Messy Room, originally uploaded by Melissa Gray.

This is a photo I took of my room on the 22nd April. It’s now the 3rd June and even though I tidied it all back then, it’s in an even worse state now. So my task for this afternoon is to completly gut it.

I’m going to rearrange it, throw out everything that I don’t need anymore (like 8 year old nail varnish, anyone?) and sell anything that’s still in good nick and people will find useful, like my old Dell Inspiron for spares & repairs only mind because it’s wrecked.

I can also see all my books being sold, they’re threatening to take over my room at the moment, as well as clothes. I have so many but can never find anything to wear. I’ve been to Oxfam 4 times so far this year and yet I still keep finding more clothes lying around…not to mention that bags and bags of my stuff that’s at the boyfriends house.

Right, enough blogging - I’m going to tidy. Anything to take my mind off the fact I’m not smoking and have a horrid pain in my lungs :/

This video freaks the life out of me for two reasons. Madonna, who is 49, looks younger than I am. She’s 27 years older than me for goodness sakes! The second is the weird kissing scene, seriously why would you want to show people kissing with no skin?

Plus I hate the song, really hate it. But I listen to it all the time because it’s bloody catchy. I blame this on Timbaland. I’ve become obsessed with him recently.

A few hours ago I opened up my GoogleReader and began reading through the 100+ feeds that I’ve managed to neglect over the course of the past 4 days. I was quite content reading away until I came across an entry from Nettuts.com about creating a layout. I loved the end result of the tutorial and ended up creating my own theme from the tutorial. It’s very similar to the tutorial, but at the same time, it’s not really. Uh, whatever. I love it and it’s staying for the long run (i.e. about 2 weeks).

I’ve got a couple of things still to add, my Reading Library to chane back to running off a plugin rather than a script from another site, and I’m not too sure about the text at the top…too much like a menu, maybe? I don’t know. I’ll see if it grows on me by the morning.

It’s a miracle that I’m still awake, I woke up pretty early this morning because the sun was blaring through my curtains. I’m impressed that the sun was shining on a Bank Holiday to be honest, such a shame that I had to go to work though - I spent half the night staring out the front door wishing I was sitting in a park, eating a picnic and listening to music with my mates! And after the chaos trying to get to work I really wasn’t in the mood to be working at all. I’m off til 4pm on Wednesday and I plan to fill those hours with as much as possible rather than my usual of sitting watching TV or reading a book.

I want to do all my laundry and take old clothes to a charity shop since I’ve got clothes everywhere which I hardly ever wear. And I really need to plant all the bulbs that I bought a few weeks ago in the front garden so that when summer finally arrives the garden will be nice and colourful rather than just grass and a few roses. I like having something pretty to look at when I’m sitting outside reading.

Other than that, I don’t know how I’m going to fill the next two days - I have no spare cash so anything that I can do must be free. If it’s nice again tomorrow I’ll probably take the dog down to the local country park for a while, I’m sure she’ll enjoy it and I could do with the fresh air.

I was looking for a logo to use on my sidebar to link up to my Twitter account and couldn’t find any good ones that I liked so I decided just to make my own and offer them to other bloggers to use.

All logos are .png format and have transparent backgrounds so should work against any background colour.

Credit would be nice, but it’s not essential. If you attempt to direct link these files you will get a nice message shown on your site instead of the logo…you’ve been warned!

Twitter

Hope that everyone had a great Christmas, I had a blast - even though I was working 10am-2pm! It was a great wee shift though.

I got excellent presents from everyone - I am so spoiled! My mum got me an iPod Touch 16gb, a stunning framed photograph of New York for my bedroom, chocolates, a selection of belts including the most awesome sparkly gold one, underwear and money. I also got a docking station for my iPod from my gran! The boyfriend got me a Samsung D75 camera, perfume, a 1gb memory card for the camera and some other stuff. Friend’s presents included perfume, necklace, earrings and Richard Hammond’s autobiography! So awesome.

So, what did Santa bring you?

Lack of access to a computer, never mind the internet, is taking it’s toll on my blogging. It’s not, however, taking it’s toll on my writing - I’ve discovered writing in a diary again after about 3 years of publishing my thoughts only online. When I first started blogging I kept up a hand written diary, a warts-and-all LiveJournal and a less personal blog. I must have had so much time on my hands then!

My laptop, which I thought I had finally fixed, is well and truly dead. There’s nothing. Nada. Won’t switch on, won’t charge up. I think I might just take my hard drive out of it and sell it on eBay for spares/repairs. It’s a shame, such a great laptop! I miss my little Inspiron.

Won’t be getting a new one for Christmas though - I’m getting a kick ass digital camera from the boyfriend though. I can’t wait, I love taking pictures but my camera got dropped a few weeks ago and now it’s really blurry and taking yukky pictures. I’m hoping to get a Flickr Pro account in the New Year too, and start taking at least one picture every day. I want to be able to look back in five or ten years and say ‘Oh, that night was awesome…Nintendo Wii’s are sooooo old skool’ or something! And laugh at dodgy haircuts!

Can’t believe that it’s Christmas so soon, thankfully I’ve finished my shopping though - I’ve spent nearly £600 on presents mind you! Well worth it, everyone will adore their presents since I put a hell of a lot of thought into them. That’s me penniless til the next pay day mind you - in January!! Hopefully I can convince one of my mates to have a house party so I don’t have to borrow money to go out. And then I get to watch the Hogmanay edition of Still Game.

