Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I think the blog title says it all. Here I am trying to write a news story and I am distracted by things like an article describing Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a comedy drama show. I mean, have they even seen the series? Sure it can be funny but there is no way that could ever be classed as a comedy drama.

Check the article out on Kentucky.com. Paragraph 3: what’s with that. Buffy is SF (speculative fiction). You can extend the genre to teen, maybe even stretch it all the way to drama. But comedy drama? Let’s get serious here people.

Speaking of Buffy, we are still looking and hoping for new life. There was talk of a Dawn the Vampire Slayer spinoff – pure rumour as far as anyone could make out. But apparently the Buffy the animated series is back in production so that should be something to look forward to.  Providing it’s pulled of well, but I’m not sure it’s even possible for Joss to do something badly, the original Buffy movie excluded.

As for talking Buffy there is only one place to do it: BuffyTalk.com. I say that not just to plug but because it still is an active community with new posts every day and new members signing up regularly. Including you: do it now!

Currently I consider them both to suck. Let’s start with the weather. We have plans tommorow and something could actually get done – everything is going to plan and then tonight it begins to violently thunder and lightening and now it’s started to rain. Plus I have loads of computer equipment that could get damaged by surges. Luckily my laptop is now producted by a Belkin Surger Master.

As for Nero, all I want to do is backup my files. First of all though when I booted up Nero Express it doesn’t appear to let me switch to CD mode from DVD mode. I would like to see it fit 4GB on my CD. So I finally did it through Smart Start and it keeps crashing.

Hopefully I can get it working and spent tonight doing some quality video encoding. Meh I might just switch my laptop off actually. That way I will actually be able to sleep rather than being kept awake by the less than quite fan. And Nero is still trying to add those files.

My escape is currently Dead Ringers but it only has 8 minutes left and it is either a repeat or they are majorly using old footage. I will go with repeats. There must be some stuff on at 10 but things will not be right again until QI returns.

Although it’s not actually the deepest debate, I got thinking about whether internet shopping is the way forward. Also I needed a main focus for my blog as otherwise it was going to have a title that involved the word ramble. And we don’t want go get to a point where my post contains waffle as a certain person would put it and later Gary Flockton when parody it ;). Those were the days.

But today we have moved on – to things like internet shopping. Considering I rarely leave my house it seems sensible I could just order my things online and have them delivered, it’s not like I am going to miss it. It saves me having to go out to the shops. Or normally it would save my parents. But oh no, a £3.50 delivery charge is too much to bare. Meh, not my problem I guess.

What else did I want to talk about? BTW I am talking to myself there. Oh yes mysterious traffic. Do people actually read Nerd Federation? I have finally managed to get into the stats as they tended to die in Firefox but for some reason IE worked fine. 44 visitors yesterday. No bots although before that we got some including Google and I think 2 others. 2 referals from Google too although no keywords – wierd.

Perhaps it’s just us hopping along to post stuff though. It’s easily conceivable that we make 10 page views per post. 4 posts per day could
account for all the page views. Of course the sensible thing would be
to move my eyes less than an inch to the left to look at the visitor
count but I won’t be doing that.

I was looking for the meanings of some songs recently I noticed there are virtually no sites out their with song means like lyrics sites. It’s probably due to lyrics being a lot more readily available and popular than meanins but I see a gap for a potential new website there. With that in mind I set about thinking how I can adapt my existing lyrics database to do it.

What I would normally do to list artists and albums, etc would be to use distinct. But that would mean I could only get one column out of the database and I need to check to see if there is anything in the meanings column as for most of the songs in the lyrics database, there won’t be. The problem is that distinct check all columns listed not just the first.

On looking around for the answer, the best thing I could find is located here, on the SitePoint Forums. I am hoping it will do what I want – select everything from the database but only where there is a unqiue artist name.

select * from yourtable where lastnamein ( select lastname from yourtable group by lastname having count(*) > 1 )

Looks crazy to be but I am willing to give it a go. I will keep you posted on how it turns out.

Crazy McCrazySon. Now there is a guy who knew about stuff. But anyway let’s get on with this post. Last night (and to an extent this morning) I was watching Coyote Ugly on ITV1. I regret my decision to video Law & Order: Special Victims unit instead of it but I guess this way I can justify buying it on DVD :D.

I spent some quality time writing reviews for the movie. You can see the first one I did on Review Machine movies and the second one I did is splashed over the Emo Movies homepage – yep, that’s right, I actually updated Emo Movies. For only the second time in history lol.

Maybe I can catch it on video next time it’s on. This isn’t the first time ITV1 have shown it, they had it on a few months ago, but I missed it last time. Oh well, I needed to spin out a final paragraph which I think worked out well ;). Cool movie.

Nerd Federation is on the grow :). Not only do we have posts and everything now but also this post marks the first one in August – we now have an archives section for July! Oh yes, these are the days people, these are the days. And speaking for today it has been pretty good even if I didn’t get up until 10. Though I do regret last night’s video choices – more on that some other time.

