilion and it’s pretty basic. 256MB RAM 2.53 GHz Celleron processor with on board video. I’ve had a scavenge through some of my kit and found a reasonable Nvidia graphics card and an extra 512 MB RAM to go in it. I decided rather than formatting the 40GB HDD that was in there already I’d replace it with a 60GB I had laying around. It’s not much by today’s standards but it’s a little more space for music and pictures and I could keep all the old HDD intact in case anything got missed in the rebuild.

I’ve had to bear in mind that this is a family PC and it’s going to be used by two young lads. Now since I used to be a young lad (a long time ago now but I was) I know the kind of things they get up to and the Internet is full of things that as a parent you might not want your kids to see. When I was growing up the Internet was still in it’s infancy and the idea of locking down what your kids can access was a pretty new idea then. I used to talk to friends back then who had their connection filtered by the likes of Net Nanny amongst others. I remember when I was a teenager I was chatting to an American lass on AOL when I used a very mild swear word and all of a sudden she signed off. I figured she’d had to go and never thought no more about it until a week later when I spoke to her again and she said the word I used triggered the parental control software her parents had installed to block her Internet access for a week. As you can imagine she never spoke to me again for fear I might get her kicked off the Internet again. This is a little extreme in my view but it’s impossible to protect against every thing that’s out there.

I wanted to protect prying eyes from some of the darker corners of the Internet because I know what’s out there and some of it is pretty disturbing even as an adult and it’s getting worse year on year. I had a look on wikipedia to see what the current state was when it comes to parental control software. I’m rebuilding the machine as a Windows machine as Janine is into games and the kids have a good few Windows based educational games that there probably going to want to play. It seems there isn’t a deal of choice when it comes to free and open source software. There are a couple of commercial offerings but I like to avoid that where ever possible. I decided perhaps I could look beyond the full fat parental control app and have a look to see if there were any good plug-ins for FireFox that would do a reasonably good job.

Thats when I came across ProCon Latte. It’s a FireFox plug-in that filters pages based on key words or specific sites. It’s possible to password protect it so it can’t be disabled or removed and the default list is pretty good but you can also add to this yourself. There is also a white list to allow any sites that it blocks that are harmless but may contain a word that triggers the filter or you can lock down access to a few specific sites by blocking all traffic except for the contents of the white list. I’m used to web content filtering from work where we use a Squid proxy server which is very good but over kill for one machine. I’ve set up Windows with a separate account for each user and installed ProCon Latte for the kids accounts so that should filter out most of the nasty stuff the web has to offer. As I said before it’s impossible to protect from everything out there on the net just as it is in the real world. We all have occasions where people use inappropriate language or other things out of your control but it’s important to make sure kids know what’s right and wrong when those moments occur.

I’d highly recommend FireFox and ProCon Latte on any machine that would be used by kids. It might not be the strictest solution out there but it does a really good job and it’s £0 cost

Ben

= 7.6