This year the ObscureInternet forum members decided that this year we should have a 'Secret Santa', the main rule being The present sent must be something you already own. The value of which is entirely up to you.

Anyway fast forward a few days, this arrived;

Look at the address, it could only be my secret Santa gifts! So I hurried to open it, and I found the following;

A pen making light of serious problem of cats being killed by dogs wearing clowns clothes in hit and run incidents.

One of those fashionable (a few years ago) wrist band things, that is extremely tight even on my girly wrists. This one is for beating off bullies or some such thing. 

Some chewing gum, which was sent no doubt to hide my offensive breath.

Disappointingly, none of the chewing gum was missing.

Some Boots Spa washing gear, so not only do I have bad breath, my body also smells. Great!

Soup. Soup that is worth 25p. Soup that is worth 25p which was won on a raffle.

Some 'Fiz Wiz', I'm not down with the kids but I can only assume that this is some sort of new drug, that they are taking at their Rave parties. I will put this in the wife's tea to see what happens.

A coin, with a picture of a disfigure man on it. I mean seriously that scar is bigger than his entire face.

The finally gift, was a pound coin sized token with a picture of smiley face that has been shot in the forehead. Is this warning to tell me not to get too happy or is it a message to tell me I should go shopping with the wife more often.

All in all, I couldn't be happier with my 'Secret Santa', I think this fits the bill perfectly and I can't wait for next years!

Link: Join the community!

Well Christmas is now less than a week away, but I have still got a few more thing to buy. Hopefully I will be popping into town tomorrow to get those last few things.

The situation at work is pretty much sorted, I am just waiting to hear the final confirmation. One thing that has definitely happened is the split up of my old team. We have all gone in different ways, but of course we didn't let this monumental occurrence pass without a celebration. Pictures of this celebration can be seen in the gallery.

Speaking of celebrations, it was the Conor's Karate club Christmas party at the weekend, and great fun was had by all, especial by niece Abi who won students Choice student of the year, again pictures of this night can also be found in the gallery.

However the major highlight of the last two weeks was watching the Conor's school play yesterday. I was very proud to see Conor on stage and he wasn't bad at all, no problem with this lines or anything. Perhaps a future in acting beckons? The only slight disappointment was that the physical comedy was missing from yesterday performs as there was a prop malfunction (they had the wrong size bucket on stage), however there is another performance tonight which I am going to see some maybe it will happen then.

The spare Wii I got from German is on sale on ebay, get it while you can because it's only listed for 24 hours. 

As you know I'm always trying to get people to join the ObscureInternet forum, and this years Secret Santa is great example why you should. Check the blog on Christmas day for more details.

Now then turkeys, as you may have guessed I've had a little bit of blogger blocks as far as this blog is concerned, but I'm sure you'll have got use to that by now.

Anyways loads has been going on we since we spoke last, most importantly we've almost done all the Christmas shopping. We've even manged to get hold of those Nintendo rare items, the Wii and DS. Infact I got hold of two Wii's as I pruchased one from HMV in Middlesbrough, and then one a I'd order from a online store in Germany turned up the next day. So I've got a Wii to get rid off. The DS was actually more difficult to get hold of, the wife managed to buy the last one from Game this afternoon after they got a few delevired.

When I say we've done most of the Christmas shopping, of course that doesn't include the thing I'm buying for the wife, as I have to sort that out myself. Anyway I've a good idea what she wants, as she has told me. She wants some Craft gear, she is current into all this creative stuff, making Christmas cards and the like.

Workwise everything is still up in the air at the minute but it does look like it will be sorted out in the next week which is great news, since I've been waiting 18 months for them to sort this out.

The other stuff I've got going on it's very interesting, so I'll leave it for now!

There is a great article on CNN called 'What can you do with a Commodore 64?'. Surprisingly it's all about the Commodore 64, a computer you'll not be surprised to read I'm very fond off. Go read it.

Link: What can you do with a Commodore 64?

You might be thinking that I've been forgotten to update this blog recently, but in reality not much has been going on. We are current preparing for Christmas, we have wrote a list of people we need to buy presents for and we are thinking of what those presents should be. One present we do know we want, but we are having great problem getting it, along without 100,000 other people in the UK, is a Nintendo Wii. I refuse to buy one from the scum on eBay, and I've been desperately trying to order one from the Internet. I've had a few close calls with German based shops, but no luck so far. One present that has already been bought is my present for myself, it has been purchased, has arrived and has been put away until Christmas time. I bet you can guess what it is.

I had a surprise last week when a couple of young lads knocked on the door, when I ask them what they wanted, they told me they had come to cut down the tree in the front garden, and soon enough the tree was gone, just a little stump remains where it once proudly stood. Conor wasn't at all happy with this, but Suzanne was over the moon. I think I'll miss it, but it had grown to big for the Garden and the tree's roots are probably is the main reason the house is failing down.

