Mjay06

I recently switched from Firefox to Netscape 8.1, im pretty impressed so far. The security centre with built in anti-virus/spyware protection is good. It does tend to spontaneously combust if you have a multitude of tabs open though, Im hoping this will be recified soon with updates...

They are the Terminator of spam emailers. Just when you think you have defeated them, they laugh at you & say 'i'll be back'...

Maybe its just different here in the UK. Im freelance, & the most I can charge is Ł18 an hour, plus other bits & pieces I chuck in if its a pain in the *bottom* job im working on. The 'artwork manipulation' charge is a nice one. If someone supplies me with their own artwork on cd & its unuseable I normally stick this charge on to cover my time redoing it. I tend to find my time is more filled doing vectored linear artwork nowadays, as opposed to more traditional 'photoshop' artwork. You cant see the results with this as obviously as you could, say a flashy full colour image, so people are more reluctant to pay high prices for it. It keeps me in beer though so I cant really complain...

I have been a graphic designer for over 10 years & i've never earnt anywhere near that, even when I was working in Formula 1 designing the car graphics.

Thanks guys. I think I may just settle for having specific areas for each age group, so the kids dont mix with the 'adults'. I will do the birthdate thing anyway, & hope it kinda works...

Ive had to create a new hotmail account, I follwed the links in the emails to cancel the subscription but still they came...I wouldnt mind but when im on msn every 5 seconds i get a popup window appear saying ive got new mail :S

I like to socially drink now & again. Unfortunately I end up doing daft things as can be seen here http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

My delightful ex, bless her little cotton socks, signed my hotmail account up to these charmers: https://login.findlaw.com/scripts/ecomm_login?dest=http://newsletters.findlaw.com/nl/sub/review-account.jsp? 73 emails, yes thats 73, in about 10 minutes :S If you hate someone, follow that link... Has anyone got a gun I can borrow...

Even after what I posted up there, I can honestly say I have never actually seen a ghost. Ive felt them, heard them, seen what they can do, but I couldnt describe what one looks like.

The main reason I want it isnt as there will be unsuitable content on show, its more to prevent a clash of personalities. A 21 year old uni grad wont have much in common with a 13 year old who 'spks lyk dis innit'Ive worked on student websites in the past & its amazing how annoyed people get about this kind of thing.Im just after a peaceful life I guess

