For anyone interested, squish has changed quite a bit since I last journaled. I have worked on the layout to make it more friendly for 800x600 resolution. It also no longer requires accepting an applet signature, which seemed to scare some people.

http://ptth.net/squish/

Please journal comments here.

There is now a how to play page linked from the main page.

Note: requires java 5. If you don't have Java 5 installed and usable from your browser, you'll get a class loader error in your java console, or an applet loading failure. I'm interested in pretty much any other bug reports, as there is nothing I can do about how Sun handles these errors (I've had no error reports so far that did not trace back to not having Java 5 installed & set up to be used from the browser).

Well, now that I have lots of friends fans foes and freaks, I think my new slashdot goal will have to be the octuple crown. To get one post to have one rating each of each of the 8 ratings:

Insightful Offtopic Interesting Flamebait Funny Troll Informative Redundant

So far I've gotten one post with 5 different ratings, and one post with six ratings with two duplicates.

Try this one.

Here we go again...

Friends and Family members wanting pictures of Thomas please send me an e-mail for access.

2005 already, it's true what they say. The years go by quicker the older you get. I must be getting old.

December was a busy month as always. In the middle of it all we discovered that we're having another baby! By my calculations it will be some time in late-July or early-August. Of course, it's far too early to no for sure yet. Now, I just have to figure out where the money is going to come from :)

Christmas and New Years were a lot of fun as always. It's one of my favourite times of year. Back to work now. Wal-Mart were stocking the shelves with Valentines Day gifts on December 26th. I imagine they'll have Easter stuff before long as well.

The holiday celebrations have been marred this year by the Earthquake and Tsunami in the Indian Ocean. I cannot even comprehend how terrible that must have been for them and offer my prayers and support to all those affected.

Thank you to all of the fallen troops who died so we can live in freedom. You are forever in our debt. My prayers and thanks go to those who are currently in harms way defending my freedom, and the freedom of others.

The horrible cold that Thomas brought home as a souvenir from England resurfaced. He was sick for a week again. Thankfully, he had his respirator and decent medicine (why don't they sell Motrin in England?) so he was much more comfortable this time around. On Wednesday the 10th he turned 2 years old. The little boy who couldn't even breathe on his own 2 years ago spent most of the day singing "Happy Birthday" to the dog and riding around in his new toy. Our dog will howl at you if you sing Happy Birthday - but nothing else. Our dog is very strange.

No tropical storms in a while, and hurricane season ends in 3 weeks. I really hope we've seen the last of them for this year. We are still clearing up from the three that affected us. The roof is still covered with tarps - the plan is to fix that at the end of this month. Should be fun. The garden is almost completely cleared, but I have a feeling I'll be finding roof tiles for years to come. No matter how many times I think I've picked them all up I find more!

Obviously the NYY's didn't read my entry reminding them to pitch properly and hit properly. Oh well, maybe next year. Well done Red Sox and watch out next year, we'll be back stronger than ever to take our revenge :) Looks like I started a nice flame war over on the poll pages too... arf.

Got back from England on October 13th. Was so nice to be back in my home country for 2 weeks. It's very surprising what you miss (mainly food, in my case...). I didn't miss the cold weather or the prices though.... I forgot how much of a rip off England is!! The equivalent of $1.60 for a bottle of Coke, with 90ml less coke in it, that doesn't taste as good. Horrors!

Still, I pigged out on curry, proper chips and Batemans. Even better, I found out I have a cousin who works for Batemans who is going to see about getting me some cases shipped over. Joy! Also rediscovered Mr Kipling cakes, Lincolnshire sausages and cold tea loaf. Needless to say, I acquired the recipes for the latter two. The former, you can buy in the States thankfully.

My home town of Boston really hasn't changed much. This comes as no surprise to me, it hardly changed at all in the 18 years I lived there. A few new buildings (they call it a shopping center... it's not, it's 6 new buildings and they turned a street into a pedestrian area) and that's it. The traffic has certainly increased, we've been asking for a bypass for 50 years and they're still discussing it. Much quicker to walk! Everything seemed smaller, even my parents house. I'm told this is a fairly normal experience. But it's still weird.

The biggest thing for me though was to see my family again, all my little cousins are now not so little and I suddenly feel really old... :)

Strange emotions... I found myself happy to be back in my home and where I supposedly "belong", I'd missed England so much over the last 4 years but I was really surprised how homesick for America I was whilst I was there. When I first arrived, I didn't feel like an Englishman returning home, I felt like an outsider visiting a foreign land. It took about a week before I started to feel like I was truly "back". My frame of mind after returning is this... America has become my home and it's were I intend to live for the foreseeable future, but 4 years is far too long to be away from my homeland and it has made me appreciate it all the more. I intend to visit it much more often in the future!

It has been determined that Thomas loves flying, I was expecting 9 hours of hell but he remained on best behaviour for the whole trip and behaved so cutely that he made the 9 hours fly by in no time. What a great kid he is... :) I must tip my hat to British Airways, I flew on them in 2000 and was very impressed and I flew on them again for this trip and was equally impressed. The service was excellent, the plane was excellent (a Boeing 777) and the food was excellent too. What more can I ask for? Oh yes, what did you do with the dance music radio station you used to have??? Bring it back! Immediately!!

