One of the other websites we run titled “Haunted England - Top 100” (sister website to “Haunted England Search Engine“) is a voting website where paranormal groups and individuals can list their website and have members of the public vote and comment, now in a just world you expect adults to be able to behave and act in a professional manner when proclaiming to be professional. Not the case!

We get three kinds of comments on Haunted England, self reviews where they praise themselves, Team rivalry where 1 person or a team makes attacks against others they dislike for what ever reasons and the third are accusations we fix the rating, here are some of them:

Self Reviews:

Great website, great team!
This team is the best in the worlds.

Aggressive Rivalry:

Boring site, boring content and boring people, half of whom havnt the faintest idea what exactly they are talking about!!! To be sucessful, you must offer something your competitors do not….and sadly, you dont!

dogsmess

What a pile of sh**

total rubbish what a complete con this group are the worst event i have ever been to no organisation and fraud mediums dont bother is my advise.

Accusations Against Haunted England:

Haunted England is fixed for all you mardy I have a nice hats

Haunted England only publish the positive comments.

Addressing intellectually retarded individuals

I’ve not published all the comments here, some are really nasty which can often be real personal and won’t ever see the light of day. I think we’ll address the comments in reverse and talk about the ones made against Haunted England.

The reason we don’t list our main website which we run, “Ghosts-UK” is because it could seem unfair and like a fix, if we wanted to fix the ratings we’d add our own main sites to further self promote but we don’t and we don’t influence the voting in anyway. We don’t touch the database except in occasions where we believe people may have found a way to cheat the system, we then examine the data and take whatever action we deem appropriate. We believe in allowing people a fair chance to be listed without our influence.

So, we have nothing to gain by “fixing” it as some Muppet wrote.

Now to address the issue of only allowing positive comments, I suppose you could say this is true in most cases but only because people struggle to string together even one constructive sentence. Its like a war in the comments section with people having a go at each other because they have some differences or because their groups are competing or just because someone left one group and made their own.

Everybody wants to be a founder!

If you can’t be constructive rather than resorting to animalistic attacks then don’t bother, we won’t set them live.

The self-reviewers, it’s obvious when you do it. You write in the same style, same gramma, same bad spellings and pretty much saying the same thing over and over and over again. It’s boring, stop it!

We once allowed simple comments, but no longer set them live so comments like “good site”, “Brilliant”, and “Fantastic Team” will not go live, there maybe some older ones still in our system though.

The comments feature is not to abuse other websites or to make personal attacks, it’s to give constructive feedback, if their going wrong with their website then how can they fix it, what can they do. If it’s feedback on an event then how could they improve, or what did you love about it and what didn’t you love and why.

Be constructive in your comments, don’t be personal, don’t be aggressive, stop being petty and for goodness sake grow up and be adults for once in your life. There is nothing remotely scientific or professional about some of the conduct we’ve seen.

This is obviously not true in all cases and doesn’t apply to all websites, it’s just a select few and they know who they are.  If it doesn’t stop then we’ll simply turn comments off, end of story.

Life is to short to be angry all the time, if you can’t accept your differences and get on, then just move on.

Recently we heard news about one council in Somerset I think, which has stated that a dustbin must not have it’s wheels even an inch on gravel incase our employee’s stumble and fall, yeah I know ridiculous.

Well please tell our dustmen to stop leaving our bin three mile down the bloody road, OK an over exageration but my mother lives here also, could you imagine if she had to go get the bin, a 72 year old woman being forced to walk down the street to get her bin, because some dustmen can’t simply leave it where it was put.

When they don’t leave it down the street, it’s been known on a couple of occasions to block the driveway so when I come home I can’t get the car straight in.

I have respect for people that do jobs like this, it’s hard, you’ve got to endure all weathers and it’s not the cleanest of jobs but it’s the small things that matter especially with Christmas tip season coming.

PS we don’t recycle as much now, it all goes in the Black bin now!

Recently I learnt something about a very close loved one, well we were close once but in recent years we had kind of drifted apart which I’m now doing my utmost to change, this person I hold dear to me and love with all my heart, we may not always agree or see eye to eye. I’m sure I irritate him sometimes as he does me but that’s what family is about and being able to be there for each other and when mistakes are had, being able to forgive them regardless, although sometimes a little time is needed.

