So it turns out that this year the boyfriend & I aren’t going to Blackpool. We aren’t going to Benidorm, we’re going to Los Cristianos in Tenerife sometime in October. The only downside to this is that he’s also invited our friends. *shrug* I suppose it would be fun with them but obviously I want to go away together alone. We’ve only done it the once and that was to Dublin about 3 or 4 years ago.

I’ve had a look on various websites for pictures and reviews of Los Cristianos, and my gosh it’s a beautiful place! There’s a water park and places to go out on boats to see dolphins and whales nearby and I think it sounds wonderful, even if I’m afraid of boats!

Hopefully, we’ll be staying in self-catering apartments rather than a hotel. They’re a lot more fun I think, and at least you know what you’re eating - the last time I was in Spain I thought I was eating onion rings when in fact it was squid rings. Yuech! The apartments I fancy are something like the Reveron Apartments, it’s £238.00 for both the boy & I for a week in a studio apartment which is not bad, really!

If anyone has been to Los Cristianos, or Tenerife in general, recently…what did you think? I’ve not been since I was about 4 and he’s not been for at least 5 years! But Tenerife means something to him, so that’s where we’re going!

In other stuff that I’ve been up to..wow what a busy weekend I’ve had! On Friday night the boy & I went to our friends to play poker. I ended up making dinner, a gorgeous chicken and vegetable stirfry with lots of soy sauce and peppers. It was amazing! And I didn’t poison anyone. I think I might post the recipe for it, because it really was out of this world nice. I can’t believe I actually cooked something without killing anyone. After dinner the boys got drunk and we played Xbox and had a sort of mini-pub quiz. It was great fun, but as it turns out my night was about to get so, so much better! The boy & I left the guys to play poker and went into one of the spare bedrooms for a little fun ourselves…won’t go into too many details but it was a great night. We also talked and talked and talked like we haven’t done in ages and decided (half-heartidly on his part I guess since he had been drinking) to start saving money for holidays, a car..whatever.

2 hours later we actually went and played poker. I was the dealer and my god those guys totally loose the knowledge of how to play poker when they’re drunk! Heaven help us if we ever go to a real casino, they’ll be thrown out for acting the idiot!

On Saturday we went shopping and played some pool, which I actually won a game of, very impressed with myself on that one. I was getting fed up of the boy constantly winning so I started playing properly (like putting some power into hitting the cue) and won! I wish we’d put money on the game now. The rest of the night was spent watching nearly all the episodes of Still Game that have been put out on DVD and eating kids sweets that we picked up in PoundLand - you know, strawberry laces and dolly beads and sherbet. Teeth-rotting stuff.

Up until about half an hour ago I was running WordPress 2.0. *shock* I hear you gasp. Why hadn’t I updated to the newest version of WP? Two simple reasons, really.

1. I wanted to wait until a more stable version of 2.2 was released to safe having to update again a week, month, whatever after release, and;
2. I’ve had bad experience with upgrading various otherCMS in the past, and didn’t fancy either loosing everything or spending ages backing up all my databases

To be honest though, there’s only one reason that I’ve updated tonight. WordPress Automatic Update Plugin. I found it via a quick google search for an other plugin I was looking for and liked the blurb;

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin saves you all the headaches and efforts while upgrading your wordpress installation. Here is what the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link to run the database upgrade.
8. Re-activates the plugins.
9. Gives you a link to clean up the installation after completion.
10. Shows you the upgrade log.

You can also run the Automatic version which will run all the processes automatically.

This plugin will let you upgrade from any version to the latest version provided by Wordpress. I have tested the plugin with version 1.5+.

Within ten minutes I’d downloaded the plugin, uploaded it, backed up my entire database and upgraded to version 2.2.1. It really was that easy! I’ve not lost a single byte of data, with the only issue being that some of my plugins didn’t re-activate themselves but that wasn’t much of a hassle to do myself.

A brilliant plugin, everybody should install it!

For some reason I’m sitting on my brother’s computer playing poker instead of sleeping. I went to my bed at around 4am this morning, got up at 6am for work and have just got in the door about a half hour ago at midnight. That means I was out the house for 18 hours, worked for 14 and waited 4 hours for my mum to finish work in the take-away for a lift home. It’d have taken me about 2 hours to get home so I was aswell waiting and saving £2.00 in bus fare. I actually had quite a good time waiting with her in work, trying to come up with new ideas of the take-away’s menu. So far I’m convinced the owner to add Pizza Crunch suppers and Steak Pie suppers to the menu. Pizza Crunch suppers are such a Scottish thing, one soft-based pizza with cheese and sliced tomato, deep fat fried in sausage batter and coated in salt & vinegar, in between a buttered Morton’s roll. Best, thing, ever. I don’t even want to think about the calories that thing has but mmmm it’s good!

For most of the weekend (when I’ve not been reading), I’ve been working on this site a lot, in case you hadn’t noticed. There’s a new layout, some new content and I’ve deleted some stuff too. Since I’ve been at the boyfriend’s all weekend (I work when he’s sleeping, I’ve gotten it down to survining on about 4hrs sleep a night these days), everything that I’d done was saved to his computer which I obviously can’t access when I’m at home on the other side of town.

As I didn’t have my external HDD with me, there was only two ways that I could make sure I could use the files that I’d created over the course of the weekend - ZIP them like nobody’s business and email them to myself, thus taking time and effort on my part. Plus, I wasn’t too sure if I’d have enough room in my email inbox for this to work. The second way of getting the files was using an Online Storage facilty, like IBackup. I’m currently trying them out on their free 15 day trial, but so far the service they offer has been great so I’ll probably go with their 5GB per month for $9.99 price plan. Since I have bad experience with laptops and drives dying on me, knowing that I have a backup online of all my important documents and files is worth the small price!