Meanwhilst, back in Florida and we got hit by ANOTHER tropical storm whilst I was gone. His name was Matthew and he didn't do any significant damage (and he didn't hit anywhere near were I live anyway). Can this be the last one? Please? We have a new Air Conditioner so the house feels wonderful - this is something we've been needing for a long time but we didn't have enough portraits of dead presidents until now.

Went back to work the day after I arrived home and haven't had a day off since. I'm really tired but am slowly getting over my jetlag. Thomas was completely messed up on his arrival to England, he was sleeping all day and staying up all night. He adjusted back to EDT fairly well though, thankfully.

To the Yankees. Start pitching the ball properly, and when a ball is pitched to you - hit it out of the ball park. We are not losing the World Series again! And to Boston, you're putting up a fine challenge but we'll still beat you tonight *thrrp!*. Hopefully.

Three hurricanes! I'm getting pretty tired of being hit by them! Maybe God is trying to tell us Floridians something? (Message received, we know you're great and powerful... please stop showing us!)

Charley knocked out the power for 7 days, Frances for 8 days. Jeanne was only 24 hours thankfully. My worst fear that Jeanne would cause even more roof damage was not realised because luckily she went further south than planned. I did get to spend the day watching the wooden straps holding my tarps down fly off the roof one by one, but enough stayed nailed down to to keep the tarp in place and prevent my roof leaking.

So, we take the boards down once more, clean up the mess again and thank our lucky stars we made it through another one. Hopefully, this'll be the last one for a while.

In other fun news, I drank far far too much last night and am really suffering as a result. I'll never drink again! :-) (yeah, right!).

The two teeth that have been driving me crazy and ruining one of my favourite activities (eating) are finally gone, pulled out by my very nice dentist. Having toothache on either side of your mouth is no picnic :-( I've learned my lesson that not visiting a dentist for 8 years is not a smart thing to do.

I will be visiting my parents this week, so two weeks in England. First time I've been back to my home country in 4 years so I'm really excited. Proper chips! With salt and vinegar! And curry sauce! From Tates!

Another week, another Hurricane. This one was called Frances. Next week, we say hello to Ivan and goodbye to my roof. I'm really, really sick of the weather right now! Frances was kind enough to cause our Uncle's ceiling to collapse so we have 10 house guests right now (4 humans, 4 dogs, 1 cat and 1 mouse). We still don't have power, but we do have a generator and my brother-in-law, who is an electrician, was kind enough to wire it directly into the mains panel. It works, but the AC draws too much juice to be useable, therefore we're sweating. We did not get so much damage this time, but the roof is severely weakened. If Ivan hits, it could be catastrophic.

The cat (and his aforementioned cousin as it happens) went to get neutered. Unfortunately, they found a rotten tooth so he got that pulled as well as his balls. He's not a very happy camper. He can now do a really good John Wayne impression, I know I'm being mean but it's cute! Our other furry child will be getting neutered as well soon. At least the vet's happy I suppose :)

We watched "The Passion of the Christ" finally. Now, I was brought up a Christian so I think I can safely say I speak with some authority on knowing what happened. I did enjoy the movie, but I thought Mel Gibson took things a little too far in places - shocking just for the sake of it, as it were. Some of the scenes were just unnecessary, the freaky baby in the devils arms for one. I don't remembe reading about that in Sunday school! Still, it was a good movie and I do recommend it even if you don't believe in that sort of thing. Just remember that the people who made it are very devout catholics and it really shows.

Interesting fact, 7 years since Princess Diana died today.

I should've kept my mouth shut about things returning to normal after Charley. Frances has decided to take careful aim, directly at my home town as it happens. It has 5 days to change course, or I'll (at the very least) not have a roof come Monday.

Thomas has a cold, so we're not getting much sleep right now. He seems a little better today so hopefully he's on the mend.

I listened to the new Prodigy album ("Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned"). I was so shocked at how bad it sounded I had to listen to "The Fat of the Land" just to convince myself it wasn't my music tastes that had radically changed. The album is truly awful, and it's not me, it's them. The absence of Maxim and Keith Flint is really really noticeable. They should just disown it and move on in my opinion.

Maybe I'm getting old but did anyone else feel that MTV's VMA awards really, really sucked this year? It seemed to be 90% Hip-Hop and the small amount of non Hip-Hop music they played was done by performers who should've been told polietly to not give up their day job early in their careers. Out of the whole show, I maybe enjoyed one or two performers.

My biggest beef with MTV is the hip-hop. They need to realise that the whole world is not dominated by one genre of music and start playing a variety. We're in the same situation now that we were in in the 1980s when they played nothing but rock music (not that I minded :-)).

Anyway, like I said - I may just be getting old.

Things are slowly returning to normal after Hurricane Charley. We lost power for 7 days and the house remained in a state of total upheaval as we cleaned everything up for another week after that. The only thing left to do now is get the roof fixed, for that we need the insurance adjustor to show up and give us an estimate.

Fun weekend, spent Saturday in St Augustine enjoying the sights. One of my favourite places to visit in this area :) Built half a fence yesterday, one again we're thwarted by the big spinny windy thing, the trees that got downed are now reduced to stumps that require the use of heavy equipment to move. Hopefully this week!