And here’s my Face Your Manga pic. Hm. Not all that accurate… yet. One thing is accurate, though, I forgot to put make-up on.
Me, by face your manga
Me, by FaceYourManga
After seeing almost everyone’s Twitter avatars changing into little cartoon faces, and lots of links to FaceYourManga, I finally gave in and installed the latest version of Flash to give it a go. The result isn’t bad. I think it looks reasonably like me.
I’m not sure if I’ll actually start using it as my avatar, but I do need a new one, and if it has to wait for me to get around to getting a new photo and processing it, it could be a while…
Tags: avatar, FaceYourManga, me, MichaelRandall, pigpogm
We had a walk over to West Exe Park today, where Tiverton Town Band were playing a concert. It’s not often you see a bandstand being used for its intended purpose these days.
Photos follow, but a brass band really needs video first:
Setting Up
The Horns
The Audience
Tags: BrassBand, music, Tiverton, TivertonTownBand, trombone, trumpet
Emo fence has been crying.
This fence is just down Canal Hill from home - it looks unhappy. It would probably be happier if it was facing the canal, rather than looking out onto the road.
I’m mainly posting this for the sake of trying out WordPress’ built-in image and media handling. It all seems quite impressive, but I’m pretty happy with using Flickr for the most part. Still, it would be nice to have all our photos and videos here on our own site, rather than uploading them to Flickr and YouTube, and then embedding them into posts here later.
*Looks around*
Cor. What pigpogm lacks in real world decorating skills he more than makes up for around these parts. I am loving this new layout, and it’s really nice to be back with Wordpress. In making the decision as to where to take the site next, Michael contemplated many different options, but I’m glad he chose this one.
So, time for a catch-up…
Work
Gah. My least favourite four-letter word. My quest to find exciting, fulfilling employment continues, and although I have found what I think will be my ideal job, it’s going to be a little while before I can go for it. In the meantime, I needed to get out of the job I had for personal reasons. We all have our dark times, moments in our lives that we really don’t need to be reminded of. The job I had reminded me of some personal bad times all the time. It didn’t make sense to stay. I am very grateful to Carol, my line manager, and Ann, my co-worker, for their understanding and support, and I will miss them. Tomorrow, I return to the job I had before - phone numpty. Oh dear. At least it’s only temporary.
Slimming World
This has not been going well. My motivation has been way off, and I’ve been more interested in eating chocolate and drinking wine than sticking to plan and losing weight. Fortunately, the wonderful Katrina gave me a few suggestions on how to get through this and on Thursday I became a Target Member. I have been acting as if I’ve been at target for a long time, this just makes it official, but it is only temporary. At Slimming World you have your final target, and two or three interim targets. I didn’t know when I passed my first interim target back in December that I could do this, take a breather, and go back to it when I was ready. Had I known that I may have saved myself a fair amount of hassle. So I’m now having some time to sit back and enjoy the fact that I am still over 130lb lighter than when I started, and gently taking myself back to plan. I’m hoping that moving back to my old job will help with this, the ability to switch off at the end of a day should help me to calm down a bit. The journey, as ever, continues…!
Other stuff
I’m looking forward to September. So many great things happening:
I’m going to help out with some promotion stuff for Slimming World.
It’s been a long time coming, but they’ve finally cracked it:
Metallica’s first album with Rob on bass. From the footage on Mission Metallica it sounds like the boys are in fine fettle and Mr Hetfield is as gloriously growly as ever. Can’t wait to hear it! \m/
And there’s a slight possibility of some worthwhile telly again as Team Glenister begin their squee training in preparation for The Last Van Helsing, due in ‘Autumn’. Unfortunately ITV seem more keen on announcing when the new series of X-Factor starts than telling us any more information than that.
While we’re talking about Mr Glenister, we’re all excited over at Luigi’s because in September, filming starts on series 2 of Ashes to Ashes. Hopefully Deano will keep us updated on that lovely blog of his.
Alright, that’s enough blether from me for now. Off for a walk across town now to see Senorita Kat Hootas give it the (flugal) ‘orn at West Exe Park. Rock, and indeed, roll.
Tags: AshesToAshes, KatrinaBarker, Metallica, PhilipGlenister, SamRandall, slimmingworld
When we moved everything over to WordPress (from Drupal), we lost some data.
- All posts lost their ‘author’ setting - for old posts, the site has no idea if they were written by me or Sam.
- Tags and categories - they did come over, but in such a mess that they had to be deleted. There aren’t simple parallels between Drupal’s Taxonomy system and WordPress’ Categories and Tags.