Within the paranormal and the music world my brother was known as David Vee, was and yes talking past tense but no this person isn’t dead. I’d always kind of looked up to David with some things in my life being inspired by him (That doesn’t mean I always agree with everything he says or does).

We lost contact last year but hadn’t really seen or spoke much since he moved back to Oxford after dad died in 2005, I suppose I was dealing with things in my own way, so relations of any kind were maybe a little stretched at the time. I really wish he hadn’t moved back because losing dad was real hard he was my rock and when he died it was like reality hit home and I finally realised life as we know it, inevitably changes and no one lives forever including those you love dearly. I’m not sure I was the same after that but when I was ready to rejoin the living again, I could have really done with David there.

We used to go for coffee’s every week, something else I miss because that was the time we got away from everything and just chatted without the pressures of real life, because of the distance we live apart that’s now a rarity.

In March of this year Helen and I married, we tried to contact David to invite him but couldn’t get hold of him even through mutual friends. I was disheartened and worried at the same time because we wasn’t sure if he was even OK. I spent a little while tracking him on-line through sites like MySpace, Facebook and of course his own website.I could see the content was changing and he was active, the only two real new things were in a link on his links page and someone else’s name running his profiles “Tansy Tyler”.

Now I know David and if someone was running his profiles it would either need to be a partner or a real trusted friend and I knew he was always content with his choice in living alone and he’d never mentioned this person as a friend, ever!

So 2 + 2 did indeed seem to make 4, that link I mentioned was to a Transgender website and if you hadn’t guessed by now then this blog will become clear very shortly.

The wife and I were still worried so we took an emergency trip to Oxford (from Yorkshire), we had an old address for David, I also vaguely remember another place he lived. The address we had was probably the most recent, so we started there. A guy was outside the property, when we approached him, he seemed a little distant and perhaps odd especially when we asked for David Vee along with another alias ‘Moggy’ as some of his friends knew him. This guy wouldn’t tell me a thing, except to say David was at work and wouldn’t be in for a long time. We left our details in case David got home early.

The other location I knew of, we left for the time being and moved on to a music shop that I knew he frequented whilst in Oxford. The guy was really helpful and let us know where David was working and so off we went in search…………………………

20 minutes or so later we arrived at his work place and walked in, I think as we approached he seemed shocked and unsure of what to say, maybe stunned about our sudden appearance, I don’t know.

We went out into the alley behind his workplace for a chat where he confirmed my thoughts. David Vee was no longer and had in fact changed to Tansy Tyler yes that’s right and he then confirmed he was indeed having a sex change also, I simply replied with something along the lines of ‘yeah thought as much, I still love you no matter what but you should have told me sooner’ the words may have been slightly different but the context was the same.

From this point on in this Blog I shall now refer to David Vee as Tansy Tyler and refer to him as a her and he as a she.

I sincerely believe in equality although not always apparent with my sense of humour but my friends and family know different, just because for me personally something doesn’t work, doesn’t mean for others it can’t and doesn’t mean I won’t respect their choices and paths no matter how diverse it maybe.

Turned out she hadn’t received the communications we’d sent and for some reason the phone number I had was totally wrong even though she’d not changed her mobile in years. The wrong number would most likely be attributed to my fairly recent change of mobile and manually moving all the numbers over.

It must have been so hard, carrying this around her whole life worried about what people may say, think and do and now coming out is something I have much admiration for, as this takes much courage and strength.

Tansy now knows she has the support of the family, I’d already spoken with most of them before going to Oxford and informed them of what I thought was happening and they were all fine with it, so with Helen’s and my message of support also came that of our families.

Tansy expressed that it no longer mattered what people thought because now the dream she’d had her whole life was being followed and coming true. I’d still like to believe though that our support makes a difference and gives her some solace in knowing that she doesn’t need to be alone through this transition and we, the family are always only a phone call away and a few hours by car when needed.

I’ll be honest in saying it was (yes was) easy accepting this change for me because I’m a fairly open person but hard to say good bye to a few things like the name David Vee and saying she and her, it will also be hard saying good bye to the voice. I’ve always felt Tansy had a real nice and distinguished male narrators voice. But those are very small things in comparison and within time the change of title will roll off the tongue much easier and no matter what Tansy is still the same person deep inside. I suppose a vague and weak metaphor would be calling an apple, an apple all your life then learning it is in fact an orange, accepting that but getting use to just the name change.