Speaking of the wife, we manage to get out of the house for a night out last weekend. We enjoyed a nice meal with Anthony Putson and his fiancee Nicola in Joe Rigatoni's. I'm also heading out to the pub this Saturday night, partly thanks to facebook, to enjoy some drink with some old friends I haven't seen for ages.

Well it’s been almost two weeks since I return from Holiday, and they have been eventful in both positive and negative ways.

The most positive bit of news I have is that Lisa give birth to a little baby girl (6.2 pounds) called Katie on the first day of November. However I’m still waiting to see a picture of mother and child.

The big negative news was the very sad news was the death of my uncle Peter from cancer, he will be very sadly missed by myself and a lot of people.

Another bit of good news is that Conor has a part in school Christmas play. It’s a role with (seven) lines and some physical comedy. He is very excited by this, and I think he will make a good job of it, because he is a bit of drama queen.

In less interesting news, I’ve given my desk a good tidy, just in time for it to display my latest induction into my Starscream collection. It’s the G1 coloured movie Starscream! It picked it up from ebay for a reasonable price. The new colour scheme and head make it look a lot better than the normal and more ape-like movie Starscream, it also seems that the legs have more articulation making it much more pose-able and fun.

Finally this year the family and I celebrated Bomb fire night (the night in Britain when we celebrate the fiery execution of a catholic) by watching the Firework display at Stockton riverside. It was an very exciting twenty minute display.

Now then, It has been a while since the last updated, however the family and I have been away on holidays. A week in Ireland away from Work, Computer, Internet, Social Network and everything, it was bliss.

The lack of a computer meant that I have taken most of my blog notes in a note book, so excuse me if I have missed anything out, but I am not a great at hand writing or note taking.

The holiday was mostly visiting family and shopping. Visiting family means visiting my many aunt, uncles, cousins and their children which makes be realise how old I am getting.

While shopping we visited Cookstown, Omagh and and they only thing I bought was a T-short for three pounds. But I can say is Dungannon gets points for having no stupid sectarian flags. Also I can buy packs of Victory V in the local shops in Ireland, which is great because I really am a pig for them.

I had a strange dream while I was away, it involved fist fights breaking out between the participants of meeting I was running, however this probably can be explained due to the fact I watch Flight Club for the first time the night before.

You can view the pictures of the trip in my picasa gallery

The main news since I have got back is I have finally managed to clear the credit card debt. Yes, I am credit card debt free, just the car loan to worry about for the next five years.

Finally this week also saw a Halloween Party at the Karate Club, You can also view the pictures of that in my picasa gallery.

I've two reason to update the blog today, firstly I did say I may actually keep updating it with this stuff and secondly the Half Life 2 Episode 2 and Portals games come out tomorrow (I think), which I imagine will be taking up my time in front of the computer. I've already ordered the Orange Box, so I've already played Team Fortress 2  (which rather annoyingly crashes on me) and I've got a free copy of Half Life 2 to give away (Mail me if you want it). Also it's not like I haven't been blogging, I've just been doing it elsewhere, mostly on Twitter and 43 things. On the subject of blogging I see Scribbler has updated the look of his blog, and I think it looks very snazzy.

The gallery has been updated with some of the earlier images from the old gallery. So if you haven't had a good look at the gallery now is the time. 

You have probably noticed some subtle changes to the blog lately, most notable is that I’ve added RSS feeds and feed icon for the comments and forum, but again I’ve also made big changes to the backend. My administration panel has been moved from a separate page until to the blog itself, but the opinions only become visible when I log in using a user name and password.

I’ve decided it time for a change of philosophy in the development of this blog, until very recently everything on the site (aside from the the forum) was hand coded by myself.  This philosophy was fun and a great way to learn php/mysql. However I don’t have really have time to code everything myself anymore and the fashion nowadays is ‘mashing’ apps from other sites (or something such like, I’m not down with the web2.0 kids yet) using RSS Feeds

So I’ve grabbed rss2array from rssmix which is an RSS Feed parser which converts an RSS XML feed into an php multidimensional array, which I can then play with in PHP. I’m still having to use my brain, as I’ve not touched ensional arrays in quiet a while, but it saves me a programming nightmare.

The first thing I’ve done using this philosophy is to replace the old Gallery, which I abandoned ages ago as it was a pain to update. I’ve since used Flikr, photobucket and Picasa for my images, however recently I’m managed to arrange them in some sort of order. Flikr I use for my Transformers pics, Picasa is used for my main photo storage (holidays and nights out, etc) and Photobucket is used for everything else but mostly for storing blog and forum images. So now if you click the gallery button on this blog you will see a list of my photo albums on Google’s Picasa.

However this is only the first of many possible uses of this the technique. I’m thinking of adding the status feed from facebook, you know that one that’s starts “Glen is..” to this blog, but I could go on to pull my information from many different websites, for example I could pull details from last.fm for my favourite music, 43things for my latest goals, allconsuming.net for my latest books read and WAYN for my travel information.

So keep an eye on this blog, I may actually keep updating it with this stuff.