Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I’m a bit apprehiensive when discussing issues that concern others as I’m aware that other people actually read my blog. However I’d rather be honest on my blog even with them reading so in the spirit of such honesty I’m going to talk about tonights events.

I went to Bondi. I actually started out at Leodis and got a VKD and a coke in with John before we went down to call for Fonze and headed to Bondi. We got there at 10:45 and it was dead. Indeed it remained dead for the whole night, at least compared to normal. All the students have gone home so there was no cue when we got there (pretty early though as free drinks don’t start till 11).

They closed off the upstairs where we were sitting though because of how empty it was. Did they not see this coming? Perhaps not as Leeds Met only broke up this week so they will have been there last Monday but as Leeds Uni has already been off a week I would have thought last week would have been relatively dead too.

I did quite a bit of dancing when we were down though. Well, skanking, I can’t really be expected to do any more being a punk rock fan. Got my some serious time on the big screen though :D.

Of course the concept of dancing with a girl is rather mundane to most as by my age I should have got laid many times over but I would remind you that I am a computing undergraduate and so my natural environment is in a darkened room in front of a computer screen leading to massive social-underdevelopment. I stand by my choice and now it gives me the added bonus of being able to psycho analyse (spelling?) each new situation I end up in.

So yeah, overall a really good night. I doubt Star can top it on Friday but I’m eager to find out :D.

Last Monday I mentioned that a new episode of Nightmare 90210 was on it’s way. Well, it’s arrived.

Episode 4 has now been unleashed onto the internet via Blair Space’s indie movies channel. Entitled Evil Wind it takes a cold hard look about the evil that can dwell within mother nature.

I would make a comment about how bad I probably spelt that but as it’s not a real word I don’t think it matters.

David Smith: humm i dont remember installing this
David Smith: my webcam is up and running
Chris: lol
David Smith: aparently it cant save pics though
David Smith: humm cant find a wizerd for it
Chris: Check behind the fridge. When I loose stuff, it’s always behind the fridge.

Well, if nothing else, as this is going to sound like an attack on Amazon, I will say that they really put some time into finding my book. So it’s not really a negative post. But anyway…

I got an email this morning from Amazon informing me that they had cancelled an order I made because they were unable to source it. I placed the order, well, I don’t know because it’s disappeared from my account but it was somewhere around the end of November / beginning of December last year. 5 months ago.

I was annoyed by the “this may take us 4 weeks to ship it” thing on the page but I thought what the hell, I’ll order it and wait it out. Of course, now I know it would actually take a little longer than that. Indeed forever, as they can’t actually get hold of it.

I have actually forgotten about it most of the time, I only really remember it when the send me the occasional email saying “we’re still trying to source this for you but it’s going to take x amount more time to find it.” Still, now it’s cancelled I guess that’s a good thing considering the amount of debt I’m in.

Who says punk revival is dead? Well a lot of people given the massive rise in popularity in the 3rd generation of punk – emo punk. The hate of it must go ever on. But then punk revivial isn’t dead. Sure, we’re a long way from the hayday of the 90’s when Offspring and Green Day were at their peak but then both Offspring and Green Day are still producing albums. I wasn’t a massive fan of Splinter and American Idiot was wandering off punk but it was a fantastic album never the less.

Plus many bands only recently started – The Used, Billy Talent (ok, they are slightly emo but still more a punk revival band than an emo punk band) and many more examples that I am not sure of the date of but think they fall into the right category, only made it big this side of the millenium.

Then you get bands like Be Your Own Pet that only recently burst onto the scene but have none of this emo crap, they are punk all the way. They have a female vocalist too which makes them the decond non-gothic rock band to have a female vocalist ever I think :-p). They are even playing in Sheffield. On the same night as The Wendy House! That is just inconsiderate. I mean, what am I supposed to do there?

I could do both possibly. If I got a train back at 10 (the gig starts at 7:30, I presume it will be done by then, although I wouldn’t suprise me if it went on longer, who knows) but that would involve paying for my gig ticket, Wendy House ticket, bus ticket into town, train ticket there and back and taxi fare home. That’s a expensive night even for me. It sucks I can’t go back to Bod, maybe I should have applied to go back a day earlier then I could just crash back there. That said, I don’t know when the 95 starts running again and I wouldn’t have my bus pass anyway.

As some of you know, I’m quite a big fan of The Offspring because they are blatantly the greatest band ever. Recently their frontman, Dexter Holland ran the Los Angeles Marathon in aid of the charity, The Innocence Project.

It was quite inspiring. I mean, the guy is 40! I know I am normally against the whole charity thing because of my moral views (I think it conflicts with the interests of civil rights) but then an organisation such as The Innocence Project is fighting for civil rights as it’s about exonerating those wrongfully by using postconviction DNA testing.

