Well I've hit the half century

It was ominously looming on me my 50th year on this planet..... I have to say I wasn't looking forward to my birthday.... 

My ever thoughtful and darling wife had been deceiving me for weeks, I knew something was happening but I've got to be honest I had no idea what she had planned.... she finished work early and then when I finished work,  she turned up in the car without the kids, which immediately got me on edge.... we drove, and drove... it started to get dark, we still drove out into the wilds of Wales....  

then the water pump blew on the car..... we sat there looking at each other, Andrea had a bit of a melt down because the surprise had been scuppered by the BMW's water pump going and dumping our entire coolant over the road, and we were out in the middle of nowhere... and by nowhere I mean absolutely nowhere even the local sheep were miles away.....

So we had a discussion after the minor hysterics and I explained that logically to decide what to do that she had to tell me where we were going .... So I asked would we lose any money if we cancelled, apparently yes..... all of it.... Soooooooo I spoke to our friendly garage owner on the phone and he gave me a number of somebody local in St Clears who did recovery..... and then I phoned my parents and my father eventually picked us up from our wilderness break down, and carried us to our final destination...... The £95 sting of the vehicle recovery marred things somewhat, and we knew we'd have a massive repair bill for the water pump (well I did)

My father bless him turned up about an hour and a half after we broke down and drove us to our final destination.......I have to say I was blown away with this 5 star hotel, they upgraded us because of our unlucky car troubles and probably because they felt sorry for us, but I wasn't complaining ... it was stunning, the whole place was pure sumptuous luxury.... They had a treatment room/spa.... hell there isn't any point in me describing it on here..... 

just go here and take a look at the place 

http://www.peterstone-court.com/

Amazing place.....

We were booked in for two nights weekend break and it was worth every penny......

Having to go down to the bottom of the enormous drive and wait for the local bus to take us into Crickhowell did raise a few eyebrows with the locals on the bus.... We were the only guests who didn't have our own car... but I've got to say it didn't dampen the weekend very much at all....

My wife also sprang a surprise visit by our friends on the Saturday night which was a lovely surprise.....

I've also been rocketed into the 20th century with an Android smart phone, which I'm still getting to grips with......(which by the way I'd managed to lose on a walk within hours of getting it... but it was recovered.....eventually)

Overall I've had the most fantastic 50th birthday a person could wish for.....and I'm married to the most thoughtful, loving and beautiful  uber fit wife a man could wish for :) 

Adobe Flashplayer & older PC's & Linux

I'm putting this up here so other Linux nerds don't spend hours figuring out what I have......

I have an old Athlon XP 2800 system knocking around which was earmarked for Freya (my 5 year old daughter.....running linux of course.... start them young I say ).... everything went swimmingly with the installation until I tried to use flash... no go, no error messages just "cannot load flash plugin".

Now I'm no stranger to hardware/software/operating systems, it's been my bread and butter for many many years.....(you don't need to know how long...but lets just say I'm an elder geek, in fact I was a geek before being a geek was fashionable....sigh) 

I went through all of the hoops installing from different sources, using different browsers, setting rights on the libflashplayer.so file, you name it I did it ....nothing nada, same error.

I initially thought it was maybe because of the low memory the pc had, but no.....

it's a really really simple fix

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags

which will look something like mine below except it won't have the SSE2 flag

fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow rep_good nopl extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy 3dnowprefetch lbrv

if it doesn't have SSE2 in it, you'll have to go back to the 11.1.102.63 version which is here 

that will solve your problem, unpack that into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins directory or wherever your browser is trying to load it from and it will work..... you can even just overwrite the newer libflashplayer.so file .....

Job done

Gun Control in the United States

The world is really starting to worry me, well America specifically along with all the other inhumanities going on in the world, such as Syria. What with the shootings in America in that primary school, and then the idiotic statements made by NRA representatives stating that schools should have armed guards !!!!.... I read some very interesting statistics on gun crime here in the UK we had 55 gun related deaths in a year, in the United States they had approximately 88 per DAY !!! which translates to 32 THOUSAND gun related deaths in the USA per year ......EVEN if you scaled up the population of the UK to that of the United States we would only have 255 gun related deaths a year.....of course any sane person would realise that it's all to do with how many guns they have and how freely available they are and their love affair with anything that can kill......and of course their precious 2nd Amendment, which has been twisted beyond recognition to support their "right" to carry arms......

I cannot understand how the pro gun people in the United States have such a narrow view on gun control, and why would anybody want a semi automatic assault rifle ? vermin control ? how many rounds do you need to put in a rat ? ....The bushmaster rifle used in the Sandy Hook massacre fires a .223 round which is practically identical to the NATO 5.56mm round

Why would you need a semi automatic rifle which can empty its entire magazine in seconds with the same muzzle velocity as a British Army SA80 ? Don't be fooled by the idiotic posturings of the NRA, nobody needs an assault rifle for protection unless you're a soldier in a war-zone. I find the whole argument that the NRA and pro gun people of America totally ridiculous and without substance or valid point. You only have to see the backlash Piers Morgan (whom I can't stand let it be known) got when he confronted pro gun people on his show.... DEPORT HIM !!!! HERESY !!! BURN HIM !!!! .....utterly ridiculous.... They are morons. 

Its seems the argument revolves around protection, a sort of mini cold war but on an individual basis, somebody comes at you with a .38 revolver and you whip out an assault rifle....and gun them down.... result....and a yippie ki-yay ....sad

But that isn't the point is it, an air rifle can kill a person, it really doesn't matter if it's a .22 or a .303 or a .223 or a 7.62mm death is about the only certainty you can count on.

How many more horrific deaths will America have to put up with before these idiotic gun freaks realise that the more available firearms are the more likely it will be that some psychotic nut job will use them to kill people..

University of Texas Clock Tower Shootings

18 killed | 31 injured | Charles Whitman

Virginia Tech

32 killed, many more injured | Seung-Hui Cho

Red Lake High School massacre

10 killed | 12 injured | Jeff Weise

Columbine High School Massacre

15 died | 24 injured | Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, Connecticut

26 died | 6 Adults | 20 Children aged 6 - 7 |  Adam Lanza

I cannot imagine what it is like for the parents of the children whose senseless killing have just taken place in the United States....

What I do know is that somebody is going to have to grow a set of balls and stand up to this powerful gun lobby and put them in their place...... 2nd Amendment or not