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Sadly had a few nights in hospital the other week. Nothing too serious, but definitely something I'd like to avoid. That said, there were several times I managed to amuse myself. I even made a video of my experience using the shower in my room.

Full HD Video (Right click and save as)

Roll up, roll up! It's time to create your team for the 2015 NASCAR Race Game. When most people are looking for to a valentines day with their sweetheart, I'm going to be watching the Sprint Unlimited race which is the precursor to the 2015 Season.

Register for the 2015 NASCAR Race Game.

When I was growing up, the M in the MTV stood for music, these days it must stand for mush or mindless or messed-up.

I've just got back from a short trip to Vegas, and as you do when you are in a hotel room, you flick through the channels on the off chance that you get a 15 second preview of the special interest film (no luck this trip), and you end up landing on one of the unfamiliar stations. Don't get me wrong, I don't watch MTV here in the UK, but I always thought it was a music channel, but no, it seems that it has become the home of "reality" TV. I put the word reality in quotes as I am dubious as to how real the program I was watching actually was.

I stumbled across a show called "Parental Control". The basic premise is that the parents of a poor child don't like their offspring's current choice of boyfriend/girlfriend so they interview a set of 10 prospective alternatives, pick one each and then force the current incumbent to watch their kid to go on "dates" with the new choices. Then the kid has to choose between the two new choices and their current partner. Ok, so not the greatest format of show, but what made it car crash TV was the fact that it all appeared staged, in fact I am sure I recognised one of the parents and the prospectives partners from other shows. What made it worse was that I sat through 4 of these shows back to back.

In case you were wondering why I was in my room for that long in Vegas, I was just recharging the batteries from the two mile walk back from the MGM Grand garden arena to my room at the furthest end of the block in the Excalibur hotel. Plus was tyring to straighten out after being scrunched up in the seats at the MGM Grand whilst watching the Mosconi cup of 9-ball pool. (Don't get me started on the subject of Americans and sportsmanship).

I do get the impression that the standard MTV channel is now a non music channel and is aimed at teens, but now, nearly 25 years on, I disagree with Dire Straits' Money for Nothing, I don't want my MTV.

No don’t worry, I’ve not been influenced by our trip in the deep South, haven’t taken up playing the harmonica and writing songs about my dog running off with my woman whilst my sister is run over by a steam roller, it’s the promised retrospective of the trip now the dust has settled, the bags have been unpacked and the washing done.

So where do I start? I guess having been back at work for a couple of days, I start by planning the next trip and working out how I can get someone else to pay for it. However, knowing that it’s not going to happen I’d better tie up the loose ends on this one first.

So, would I do it again? Yes. Exactly the same way? No. That’s for a couple of reasons, firstly as I’ve now done that trip, secondly as I would do some parts differently. It was a strange trip although we had a semi-plan we didn’t have a mission as such. The coast to coast element got introduced in day one and then we half adopted an idea to find a strange place name in each state we visited and to also visit as many states as possible, but the latter two were almost accidental. If I were to do something similar again, I may adopt those two ideas and expand ensuring we had a tripod moment in each state (and obviously a bad pun about the place name).

I’d also liked to have spent more time on the road perverse as that sounds. I was prepared for earlier starts and later finishes. However that said, I would have had a rough idea where the end point for the day would have been to enable a bit of research on places to stay to avoid a couple of those places right next to train lines.

Would the trip have been better if it was just Rag and I? Tough question, that was the original thought, and if that had been the case we would have had the car fitted with hand controls so as we could have shared the driving, but would we have had the same experiences? When we did split it did allow Rag and I to crank up the stereo and stick Octane on the car’s satellite radio, plus we were able to get the early starts and the miles under our belt, but it felt like something was missing. It was difficult for John, not driving or navigating, he was always in the back looking out of the window, but that was always going to be the way with the road trip. What he and Ivan did bring was some local knowledge from chatting to folks in bars and taxis, without them we wouldn’t have found Tootsies in Nashville or the place in Vegas, or indeed have visited as many Hooters/Winghouses as we did, but Rag’s doctor may see that as a bad thing. I guess I don’t know what idea they had at the outset, but I was happy just covering lots of miles, eating and holing up in the hotel and blogging in the evening. I know that isn’t most people’s idea of a holiday, but it was a road trip and the holiday part came in Vegas, although I could have done with an extra day or so there (my bank manager may disagree).

I hope John and Ivan got something out of the trip, I know they had a good time in Santa Monica; it was a shame that Ivan was so ill in Vegas. I know how he felt; I’m still recovering from it now.

Ok so how about places I’d go back to? Tombstone would be good for a whole day, as would the Kennedy Space centre. Not sure about Pigeon Forge, intriguing, looked as if it could be worth another look but it’s not near anything else other than Dollywood and I don’t plan on visiting that.

What about Route 66? It’s a bit of a cliché now, as mentioned in a previous post, it doesn’t exist as a road in itself so is it worth travelling along? Probably not, it’s been done before, the one thing you can guarantee about our trip; no one has done that route before.

So what about the next trip? As Rag said in his posts and the vote page, we’ll look at doing another and no doubt base it around a sporting event, but we need to think about where and when. At least I don’t have to worry about getting a pass out to spend two weeks away from the missus and the kid, however knowing Mrs Rag I’d no doubt she’d pay me to take him away and give her the break.

What about future blogs? Well there is the OBlogs section on this site, but unless work suddenly becomes like a road trip with a new adventure each day, the frequency may be slightly less, but if there’s an opportunity for a bad pun I’m sure I’ll find a way of working it in somehow. So happy reading if you pop back once in a while, otherwise we’ll see you for the next trip.

Yes, the good old chain of events where something sounding simple starts and things take on a life of their own. I received an email a while back from Google letting me know that they were no longer going to allow authentication to their mail servers using an ID and password. This impacts the weekly email that is sent from this site and some other functions. Simple, just change to Oauth 2.0 and you're good, right?

In order to use Oauth 2.0 I need to update my mail program (PHPMailer) ...

... in order to use PHPMailer with Google, I need to implement SSL and turn on https with Apache ...

... in order to turn on https with Apache I needed to upgrade my entire stack (WAMP) because somehow the ssl_module on the version I had wasn't working. Assume it wasn't compiled right as there were several posts from folks having a similar problem ...

... upgrading is always fun as there's a bunch of functions that have depricated since I wrote my code, so that means re-writing a lot of the backend code for the site ...

... before installing and rewriting code, need to take a backup ... my NAS fried, so I had to get a new one ...

... ok, so I got a new super duper NAS and it came with loads of bells and whistles, so I did get quite sidetracked with that. It comes with a streaming functionality, so you can stream to it and it will record the stream and then restream out to any number of RTMP services. Right now I have it setup to stream out to Twitch, YouTube and Facebook. There's literally no reason for me to do this other than the fact that I can. And sometimes, that's the best reason of them all :) ...

... sidetracking done and back to the task at hand, backup website, installed new software, install composer to get new PHPMailer, install certbot so I can get SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt which is great as it provides free certificates and free is good, particularly to a project website like this that is not monetized ...

.. infrastructure in place, do some tidy up and recode parts of the website not working. Bit of a note here, there's still some, but it's not related to this. There's a flash plugin used on one page that I need to update when I get time, but where does one get time once you're a megastar streaming to absolutely nobody on three platforms?

All in all, a huge amount of fun as it's been a while since I've done anything with the site and even though visitors won't notice the difference, I do.

A great video.