So it got me thinking, maybe I should be doing my bit for charity. I lot of people who represent the man (parents, teachers, confirmists, etc) have suggested I shave my head for charity and normally I would just laugh at them but now I’m giving it some real thought.

If you don’t know, Spam Arrest means that whenever you email someone using it, Spam Arrest send you an email and you have to click a verification link before the original email is actually sent on to who it was originally supposed to reach.

It’s a system I have always felt is stupid. You probably loose a lot of email that way. I’m not sure how much spam it keeps out but I doubt the rates are really any better than such things as SpamNet which catches virtually all of my spam and with hardly any false positives – every time someone doesn’t click the Spam Arrest validation link, that’s a false positive. I bet that is a lot.

Anyway, so I have just got an email saying I need to click the confirmation link for an email automatically sent by my web server to confirm someone’s forum registration. I’m not going to do that. I don’t want them blocking my emails. If they want to register on that forum they can use an email address that can actually receive email. They look like spammers themselves anyway. Do they honestly expect people to confirm these validation requests for auto-generated emails?

It’s great news! I was running round going crazy for about 10 minutes at the thought that I had lost my Millencolin t-shirt. Sure, it’s just a t-shirt but a) it’s my favourite t-shirt and the one I do most of my VNUs and, well, pretty much any video project in, or indeed go out in and b) I got it when I actually saw Millencolin which while isn’t some big achievement, was an awesome gig and one I have fond memories of.

I got to the point where I was searching online stores to replace it even though I knew it wouldn’t be the same. The only place I could find a mention of it though was on the official Millencolin site that have a t-shirt-ography cateloging all the t-shirts they have made. Mine is called “skull” apparently.

They have some stuff available from a company called Backstreet Merch. Not what I wanted though. Plus dispatch times were so random and so long. The Bullet For My Valentine tee I looked at was a 2-14 days dispatch time (I think I should point out, although it’s BFMV, I wasn’t actually considering buying it so it’s go :-P) and some of them I saw had a dispatch time of going on a month.

This pales in comparision to what I found earlier today on Giant Merchandising’s website though. I wanted some more band t-shirts that would be good to wear when I go out and given that Lostprophets really, really rock and they have some cool designs when I looked I decided it would be cool to get one of those. $16 but as long as the shipping was cheap that would be affordable. $21 shipping outside the US! I’m sorry, but it does not cost $21 to ship a t-shirt to the UK! That is such a con.

Yep, I finally made the jump to WordPress version 2. It’s basically the same now I’ve sorted things out (I’m not using the visual text editor crap for my posts). I can’t say I prefer the interface but it’ll do and this way it will auto generate the thumbnail code and allow me to browse images more easily even if I can’t choose what size the thumbnails are.

That’s one of the most annoying things about WordPress 2.0 I think. Also when you select an image, by default it isn’t linked to anything. I can’t see when you would ever want to upload a file, create a thumbnail of it and then not use the image, just use the thumbnail. It’s a waste of disk space. And that is presuming you would have a reason to use the thumbnail and not the image which I can’t see happening. But oh well.

I think I really am a blogging addict. I have been sitting here waiting for the files to upload (it’s taken a while as I’ve been uploading other stuff at the same time) and thinking “hurry up! I really need to blog! I think I’m going to burst if I can’t blog soon.” But with good reason, which I will go onto in my next post. Also, the fact that this is my 5th post of the day, I have another one coming, it’s only 5pm and that’s providing I don’t start posting all the photos I plan to.

The reason I never really use my camera is because it’s messy – first I would have to dig out my USB cable, plug it into the back of my laptop, plug it into my camera, I know it doesn’t sound like much but it is when you don’t know where you’re USB cable is, both USB ports on my laptop are already being used and even if they weren’t you would have to get round the back of what is already a jungle of cables.

It’s the same with the phone on my camera, I would need to find my Bluetooth adapter and plug that in and then configure it all. My phone isn’t doing me much good anyway as I can’t be bothered to carry around my actual camera because I have one on my phone even if it’s nowhere near as good.

However recently I found my Bluetooth adapter will just plug straight in and work so I have finally re-claimed my picture taking. I have a load uploading (it’s still a bit of a hassle uploading them as I have to confirm each one but it’s so much better. I can just browse through the pictures of my phone using the thumbnails and select which ones I want to be transfered to my laptop. No wires, it’s brilliant.

So yeah, expect a lot of upcoming posts with pictures in them. I think I may have to create a third category! Although I’m not sure, it’s a major discussion to add a new category to my blog. I only really added the video one because I was initially going to make the video totally seperate. This is something I am going to have to meditate on a little while I think.

I am also toying with the idea of upgrading to WordPress 2.0. I’m almost settled on it in fact. I really like WordPress 1.5 as it’s simple – the categories are just on the left rather than being on a menu you need to open in 2 but that said, it only closes when you haven’t been to the blog for so long it automatically logs you out (I think it’s like a week) and the chances of that happening with this blog are rather slim I think :p.