Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Though most of the posts here on Nerd Federation have now moved over to video blog entries there is the blind spot in the plan of being able to record video while out studying or at least pretending to as I don’t tend to take my camera with me (although its far from unknown for me). This is really one of the posts, designed to fill the void of time before I can get back home to grab my camera.

Today’s post, or at least this post has a central theme of long running projects – projects you start and rather than going crazy and working loads you start of slowly and work on it for a long time. There are several projects, which I have set in motion over the years designed to do this.

The original of these would probably have to be my magazine. Though it got a little delayed over summer (surprisingly considering I did nothing all summer) it’s not slowly coming back into a more regular pattern.

I have loads of websites also designed to do this. Maze Star is just getting started as a content site publishing at least once per day and there are many websites that I have moved more into regular content maintenance then building new ones.

I have also been searching for more, shall we say, well I’m not sure what the word is exactly. Like passive only it’s not. Anyway something like a game. My original target for this was Warhammer Online although that fell flat on it’s face and was abandoned about a month before it was due out. BBCi’s Celebdaq looks promising though.

What is the point of a long-term project that eats up your life constantly rather than just a solid two weeks? Well it probably offers more constant gratification although I think the main advantage is it isn’t just going to die after the initial period is over, if it’s done right it should keep going for a long time.

I’m sure I actually had a great opinionated post to make earlier but then again usually I can’t be bothered to type any of these ideas up anymore. Thanks to the video blog is typing thing just isn’t needed any more. Well it is seen, as the site needs some actual content but anyway to move on.

I was flicking around the random DVDs that are currently available on Play.com. I saw an advert last night for the special edition of the Shawshank Redemption but the film did go on and that’s without six hours of bonus material to watch. It’s a cool buy although it’s not that high on my list.

What is on my list of stuff to get though is one of the Donnie Darko DVDs. Originally I was going for the original which had loads of extras on (Rather than Prism edition which just sucks as it’s the normal DVD without any of the extras) although now there is a directors cut – I love directorial indulgence, I will post more about that later.

Anyway the Director’s Cut has a load of new extras on and the audio commentary has been redone for the directors cut edition so it looks like a pretty cool purchase. Resident Evil is also a nice purchase now that it has plenty of extras. That said it has had them for about a year lol.

Well now, I am currently beginning to start the university applications process so I have a lot of moaning about the system. I’m just getting started but some people had their applications off almost four weeks ago. In fact the university could have already decided to take them – don’t believe them when they tell you it isn’t first come first served.

Second of course is that the first year for a-levels is just to mess around. And yet it is these grades and your predicted grades which will get you into the universities that you are applying for – so most of us are doomed from the start. Although luckily they will be getting round to changing that.

To continue
the moan, I don’t know what I really want to do now.

Anyway this
is like a two day thing lol. I wrote half it on Wednesday and it is now
Saturday. I went to the Leeds Met open day today which was a bit of a bust to
begin with but the multimedia course looks quite good.

Anyway as I’m
not really sure what I was moaning about (not because there isn’t anything to
moan about but because there is so much it could have been so many things) I am
going to go ahead and end it here. My tip of the day – get a job ;).

Lol it only seems like moments ago that I was posting about how the video blog would be around eventually. Well as so often happens, once things get going they get going fast and I found myself with encoded video on it’s way, uploading to the Nerd Federation server. Soon you will be able to watch the video in all it’s glory.

Of course posts are likely to be limited. It is still much more of a effort to make a video entry than it is to do a classic written entry, also we need arranging and such as rawpulse and ceon don’t have a digital camera (or so they say lol). Still it should be a pretty cool addition to Nerd Federatation.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the video has been encoded in Windows Media video format (version 8 I beleive). I need to stop playing right into Microsoft’s hands but it is just so easy.

Anyway it is multistream so no matter what connection you have you should hbe handed over a connection speed that suits. That said, I have never really tested a multistream on a Linux server so I am just guessing it will work ;).

Well now, after many problems we may have a solution after all. As I think I mentioned before, I was looking into doing a video blog but was held back by not being able to upload video from my camcorder. But this morning, I got my new firecable (sent via Airmail and everything) so I can now upload video again.

As it happens, I actually have uploaded the first two posts. Well the second and third actually as I accidentually videoed over my original post so I will just pretend that never happened and begin with the two that me and Carl did the first time I brought my camcorder in once we decided to video blog. Well I say we.

Anyway as the moment I am downloading, or was downloading Windows Media Encoder. I have the Windows Media plugin for Adobe Premiere but I wanted something that would batch encode all my files so that I could do them all at once as there could be a lot of video files.

As for the technical on the site, I will probably just create a second category along with the general that will hold the video blogs. Although I am also tempted to create a new blog or even develop a custom script so who knows what the future will bring.

