Smiling Grump’s blog

Hello all,

What a day it has been! We have been looking after a springer spaniel for the last two weeks called Frank. My parents and I have thoroughly enjoyed it with made my stepmum start bugging my dad for a dog of our own. Well she finally won her (and my brother and I) own way. Whilst I was at work today my brother text me a picture to say that they were down Bournemouth looking at a puppy.

 Yay my dad had finally come round!

I got back today and I have to say I was totally taken by the puppy straight away. My brother did text me over a picture of the puppy at diner time and I though straight away that he looks like a Charlie (I had other reasons hehe Charlie Runkle - Californication what a legend!)

So this is his first day with us. I cannot wait to take him down to the village to see my friends. He needs his vacinations first of course but I am very happy as he is a very lovely puppy. :-)

Well enjoy the pics.

BTW He comes from a gundog working home and we are going to take him to gundog lessons in order to teach him some basic skills. (no killing animals though Ellie I would NOT allow that!)

Woof

Hello all.

I had my first customer call me today with an IT problem. I have been thinking about setting up a business on the side to help people with their IT problems for ages now and it was my step mum that has given me the extra push to do something about it.

I originally trained in IT after I left school for about three years but was made redundant from my job and have never got another position in IT. My qualifications seem old now but I feel I have kept up to date with computers enough to fix general problems that a lot of people at home can encounter. My step mum own a hairdresser and has a couple of clients that have been using another IT company in Nailsworth. I called into this ladies house today after I had a call and she said that she was ready to throw her laptop out the windows and demand her money back from this company. She said that the guy has been to her house a lot of times now and still couldn't sort the problem out (she could not connect wirelessly to her wireless router but could through a cable). The guy even brought in what he called "an expert" (Shouldn't that be him, owning his own IT business!) and he couldn't cort the issue out either! Anyway I turn up and correctly diagnose the problem and fix it in less than 10 minutes.

I really did feel proud of myself and this has given me the push to get some advertisments, cards etc made up. Hopefully word of mouth will work to as the lady took my umber and said she would tell everyone she knew to drum up some buisness.

Gwyn has been kind enough to help sort out the cards and advert for me (thanks mate) so I need to drive myself to make this a sucess. I can do this work after my main job and undercut most people as I do not need to make too much as I have a main job. Hey things could change, I certainly know lots of people I have helped in the past. Dad mentioned that I could also put up about being able to set up household electronics (TVs DVDs etc) as I have had so many people ask me in the past and he said there are plenty of people that struggle for ages to plug it all in.

I'll keep you updated with and sucess I have in due course. Any ideas, company names, USPs would be greatly apprechiated.

Lee Uzzell - IT Guy ;-)

Sometimes things are crap, sometimes things are really crap. For once this has been a very good weekend. Unexpected, pleasant unexpected things can happen when you least expect it. Last night I swapped numbers with someone I have seen a couple of times down my local. A very beautiful woman I thought I hadn't a chance with at all. Last night I was proved wrong. Now I'm just wondering when to call.

I'm a very happy Lee Uzzell at the moment. It makes a very very nice change. Even if nothing much comes from it I feel wanted.

Thats it. Simple.

Hello everyone, sorry for being so quiet when I had only just started. You see I have had a few issues to sort out before I even felt like I could write about myself. Forgive me if my writing style seems a bit 'off' this time because I find it hard to put into words.

Three weeks (ish) ago I was signed off by the doctor with depression. It has been long long overdue and I really should have done something about how I have been feeling for about two years. However it would come and then for a while die down again a bit. But this time it came back very very badly. If I give you some background info first.

Two and a half years ago I had a very serious car accident in which I ended up in a wheel chair for about 6 months. I was very lucky to have survived the crash because from what I was told the car was very much destroyed. I had a girlfriend at the time of 6 years who helped me through (as well a mine and her family) the worst of it in which I very much appreciate although looking back I must have been a nightmare to put up with and probably never said enough times how thankful I am. I had to learn to walk again and get my strength back and I suppose looking back I was dealing as best as I could with the physical side while not even thinking about the mental side of all of it.

Six months after I got back to work my relationship broke up with my girlfriend, we were arguing a lot of the time and it was most of the time over really stupid things that I seemed to pick up upon at the time. We certainly weren't doing couple things any more. You could say at the time that I was an angry person and had issues I needed to deal with but never did. Looking back we should never have got wrecked almost every night, we needed to speak and do things. However this could be for another blog if I ever feel like talking about it more. All I can say is I wish I had got the help I so obviously needed straight after my car crash as things 'might' have been different.

Back to a few weeks ago I was staying at my cousins flat looking after it while she went on holiday. This gave me a lot of time to think about an awful lot of things but I knew that I wasn't feeling right as I was having time off work as I felt so bad. I was spending too much time on my own and shutting myself away trying not to deal with things. I decided on the Monday to go to the doctors to get something sorted out and speak to him. I completely broke down when I got there and explained about the last two and a half years, about how I hate myself, how I cry, how I feel ugly and unwanted by anyone. This led to him signing me off work and telling me to come back on the Friday. He told me that I need to get out and go for some walks and generally be with friends (this is one aspect of my life that I am happy with, I have a wonderful group a very varied and different friends and one in particular whom I can trust with telling him absolutely every thing about me and how I'm feeling. Thank you Gwyn!) This led to a couple of 10 mile walks over a couple of weeks which I am sure most of you have already read about on Gwyn's blog. Friday came and I gave the doctor the questioaire I had to fill in. This basically told him that I was severly depressed and that I most likely had post traumatic stress disorder as well.

