the newts.net

I love Summer. The days get longer, warmer and hazier. The chicks get their skimpy little dresses on and let it all hang loose :0)

Click the pic for BIGNESS.

I’ve seen a few mini clips of this video in the news just recently, but have only just got hold of the full uncut version. It’s really well done and the main dude is a right ringer for Peter Kay. Have yersen a little look see.

Watch the Army Amarillo vid in the Media Library.

LIVERPOOL 3 - 3 AC Milan (Liverpool win 3-2 on penalties).

I’m still in shock after this amazing match. What a seat of your pants emotional yo-yo this one was, and I’m not even a Liverpool fan! You’ve got to give Gerrard and the lads nothing but admiration for their Herculean effort. Talk about never say die! Their spirit was amazing and I’m so pleased they brought home the goods. What a fantastic night of celebrations it must be in Liverpool tonight. You know how much it means to the nation as a whole when even the Evertonian blues (the other half of Liverpool) are celebrating their derby rival’s success. I’ve even heard Man U fans singing the praises of the other Reds.

Apparently over 1 MILLION fans lined the parade route to welcome the team home. The latest estimates are that 300,000 people were gathered to greet the Liverpool bus at St George’s, and a further 750,000 people lined the parade route.

Liverpool’s dramatic victory, a penalty shoot-out win over AC Milan after being three goals down, sparked joyous scenes both in Istanbul and back in Britain. And indeed, fans all over the world have been celebrating a famous with little trouble reported and few arrests. It is the Anfield club’s fifth European Cup triumph, a feat that means they get to keep the current trophy.

The only question begging now is will they be allowed to defend their title? Yeah I understand that Everton won’t want to be dropped from the competition in favour of Liverpool, and that UEFA are reluctant to change the rules to accomodate Liverpool part way through the year, but come on! After what will go down in history as one of the best if not the best football cup final, how on earth can they not find a means for Liverpool to defend their title?? How can the holders not be allowed a defence?? Ridiculous. I hope UEFA see sense.

Me and Oli have got our tickets…

…Have you got yours?

It’s nearly that time of year when the newts gets his free yearly upgrade on his mobile phone so I’ve been searching around to see what’s on offer. Most new phones come with everything and do nearly eyerything these days, but because of the website, I really want a phone with a decent camera. That’s my overriding requirement.

I do have a quality camera in my Cannon, and that’s what I take my quality photo’s on, but it is so handy to have a good camera on a phone that habitually you have with you all the time. My current Sharp GX30i is a great phone and the screen is one of the best out there. The Camera itself is 1Meg and while it takes a decent still photograph, the refresh rate on it is terrible, so anything moving in the slightest is dificult to get sharp. I.e Ben!

The new Sharp 902 has an improved 2Meg camera but the guy in the Vodafone shop’s first words on me mentioning it were “IT’S BIG!” And while not being overly concearned on it’s size, I thought he might have come out with some of it’s more redeeming features before instantly putting me off it. So I was put off it. He suggested the Samsung D500, but with the new D600 just round the corner I thought that this phone would be outdated too quick. I do like the look of the D600, and it has a 2Meg camera on board, but it’s not a clamshell so the screen tends to get marked up too quickly for my liking.

There’s not many 2Meg camera phones out there at the minute but the one that’s caught my eye is the new Nokia N90. It looks like the only cam phone with a proper camera lens on it. A Carl Zeiss. I’ve seen plenty of sample pics and they are great, easily webworthy of the newts.net, and from what I’ve read the video capture is pretty amazing too.
It’s jam packed with other toys and gadgets but with my brief being a good camera, I think this is the one for me.

The only problem being it’s not been released yet. Although I’ve not seen anything official, most sites seem to point at it being released in the 2nd quarter of this year. So hopefully, I won’t have to wait too long before I can get my hands on one for nowt!

This picture of Lincoln Cathedral was taken by Oli on his new Nikon Coolpix 5600. It actually consists of 2 seperate photographs that the camera has ’sewn’ together. Can you see the join? Nice feature, nicely done.

Click the picture for a BIGGY.

