Archive for April, 2006

I ended up on Tickle just now after Fran sent me an email (one of those invite you’re friends to take this test too things). I haven’t been on Ticke for ages – to show you the length of time it has been, it was still called eMode when I joined ;).

So anyway, here are the results I got…

Your Unconscious Mind Is Most Driven by Reserve.

You approach the world with reserve because unconsciously, and perhaps consciously, you like to be in control. You keep your emotions to yourself and you may seem mysterious or enigmatic to others. You’re often very cautious about truly expressing yourself.

Even people who have known you for some time may find it hard to get close to you. Your psyche is very deep and rich; the more you learn about it, the more you will understand who you really are…

While I don’t heed particuarly significance to this, I do accept that by personality profiling they can achieve some results (unlike horoscopes) and I do think what some of what it says is true but then that’s nothing really I couldn’t have told you myself beforehand :p.

I love YouTube, it’s cool. The people however, are not. There are so many assholes on there! I go round looking at videos and see comment after comment saying “what the hell is this crap?” You don’t like it, don’t watch it! Maybe rate it down but why do you have to throw abuse?

Personally, I delete the abusive comments posted on my videos but a lot of people leave them on. I’m thinking of just disallowing comments on my videos.

It’s just not abusive comments, it’s just generally crappy comments too. When the 5th person posts “wooh, that’s my sister!” on a video it’s just stupid. They are clearly just posting crap for the sake of it.

So yeah, I’m not a fan of the community on YouTube. It has the wrong element on it shall we say.

The new .eu domains are selling well. Over 1.3 million have now been registered since going live just before the weekend. (But don’t quote me on this as the stats are not particuarly clearly explained so it could be talking about a larger period of time :p).

Panorama are doing a thing about whether old people can work as well as young people by comparing a 1949 Land Rover with a 2006 one. Not that I am saying that old people can’t work as well as young people, I think the greater experiance allows them to work just as well, if not better. But this comparission is biased BS.

Yeah, maybe the 1949 Land Rover can get through the muddy track as well as the 2006 model but then, this is 2006, who actually uses it for that? The new Land Rovers are more about comfort and looking cool (because that’s what the target audience really want). If you compare the sound system and air conditioning of the 2006 model and the 1949 model, there would be no competition. I very much doubt the 1949 model actually has those.

I agree with a lot of what the documentary is saying in that there is age descrimination but I think the documentary is just BS.

I also want to talk a bit about religious discrimination. Apparently the new laws prohibit discrimination in employment on grounds of religion or belief. Belief? Come on, if someone has a belief that you should kill people for sport, can I discriminate against that? That’s awful language for an act or if it actually means that, then it’s just retarded. Of course you should be able to discriminate against such a belief.

However I read over this page on Direct.gov.uk which explained a lot to me. It basically said that businesses don’t really have to make allowances for religion if it affects their business. While I wouldn’t just rule out things like giving time off for religious holidays, etc, you can’t let it damage your business.

The thing is though, when I start hiring people, say content writers for websits and such, they are going to need to write from an Encorian perspective. Of course, if someone of a different religion was fine with that (which they should be, it’s just a job) then I wouldn’t have a problem with that but what if they did and refused to do it? Obviously, they wouldn’t get the job but could I get hit for discrimination for that? I clearly shouldn’t be.

One of the problems with WordPress 2.0 (compared to 1.5) is the lack of ability to choose you’re thumbnail size. So if you really want to see this you’re just going to have to click the thumbnail.

It’s the holding page that appears while YouTube was offline for a roll-out, I found it fairly amusing.

I don’t feel I am panicing enough that bird blue has now reached the UK. I mean, I heard about it like two days ago but I haven’t really thought about it. I mean, who is going to spread the panic around Leeds if I’m not doing it?

Speaking of panic, I’m guessing Sarahann is running round screaming at the moment. Although as long as they don’t have birds in Cumbria she should be fine for the moment.

But yeah, we are clearly all going to die, it’s just a matter of time.

I’m giving the old podcasting a go with the new Celeb Storm Blog. It’s a video podcast dealie which is just basically me talking to the camera but some celeb photos and such stuck in every now and then to relate to what I’m talking about.

I’ve choosen to host the videos with YouTube and embed them into my posts although I’m also going to offer my own hosted video for the podcast URIs. At the moment though it’s in Windows Media Video format so I think I am going to re-encode it in something else to make it more accessable. What’s the best video format to use for a podcast? I don’t seem to be able to encode into MPEG-4.

Before it’s completely up and running I need to work out what I’m doing about my podcast feed, set up the subscription buttons and such on the right hand side menu, make sure my YouTube video is working, sort out the video encoding format and then get promoting it.

