Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Only 10 days until Christmas

Wednesday, December 15th, 2004 | Life

Normally that wouldn’t be particularly important although this year I have my electric guitar to wait for. Bah, I thought I can got past the years when time would literally stop. That said it is still not a patch on the time before my birthday.

My y key isn’t working properly. Anyway staying on topic, JD is also waiting on his X-Box which means that he can finally play the long awaited (for us anyway, I realise the game is out) Halo 2. That is the up side to Christmas though, and I have plenty of down side to go with it.

This year I decided it was maybe time I started hating Christmas. I mean, I am just too unmoved by the hole situation, usually I would be hating everything. There are so many reasons why I could hate Christmas that I am not really sure why I don’t. Well actually my official stance from now on is that I do.

The important thing is that ITV better be showing Zulu this year. They didn’t last year! It is a traditional it has been on for the last 20 years or something! I checked IMDb on the date to make sure that was possible ;). I didn’t realise how old it was though, it was made in 1964. But the important point is no Zulu this years equals lawsuit.

Leaderboard ads

Sunday, December 12th, 2004 | Life

Designing advert creatives is quite fun. Recently it occured to me what
a shift there has been away from traditional banners to large
advertisements, most notably leaderboards. Even as I type this GameSpot
has a leaderboard ad at the top of the page for Java.com.

Looking at my own main ad server on Worfolk Online, it doesn’t even
have a traditional banner section. The only things on it are
leaderboards, skyscrapers and a few other select ads which are a weird
size designed for specific sites. Which reminds me I should add
something new to Frinks.

My time at the moment is split between a few things though. Two of the
main ones being Gamer Forge which I am trying to keep up with writing
new content for and a new project that I have underway named Blair
Space. Ya know, I am going to start posting this on both my blogs, it
is long enough.

Anyway I spent some time this morning developing new advert creatives.
I finally got round to doing a leaderboard ad for Gamer Forge though
that was simple. My real work today was doing leaderboards for Judging
Amy .info
and Resident Evil Now. Image blending and such always looks
good.

The best laid plans of mice and men

Saturday, December 11th, 2004 | Life

Wow, today was not what I was expecting. I headed into town to have a little look round and ended up coming home with my soon to be Christmas present in the back of the car. The aforementioned item being an electric guitar.

I have wanted one for a while (like 10 years though never enough to actually buy one) until now that it is, so in preparation for the holiday season which is quickly approaching, I settled on getting this Frontman pack thing from Music Ground.

The pack (which was £200 in total which is pretty good for store retail prices) comes with a Fender Squire guitar, 15 Watt amp (or so I think), strap, wires and some book and CD to teach you how to play. I also got an automatic tuner and soft carry case on top of that.

Now begins the random order spreeing for accessories. I ordered Guitar for Dummy’s from Amazon which was pretty cheap although I couldn’t get super saver deliver and I also ordered some rubber plectrums of eBay as they are superior apparently. Bah, looks like my shopping addiction is back.

By the way, the title of the post refers to another incident of todays town visit. While shopping for my mum, I went to get this bracelet. Which they had lost all copies of. So after an extensive search they took the one out of the display cabinet. Now began the search for a box for it. The best laid plans hu?

Audio Senate is back baby

Monday, December 6th, 2004 | Life

Oh yes! It has been months. It was May / June when the great server fell leaving many sites including Audio Senate without their databases. For months (literally 6 months) I tried to get them restored. Long story short it didn’t happen. But I did manage to get hold of the Audio Senate and the lyrics ones manually.

So after a few hours last night and a few more this morning I finally managed to fix the main Audio Senate one. There is still more database restoring to do but this is a great step forward. Because I can sit back and tazer people if they fail to return.

Of course how Audio Senate will go remains a mystery. Chances are it is going to take a lot of work to get it going again although it already has 255 members so being the biggest forum on the Worfolk Online network (Buffy Talk is catching up though) it is good for making up numbers.

Speaking of stats and numbers, this changes the top 10 forums list. It pushes Gamer Forge off the list meaning that the bottom of the top 10 has over 10 members. Buffy Talk is now second and Fallen Nation is third. I need to publish a report about this.

Multi reference quoting cartoons

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004 | Life

Ok, even I didn’t know where I was going with this title. But there is an important point here. Ya see, even the most shallow low brow humour cartoons these days seem to have a deeper layer. I mean in Family Guy series 3 alone there are references to American Beauty and the Breakfast Club – how many kids are going to have seen those?

Another example is from the Simpsons, where Homer goes to buy illegal fireworks and tries to act cool (in the episode where he is staying that Ned Flander’s beach house). That quote is actually a reference.

"Let me have one of those porno magazines… large box of condoms… a bottle of Old Harper… a couple of those panty shields… and some illegal fireworks, and one of those disposable enemas. Eh, make it two."

The quote is a reference to American Graffiti which was releaded in 1973 (again how many kids are going to have seen that) directed by George Lucas – it was really his breakthrough movie, winning him his first Golden Globe. Anyway to compare quotes, the one from Toad in American Graffiti:

"ok yeah, let me have err, a Three Musketer’s and a ball point pen, one of those combs there, bottle of Old Harper, a couple of flashlight batteries and beef jerky."

Google comes to the rescue

Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 | Life

The day has arrived – I finally found a practical use for Google’s Desktop Search. After having it installed for like a month and using it a total of half a dozen times to which it never returned any useful results I have finally used it and been sucessfully. Maybe it is not such a waste of space after all.