So today I publicly say with great sadness good bye my Brother, David Vee and with much excitement welcome my new Sister Tansy Tyler.

To Vee or not Vee, that really is what the question was once!

If you have a friend or family member who is curious about transgender and have questions, then there is a lot of support out there for you, like wise if you’ve recently had news of someone’s intentions and your unsure of what to make of it or want support yourself. Medically you should contact your doctor who should as a professional give you some sound advice and details to seek further information. If you have a patronising doctor who doesn’t listen then make a formal complaint and get a new one, or to just save face move onto another source of information.

You can also try Google to find the information you wish.

http://www.transgenderzone.com

http://www.davidvee.com

 (Out with the Vee! In with the Tyler! Tansy Tyler October 2008)

If your reading this blog and have some useful links to help people then please just make a comment, I’ll check them out and if they appear to be suitable then I’ll set the comment and link live.

If you can’t get your head around it, then give it a little time before dismissing that person and remember that person for all intents and purposes is still the same person you know and love inside even if their choice wouldn’t have been yours.

If your about to go through this, or come out then remember you may loose friends but remember this rhetorical question, were they really friends?

Not everyone is as open to this sort of thing, some people fear what they don’t know, some people are just to narrow minded but you will find out who are your true friends and who really has love for you. If you don’t get the support you need from your family then seek out some communities where others have gone through similar experiences, I’m sure they would love to help you.

Finally, remember if someone cannot accept you, for you, then thats their problem and not yours!

Anyway we walking around town on the way to meet David at his work place so it must have been around 11pm-ish. As we walked up one street we kept seeing flashes of light in the distance and at first wondered what it could be, as we approached we could see it was two traffic wardens, ticket inspectors, idiot’s or what ever name you wish to use. lol

Now they were doing their job which is fair enough, the council need to rob, scam and pillage people somehow especially during this credit crunch (recession despite what the government keep fooling themselves with) but the irony of what we saw is after a while these traffic wardens went and jumped in a car parked on double yellow lines and sat there for while longer, before driving off. Maybe they sat there so long writing themselves a ticket.

Don’t you just love the law, the council and the government, do as I say not as I do!

Rob from the poor and give to the rich!

Don’t steel from the government, they hate the competition!

I played Guitar Hero (not sure what version) about 2 years ago at a friends and it never really interested me, well except for the music. We then got a Wii a few months ago and got Guitar Hero 3 fairly recently and I just got hooked. I’ve now completed Easy and Medium in little over a week but not sure I’m gonna manage hard, damn is it hard and yeah yeah I’ve seen the pro’s out there working their magic on the hardest levels.

So GH World Tour, we, the wife and I decided to invest in it after having so much fun on GH3 I just can’t wait to get my hands on the new guitar, drums and maybe the microphone on a low volume, with no one there and in the dark, lol.

The second game we’ve pre-ordered is the new Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party which I bloged about in the past. I made a mistake on the release date but I’m sure when I posted back then the date was set for October. I either made a mistake or they moved the date back which I believe the gaming industry is popular for.

If you’ve got a Wii and love fun then this is a great title that also works with your Wii Board. We completed the first two releases of Raving Rabbids and they were so much fun.

Guitar Hero: World Tour: Release Date: November 7th, 2008. November 14th 2008

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party: Release Date: November 14th, 2008.  (Confirmed by Game.co.uk)

NOTE: I’ve just checked and apparently the original release date was for Raving Rabbids TV Party was October but was set back, well at least I’m not crazy.

We go down and see the doctor, he sees I’m struggling to breath, diagnoses me with tonsillitis and gives me a prescription for mouth wash and pain killers. He saw my throat closing over and said come back in a week if it’s no better.

It gets to Wednesday and I can hardly move or breath, I’d not eaten since Saturday and drank very little. I’d had plenty of sleep on and off up to that point but couldn’t sleep no more. The wife returned home from work and called NHS Direct, they then sent out an ambulance.

On the way to the hospital the paramedic was saying they would most likely not do anything for my tonsillitis and that he gets it every 6 months and can’t have them surgically removed, the NHS doesn’t like doing it any more.