What are your opinions on ghosts/entities/poltergiests? Are you a believer or non-believer? Have you ever witnessed anything you cant explain? When I was younger I went through a pretty horrendous experience, & id be interested if anyone else has a story they would like to share. Below you will find something I wrote a few years ago, & no im not insane My Story Well, i've been reliably informed this will be therapeutic, stop the nightmares & so on. I hope so, as it's getting quite tiresome to put it mildly. I shall start at the beginning (always a good place), & give a brief overview of the circumstances surrounding this tale. I grew up i'm a typical rambling Norfolk house. Nothing remarkable about the house, just your typical 100 year old country house - long corridors, high ceilings, bay windows, i'm sure you get the picture. I shared the house with my parents, older brother & younger sister. The events I am about to recall happened in the late 80?s, when I was still at school. At the time my father owned a printing company set in a converted barn in a village a few miles up the coast. After school I often used to help out in the office collating or hot-foiling or something equally as riveting. One particular evening I was collating some invoice books (collating is the most boring job in existence), dad was in another room hot-foiling some leather key fobs, & my brother was sat in dad?s car having a kip, i.e. a crafty *BLEEP*. I clearly remember the lights going a bit weird. Nothing unduly amazing about this as it was an old building. This was followed a few minutes later by pretty mental temperature changes. Again, this could easily be explained by crap plumbing/heating system. Then there were 3, its hard to explain, pulses maybe, that seem to go through the building. Not loud bangs or anything, more like pressure changes in the room, really quick, one after the other. Then the power went totally, & I was snapped back to reality by father swearing his head off about the power cut wrecking the temperature settings on the hot foiler. After a few seconds the power came on & everything returned to boring normality. Unfortunately this only lasted a matter of seconds as my brother literally came through the office door, crying like a baby claiming he had seen ?a woman with no legs? go past the car. My first thought was ?twat, its gravel you wouldn?t get a wheelchair across there?. He was insistent, & quite disturbed by it all, so dad decided we should head home. Alan however wouldn?t go anywhere near the carpark. At this point I probably wasn?t helping ? I had slung dads little cylinder hoover over my shoulder & was running around ala the ghostbusters laughing my head off. Anyway, I digress, father got the car, we went home & after an hour or so more pisstaking we all went to bed. Fast forward 24 hours: 9pm on a Thursday night, Crimewatch was just starting, I was in the lounge watching it with mum, my sister was upstairs in bed, Alan down the hallway in the kitchen making a sandwich. It was the noise I remember first, a groaning type effort rapidly getting louder. I didn?t have much time to ponder on its source, my brother for the second night in a row flew through the door, knife in hand, screaming like a banshee. He threw himself at my mum. I obviously thought he had gone mad & jumped on him kicking & punching. Any opportunity to get a free hit in I?d take it, & this was a brilliant opportunity. I stopped when I realized he had wet himself, I looked at his face, then mums, then followed their gaze to the door. It was slightly ajar, & the big fern which stood next to it was blowing like it was in a reasonably sized hurricane. 1st question: why wasn?t the door being blown open? 2nd question: What the hell was that banging? It was in the kitchen, then the staircase, then dining room, then upstairs, all around the house. Then Alan decided to say he had seen the same woman as last night looking at him through the kitchen window. Now this disturbed me. It was bad enough seeing a ghost, but having the sodding thing follow you 7 miles? That?s just wrong. It was decided it might be best to ring father & get him home from the office. Excellent idea ? strength in numbers & all that. The only problem was the phone was in the kitchen (this was before mobile phones remember) & funnily enough none of us were to keen to be rushing to the kitchen. The banging stopped, & we kind of tried to take stock of what had just occurred. It was then I stated what anyone probably reading this is already screaming ? yes, what about my 5 year old sister upstairs on her own. Alan was in no fit state to move, mum wasn?t much better, I was still being Mr rational & explaining away things as any obnoxious 15 year old know-it-all would. So out of the lounge I ventured & saw?. nothing. Absolutely nothing. I could see down the corridor to the kitchen, looked fine, the radio still playing Alan?s Bros (yes Bros) tape. I will admit to being less keen on going upstairs, but off I went. Again nothing untoward, go to my sister door & heard her talking. I went in & she was sat upright giggling away as 5 year olds do. I picked her up & headed downstairs. Apparently she had been talking to the ?funny man?. Yes, I said ?man?, not woman? Anyway, father was rang, he came home. After a quick family meeting all was declared well & off we went to bed. God, how little we knew. Over the following weeks/months I can only describe what happened as systematic abuse of the family. I won?t give a day by day account, just state some of the choicer moments. The banging continued with monotonous regularity, toilets started flushing on their own, things vanished & reappeared, this was all freaky sheet I admit, but bearable just about. It got a bit much when I stated suffering form sleep induced paralysis, but I woke with hand marks on my wrists & ankles. This was bloody scary. You feel consciously awake, but you can?t move, or scream, & it feels like a weight is slowly moving up your body, encasing you. It is a feeling I wouldn?t recommend anyone experience. At this point I fashioned a crucifix out of chopsticks (I knew the scouts would come in handy one day), & proudly placed it under my pillow sure in the knowledge that no self respecting ghost would have a go now. You can imagine my disappointment to wake the next morning to find it in pieces. It got to the stage we were sharing spooky events over dinner. MY mum?s best was she was lying in bed, heard dad pull into the drive, get out of the car, come in the kitchen door, come upstairs, go to the loo, put his keys on the bedside table, get into bed. She turned to hug him or whatever heinous thing it is parents do to each other & there was no one there. Dad?s best was he pulled down the drive one night & saw some kind of face type thing filling the bedroom window snarling at him. That did it for him. In a display of cowardice not seen by mankind since France last went to war he buggered off, never to return. He joined some religious sect, sold the printing company & gave the money to some German woman he had never met & as far as I?m aware is in Africa somewhere being a prick. Alan was next to go, he moved in with a mate. The house was put up for sale soon after. Word had spread around the village about how this respectable middle-class family had been ripped apart by ungodly events etc, & local TV news took an interest. This led to para-psychologists arriving from one of the Cambridge Universities. Muppets. Lasted one night before they went bombing back down the A10. Before they left, they had at least established something: Three separate entities (spirits, ghosts, whatever) had been discovered. There was the evil bugger which caused all the trouble & didn?t like me much. The old boy my sister talked to turned out to be the ghost of the old village rat catcher, who used to often walk past the house with his dogs when alive. He instantly took a shine to her right from when she was a baby. General consensus at the time was that he had appeared to protect my sister from the evil *BLEEP*. He did a fine job, she has no ill effects to this day, & is the only family member willing to talk about what happened. As she was being shielded she missed most of the juicy bits though? As for the woman: god knows who she was or what she wanted. That?s my brother?s problem not mine. Anyway, me, mum & sis moved to a smaller cottage in Dersingham just down the hill. Bloody things followed didn?t they? It was nowhere near as bad though, carpets rising up and down, the odd bangs, stuff like that. There was one mad event, when I was up rooting around in the loft with my Aussie mate Hick. He was on the ladder peering through the hatch, I out of the blue he started shouting ?get out, get out?. This was totally unlike him so I did. Then the wind started blowing, paper flying around, bang bloody bang etc. I got on the ladder & tried to pull the hatch shut above my head, & the bloody thing wouldn?t shift. & was ice cold. I eventually got the thing shut & I followed the rapidly disappearing Hick downstairs. We agreed not to tell anyone for fear of being called mentalists. Funnily enough he never came round again. That will probably do for now. I may at some point go into more detail, but at the moment that?s as deep as I?d like to go. As for me, nearly 10 years on, I still have regular nightmares about that house, at least twice a week. I still get that same pinned down, suffocating feeling, though I imagine that?s some kind of memory impulse that has engrained itself upon my subconciousness. To finish, if you are reading this as a non-believer I sincerely hope you stay that way. I sincerely hope nothing happens in your like to make you believe in ghosts. For everyone else, don?t play with ouija boards, they ain't big, they ain?t clever & are almost certainly bloody dangerous.