Don’t get me wrong though, a month and one sucessfully usage is far from great especially considering I have to have an application running in the background and sitting in my system tray. But at least it is a step forward.

The problem actually began last night when I saved a text document, in what I thought was Desktop. Well I can only presume that’s what I thought, I don’t really remember. Anyway when I came to find the text document this morning it wasn’t there.

I was about to start trawling through all my locations when I remembered Google Desktop. So I opened the page up and ran a search for some text I knew was in the document. And the text document came up sitting in the root of my hard drive. Cool :).

A bad day in peace town

Saturday, November 27th, 2004 | Life

Well I don’t actually live in peace show and to be honest I don’t even know what REM were refering to when the sang about what a bad day they had, had. But the end result or to be more precise the point is that my day as been far from the greatest day ever. Which sucks because I love Saturday.

This morning I was excited – a day of filming ahead of me. Due to certain cancellations though this never occured. So I decided to head off into town in which I blew almost £20 on DVDs. So, so far I have wasted a day and lots of money.

The latter part of the afternoon I spent in an argument with myself about the theory behind appologises. It was quite interesting but never the less I don’t like arguging with myself as half of me is always the loser (although of cause it is always the half of me playing devils advocate as my opinion is never wrong).

Then this evening I spend some quality time a party. I put in an appearance as it was an 18th though I really don’t like parties. I could write a whole other post on this. You see, the idea as far as I can make out is to talk to your friends. And then to make it a real party you play load music so nobody can here what each other is saying. As you can guess I am the type of person who can be found outside where actual conversation is able to take place.

Also the route home was filled with chava’s. Out of intrest, I saw a DVD or book or something in HMV named "chav!" which annoys me. Being a chava is not something to celebrate, they are not a welcome part of our society! That is another post that I could fill with content.

Still things are getting better or so I hope. I am cooking waffles and the Joe Schmo Show is about to start. Is it coming to DVD, it is a great show, I highly recommend that you check it out.

Time shall forever stand

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 | Life

Hmm well it is going on a month since anyone last posted on Nerd Federation. So much for rawpulse’s weekly post. Anyway I thought I should post something, I need to learn to post things before I have a total essay to post on the site. What with all the other blogs I have set up to compliment my other sites my blogging time for Nerd Federation has been restricted a little.

I have loads of video to edit together for Nerd Federation although it doesn’t look like that is going to happen any time soon or even ever. Still I have bigger things on my mind. Like my doom for instance as I have my driving test tommorow. I am remaining upbeat and positive although I expect to fail, more people fail first time than pass. Plus I will come up with some fake excuses too. Oh well, see you when I next check in.

Nothing to do with Everybody Loves Raymond

Monday, October 25th, 2004 | Life

The clock of doom continues to count down with now less than 15 hours. But anyway I am sure I will get plenty more random comments in before the end of this post. Ya know, as my hand reached out from my bed this morning to put on some music while I got up I realised how messed up my playlist is. It currently goes from Britney to Nirvana. Still, it stabilises at the end with Smashing Pumpkins.

One other thing recently occurred to me. I mean it is something I always knew but it was only put into context a day or two ago – hit and runs are wrong if you hurt somebody. It is an obvious point but I never really thought about it until recently when I realised that if you do run somebody over you shouldn’t just drive off. You should either help them or finish the job.

Speaking of driving, I have a lesson this afternoon. I have this one and two more before my test so considering I have failed all three of my mock tests it is not looking so good. I started to have my doubts already everyone else seems to think go for it. Confidence has never been my strong point although I don’t think nerves will be my undoing considering there is hard evidence in the form of 5 failure points that it may be my driving at fault.

What else is there to talk about? I have a good old to-do list which I mentioned in my video blog post yesterday although I did get round to adding a third item to it – the third item was to make this Nerd Fed post though so that is pretty much done. As for other preparation for tomorrow, I was planning to find out where all my baby photos were so I could burn them although I am not sure where they are.

My random projects on the net are going well, however. Particle Soft, the new company from myself and Ceon is going strongly; we now have 2 products out on the web – Particle Blogger and Particle Whois, both of which are now listed on Hot Scripts and if Particle Whois is accepted onto ScriptSearch.com they will both be on that too. And one day Particle Board 2.0 will come out! 😉

One thing on writing this has occurred to me though – despite the fact that Particle Soft’s most popular product, myself and Ceon both use pLog (ie this) to blog. I mean we do have a good reason – Particle Blogger launched a few days ago and we started blogging back in July so we do have an excuse. Although no matter what the reason is, it might still be a little discouraging lol.

Favicon added

Saturday, October 16th, 2004 | Life

Well after that last ramble I best keep this one short. I thought it was about time that Nerd Federation got a shortcut icon (favourites icon) as blogs are after all for the most part crazy experiments of web technology so anyway I draw a nice simple design up. It’s not great but it will do a for a start I think. It’s not added into the code so your browers need to pick it up automatically. Not too much of a problem for us Mozilla users :D.

In other news I am currently watching The Cell as I mentioned in my previous posts. I thought it was some wierd drama at first but now I have started to watch it, it has some cool sci-fi elements and also the backstory to all the sci-fi stuff is kind of like a Without a Trace style thing which is pretty cool. Nobody really knows what is going on but that makes it more entertaining ;).