Through united co-operation everyone regularly profits

This picture, from Flickr, makes me laugh. Because I work for SPAR no doubt. To you, probably not so funny.

I found out yesterday that Asda, one of the most horrible companies in retail, are to open a store in my home town. They will be putting in an application to the council within the next few weeks - and I will be putting in my complaint against it.

Ok, so the area where they wish to build this 60,000 sq ft building is derelict. It’s covered in graffiti and there hasn’t been a company opened in the office buildings that currently stand there for at least five years. Yes it needs a new company to move in, but why not utilise the current office buildings that stand there? If South Lanarkshire Council lowered their rates, somebody probably would move in - Vodafone were the last inhabitants, I believe, and they didn’t last very long at all due to spiralling costs.

Why do I have such a problem against companies like ASDA? Probably because I work for an independent convenience retailer. Granted, we’re part of a symbol group but we’re still independent..

I know how hard it is to get customers through the door of a small shop with a large supermarket down the road. I know how badly sales are hit when a new shop opens, or said supermarket gets a re-fit. I see how much stock costs and the low markups on everything. I might not own the shop I work in, but I know how hard it is to keep it afloat and actually make a profit.

With monopolizing stores like ASDA and Tesco moving into every spare piece of land in the country it’s making life for the small, independents hard. In fact in East Kilbride town centre there are shop unit after shop unit lying completely empty, their To Let signs more of a common occurance than actual shops. The place is becoming a ghost town, and the council are going to sign it’s death warrant by allowing ASDA to open on a nearly-out of town piece of land.

Imagine the situation. Mrs Smith needs to go and buy her grocery shopping for the week. Plus she needs to buy a new pair of trousers for a birthday party she’s attending at the weekend. Oh and buy a present and card for the party…while she’s at it she’ll need to put on her Lottery ticket and top the car up with petrol while she’s out and about. Currently her only option for doing this is going to either a local, independent grocery shop then a card shop and then drive to a petrol garage which might or might not have National Lottery status - so she might need to go somewhere else to get her ticket. Plus going to a clothing shop somewhere to get her outfit. By doing this she’s giving at least four different retailers her custom.

If ASDA opens she’ll be giving her money to one, money-grabbing, world-polluting arsehole of a company.

I can’t wait for the letters page in next week’s East Kilbride News. I for one will be signing the petition against ASDA in East Kilbride…I know that somebody will start one. And if they don’t…well, I will.

I for one know how annoying it is when you decide you want to (re-)open a website and don’t want to splash out for a domain and hosting straight away. Over the years I’ve had numerous different domain names and paid hosting, as well as having lots of sites on freehosts. I admit it, when I was younger I was running upto 20 websites at a time. Personal site, blog, review sites, layout sites, fanlistings, hosting sites…hey, I was a fat kid with no friends when I was 13 - I had time to spare.

Anyway, roll on 8 years and the world of free hosting is slightly better these days than it was back then. I remember being pretty much restricted to Geocities and Homestead! This post will be updated as and when I come across good, free webhosts.

1. 110mb.com View test site

   
   This is what you get when you signup for 110mb.com;

   • 2 GB (2000 MB) web space
   • 6 MB max file size upload limit
   • PHP v5.1.4
   • Shockwave & Flash
   • XML support
   • 110DBManager (better then phpMyAdmin)
   • Run IonCube encoded PHP scripts
   • Push-Button Application Installer
   • 100 GB (100,000 MB) monthly transfer
   • FTP Access (CHMOD Allowed)
   • GD Lib 2.0.28 support
   • Powerful WYSIWYG website page builder
   • Online File Manager (Unzip compressed files from the server!)
   • CURL enabled
   • see more

   
   

   I have fond memories of 110mb.com, this website actually started out there for a few days before I accepted for hosting here at misstuned.com. Their website quotes the following;

   110MB is powered by Quad Intel Xeon Servers operating in a cluster-based environment. In plain english: lots of servers connected together rather then 1 server which hosts all the members as is true for 99% of free hosts, since they can’t afford extra servers. Meaning that if one 110MB server goes down temporarily, your site will be entirely unaffected — ensuring maximum data protection and uptime for your site.

   It’s certainly true - I have a few sites currently on 110mb.com and I don’t think that I’ve ever seen any of them down at all!

   The reason that I love 110mb.com is the excellent CPanel which it boasts. From it you can set up MySQL databases (there is now a $10 fee to do this now, shame really. You could always use freemysql.net ) access phpMyAdmin and one-click install over 30 great scripts and CMS, including my trusty WordPress. There’s also phpBB3, CuteNews, bBlog, ZenCart and Coppermine in there too. For those not wanting to pay the small fee that is now charged for MySQL there is a WordPress installation which doesn’t use it, called FlatPress which is a one-click installation. I’ve tried it out and it’s just like WordPress only a lot more simplified - perfect for first-time bloggers!
   An other great feature of 110mb.com is the FTP access and the easy to use File Manager with built in un-zipper. You can upload a .zip file and then press the unzip button to..well unzip the file into a folder!

If you’d like to nominate or suggest a free host for my to try out, leave me a comment below.