Has anyone encountered an efficient age verification system that doesnt rely on either cradit cards or paypal?The target age group for my website is 16+, so obviously 16/17 years olds wont have access to a credit card, & many people who do have cards are reluctant to give their details out online.Short of relying on people being honest about their age when they join (not a good idea normally), I cant think of an effective way of doing it.I'd appreciate any ideas you have regarding this.

"they know it and they write it down."Somehow I doubt google have a bloke sat in an office somewhere with a pen & a bit of paper recording postcodes I cant see the problem myself - postcodes do not identify a single residence. Take tower blocks for example - 60 different apartments could all share the same postcode.

I just tried it. You can zoom around the world as normal, but try & zoom in on a specific area & you just get an extremely low-res image.

My SonyEricsson P910 is the best phone I have ever had, & ive had a few.Ive installed Tracker with the XP theme, which basically looks like a mini pc desktop on your phone (same icons, background, menu options etc).Storage is great - using oggplay I have 130 cd quality songs stored on it, plus the full dvd of Matrix ReloadedIt also has a pretty respectable mobile msn.

You could try using AVG Free to 're-record' the section of the movie you want as an .avi file. Its like a screen capture progrom but videos the specified area rather than take a snapshot. I believe its downloadable free from tucows.com.

I wasnt overly impressed with live messenger until I downloaded messenger plus live. I do like the activity log (handy if you are away from your pc for a while) & the way you can see your contacts in a seperate window in order of last online/last chat etc. Most of the frills I wont use though, but I imagine the kids will enjoy it.

Rooney was targeted by the Portugese players before the match started, Ronaldo even headbutted him before kickoff, & clearly said he was going to get him sent off. As for the actually kicking incident, Ronaldo ran a full 40 yards waving his arm around trying to influence the referee into producing a card. Hardly sportsman like, & I sincerely hope Portugal get knocked out in the next game.As for Beckham - granted he takes a good free kick, & can deliver pinpoint crosses, but he isnt a leader. Gerrard, Neville or Terry would all be better captains.The manager thing confuses me, we get rid of the randy Sven, only to get his number 2 Steve Mclaren. Everyone knows Mclaren was responsible for England's tactics, not Sven, & they blatantly dont work. I cant see the team's performance improving one jot under him.