"Back off Badgers", says RSPCA

Posted Thu, 02/02/2006 - 09:52 by rich

Animal welfare charity the RSPCA is launching an advertising campaign aimed at preventing a large-scale cull of badgers in England.This will no doubt come as a relief to Matt.

The leaning Powell of Pizza

Posted Tue, 31/01/2006 - 07:54 by Martin

I don't think eat a lot of Pizza, but the guys at dominoes in Cwmbran have seen fit to give me several loyalty vouchers.

One of which says that if we spend over £20 we get everything half price. With an offer like that I am interested to see a poor guy deliver more pizza than he can carry.

With that said I would like to extend an invitation to all the regular Eggwanners to indulge in a evening of alcohol and pizza at mi casa.

Saturday 11th Feb.

Lets do this.

Gallery upgraded

Posted Fri, 27/01/2006 - 11:05 by rich

OK... I have successfully upgraded to gallery2, the much-improved gallery software. I've imported all the old photos, comments, etc.

This brings many benefits and some problems.

Problem: the postnuke integration is fiddly and removes some of the benefits of the new system. So I've disabled it. The gallery is now a stand-alone system installed at http://gallery.eggwan.com. This has some knock-on affects:

  1. You must register a new username and password for the gallery. I suggest you keep it the same as your Postnuke one for the sake of simiplicity.
  2. Once you have registered, you won't be able to do anything until I turn your account on and give you permissions. This is an anti-spam feature.
  3. The user interface between Postnuke and the Gallery don't quite line up. I'll try and resolve this with some mad HTML skillz at some point but it's not a big issue, I believe.

On the other hand, we get much, much better upload support, like the ability to drag-and-drop a ZIP file full of folders of JPEG files and have it turn it into a nest hierarchy of albums automatically. That's worth the price of admission right there, surely?

I will be writing to tool to unify the passwords and suchlike soon, so hopefully everyone is OK with needing yet another account to get at our services.

Gallery and oldmail access restored

Posted Tue, 24/01/2006 - 08:17 by rich

Hi folks. Finally got some PCs set up at home last night, so had chance to restore your access to the gallery (old version until I figure out how to upgrade) and to your mail archives on oldmail.eggwan.com. I've also added a webmail service on the oldmail server, accessible simply at http://oldmail.eggwan.com.

I can't make any guarantees about how long oldmail access will stick around, or how reliable it will be. It's still hosted on my old server on my home ADSL connection. I suggest anyone who hasn't already taken everything they need off it do so ASAP. I'll send around more warning before it is shut off altogether.

Also, note that the gallery has some sort of minor template problem that I simply cannot be bothered to fix :o) I'd rather spend time upgrading to gallery2 with dozens of spiffy new features instead.

Regards,

Your fearless (and lazy!) sysadmin

Big changes coming

Posted Wed, 04/01/2006 - 14:11 by rich

Depending on my schedule for the next few days, at some point, I will be swapping the site over to the new server.

When this happens, it will have some detrimental effects. Firstly, the site may be offline for a little while (hopefully not long). Secondly, all your email will apparantly be deleted and your email login stop working. This is because the new email server will not carry copies of your existing mail. Don't panic -- all your archived mail will still be held on arawn and I will provide instructions on how to copy it over to the new server closer to the time.

However, with my house move coming up, the mail server you use now will be offline for a while -- perhaps two weeks -- and your mail unavailable for that time. You might therefore like to back your mail up to your own machine right now in case you need anything during that time.

You will all need new username and passwords for the new email also. I will be mailing these out individually as I set the accounts up.

The Most unbeliveable thing has happened..

Posted Sun, 01/01/2006 - 11:12 by Martin

For a town like Cwmbran, this is a huge event.

You want to know why you can't get a parking space? You want to know why every Thomas, Richard and Harold is flocking to the concrete metropolis as if their lives depended on it?

It's because apparently opportunities like this are few and far between.

I was so excited that I went into buy a packet of socks (You know the ones that won't fit after the second wash...). Lucky for me some Chav twat bumped into me on his way into Poundland and I woke up. I can now spend that £5 on a new genuine fake Burberry stick to beat him with.

Happy new year. Let's hope next year see's a new government sponsored sterility program...

Another Christmas is upon us...

Posted Sat, 24/12/2005 - 18:11 by Martin

And as I am trying to stuff a duck, Ill keep this short.

As usual the EggWan flock will be descending upon the Xmas Eve Grotto AKA The Crows Nest in an effort to celebrate the last year.

The Lesser spotted Eggwaner can be identified by the Black Eggwan.com polo shirt, proximity to a large table FULL of bottles and glasses and a high level of general noise.

If you feel like joining the party Me and Stokes should be there from no later than 6.30pm. If you are going to arrive after 9.30pm, don't expect intellegent or even coherent conversation as we will be too pissed to speak to you no matter who you are.

However, it would be good to see certain people at this traditional shindig and as the primary functions of this party are to meet friends and get pissed, you should not be disappointed by popping in.

I am looking forward to seeing you all through my One Eye.

Martin

Cheaper petrol anyone?

Posted Wed, 14/12/2005 - 14:06 by badger

Yes, we all live in rip-off Britain where petrol (as well as just about anything else you can think of) is prohibitively expensive however help may be at hand!

I found out about this scheme a few weeks ago but thought I would check it out before announcing it to everyone in case it was a hoax. The scheme is called Pipeline Card and if you wish to register you can do so here.

The idea behind the scheme is that enough members of the public register for the card in order to negotiate a discount with a major petrol retailer (similar to company fuel card schemes). A discount has already been agreed in principle with one dealer. The more people that register then the better the chance of negotiating a discount and the bigger the discount will be.

Since registering a few weeks ago I have received 2 e-mails from pipeline, both just general updates about the scheme, so I don't think its just a way for them to collect details and bombard people with spam. To register you only have to leave your name and e-mail address as well. This then makes you eligible for a discount if the scheme is successful.

As far as I can see we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by registering so would recommend that everyone does so. Unless you enjoy paying over the odds for your petrol of course.

Now if only they could do the same for beer!

Badgers

Posted Fri, 09/12/2005 - 16:57 by badger

The Google ads just don't have enough relevance to badgers for me at the moment so in the hope of getting more badger related ads on the site I'm submitting some news about badgers.

Check this out for some interesting information about the Stink Badgers. These odiferous fellows produce foul smelling emissions from their anal glands.

Doesn't sound at all familiar!

Badger.

p.s

Badger badger badger badger.

Badger.

Server roll-call

Posted Fri, 02/12/2005 - 13:22 by rich

See below for a list of who has volunteered to contribute towards the server.

To remind everyone, the costs to be met in the next few weeks are:

  1. Memset 8000 miniserver: £17.50/mnth, plus VAT[1]
  2. Eggwan.com registration: £60 for 5 years (RichL paid this last month out of his own pocket and as far as I know is still owed for it)
  3. Eggwan.co.uk renewal: £10 for 2 years (RichL has to pay this out, coz his name is on the Easily account).

That's a total of £316 divided by however many people say "yes". If everyone shown below agrees, that's just £25 each for the whole of 2006.

Based on how many people have said yes so far (nine plus two reduced contribution), it'll currently cost £30.67 each. If the rest of the responses fall the way I think they will it will only be £26 each.