We get to Doncaster Royal Infirmary and I’m now being assessed by the doctor he informs me it’s Quinsy and the side show starts with doctors coming for a quick peak in my mouth, apparently Quinsy isn’t all that common and my case was real bad. The doctor informs me I’m in for the night.

So we get to the ward and the next doctor is ready to see me, we get into a private room and he sprays some stuff in my mouth, gives me a local and then pops another needle in my mouth to take some of the puss out of one of the abscesses………………………………. Relief, I can breath again.

They then pop me on a series Intravenous Drip’s and other drugs, the next morning I’m feeling well but by the afternoon my throat is closing over again so they decide to keep me in another night.

Friday I feel good again and they decide to release me with a bag of medication. It’s now Tuesday, just over a week from when I saw my GP and I’m just about feeling on top of things again, but what If I’d of waited a week like my GP wanted to, well apparently if not treated quick enough Quinsy can be fatal.

So if I hadn’t gone to hospital would our GP have killed me, he knew I was struggling to breath, he could see my throat was closing and he knew I hadn’t eaten or drunk that much since the previous Saturday And yes Quinsy can be fatal, the infection is much worse than that of tonsillitis.

It’s not very often I say this but Doncaster Royal Infirmary were amazing, they looked after me and did a real good job but the other face of the NHS, our GP, our Surgery failed our family again.

Without drawing this blog out to much the last two times our GP’s messed up (if you ain’t already read this before)My father had a recurring chest infection for 3 years and the doctor just kept giving him antibiotics rather than a chest scan. They diagnosed my father with Asthma  but Doncaster Royal Infirmary corrected that because it was severe Pneumonia, they then found Cancer. Later they gave him some medication, the pharmacist wouldn’t give it him because he realised that the new medication mixed with his other medication would of killed him on the spot, it’s a shame the GP didn’t realise this first.

I’ll most likely submit a complaint about our local surgery and the GP in question

http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk

0845 4647 - NHS Direct (Yes the number is that short)

Information on Quinsy

Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying–
He had always taken funerals in his stride–
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were “sorry for my trouble,”
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

Seamus Heaney

If you not familiar with Blog Action Day, it’s basically one day of the year where thousands of bloggers all blog about one important issue in an attempt to make a difference via the internet. Some will talk about issues close to their hearts, others about ways to donate and fight the cause.

It doesn’t so much matter what your blogged about providing it covers that years topic.

Information from their website:

Post Topics

The best thing a blog can do is to keep their post on topic. Audiences visit our blogs because they enjoy the style, personality and topic of the site. So it makes sense that the best way to get through to these audiences is to use that same style, personality and topic to talk about Poverty. For example:

• A Design Blog might analyse a set of charity posters and how they convey their message.
• A Tech Blog might look at pro-poor technologies and projects.
• A Political Blog might examine the relevant agendas of leading candidates.
• A Sports Blog might look at recent charity activities of a major sports franchise.

Read More Post Suggestions

What Can One Person Do?

Poverty is not only a pressing issue, it is a complex one. It’s easy to think that there isn’t much an individual can do. Fortunately this isn’t the case at all. With activities ranging from advocacy and professional contribution to charity and financing, there is in fact many ways that we can act.

You can find a range of resources about poverty, about what the average person can do as well as dozens of post suggestions and ideas in our Resources section.

Visit the Resources Section.

To learn more and/or get involved then visit their Blog Action Day’s website @ http://blogactionday.org

Ok a little over dramatic, it never quite got to the bin but it was close on a few occasions. Ubuntu is an opensource Operating System which is basically a Linux Variant. An OS (Operating System) you will most likely be familiar with is Microslow Winbloze XP or Vista

I spent perhaps 18 to maybe 20 hours trying to figure out why my adaptor would not work, once I found a nifty feature it took 2 minutes to get it going. I went through various Ubuntu support forums to find what I needed.

I’d played with Ubuntu a fair few times but always hit the same issue of the wireless adaptor not working, this time I was set on making it work so I downloaded the latest copy which is currently Ubuntu 8.04.1 desktop from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download and installed it.

I was hitting the same issue and just couldn’t get it to work, everything kept pointing to something call Ndiwrapper which basically allows you install windows drivers on a Linux box. I’m familiar with commands after using SSH on my managed servers so it made it a little easier for me to understand, but I still couldn’t get everything to work. I downloaded the Ndiswrapper but couldn’t get it installed to start with.