The end result of the activities from last night anyway is that I ended up in imdb.com, looking through the filmography of John Goodman. He has done loads of voices but perhaps his most famous roll was in the Flintstones. One other film I fould he was in was a 1984 release called Revenge of the Nerds. With a title like that I just had to find out more.

The basic plot summary seems to be that a bunch of nerds are getting picked on and bullied and so form their own fraternity to fight back against the jocks with high tech weaponry and tactics. Kind of like in Malcolm in the Middle where the geeks guild that pie slinging thing with Stevie’s telescrope.

I headed onto Play.com to have a look for it and discovered there is a sequel too – £10 will score you Revenge of the Nerds 1 & 2. If you want to buy me a copy it’s available from Play.com and Amazon.

Well now, it seems that certain things are going fairly well. Sure it is raining outside and I am hungy but there are more important issues at hand – for instance, last night I burned Book of Vegans: Blair Wiccan II and the original Blair Wiccan Projectto a special boxset style DVD featuring all 3 commentaries. The only thing that was left off was the Blair Wiccan Project commentary, deleted scenes and outtakes which I shall try to find today.

Even above that though is the development on Frinks. This new web portal will take over from M World / Rawice as the central portal for Worfolk Online like MSN is to Microsoft and drawing all Worfolk Online’s content together, in one place with static type content to maximize our traffic from search engines. The news and weather sections are already complete.

Worfolk News is also getting a make over so that it can have a white background rather than the bright orange one it has covering the entire page at the moment. I would like to see Worfolk News in Google News some time this summer so I think as well as plenty of news we need a site that looks presentable. I want to launch that some time in August.

Tommorow after all is August – which means that from tommorow, posts on Nerd Federation will be archived under August 2004, instead of July 2004 . We will have ourselfs a real archive! I think it is an exciting day for all of us.

I think, to a certain extent, I am waiting for the inevitable. When will we get bored of posting on Nerd Federation and simply go off and do something else? Although the word “we” is probably a bit strong. Other than my posts, the total count for everyone else numbers up to the high about of one. Still, maybe more life will be pumped in if the forums ever return.

Still I would like to think Nerd Federation can keep going for a while. If it can be sustained for a month or two, at least then it cannot be classed as a phase, it will be more of a long term project. But the most important thing is the archives building up as each new month adds a link to the list on the left of the homepage. And isn’t having a cool archives list what all websites are about.

Sustainabilty is a big issue for my web development at the moment, though. My new Michelle Branch Planet website will hopefully begin to gain traffic thanks to several new bits of information being published each day. However this constant updating needs to be sustained if I am to make the site really popular.

It is the same for Maze Radio also. I can see nobody else is really that bothered so there is little chance the show can be made daily. But weekly is the very limit of what we need if the site is to ever become popular. And considering they are only 15 minute shows I’m not sure that will be enough. I need a new project, TV Forge perhaps.

Well well, it is only 15 minutes until the new series of Law & Order that has been totally ruined by a new theme tune, opening sequence and random changing of cast. Oh well at least I can catch the last 15 minutes of Friends on E4 plus 1. Meh, I am still longing for the next episode of One Tree Hill but that is still 6 days away! How can anyone wait that long? I haven’t felt this way since the O.C.

So anyway my plan for today was to head into Crossgates and search for some recordable media. But as my order didn’t get dispatched until quite late it was too late by then and I didn’t want to go until it had been. Still it has now so hopefully it will arrive tommorow and I can spend the afternoon getting the media. That or sleeping, sleeping is good too.

Ok, what else can I complain about? I am working on Frinks yet again with Frinks mark 5 the versions just keep coming hu? I am moving Frinks and Worfolk Online over to a new server although I am having problems making remote connections to the server. Plus I still need some of my databases restored on the old server. Bah!

I have been searching for some ways to get RSS feeds. After ignoring the technology for quite a while, I finally decided I should delve into the world of RSS, I am a nerd after alll. So I headed off to a number of sources including SitePoint and CNet to get some information, software and other such things that I would need.

Having tried one though I destroyed Firefox with it refusing to open when I tried to run the application. Not the best start. I was also going to try the Firefox favourites type plugin although it is only available for 0.7 and 0.8. I am running 0.9 so I didn’t want to risk it. My third alternative was Sharp Reader or something, which required the .net framework which has never ended well when I previously installed it.

The reason I really got started with it as I noticed Yahoo Groups were now offering RSS feeds. I had noticed it before but now I actually wanted to use them to allow me to get access to all the latest Michelle Branch news and discussions for my new site, Branch Planet.

Still, I am sure a solution will randomly turn up. I was tempted by the one that is intergrated with Outlook Express although I always find that place depressing and can never keep on top of all the emails I get.