A Policeman who’s own police car’s black box showed he’d been driving on a public motorway at 159mph has been cleared of speeding.

He claimed he was “familiarising himself” with a new car.

We’ll all have to remember that one next time we’re nabbed for speeding!

Jobs for the boys and all that.

I’m currently working on a new ‘media library’ for both my own personal benefit, and that of the website too. It’s basically a collection of all my media (pictures, videos, audio files etc) in one easily accessible place. It’s a huge undertaking. Firstly I have to get thousands of files uploaded and moved into the correct folders, then I have to name and describe each one, and finally I have to redo every single link that points to any of the media on every single post in the 21 months the blog’s been running.

Because of the sheer magnitude of the task it will be an ongoing process, but it’s well underway. The major benefits of the media library is that it keeps ALL the media together and it’s searchable, making finding any type of file quick and easy for both me & you! You can rate pictures / files and leave comments on them too, as well as being able to see the most popular pictures etc.

You’ll probably be taken to part of the Media Library when you click on a link on the site, or you can view it in full using the [Media Lib'ry] button in the nav bar at the top of the site. Try doing a search, you may be in there already. Don’t despair if you’re not there yet though, it’s a rapidly growing resource.

I like this little puzzle game. Simple to play, and quite addictive in the fact that you know you can do it in less moves so you’ll just have one more go. And one more go. And just one more go.

Basically there’s one empty dimple, you click any coloured ball next to that dimple, and it moves in to it, freeing up it’s dimple. You can also move 2 spaces and jump a ball on the same face. You need to move all the matching colours round to the other face. It’s a bit like a cross between rubik’s cube and those little picture puzzles where you move the tiles round to make a picture.

ps. Anyone who does it in 45 moves feel free to send me a screenshot!

Best scores so far:
50 by Fingers Freeman.

But newts is in the hot seat with a 47.

Yeah, I fancy a go so I’m going to click right here.

I like the look of the 1st class seats on the new Airbus A380! Take a look at the website and check out the stairs and lounge bar on this fantastic looking aircraft.

“The 555 seat, double deck Airbus A380 is the most ambitious civil aircraft program yet. When it enters service in March 2006, the A380 will be the world’s largest airliner, easily eclipsing Boeing’s 747.”

And so to the first fishing trip of 2005. It’s a shame it took until May for it to occur, but that’s just about the story of my fishing outings of the past few years - not enough of them! However I’m sure that situation will be redressed when Ben’s old enough to come along with Dad. I can’t wait!

So it was off to Toft Newton near Market Rasen to open this year’s account. Me and Willie got there for 1pm and were fishing by 1:30pm as the only boat on the water all day. There were quite a few bank anglers but as the nippy North Easterly breeze was quite strong they were all relegated to the lea bank in order to be able to cast. Me and Willie however, with the benefit of the boat, were able to fish the winward bank with the wind behind us. Always the massive bonus of having the boat.
And it was a great start (Apart from me shearing my landing net handle into 4 pieces on the stern of another boat while leaving the jetty) with Willie into a fish on his very first cast of the day. A feat he’s never managed to do before. That meant that he’d already won £2 off me for the first fish of the day. It was just my luck that my first fish came 1 minute later with my 2nd cast!

The takes were quite plentiful and it wasn’t long before we had 4 fish in the bass bag for dinner and we decided, good spot though it was, we’d have a move and explore some more of the lake. It was pretty much neck-a-neck fish-for-fish catching throughout the day, with all the spots we tried offering up a fish or two.

Flies of choice were buzzers; red being the most popular for me and black for Willie, and while all my fish fell to either a red or black buzzer, Willie did get a couple on a small black hopper. It wasn’t until later on that the newts opened up a small lead winning 7-4, but after giving Wil one of my new experimental hot head buzzers that I’d tied, he quickly caught me up and we ended the day at 9 each.

One of my 9 was this fantastic 1lb 12oz Perch which fell to the red buzzer. It fought and felt like a trout all the way to the net, where we first realised it was a Perch. It’s not uncommon to catch a Perch at Toft, although you can usually tell when you’ve got one on because they’re normally somewhat smaller than a trout, but this fella was an absolute beauty and was bigger than most of the 1 1/2lb trout we caught!