I looked for tutorials and found the following:

HOWTO: WUSB54GS V1 And V2

I still had trouble even after reading this, not sure where I was going wrong.

After the many hours, I was about ready to give up again but thought I’d have a play with Ubuntu first. I went into Add/Remove Applications and found some real cool stuff, free games and more. I then used the search box and searched for ‘Wireless’. I couldn’t believe it an option came up ‘Windows Wireless Drivers’ and it was the ndiswrapper so I installed it (you’ll need a hard-wired connection).

The ndiswrapper was now working with a nice GUI (Graphical User Interface) which made it real easy to add drivers, but it wasn’t recognising any drivers I had, so I plodded off back to that tutorial again and found the following:

My guess is that you’ll come back to this tutorial wondering what went wrong, right? Ndiswrapper reports “invalid driver”, right? Well, if I’m wrong, skip the rest of this step.

The last command says that the drivers are invalid. That’s because it didn’t install the sys files! We need to do this manually. Run these commands in the same terminal:

If you have a WUSB54GS device, run this:

sudo cp usb8023.sys rndismp.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54gs/

If you have a WUSB54GSv2 device, run this:

sudo cp usb8023.sys rndismp.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54gsv2/

Now run this command:

ndiswrapper -l

Now if you new to linux all together you might be wondering what’s happening here, so I’ll break it down

sudo - Super User DO - Basically says “oi run this as admin/super user” and it will request your password to before running the command

cp -  This ones just saying copy

The next bit looks first at the file/folder and copies it to then to the location after the space:

usb8023.sys rndismp.sys /etc/ndiswrapper/wusb54gsv2/

Is the same as:

/copy/file.sys to /etc/location

Now you will need to navigate to the folder or use the correct path for the files within your command.

cd /folder/name - will move you between folders.

I hope this saves someone losing hair and sleep, lol. If it helps at all, then please just drop me a comment, it’s always nice to know that I can help others

My Ubuntu install is now successfully working with a Linksys Wireless SpeedBooster WUSB54GS

The following is a compressed archive containing the Linksys WUSB54GS drivers for both version 1 and version2

ndiswrapper files

If you need the actual ndiswrapper because you can’t see it in your install:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndiswrapper

There were some companies you could still get the Wii Fit from, that’s if you didn’t mind paying over the odds for one or if you wanted all the extras they forced you to buy at the same time.

On Friday 1st August, I went shopping with the wife and my brother Alex to Tesco’s. It was our usual weekly shop of food and when ever we get there we always have a wonder upstairs at the games and cloths  to see if there are any bargains, as you do. This time I decided to ask how often they got Wii Fit’s and if I could pre-order them. The young kid said they don’t allow pre-order but asked if I was looking to buy one. I was rather confused because I thought my originally question would imply I was looking to order one, you know buy one! Of course I said I was to which he told me they had some in the back stock room.

Apparently after purchasing mine there was only one left out of a large pile that had arrived that morning. The reason they never made it to display is that they were awaiting a promotional box to use.

I’ve now sweated 10 buckets and still weigh the same but apparently if I persist then I’ll soon be loosing that fat. The wife is also extremely happy with it, she’s wanted one for a while.

I’m disapointed I never received a mail from them about their stock, I’m also disappointed that I couldn’t get the double points that you get from ordering on Tesco Direct,  I’m disapointed even more because the gent at the check out forgot to put my points on and my final disapointment is that they refused to do it at customer services because they close at 22:00 and it was just 22:00 plus a few seconds. Now we never normally go in there before that time because we like to avoid the crowds and go later to do so, we were only early because of my brother being with us. Normally when they screw up the points they will fix the problem at the till but not this time.

Now I bet some reading this are thinking whoopee do, a few points had been left off. Well each quarter we probably get about £10 or £15 back in vouchers from them because of our shopping there and purchases like this.  Just think of it as a free weekly shop every year, or a free tank of fuel for your car every year, in addition to 5p offer each liter when you spend £50 or more in store.

Anyway enough about bloody Tesco staff being unable to perform their job and Tesco points!

I just can’t wait for the forthcoming release of Raving Rabbids TV Party. Now that looks awesome, October 2008!

[See post to watch Flash video]

[See post to watch Flash video]