The tablets have for the last few weeks been taking ages to kick in. I was told by the doc that this could take up to 4 to 6 weeks. The only issue with this was the side effect of really awfull tremors in my hands that would not go away for hours. Que a couple more days off work due to this as I could not concentrate. I spoke to the doctor and he said that this is normal in some people and it will go away.

Well this is the first day so far that I havent had any of the shakes at all and I can feel within myself that they are starting to kick in. I seem to be smiling at things I wouldnt have for years. And this is why I have felt compelled to write again.

There is a lot that I haven't covered that I have been up to but I feel I don't want to go on too much. It just feels rather good to publish this to people I don't know apart from through their own blogs. Hope I haven't bored any of you too much however there is so much that I could get off my chest.

I'll leave this for now however there may be some aspect of this that I may look into and write about a bit more.

Why haven't I watched this before?!

Last night I got back from the pub and decided I really wasn't tired at all. I was flicking through all the television channels and the film Being John Malkovich had just started.

Gwyn had told me what a weird film it was but to be honest I never though it would interest me. How bloody wrong was I? I was obviously rather drunk but this has to be one of the weirdest films that I have seen in a long time. It was funny and very clever at the same time. Did I laugh when John went into his own mind!! "Malkovich? Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich? Malkovich!" Yep what a totally weird but entertaining film it was to watch.

I think the last wierd film I watched was The Cell.

Are there any other must watch headfuck films out there?

And on a second thought, If you could go into someones head, whos head would you like to go into for 15 minutes?

Well that was my first night on World of Warcraft and bloody hell I can see that getting addictive, especially on my MacBook.

I did have the game years ago on my PC but I really did not get into it at the time as I had a girlfriend! LOL! But I have played it all night tonight and can really see myself getting into it. I installed it yesterday but it took six (yes SIX!) hours for it to all install and downlload all the patches. So I decided to boot it up tonight and have a 'quick' go.

I am now a level 7 Human Mage and have already joined a guild after they invited me. I got chatting to them and they could not believe that I was a 'noob' as they said it has been absolutley ages since they have seen a new person on the game. They thought that I had an alternative character.

Anyway it was really good and they were really helpfull, I knew the basics anyway due to playing City of Heroes so I understood that my character was suited to be a blaster from a distance while others heal me.

Quick blog tonight as I need sleep.

We were in a house near where I live looking over at the over side of the valley when every so often I started to see lights in the sky. (Very similar to some of the UFO videos of lights flying in tight formation). At first it was just me seeing them and the others thought I was joking. After a while the others started noticing them as there were more and more lights.  It was an absolutely brilliant sight to see but also there was a worrying nagging feeling inside. It was night time but occasionally the sky would light up and it seemed it was daytime only to go back to pitch black. This was when people started getting worried however when we turned the TV on the wasn’t anything on about it, it was just music and news channels and there wasn’t anything on the news about what we were seeing.

That was when a big explosion occurred which looked like a nuclear bomb. We were ok though, we just started to realise that things weren’t right. Things then took a turn and we realised that it was actually an invasion that had just started. Everyone was running and trying to hide wondering what the hell was going on. As we were running news channels started to report what was going on and every time one of the channels showed somewhere in the world being invaded it would switch off automatically.  

Once we had finally been caught by the aliens we were basically free to do as we please but in a very ‘policed state’ way. The aliens were very similar to us. I would liken them to the Cardassians on Star Trek Deep Space Nine. They were much further advanced than we were.

We were all walking around Nailsworth but it wasn’t a happy place, it was then that I found a diamond on the floor which I realised that I could try and bargain with the aliens to give my friends and family some peace. He looked at it and told me it was worthless and that the most rare item that is worth the most to them are the great sacred olive. We then found the olive shop and bought as many as we could to trade with the aliens, the thing is people were catching on to what I was doing and the anxiety was building up knowing that if too many people crowd around the aliens will know what we are doing. People started to fight over all of the olives and it got really hectic.

That was when I woke up.

I have deleted my original first post and decided to start over again on this Vox thingy. I will try and update when I can!

One week ago I finally decided that enough was enough with Windows Vista. I have just about had it with the slow responsiveness of the PC, even though it was 9 months old, the hard drive lock ups and the slow copying of simple files etc etc etc. The King has been going on and on for ages now since I have known him about the wonders of the Mac but I have to be honest after growing up with PCs I have to say I was a little skeptical. Well I have finally moved over to a nice new shiny MacBook and I am very very impressed.

I have had the Macbook for almost a week now and it's bloody brilliant! I can see why new users have said why they are so easy to use however being brainwashed by the PC it was a little more difficult for me to get to grips with simple things such as file locations. We are very lucky now though to have a wealth of information on the internet and it really impressed me on how you open up a new program and it will give you a video tutorial of the basics. The MacBook is a lower spec than my PC but its is a lot faster.

Things I'm loving:

• The speed of copying that Vista just cannot do.
• iPhoto is brilliant.
• The battery life is exceptional.
• It's not slowed down by antivirus as you do not need it.
• It just works - fast.
• It looks better that any over computer I have owned.
  

As I said I have always been skeptical about Macs with regard to the amount of software available for it but to be honest everthing that I have needed so far is out there. And it's really good to learn something new.

So will I finally get rid of the PC..... not just yet, I have some great oldschool games that I still want to play but as for anything else I cannot see me swithching it on at all apart from to copy some music over from it.

Windows 7 will need to impress me and many others before I even think of returning "To The Dark Side!"

(Typed on my brand new MacBook ;-) )