A great day out, we fished til 9pm and the rain held off, although that Nor Easterly was pretty nippy by the end of the evening. It’s nice to start a season off with 7 fish. That always seems to be lucky for me and bodes as a good omen, so I can’t complain with 9! The funny thing was both Wil & I lost a fish each on the very last cast of the day! The fish came on great in the last hour and if it wasn’t for the fading light, I’m sure we’d have been in the ‘teens’ each.

Roll on trip No.2!

It wasn’t long ago that the newts.net was getting just over a GIGabyte of banwidth traffic a month. Yesterday however the newts clocked up 1 BILLION bytes of bandwidth in just 1 day! I’m stunned :0)

It’s mainly down to the recent popularity of the Citroen 2CV download. Currently standing at an amazing 6,413 downloads in just 6 days!!

So for the those of you who are a part of the 65,000 unique visits and the 1,200,000 hits the newts.net has racked up in the last 6 months, I just wanted to say thanks for reading. I enjoy doing it, but it’s you that make it worthwhile.

//\//ewts.

It’s make your mind up time as the polls open tomorrow for the 2005 General Election. The problem with my constituency is that it’s a Labour stronghold so if you don’t want to vote Labour, it just feels like a wasted vote. Which is a shame. It’s in situations like this that I feel proportional representation would be a better bet. At least then every vote counts for something, and you feel like you’re doing your bit for what you believe in.

So let’s have a look at the options:

In my constituency there are only four parties fielding candidates so they’re the parties I’m going to deal with.

I’ll start with NEW IMPROVED LABOUR and our old mate Tory Blurr. They are what they say. New Labour. They’re not the unelectable shower they were during the Conservative’s 3 terms in office. They slid more towards the right and more away from the old Labour stigma. And it’s faired them well. Let’s be fair, they haven’t done a bad job. But if you want Conservative ideals you may as well vote for them rather than these pseudo-tories. One major reservation I have with this lot is their love affair with Europe and their desire to slide us into more bureaucratic European red tape bullshit and god forbid - the single currency. Not for me thanks.

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Which brings us to the REAL TORY PARTY. They’ve made a big issue of immigration during this campaign. And I think this is a very serious issue which needs adressing firmly. Yes to genuine asylum seekers who are in fear of their lives. No to taxpayer and social service leeches who just want to freeload off us because we’re a soft touch. Of course there should be limits on immigration. Every other country has them. We are not an infinitely deep pit for the worlds dropouts, Hell, that’s what France is for. I must admit I am an advocate of the Conservative theory of Conservatism. I.e. You earn the money, we’ll tax you less and you make provision for yourself in which way you deem fit. It’s all about choice. My only reservation about the current lot is that I really don’t think they are quite ready for power again. Another term in opposition might give them time to continue to build. Mind you, I thought that about Labour and they haven’t made too bad a job of it. At least with Michael Howard though you know he’s not going to toss us head first in to the Euro Super State.

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And so to the Yellow party. The Liberal Democrats. Err well, I know you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover but Charles Kennedy! I wouldn’t want him running my school gym class let alone the country. I’m sorry but he’s just too much of a damp squib for me to get out of bed and vote for.

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So finally to the UK Independence Party. I like their views on Europe, I like the stance they take on saving the fading sovereignty of our great country, I’m interested in hearing more on the pros and cons of complete withdrawl from the European Union. But that’s it. A one issue party. You couldn’t elect them purely on their mission statement, but they could be an interesting ‘protest vote’ in a strong Labourite constituency like mine.

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So in conclusion:
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I’m pretty sure that Labour are going to get in again, the only thing we can hope for is that it’s by a much reduced majority. In which case I’ve got to vote for the party that is most likely, (highly unlikely though it is) of winning this seat from Labour. And that party is the Conservatives. That’s where my vote’s going, and I suggest yours does too, even if it’s just to make the next Labour government slightly more accountable with less seats to undemocratically steamroller any old bill they like through parliament.

My prediction:
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Labour win with a majority of 80 odd seats.