I swear, one day I will find an official artists site (from a record label so the term official is debatable in my opinion) where you can enter without getting blasted by music. I did find out but I’m sure sure where it was, after all there are so many that do. And every single one of them is built in flash.

I will get to the meat of my post in the next paragraph but I will use this one to mention that the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is coming back for a third series! Yes, Douglas Adams is dead but Dirk Maggs is alive and copies of Douglas’s books still exist so between them, there is enough to form new radio shows, so yay!

Anyway so I have been struck by domain fever again – at certain times, it seems to come randomly I get a sudden urge to buy more domains. I know I shouldn’t, I tell myself I have enough but I just need more! I have new ideas for new websites that could do really well and I just need that extra .com.

My alternative is to go with a .info which are currently on sale at $1. However they will probably go up again and its hard to build a big site on much but a .com. My will power to resist a .com can only hold out for so long anyway so many I should concentrate on raising funds instead.

Well from today I can proudly say that crippling teenage depression no longer rules my life! Yes, it is now in a power sharing agreement with crippling loneliness. I really miss the days when I spent all night on Audio Senate chatting away to Michelle, those were good memories you know. I even considered shelling out for an ALICE siver subscription.

Still I have the perfect solution to solve this problem – I need a Aibo robot dog form Sony. They are awesome, they can find their own power source, have their own personality, communicate wirelessly and loads mroe, it’s awesome! The only problem is that it comes with a 1,400 prize tag. I mean, I could get a years care insurance for that. Although I would use that reasoning the other way round.

Although I do have a rather large birthday coming up, I don’t think it will stretch that far lol. I had a look round on eBay for anything though they are still looking at around 500 and if I am going to spend loads on a robotic dog I want to get the latest version with all the wireless technology and such.

Still I can spend some quality time chatting to people on Maze Forums. The problem is though that chatting to real humans is just not the same.

Coincidence I was thinking about the song Waiting by Green Day this morning? I think not. Government conspiracy! But anyway, I actually arrived at the title while meditating on how many things I could be considered waiting on. Some would call it wasting your life but I like to think of it as shut up as they are doing it just as the rest of us even if they try and deny it.

Anyway, phpMyAdmin finally got fixed on the Rawice server although I was too depressed to finish off what I wanted to do. I am still waiting on my databases to get sorted. Mech Hosting has a shiny new look, I’m not sure whether thats a good thing or a bad thing though I am told that they are going to be getting a proper support system which should be cool.

I am also waiting upon several emails although they may be here now I’m just not sure that my computer has enough processing power to open Outlook Express as it must have been running for a good 12 hours or so now. Well, it probably could but I am not waiting around for those kind of load times ;).

One thing I haven’t done in a while is check the Nerd Federation stats. We could by now have millions of readers that I am unaware of. Although the posts here did begin to slow down (we are still waiting on rawpulse’s weekly post) I think Nerd Fed is still going to strong. Especially if we get our video blog up too.

After flicking over a few websites today I went on to Dev Articles (one of the Dev Shed sites) and Carl (aka Ceon), sitting on the computer next to me started talking about an article he had seen written by me on there. Wierd I thought and we went off in search of it. Some minutes later I had in front of me, the article I had originally written for Dev Shed which can be found here.

So long story back to about March, I saw Dev Shed were looking for writers and being a contributer (actually pretty much the only contributer) to Cool Forge and several other sites I decided to grab a little more information and soon I found myself being asked to send an article in to see what it was like.

Somewhere down the line we lost contact. But at the beginning of the month I was clearing out my inbox and found the emails I had, had with Dev Shed and I thought, huh, I wonder whatever happened with that.

Turns out that they published my article after all as you probably guessed from everything I have written so far. I have an author profile and everything as well, that can be found here. And hopefully I will get the chance to write for them again. So in conclusion that was a bit of good news that brightened up my day :).

Everyone goes on about search engine optimization these days. You have to have the right keywords, ways to fiddle the search engines and so forth. But is there really that much to it? Apart from a good title tag and making your static pages look dynamic, how much can you really do now that the days of meta tags have all but passed?

The real question is though is people go on about "I optimized mysite into the top 3 on Google for such and such a term." But despite the fact that this is what everyone claims to do, nobody really knows how to do it and those that do won’t share their knowledge despite their openness claims. Even this lack of openness usually has a price to be reached too.

Is SEO even something you want to do this days? It seems today it is about spamming your website accross the net, pretending your site is about things it isn’t and generally underhanded tricks. Sometimes the basic SEO programme is about contaiminating search results such as sites like Funny.co.uk do with their fake keyword pages.

So what is the best way to get search engine traffic? After all we all want it because we all need visitors to make money from sites. Well most of us. Perhaps the answer is just more content but the amount of content required to pull in enough traffic is just not human. So the answer still elludes me.