Went to Star tonight. We had been planning it for a while, since the last Wendy House really. Craig and Fonze bailed in the evening though so I was debating whether to go myself. In the end I resolved to go and walked down to the bus stop. The bus was late (that or it never actually showed) but John came past as his dad was dropping him in town so I got a lift with him.

We spent some time in Fab Cafe (myself, John, Lunn, Andy P and Ashley Banks) which wasn’t bad – they had Transformers on the TV dealie :D. We hung round there a bit as it was raining and then headed into Star. I was disappointed there though. The £1 Star Spit drink things were cool but I wasn’t a fan of the music, even the indie room seemed to lack any flair for me.

So I decided there was no point me hanging around if I wasn’t going to enjoy myself and left at 12:35. That way I could get the bus at 1:10 which would be way cheaper than a taxi, even if we were splitting one (although I think it’s on-peak prices as I paid £2 for my ticket). The gap was to give me time to go down to Subway and speak to George who was doing the night shift there. So on the plus side, the Subway was good :p.

I think I’m giving up hope on Star though. I was hoping to run into someone from uni but no such luck. I did run into Big Ash, Andy Bob, Little Ash and Arthurs though. But anyway, I think my resolve to go to Friday Flock has now loosened, that’s down to a maybe. Although Sarahann is back on Tuesday so that’s good news.

Well, sort of. My sister asked me to drive her into town which I said I would so I took her down towards the building college because I know how to get in and out of town that way and while I’m a good driver, I’m not good with navigation. It’s not that I can’t do it, it’s that I’m neurotic and really like to know that someone knows where we are and where we are going.

However, the road was blocked off which I would loop round to return on so I had to go the other way which was a one way system which ended up landing me on Meanwood Road. I didn’t know this at the time though so I classify this as lost as I knew pretty much where I was I just didn’t no what roads and such I needed to take to get back to where I wanted to be. After a quick phone call to my dad we managed to work out where I was and I managed to find my way back (after the phone call, I stopped and turned my engine off because I’m a good driver who doesn’t endanger others by talking on their phone just in case any of you were thinking differently :p).

I think more interestly though it gave me a chance to think on my feet. While it wasn’t particuarly successful, it was a first step. Although at this rate I will have GPS because I have a nice secure footing :p.

Ok, I’m going to warn you now, this post is one of those that just re-counts the previous days events in one big list with much added detail of course but I can see how it could easily just turn into one continuous and not so interesting story. It’s my blog and I’m going to write it anyway, it’s you’re choice whether you read it or not.

Yesterday was Fonze’s birthday. I knew but I’m not sure anyone else did :p. Lunn didn’t. To be fair though, if you’re not a) registered on FaceBook and b) have you’re birthday listed on there then how are we supposed to remember? We’re the information age generation and therefore have no need for memory. As a consequence we have pretty much lost most of it.

So yeah, we kicked the events off yesterday with a movie – Ice Age 2. There were 10 people in the cinema (and only one of them was a kid!). It wasn’t that much busier when we came out. We decided to follow that up with pool and I decided to brave the Met’s union (this is after Fonze’s second visit to McDonalds) as I was wearing my Leeds Uni hoodie so I thought at least I will annoy some people :D.

It was locked though, I don’t know if you have to go through the main building or whatever but I thought screw this and walked up to my union which has doors you can actually get into. After beating Fonze we headed back into town and had his parents pick us up and go for bowling.

We went to LA Bowl who had no lanes :D. So we ended up going to AMF Bowling and had two games. I came second both times (indeed the order both times on our lane was Fonze’s dad, myself, Lunn and then Fonze) and I broke 100 both times! Maths Chris would be proud :p.

We were hanging around there a little while after (myself, Fonze and Lunn) as we were planning to hit a club when we ran into Andy Phillips. We ended up going to Fab for about two hours which is a pretty cool place. We then headed out to find a club.

There was a conspiracy against us though. My original plan was to take us to Bar Risa for Indie Rox. It’s a student night which is what we were looking for. But when we got there they weren’t running it!

Plan number two, Cockpit. Lunn actually just wanted to hit a bar by this point (he moans a lot :D) but me and Fonze were up for clubbing. We got down to Cockpit but they didn’t have anything on and were closing at 11.

Plan number three, Bondi. Can’t go wrong there right? But when we got there Andy got turned away because he was wearing stealies. So basically Andy ruined the night ;). By this point Lunn had given up so we decided to get the bus home while we still could (cheaper) and wait until Star tonight to get our groove on :p.