Monthly Archives: December 2005

I’m Back!

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I’ve been on holiday in Italy for christmas, and back today so that I can spend new year at home
Since i haven’t been updating my blog you’re in for a bit of a special as is always the case after i get back from a holiday

I’ll start with Desert Island Discs which is a radio show in the UK. We got talking about a variation on the theme where you get to choose 4 tracks, 3 films, 3 books and a luxury.
We came to the conclusion that this is very difficult for younger people as I said I would probably choose 4 different tracks for every day of the week. Fairly sensibly, it was suggested that perhaps the best books would be ones along the lines of “How to survive on a desert island in 200 easy steps”, and I added one though i couldn’t remember the name at the time, but it’s The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. It includes things like how to get out of quicksand, and wrestle an alligator with just a stout pole
Suggestions for the music and films varied from ones that you enjoy the most already to ones that you’ve never had the time to watch/listen to and would get the most out of.
But the general consensus was that the most interesting choices were those that had a good reasoning and reminded the person of something in the past.
Being under 30, I don’t think I’m old enough to have had that many moments to reflect on

Onward we go – I was thinking about animals that have become extinct and how often they are ones that don’t appear to be missed that much by the layman. But i thought i’d turn it around into what animals would you be more than happy to have extinct which really would make a difference to the layman. My first suggestion was the Mosquito – they’re ugly, a pest, suck blood and some species carry malaria and dengue fever, yellow fever, west nile virus (amongst others). I am not an ecologist, but as far as i’m concerned the mosquito is better to me dead than alive – the World Health Organisation did declare war on the mosquito and largely failed when trying to rid the world of Malaria. I can’t think of any other suggestions i came up with, but would be interesting to hear a few more.

Last but not least, in the in-flight magazine coming back I saw an advert for a piece of software called OnSpeed. It makes some pretty amazing claims for a piece of software and is charged at £24.99 or €39.99 in Euros per year.
It must be more than just an internet optimiser since you have to renew the subscription annually, whereas an optimiser would do the changes and that would be it. It’s won lots of awards, and has mac support (except for email optimisation). It doesnt seem to make a lot of sense though, and it’d be interesting to see if it actually works.

Till next time…

Frankenstein Mac

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My Powermac G4 Case Mod from 2003
I was talking to MacHeadCase yesterday about future computers, and we were comparing what each of us had. It was then that I realised that I’d never talked about my Mac on this website and/or blog. So I got my digital camera out, a Sony T-1 and built a little page about my Mac and what i did to the case.
It’s a bit of a mishmash of a computer now – many of the components have been upgraded, and being the first tower case computer i’ve owned, am reluctant to give it up, and want to upgrade it as much as possible.
It’s quite old though now – bought it in August 2000 as a 1st generation Powermac G4, with a 450MHz processor, Zip Drive, DVD ROM, 20Gb Hard Drive and 128mb RAM.
It now has a 2nd hard drive: 120Gb Maxtor, a DVD±RW in addition to the DVD ROM, 640Mb RAM, and no Zip Drive. I’ve added an extra 4 USB ports, and a wireless network card. The original ATI rage Pro graphics card was replaced 4 years ago for a NVidia GeForce 2MX, but that is now due for replacement – i think a Radeon of some description will be the best.
At some point i will want to replace this mac, possibly with a Powermac G5, but they are expensive, and don’t have dual optical drives which drives me nuts. Perhaps I’ll go for a cheaper 2002 edition of the Power Mac G4 Desktops or as I’ve threatened for many years buy a Windows Computer because it’s cheaper and easier to upgrade.

French Car and the Bulimic Wizards

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The other day (namely monday) i finally put up the 3rd French Car and the Bulimic Wizards album onto my site
It’s kinda been a bit unofficial that i’m hosting it, though if you do a Google Search for the band it comes up top of the list
I haven’t really listened to the most recent offering much, but the first two albums are worth having a listen to if you get a chance
If I havent mentioned anything about it to you before, it was a side project set up by some of the original members of the band Stony Sleep, and included some of their friends in various guises. It started back in 1996, went on hold for a while and got reborn a year or so ago.

On another google note, it’s good to see my blog is getting indexed already, and it appears the RSS feed got set up automatically. Will have to stick the an RSS button in the sidebar or something.

My Last Week

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It had to come one day – last week was my last week working in the NHS job i’ve been doing for over 18 months
I had planned to have a new job sorted – but things had been tougher than planned and having the time for work, socialising and applying for new jobs hasn’t been easy and realistically never happened
What i’m going to do is look to take an extended christmas/new year holiday and put my feet up for a few days. Even after a day and a half i feel better – i think knowing that i don’t have to worry about anything at weekends has been a weight off my shoulders
Have spent most of today getting application forms out, and yesterday arranged to go to my old agency in the new year.
I’m not worried yet, and there should be some good jobs out there for me. And while i’m waiting on interviews i can also spend a bit more time on my blog, website, wiki, php, mysql and all the stuff i never get the time for

Wasted at Xmas

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I should be heading off to the Mean Fiddler’s Wasted at Xmas punk festival sometime this afternoon. The first bands will be on in about an hour but they’re not worth seeing.

Wasted At Xmas:
The Dickies + The Rezillos + The Saints (2) + The Angelic Upstarts + UK Subs + TV Smith + The Pork Dukes + 999 + The Straps + Menace + Arthur Kitchener (acoustic) + The Grit
With comedy, can can dancers, merch and CD stalls, DJ’s e.t.c. Tickets from tickets@wastedfestivals.com. See www.wastedfestivals.com for more information.

Blog Design

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After a couple of weeks of messing around, i think i’m nearly happy with the look of the blog
The benevolence theme is looking good, and the plugins are working – at last
I struggled with gravatars, but after messing with the CSS and PHP stuff i simply could not get Skippy’s plugin to work
So, after a lot of messing around, posting on both the theme designer’s site and the wordpress support forum, I got no replies
My good friend Stretch suggested i try the official Gravatar plugin from gravatar.com again, as he also had problems with Skippy’s plugin on his blog

After a few parse errors, i finally got it to work. The CSS still needs sorting, but it’s actually displaying the gravatars
The blog finally looks like it’s usable, so there should be more to come

Edit Apologies for the main page completely breaking – that was due to a bit of html lazyness on this post – it has now been fixed

UK Drinking Laws

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Well, it’s been a week now since the UK drinking regulations have changed
A brief history of the regulations before can be found in Wikipedia’s information on the Defence of the Realm act and it’s page on UK licensing laws
What it boiled down to was that all normal drinking establishments (or pubs) were only allowed to remain open until 11pm Monday-Saturday and until 10:30pm on Sunday
This law did not affected night clubs which have always been able to open till later
Some pubs in the past paid for special licenses in order to open longer

As of last Thursday this all changed and most pubs are now allowed to open longer hours. In fact last Friday i was still down my local at 1:30am

So, how is it a week on since the new laws? For me personally, apart from last Friday i haven’t been down my local late, though it does appear that one place does seem to want to have more gigs, as on Saturday they had a Live Band playing covers.

Perhaps for a few weeks we’ll find people drinking silly hours, but overall it should be good in the long run, as the regulations came from the past for reasons that are no longer relevant and we’ll see the benefits of less restrictive laws.
Of course the newspapers made a huge thing about how there’ll be 24 hour drinking and nobody will be able to cope, but it doesn’t seem like that’s gonna happen now