- ‘Static’ navigation - though we’d mostly moved away from that anyway.
We’re trying to go through old posts, editing them to add back the author, and apply suitable tags and categories, but with over 2,000 old entries, we just aren’t going to get around to doing them all. I’ve done quite a few of the recent ones, and I’ll work through some more yet, then start trying to update the most popular posts.
I’ll also have a go at putting in some relatively ’static’ navigation pages, too. There are some posts on PigPog that a lot of people come to us looking for. We might as well make them easy for people to find. I’ll probably try this over the next week or two.
The photos in the top-right corner of each page are randomly picked from a list. I’ll replace the default ones with some photos of my own soon, too. It will feel a bit more like home once I’ve done that, as that was one of the last things I did to our own custom theme under Drupal - adding a random photo next to the title section at the top of the page.
Beyond that, we’ll try to actually update more often, though that will mean more short ‘blog-like’ posts, with less concern for quality. If the static navigation works, though, that shouldn’t matter too much. We just want to get back to the point where the site is a fun extra to our lives - recently, it’s been taking over, or just ignored. We want it to be part of our lives, but we don’t want it to be our lives any more.
Tags: PigPog
…and we’re running WordPress.
It’s been an unpleasant time. We’ve had to get the RAM upgraded in our server, but we don’t really know what else has gone on. In the process of the troubleshooting, we migrated the site from Drupal to WordPress, and I think we’ll be sticking with WordPress now. Drupal was great, but the site is really just a blog now, and that’s what WordPress does best.
I used to love it when things went wrong. It was an excuse to sit poking a computer for hours on end. Now, I want to leave the computer behind at least some of the time, and go outside. Being tied to the computer, and working late trying to fix a broken database isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I hope things keep working, and don’t need too much maintenance for a while now.
Inspired by this post from Chris Brogan today, I want to take a moment to give much love and gratitude to the people who are helping me through this. As you may have gathered from the lack of posts about my journey recently, things aren’t going so well, but I’m fortunate enough to have people to reach out to for help.
Michael
Well who else could I kick this off with but my husband, best friend, soulmate, walking companion, drinking buddy and just about the best partner I could ever have hoped for. He rides out the highs, lows, hikes and binges with me without a word of criticism, judging, nagging or taking this piss. He is a star. It’s just difficult sometimes watching him eat some things that look jolly tasty but would cost me a month’s syns.
Katrina
This wonderful woman’s passion and knowledge of Food Optimising, combined with patience and genuine interest in the weight loss adventures of each and every one of her members makes her the perfect Consultant. Sometimes I feel bad for being such a pain in the arse, but she is helping me through this tough time and I believe that if I keep going to group and getting that all-important IMAGE Therapy, together we really can do it.
Frankie
Frankie was my Consultant at the start of my journey. Her warm, friendly, patient and gentle approach to Slimming World was just the introduction I needed. It was a pleasure to cross the finish line with her at the Race for Life on Sunday.
Every Slimming World Member I’ve Met
There’s a sign outside the group that reads there are no strangers here, just friends you haven’t met yet - and you really get a sense of that at Slimming World. There are a few people who I have developed good friendships with, but everyone is a positive role model for me there one way or another. Big grateful hugs to you all!
The Rrrrrrumpettes!
Since developing a bad case of the Squees for Gene Hunt, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on Luigi’s, a community for fans of Ashes to Ashes. Once I got chatting to some of the other girls there it seemed a good idea to set up a thread for other slimmers. The friendship and support offered by the people in that thread means a great deal to me and it’s another great example of how good old squee can bring people together. It’s all thanks to Phil Glenister and that ruddy big overcoat! Much love to neonsox, Tasha, ihateclowns, sparklydocs and the rest of the gang.
Complete Strangers
Finally, I have to say what a boost it is when someone I’ve never met before leaves a comment letting me know how they’re doing at Slimming World. It’s nice to know other folks are out there, and it’s particularly nice to know that all this blether is helping some folks.
Thanks to everyone in my support team. I may be a bit stuck at the moment, but with your help I’ll get through it.
So, at somewhere in the region of 140lbs lighter than when I started, the journey continues…!
Tags: friends, love, slimmingworld
Update: The photos are up on Flickr - not very well sorted or commented, but there’re here:
Sam took part in the Race For Life 2008, at Westpoint Arena in Exeter.
Here are the videos I took:
Tags: cancerresearch, charity, event, exeter, raceforlife, westpoint
Tags: cancerresearch, charity, race, raceforlife
