Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I came across this which is really cool. It allows you to stream Pandora, internet radio and your MP3 connection by connection to your network (and also the internet via your network obviously) wirelessly allowing you to listen to music anywhere in the house.

It looks awesome as one of the problems I have at the moment is I want to listen to music while cooking but I don’t want to have to burn my music to CD.

The only issue is, it’s not a complete unit, it needs to be hucked up to speakers or a stereo system. And the $300 price tag. But minor bumps in the road to the plan of filling every room in my house with music :D.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube is now the fatest growing website in the world. Traffic is up 75% from last week alone and they are now reaching 12.8 million unique users per month. It just shows you how much potential there is in the Web 2.0 startups. Back at the start of the year YouTube was nothing – they didn’t even have a business model. 18 months ago, they didn’t even exist. Now they are serving over 100 million videos per day.

I think it also shows you just how right YouTube got it. While the video is the core of the site, the fact you can just copy and paste a line of code and put it anywhere makes it great for webmasters and taps into MySpace’s awesome success and the community aspect (comments, friends, playlists) is turning it into a mini version of MySpace in itself.

They may be suffering a bit with the increased load though, I’m still waiting to hear back about approval of my director’s account.

Arranged to meet at the Quilted Llama for pre-drinks with Claire and Kieran at 7. This was organised at 5:15 so I had a mental hour in which time I made dinner, ate dinner, sorted the house and computers out ready to be out of the house in an hours time. I actually arrived at the Llama on time to find it shut so we ended up at The Fenton.

After John turned up the two of us went and got some food and then headed up to the union, bumping into Fonze and Janine who informed us Oblivion had been moved to next Saturday. So we went back and joined the others at The Fenton.

So overall tonight’s activities consisted of no Quilted Llama, no Oblivion and getting to watch Fonze and Janine be coupley. Although at least they were the only ones, so it wasn’t too bad on the whole couples count. Plus I had a good time sitting round talking with everyone, we hit some quite interesting topics.

SATA or Serial ATA is what most hard drives are moving towards these days. While the technical details differ them from the traditional IDE drives the main thing you need to know is that they have smaller cables and so are a lot less fiddly.

Other than the cable going to a different point though it’s much like installing an IDE hard drive. Once you’ve grounded yourself you want to slot the hard drive into a drive bay and screw it in place.

Secondly find a spare power cable running from the power unit and connect that to the back of the hard drive.

Finally you need to connect your SATA cable. SATA cables are small and thin with little flat connectors at the end. Connect one end to the bottom of your hard drive and the other end goes directly onto your motherboard. These vary in location depending on your motherboard so have a check around.

Once it’s in, put everything back together and boot your computer up. If the computer doesn’t recognise it you may need to get software from your hardware manufacturer to pick it up (though it should pick it up automatically).

I think my brain has turned to mush. I’ve just scanned through 3,000 news stories about who Lindsay Lohan is dating, how cute Angelina Jolie’s kids are and what Britney Spears’ plans are for the rest of the year.

I came across this article on News.com about Jessica Simpson’s new single being sold in MP3 format. It could be the first step forward in moving towards selling music over the internet without DRM.

Which would be a much welcome change ad it would bring online music one step closer to being the same quality as buying actual albums. While there is still the issue of quality it does solve the issue of copying your music collection onto your different players and such and the whole having to have licences which you then of course have to back up and risk losing.

I also read a little bit more about it on the Yahoo Music blog and was also pleased to learn they are keeping Firefox compatability in mind with regards to LaunchCAST (currently not Mozilla compatible). Having to have IE hanging around for LaunchCAST was one of the reason I stopped using the service.

I’m not sure whether to be happy or upset. My second interview with McDonalds took place about an hour ago and it did not go well at all – they gave me a job. So yeah, I work at McDonalds now. Still once you get past the impact of that it’s probably a good place for me to work.

Firstly, I’ve never worked before. And because they employee idiots and losers they have a solid training program designed for chimps so it will be really good experiance as my first job as I won’t be expected to know anything.

Secondly they have lots of stores so even though I’m working at the Colton one over the summer I will hopefully be able to transfer to a city centre one when I move into my uni accommodation and so my job will still be in walking distance (indeed closer than the Colton one from where I am now).

Thirdly, I love grease in my hair. It holds my hair in place and I think it actually looks better. I know a pretty much everyone would disagree with this but the fact is most of you are kidding yourselfs – hair jel is just a grease substitute, there isn’t really any difference. But anyway yeah, I was worried how much hair jel I would have go through because I would need to wash my hair fully before work every day. But this way it will just re-grease at work :D.

So yeah, it should be interesting. I start on Monday. I don’t know what the pay is but I can’t see it will be much above minimum wage if at all. It wasn’t like I was going to turn a job down based on pay though as I have to get minimum wage whatever job I do which isn’t going to be so different from any wage I am offered that I would turn a job down based on that so I haven’t been asking.

I’m in the process of launching a new Billy Talent fansite entitled This Suffering. I thought it high time I got one online given how much I love Billy Talent. There also doesn’t seem to be much in the way of fansites for them already online either which sucks, they are really underappreciated.

I’ve updated the description for my blog. I can see some potential for it being a rotating phrase to suite my mood every few weeks or months without it really having a major impact on my blog. Though for my current one, who am I kidding, I’m really 20 :(.

Today’s activities have been interesting. I spent this evening chatting to Claire at the Quilted Llama which was fun. I finally got registered with Gilds too and I have training coming up for that. Tomorrow morning I have an interview with ISS for the student advisor jobs though which I really need to nail in order to secure my residency at Ellerslie :o.

Recently I’ve been doing some research into internet pornography and obscenity laws. Or at least trying to. It’s almost impossible though. Our law is so fragmented an inaccessable the chances of you actually understanding or even knowing what the law is in one particular area is slim to none.

So far I have found the best resource available to be the vague information on Wikipedia. To say the internet is so rich with information it seems to be somewhat of a wasteland of legal info. The websites that claim to offer legal information actually offer very little of it and the official sites that claim to actually have the law for some reason never return useful results when you’re looking for it.

I’ve spent the afternoon hunting around the inner bowls of the Brotherton Library trying to find information but it’s not easy. The acts of parliament are only available in bill form. And only from about 1960 onwards. Which is great when your looking for the Obscene Publications Act 1957.

Though from what I have gathered so far on the law including the internet, books and parliamentary papers, all pornography is illegal under English law. I mean, the fact that there isn’t actually any pornography law at all and it’s just law about obscenity applied to pornography using terms like material that would “deprave and corrupt” is bad enough but the bits of law that do exist seem to either just be ignored by the entire country or ammended by some mystical event that then wiped everyone’s memory and all records of said event.