Within about 10 minutes I’d uploaded the files to their server via a really easy to use program, knowing that I could access my files from home and download them to my laptop here. Since I’ve gotten home I’ve uploaded a bunch of important files that I really cannot afford to loose if my laptop drives ever decide to die (ie my CV, a collective list of all the CDs I own (starting from 11 years ago - trust me I don’t want to loose this!), a list of business contacts I’ve made through web designing and a bunch of other stuff.) I love the fact that you can organize a backup of selected files to automatically happen - it means I can backup important files once a week without having to remember to do it, which is a must when I’m working on new projects!

So now I’m sitting here, instead of sleeping, working on more updates for the site - which I wouldn’t have been able to do without online storage solutions! I’d recommend this to anyone who wants to keep backups of important files.

Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix
If I’m honest, I was just a little disappointed with this movie. It seemed to me that the entire story was rushed, with not enough emphasis on characters and relationships with the director, David Yates, was trying to cram the entire book into the shortest time possible. Granted the movie lasts for 138 minutes and it is, I suppose, a children’s movie but I wouldn’t have minded an extra twenty minutes in an uncomfortable Odeon chair just to have the story told properly.

The entire story is choppy and I feel that those who haven’t read the book would get lost very easily. The character Tonks isn’t even introduced to the viewer at all, I’m sure that the only mention of her name is when she tells Alastor ‘Mad-Eye’ Moody not to call her Nymphadora. It’s such a shame, as I thought that Natalia Tena fitted the image of Tonks in my head perfectly.

I loved the Dementors at the start of the movie, again these fitted just perfectly with the image I had of them in my head. In fact , a lot of the effects used throughout the movie fitted with the perfect descriptions JKR writes in the books. My favourite scene I think was the scene where Harry and co arrives at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place and the people living in the houses next door don’t realise that their houses are being squished up so that number twelve can ‘appear’.

The kiss between Cho and Harry was rather fanfic-y. I don’t know, I think I expected it to be a bit more..over quicker? Or something…But hey, each to their own.

Overall I think that too much of the book was missed out, with too much time focused on un-important things, like the kiss. The effects were amazing, the camera work was a tad too Hollyoaks-like (funny angles, ‘quirky’ shots) and the character relationships weren’t given enough time to fuse together to make the viewers believe them. I think that I’d probably rate this movie with 3 stars out of 5…unless you’re a major, major fan don’t bother going to see it and wait and rent it when it hits the DVD shelves.
The review of the book is coming soon, I’m still trying to gather my thoughts on it.

After spending over £100 on a ticket for T In The Park I didn’t think that I’d spend most of the weekend inside the fun casino that was there instead of watching bands that I love. I started off with £20 and quickly racked it up to over £750 playing poker, roulette and blackjack. I’d gotten the bug, man! Such a shame that the money wasn’t real.

As soon as I came home I decided that I was going to play for some real money but since I don’t fancy trekking into town every time I fancy a quick game I scoured the internet for a good, British online casino. Finally, after some searching, I came across Bet365 which combines all the games that I love playing.

The offer lots of different types of betting opportunities, on sports such as baseball, boxing, tennis, rugby - even lotto draws. But the best of the site is the casino area. The offer up to £100 free chips when you first sign up (which, by the way, takes mere minutes) which was incentive enough for me. I chose to download the software, but you can play from your browser if you prefer.

My favourite part of the site is the live dealer games - instead of playing with a computerized dealer there’s an actual person dealing the cards. For me, it makes me feel like I’m really in a casino without having to shell out membership fees.

…and I’ve finished Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. It was magical…

I think I’m getting just a tad excited about the final Harry Potter book. Granted I’m not going to wait outside Border’s for midnight so that I can get one of the first copies because then I’ll just stay up all night reading it and won’t be able to go to work in the morning (trust me, I have done that before!) but a friend is going to one of the big out-of-town shopping centres near where we live to get his copy and hopefully will manage to pick up mine too so that I can sit and read it before I go back to work on Monday.

I think I’m going to have to re-read Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince again to get into the swing of things. I do that each time a Harry Potter book comes out, in fact last time I re-read every single book before I read Half-Blood Prince! It only took me about five days aswell.

I’m also going to the IMAX cinema with my brother to see Harry Potter & The Order of The Pheonix, which was my favourite Harry Potter book sometime before next weekend. I can’t wait - it’s great using my little brother as an excuse to go to the IMAX to see it since the boyfriend hates HP with a passion and I don’t fancy going myself to the cinema.

It’s rather hard staying away from spoiler sites for the book and movie, because I really don’t want to know what happens in the book and although I know the story for the movie I don’t want that ruined either! So please, if you’re commenting on this post don’t say anything spoiler-y or I’ll get Nearly Headless Nick to haunt you down…

Recently, a lot of sites have been popping up with sponsered posts, ie ‘this post was bought to you by RipOFF Real Estate’, even if the blog or post has nothing to do with real estate! I’ve never been a fan of making money online by having ads on blogs, but there is one site that’s caught my eye over the past few months so I decided to check it out and see if it was worth it. The site that I’m talking about it PayPerPost. A lot of the blogs that I read regulary are all ready members of PPP and seem to make a hell of a lot of money this way. The concept is simple, submit your blog to PPP and if you are then approved you can write posts of different oppertunities and advertisers pay you for doing so.

I’ve just signed up and I’m waiting to be approved by PPP so that I can start making some cash by writing about things that matter to me. I won’t be writing blog after blog about some debt consolidation company I’ve never heard of, or a company selling houses in Florida. Nope - I’ll be posting about products and services that mean something to me. I’m not out to make a million, I just want to be able to buy my own domain again and splash out on eBay from time-to-time!

I can’t wait to get started!