Spent the whole weekend upgrading the forum over at MCO - the actual installation took 10-15 mins but it took me hours to customize the skin and colour the buttons. Part of that was getting used to the new admin panel and skin customization layout. I gotta admit I love the new admin panel - so much more streamlined and organised. I also added a new member map which is really cool - it’s set to Europe by default because we are all mainly Europeans on the board. Is that a true reflection of Martin’s fanbase? Hmmm…

I noticed that my bandwidth had shot up remarkably and it couldn’t all be down to me messing around. Had a quick look in my stats and discovered an DA RPG forum was linking to 20+ images on my DA gallery. I had been meaning to add an .htaccess file but I never seem to have luck with them. Everything shows up okay in Opera but then I get mail from IE users wondering why my images are all broken! *shrugs* I’m trying a different one this time and hoping that it is doing the trick.

I’m so fed up with ppl direct linking or stealing my stuff at MCO that I’ve decided to name and shame them on the blog. Probably won’t make much difference in the end but it sure made me feel better. I was sorely tempted to report them to Proboards though, however I decided to wait until I’d calmed down a little. I so don’t want to end up in a site war - my life is stressful enough.

You know it is a terrible state of affairs when you can’t even keep a blog on your own domain without having to resort to moderating comments and closing old posts so that ppl can’t spam you.

What a frustrating week I’ve had! I got so pissed at a certain person who refuses to play fair over at MCO that I changed the forum over to moderated posts for newbies. It’s not the kind of atmosphere I want to create over there, but I had no choice. This bitch comes in, posts personal info about seeing Martin with his kids and then buggers off again. I have deleted her account several times and she keeps coming back. The only way to ban her completely is to ban her IP but I don’t want to do that since it would effectively block any other Canadians using the same company.

LOL! I got so angry I actually denounced her on the blog and told her she was no longer welcome. Next step: publicly revealing her e-mail address (one or all of them!). In fact I’m sorely tempted to put it on a page somewhere so that it can be picked up by spam bots. heheheh! I bet she was in on all that stalker business during the PTL days - stupid, stupid person.

I’ve been in complete agony over the weekend with my jawline. It’s a long story but I’ve had this on and off since my wisdom teeth started coming in. Suffice to say, I have this really bad habit of clenching my teeth if I’m annoyed or concentrating hard on something and I end up with a really stiff jawline. The dentist is no help, just murmurs sympathetically and agrees that it is painful. Helpful suggestion: rinse my mouth with salt water. Eh? Blech!!! I’ll stick to painkillers thanks so much! I really need to stop doing it!!!

We had a disastrous day at the Olympics yesterday, mainly due to the heat. Our poor athletes were dropping out like flies. I feel so sorry for them because I can’t even walk around in intense heat, never mind run. We did better on Saturday with four more gold medals, two silvers and some bronze.

Shirley Robertson and her crew were presented with their medals and they had “Britannia Rules The Waves” on the back of their tee-shirts which was really funny. We have done so well in the sailing and rowing this time - must be all that rain we get.

Speaking of which: brace yourselves there’s more torrential rain and flooding on the way!

*sigh* Got another two job apps to fill in this week. One is for a library in my area which I totally adore. It has a really cosy atmosphere but it is with the council so I’m not getting my hopes up. The other one is council again but they are looking for 3 members of staff - it is temporary but for at least 2 years. It’s just general admin type of work but it’s better than nothing and I can only try. At least I can fill in these apps online! It’s like being on a merry-go-round - filling in apps, waiting to hear back, going to interviews and then waiting again!

I feel like someone is dangling these good jobs in front of me and then snatching them away again just as I reach out to snag one. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I did everything right at school - I studied hard and got good grades - lost out on a lot of social stuff because my head was in my books. Made the sacrifice! Went to Uni - got a degree and it all went downhill from there. What are you supposed to do?

Listen carefully! What’s that noise? A huge collective sigh from parents all over Scotland as their children return to school today!!!

