Archive for February, 2006

I met Beth!

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 | Life

Just when you’ve been at university for over 5 months you suddenly realise that someone else from your highschool goes to the same uni as you do.

I was waiting around after my last lecture today and Beth came walking past and recognised me. She is doing English. It’s wierd as we both thought that we were the only people from Temple Moor that made it in to Leeds Uni (most of the people at our school were failures :p).

The Chris phenomenon

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 | Life

I just walked through our common room where Bruce was playing rugby with a friend who when he overheard my name said he had seen my website. It just keeps spreading :p.

I need to speak to Jack actually, I posted another episode of Nightmare 90210 this morning and I know what a devoted fan he is :D.

Bands moving in new directions

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 | Life

A recent topic on Buffy Talk dragged up an issue about bands moving in new directions. The two classic examples happen to be the two that came up in the topic. Green Day’s American Idiot and Blink 182’s self-titled.

Most people seem to judge these albums as the same stuff the band have been producing all along and so give it a negative rating. Thus when a band releases an album like this it can do a lot of damage to their fanbase so it’s a pretty brave move to make.

I love those two albums though. As much as I love punk revival and bands singing about getting stoned and acting like your in college for the rest of your life, I think eventually if you were singing that all the time you would want to move on to something a bit more challenging.

You really have to give the albums a chance. I didn’t like Blink 182’s self-titled at first, I really had to give it a good few listens as it’s easy to dismiss it as different from their earlier work and ignore it. But I’m glad I did. Also American Idiot – it’s a rock opera and a very successful one. Indeed it’s probably the most successful rock opera since Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

That’s amazing! It’s going to put Green Day firmly in history as the band that not only spearheaded punk revival but created the “closest thing to an anti-war album America has” when it wasn’t even about the second Gulf war, if you want an anti-war album go to Bad Religion’s The Empire Strikes First.

My point is, you shouldn’t dismiss an album just because it’s different from their previous albums. If it’s a bad album then fair enough, but American Idiot received the highest rating from All Music Guide (the database that powers MP3.com, Yahoo Music, etc) of any Green Day album and Blink 182’s self-titled was up there with the rest of their albums. Different direction, but they still rock.

Fran is coming!

Monday, February 27th, 2006 | Life

Yes, you read the title right, Fran is coming! That’s pretty much all I know at the moment. Well I know a little bit more. She’s Michelle’s friend and she is coming up to stay for the weekend which happens to be the Wendy House weekend which is awesome.

Planning a Tunnel Club trip for tomorrow night, Oli is coming who I haven’t seen in ages. Well I saw him like last week but we just stopped to have a quick chat and block the entrance to Red Route so there is still plenty of catching up to do.

Been playing my guitar this evening, I’m hoping tomorrow will get me fired up into playing too. I’m in a band mood. Ooo, on that note, Maths Chris plays base which reminds me that he is coming to Tunnel Club tomorrow. That’s cool as it means I have more than three friends in my social circle :p.

Oh and wierdly, apparently someone actually reads my blog as Michelle says she got busted for one of the things I posted on it :D. Didn’t see that one coming.

Maths coursework conspiracy

Monday, February 27th, 2006 | Life

I’m sure there is some kind of global conspiracy against my maths coursework. I was going to do it and bring it into uni on Saturday but then Michelle came round so I finished it off yesterday and was going to bring it down yesterday afternoon. However I thought considering it would mean 1 1/2 extra hours travelling I might as well just get up an hour early and bring it in this morning.

So I got here this morning and headed down to Eniac to use the 24 hour coursework box. Only to find that they have now taken the keypad off the door and my keyfob that I put a £25 deposit on doesn’t actually work at all.

So I rushed up to the Long Room which was open (I didn’t think it would be but there you go) and went through my bag to find my coursework. It’s not there. I don’t know where it is as I had it this morning, presumely put it in my bag to hand in but apparently not.

So now my coursework is probably going to be two days late as it won’t be in until after 9pm tomorrow which means I will have missed todays deadline and tomorrows.

Where is my Finch album?

Sunday, February 26th, 2006 | Life

Ok, first my Feeder – Echo Park album disappears now I can’t find my Finch album. Where are all my albums disappearing to?!?

Sites selling out isn’t cool

Sunday, February 26th, 2006 | Life

Sites selling out to big corporations isn’t cool. MySpace is the classic example, they have all Fox’s money but the still is still so hidiously unreliable that it’s just a bad joke. If you’re going to sell out fine but at least use the money brought in to make it worthwhile.

My next example is iStockPhoto. I’m finding the site quite slow and unreliable at the moment so I went onto Google Blog Search so see if any other bloggers had been having problems. What I found were several posts about them selling out to Getty Images for $50 million.

Maybe I just caught the site at a bad time so I’m not going to judge too quickly but I think I’ll be checking back later.

Coursework stuff

Sunday, February 26th, 2006 | Life

Ok, in an attempt to get on top of my coursework, I’m working out what I need to do when.

  • SE12: Report due in on Wednesday
  • SE15: none at the moment!
  • MA12: due in tomorrow, finished it
  • CS12: March 6th deadline? Nobody really knows
  • DB11: Due in March 2nd
  • SY12: none at the moment!

Ok so my focus at the moment needs to be on my SE12 report and my DB11 coursework also needs some attention. CS12 can wait until next weekend I think, depending on how much time I have as that will still give me time to speak to my tutorial leader if I have any problems before it’s due in.

More RegisterFly issues

Sunday, February 26th, 2006 | Life

They responded to my orginal support ticket solving one of the three issues, so I’ve just replied with…

Hi,

I’ve renewed the domain but when I try updating the nameservers for AntiChav.com I get…

Error:
We were unable to update the DNS for this domain name. The errors returned were [error:NullPointerException]

Also AngelDrive.com is still listed as having an expiration date of 2006 in my account even though the whois records say 2007.

Also could you please confirm the status of TradeConfederacy.com and HotMiniBikinis.com as they are listed as renewed on the whois but are not listed in my account.

Their system is just so poor. I’ve just discovered an email saying one of my domains failed to renew but there is no way to edit my support ticket.

Random picnic

Sunday, February 26th, 2006 | Life

Michelle came over to return my DVDs today and ended up staying all day and having dinner at Bod. We decided to head into town but then she started coming up with wacky ideas such as going to the beach or going to a lake (apparently they don’t have lakes on Jersey – seriously), so we ended up calling for Fonze with a load of picnic stuff and going to Temple Newsam. That is soooo random!