Archive for October, 2004

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.

Well now I finally got around to a vide blog post. Although before we get into that:

Random Quote
Chris: 1930? Forget it. You’d be too late to save Lincoln and too early to save Kennedy
JD: lol
Chris: you could save McKinly
It’s not a time machine Moe 😀

Anyway onto the video:

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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 ;).

Well now, I have so much to talk about I could fill a video blog. Well if I could be bothered, which I apparently can’t. Anyway as I am waiting for The Cell to start on Channel 4 I shall fill the time with a blog post on Nerd Federation before I begin to forget all the things I wanted to talk about although to be honest, that has probably already happened.

So let’s start with the changes over at Google. Well there are two basically. Three if you count the fact that the Google CodeJam has recently finished. But I am not going to. So first things first and this involves a later point I wanted to talk about. Google has launched Froogle UK which is like a shopping search thing which now is available on the UK. There appears to be an absense of Play.com in the listings but I presume it is because they are getting started and such.

The second Google thing is that Google recently had their official launch of Google Desktop. It basically indexes your web history, emails, AIM chat logs and certain files and allows you to search through them via Google Search. It adds an extra tab on the Google homepage (bah, yet they claim they can’t fit the dmoz tab on there) which allows you to easily switch to it. The other way to do it is to click on the icon in your system tray.

I wasn’t going to install it when I first heard about it as I didn’t really think I would have any use for it although I was talking to Nick earlier tonight and he was giving it some high recommendations so I decided to give it a go. It seems to work fine and all and indexed 20-30 thousand items although I don’t really want something else sitting in my system tray so if it doesn’t prove itself useful I will probably uninstall it eventually.

Anyway moving on to other crazy topics, today I ventured into the outside world and headed to the cinema to see Resident Evil Apocalypse. I actually thought it was an awesome movie although I think the fight between (spoilers!) Alice and the Nemesis creature (how did it take Alice so long to realise it was mat 😉 degraded it a bit. The one thing I did think was excellent though was the way the cover up worked.

Basically I liked that because usually in these times of films, there are loads of examples though the only one that comes to mind is Antitrust, the evidence gets out, the corporation is busted and the big CEO guy in charge is arrested and everyone has a happy ending. But would that really happen in the real world or would the corporation get away with it? That’s why I loved the ending to the film. Although of course it is crying out for a sequel. BTW the film seems to have bombed, it was only released 8 days ago here and the total people in the cinema was 16! That said it was the 11:45 am showing and the whole cinema was pretty much tumble weed at that time.

Onto what I think is the final matter to cover in this post – I still had a gift certificate from a while back for Borders which I never used. So I headed in there and on the top floor I found a 2 DVD’s for £10 offer which I decided to take up. I had a choice of Johnny English, Titanic and White Men Can’t Jump. I was about to choose when I came accross one film hidden at the bottom of the shelf – the orginal Blair Witch Project! Awesome find considering it was such a cool film with so many extras. In the end I went for that and Titanic just to add to my emo collection :D.

I’m going to keep this post short and sweet. So much using the camcorder so much I have done quite a bit of written stuff recently. Then again I don’t want to go into media overload so written is cool. Anyway last Wednesday saw the third and final presidential debate so as has been the tradition – well what we did for episode 9, myself and Ceon did a running commentary over it for Maze Radio.

Check it out! Lol anyway I was thinking of switching Maze Radio over to the Linux server so I could set up such things as automatic updates and RSS feeds. That said I could equally do that with the Windows server. Meh, anyway check out the new show.

No I’m not talking about how much my friends check out a certain site of mine. I am actually on about the drama that is currently showing on Channel 4. From what I gather it is the first of two parts each of them around 2 hours long so they go on for a bit. The last time I watched a serious style powerful drama the Hamburg Cell which was on a few weeks to a month ago I think.

That was a pretty good drama. It took 3 years for it to come out but that is a whole different story that I talked about back yonder, well last month (it will be in the archives somwhere) and so on to the matter at hand. It would start going into details about it but then again this is a family blog or well at least we try to think it is.

Watching it actually came at the expense of Horizon but don’t go as far to think I missed it because there should be laws against missing Horizon. I actually video taped it seen as it was one or the other and I had an hour free on my video now that I have finished with the latest episode of One Tree Hill which was totally kick ass by the way.

Anyway I’m waffling and I need to save that for the remaining time I have on my law essay tommorow so I will spin out this paragraph and then flee. I didn’t really have a central point to this post, well I did, the drama, but all I really wanted to do is make sure that I had some kind of post for day on Nerd Fed. Anyway to quickly round it up, Maze Star, up to 91 articles!

Episode 2 and I have it paused a few minutes in – I thought I best head off to blog the fact that Paris Hilton is about to put a pan inside a microwave! I mean not knowing how to cook is one thing but microwaves are designed for people who are too lazy to cook like Paris. Of course it’s quite a broad range I usually microwave rather than cook – then again I know the first rule of using a microwave is not to put a pan inside.

Lesson two – when metal sparks begin to jump around your microwave, press the stop button! Don’t think that it needs another few minutes and turn the thing back on again. Well that is one lesson learned the hard way I guess. Anyway there are other things to talk about so I will move on and add in some random comments when they come up in the episode.

So anyway the process of scrolling down to this section has left me without memory of what I was going to write about. There is the final of three presidential debates on tonight which I was tempted to stay up and watch but considering it is at 2 in the morning I have opted to video it so myself and Ceon can do a running commentary for it for Maze Radio.

Also I have spent quite a qhile working on CassieNet News which has now indexed over 3,000 news stories and articles from various RSS feeds around the web. It’s quite fun experimenting with all the crazy ideas with the news display modes such as using iframes and dynamic JavaScript. Once it’s finished a may do a whole hey, how cool is this. Lol, anyway, I leave you as Paris and Nicole give a 7 year old or something a make over. It’s insane!

After explaining what I thought in short on the second presidential debate, I introduce the crazy new look of phpMyAdmin…

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Quick note before I go into my main post – I am currently watching Friends on Channel 4, it is the episode where Joey and Phoebe go for a road trip in the cab and Joey sleeps all the way through the journey and Phoebe tells him to sing as punishment. The song be begins to sing is Rock & Roll All Night by Kiss!

Anyway for the main post – there has been a serious Simpons drout ever since it left BBC2. It was awesome when they started to show it every day at 6 which was like for a year or two which was great for watching it during dinner. But then it disappeared and Sky One was the only source of Simpsons.

As I mentioned in the title though this will not be true forever though. It was last night during Father Ted when I first got the news. Straight after the break for the middle of the show began with a second or two mosaic of Mr Burns and I instantly knew that a new age was dawning with the Simpsons arriving on Channel 4.

Of course this is mainstream television and we don’t have to think – as at the end of the advert break there was SImpons footage and a big stamp saying the Simpsons on Channel 4. So I think generally yay, it is good news!

It is now a tradition – every year myself and several others randomly turn up at our school’s open evening armed with a camcorder to see what is going on. This year saw myself go with fellow Nerd Federation authors rawpulse and ceon for some footage including the video I edited together for the schools main presentation. Who knows I may even encode that for Nerd Fed one day. Anyway, check it out:

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