I live about five minutes away from my local primary school and I’ve been watching all the new kids heading off for their first day! Shiny new uniforms! Aw… My four year old niece is actually starting school today, so I’ll hear how she gets on later. She should be okay because she is quite an outgoing little girl and she already knows her classmates from nursery.

At the opposite end of the scale, my cousin’s eldest son is starting high school. He’s really excited - just wait until the homework starts!

What a weekend! My brother paid me a visit on Saturday and as usual the conversation always seems to direct itself towards computers. My PC is about five or six years old and it was recently upgraded to XP but the HD is only about 8GB. It was never formatted properly because the HD crashed and loading XP on top of the existing OS was the only way to save my files which were duly transferred to my laptop but it left me with a very messy C drive. Anyway, before I knew it, we were off buying a new 40GB hard drive and it was all installed as easy as pie. A very rare event for my PC - I swear it is possessed sometimes.

I installed XP on to the new F drive and have been busy transferring all my stuff over. Hopefully I will eventually be able to format the C drive and get rid of the junk. First thing I did was install Opera, unfortunately I had to use IE to get to the Opera site and within seconds I had a worm, a trojan and one of those damn dialer worm things. All this before I had time to install the virus guard and the Sygate firewall. If that doesn’t scare you from using IE - nothing will!

The new F drive kept rebooting, so I had to log off and log on to the C drive so I could run AVG from there and it finally removed the viruses. Or so I thought. I had a lovely little short cut on my desktop which regularly hijacked my system and accessed a casino site - this was after I’d run Ad-aware too! So I downloaded Spybot: Search & Destroy and got rid of a few nasties. Unfortunately the dialer thing was not detected, as soon as I opened Opera - I was directed to a couple of porn sites. I eventually had to look for the damn file myself and delete it manually - so far so good! *crosses fingers*

The rest of the afternoon was spent re-installing programmes like PSP8 and transferring my Quick Guides file from the C drive since it has all my pixel paint tutorials on it. I still have PS to install though. I needed to install a huge number of patches from Microsoft to secure my system and it took most of the rest of the afternoon.

I got approved for 3 out of 4 of my CSI episode fanlistings so that was pretty good. Thinking back I’ve only ever been rejected for two fanlistings the entire time I’ve been applying; I think it is mainly because I tend to stay away from the really popular ones. Anyway, I’ve started messing around with a layout which will probably be copied for all three but with different colours. All my layouts are pretty much the same for my sites and fanlistings - nice and simple. I can’t do fancy layouts because my graphic skills are hopeless but at least they look clean and uncluttered.

I have to admit that my knowledge of the French Revolution is fairly limited to what I was taught at school and that was more or less biased towards the revolutionaries. The picture I had of Marie Antoinette was a selfish, frivolous woman who was summed up by the famous phrase she is reported to have uttered: “Let them eat cake!” I was about to be proven wrong!

While on a visit to Scone Palace in Perth, I spotted Marie Antoinette: A Journey by Antonia Fraser and I was intrigued. I already own a copy of Fraser’s biography about Mary Stuart which I thoroughly enjoyed, so my fingers were itching to open this book. Fraser’s books are impeccably researched and she paints a very vivid picture of life in the royal courts of Europe. Marie Antoinette is no exception - from practically the first page, Fraser debunks the myths that surrounded the much hated queen and portrays her as a real person. The first myth to be shattered was the discovery that she never once uttered the famous phrase: “Let them eat cake!” that has been so long and unjustly attributed to her. The young Marie Antoine was the fifteenth child of the formidable Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria. She was ill-educated and often starved of parental love until the day she suddenly came to her mother’s attention as potential marriage material. Antoine’s star rose after the death of one of her older sisters and the ravishment of another due to smallpox. Maria Theresa’s careful plans to marry her daughters into the Spanish and French courts were suddenly in jeopardy and she was forced to consider her youngest daughter as a future bride. After years of careful negotiation, the fourteen year old Antoine finally became the bride of Louis XVI and was destined to become the ill-fated last queen of France.

This book is a stunning account of a woman who has been much maligned by history and offers the reader a better understanding of not only her character but of the political climate of Europe at that time.