Monthly Archive for December, 2005

So this is Christmas…

Published on 28/12/2005 in everything. 2 Comments

And what have we done? All sorts of silly things!

Silly thing #1 was turning off the heating here before I went to spend Christmas with my parents. It has been three hours and still this place burns me with its bitter cold!

Silly thing #2 was spending over three hours walking around Derbyshire after midnight on the 23rd. Dude, that was cold.

Was it silly to spend almost all of boxing day reading pirated comics? I really don’t like to pirate comics, but I got some Runaways for Christmas and I just needed to know how it ended, you know? Well, actually I got issues 7,8 and 9 of volume 2, so I really needed to know how it started. Then when I was gushing about it to Animal he suggested I go read Invincible (which I gather is done by someone Scott Kurtz kind of likes?), and that was pretty hot. I also caved completely when I head the next volume of Y: The Last Man is called “Girl on Girl” so I got that too >.<

So in conclusion: I am weak-willed, predictable and a bad pirate. I get it, I’m sorry. Well, actually I’m a pretty good pirate (always seed up to 1:1, children!), I’m just a bad person for being a pirate…

Oh, and I totally got a pair of manties for Christmas. Maybe I’ll post some pics if you’re lucky…

Yays!

Published on 24/12/2005 in everything. 1 Comment

Just wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas, and tell Bob that he is very special. (in the space cadet sense :P )

*waves at Bod*

it has not escaped my notice

Published on 21/12/2005 in everything. 2 Comments

It seems that around two thirds of the people who wander over to this particular fetid corner of the intarweb are still using Internet Explorer. Man, what?

Sure, you all seem to be using the latest version, but that’s not really any excuse. Seriously, give some thought to how this is impacting your web-browsing experience, man.

I mean, you know when you click a thumbnail in the gallery there and some weird little empty box appears? You think I can’t write javascript? You think it looks like that because I’m some sort of goddamn retard? That is not how it ought to be: your browser is broken!

And shit, whatever you do, don’t go to Matt’s site until you’ve gone got yourself a respectable browser. He’s all “fuck IE, too much effort”. At least I made the main blog layout work OK for you kindly, backwards folk.



Let me know if I missed any
good ones, mmmkay?

Respectable browsers:
- Omniweb
- Firefox
- Mozilla
- Opera
- iCab
- Konqueror
- erm….
- that’s it?

Oh, and mac users? Why the hell are so many of you guys still using Safari build 312? I’m pretty sure that’s the version that ships with Tiger, right? Dude, do your mac a favour and fire up software update right now: all manner of improvements await!

I love it when a plan comes together!

Published on 15/12/2005 in everything. 0 Comments

What do you mean you’ve never read
Y the Last Man?

And boy, has it come together!

The picture gallery is complete, combining some sexy server and client-side scripting to give you all sorts of dynamic-ness . It’s probably also the nicest way to look at porn in a browser ever.

Likewise all skinned and twiddled with is the chess thing. There’s 8 users on there, including myself, and I’ve got 5 games going, which I guess makes me a bit of a nerd? I dunno. It’s not dynamic, by the way, more a sort of postal-chess that will persist for days and you refresh the page to see if the other guy moved yet. It can also do email notification, but I didn’t reckon anyone would be up for that.

Speaking of chess, I picked up book 5 of Y the Last Man yesterday, which rocks all sorts of hard, and I now know that ancient chessboards never used to have a queen, oh no. They had a vizier, which could move one square at a time diagonally. When the Europeans picked it up they souped-up the vizier and it got re-named to “queen” because queens were the big noise in Europe at the time, or something.

Oh, and by the way. Snow Patrol totally put out a pair of great albums before they hit the big-time with Final Straw in 2004. 1999 gave us the jam-packed 68-minute Songs for Polar Bears and 2001 heralded the rousing When It’s All Over We Still Have To Clear Up. Seriously, you should go check them out. I did, and it made me a happier, more balanced person.

It’s amazing how they’ve grown on me, really. I remember listening to Final Straw shortly after it was released, when everyone and their brother was raving about them only to find them kind of samey and well, sort of pale, if that’s a word that can describe a sound. Listening to it now though I can see that I was clearly on LSD and missing a large part of my frontal lobes which I have since regained.

D.I.Y (Dodgy flat packed furniture, and the hazards thereof)

Published on 14/12/2005 in everything. 1 Comment

Well it’s no secret that I’m usually the man of the house (such is the burden of living in a household where people are either lazy, incompetent, or hardly ever home XD) but last night I encountered an issue that I think deserves a rant.

I’ve never had a problem constructing furniture before, so I didn’t think twice about undertaking the task of building this very simple book case you see before you. In theory, you should be provided with enough wooden boards, with ready-made screw holes, and all you have to do is screw them in. Well, that’s the /THEORY/. Not one of the screw holes in this book case was aligned properly. That’s right, not a single solitary one. So you can imagine the fun I had forcing 1.5” screws into solid blocks of wood, aided with nothing but a screwdriver (and each shelf requires 8 screws) So not only was this painful after a while, but it was also tedious, as I had to keep tightening each screw a little and then moving on, to make sure I didn’t accidentally warp the wood. So here I am consuming my millionth cup of coffee, not having slept in 38 hours, sporting a variety of rather unpleasant injuries. (Before you ask, I didn’t spend /all/ 38 hours building the book case, I just thought it would be clever to start it at 4am, thinking it would only take 10minutes. By the time I was ready to go to bed, I had to be up again~ -_-)

So here’s the offending hand. Several tender bruises (in various trendy shades of black and red) a blister on my palm which makes driving very unpleasant, and a 10 x 3mm chunk of skin missing from my index finger. The latter of which I don’t mind so much, as it gives me an excuse to wear one of the cool piratey plasters Trebius bought me. (Thanks again for those ^_~)

There’s a lesson to be learnt from all this; Never buy cheap flat packed furniture. (Or at least, get someone else to build it for you) Are you busy on Friday, Bob?

On Christmas!

Published on 14/12/2005 in everything. 2 Comments

I do not approve of this .\/.

Ok, so this is my first rant in ages, and I’m going to go all Scrooge on your asses. ~ <3

I’m all for the Christmas Spirit an’ all, but why, oh why, would you ever want to deface your property with something like this? It’s hideous! (particulatly the musical ones) You can’t go anywhere in this town without coming across at least 15 of them. In fact, yesterday I almost hit a pedestrian due to being distracted by two flashing houses in immediate succession, one of which had a 15ft inflatable snowman in the front garden~


Nor do I approve of this >.<

What I’d really like to know though, is how on earth people can afford it. Aside from the initial cost of buying these things, you then have to power them all from the moment it gets dark until the moment it gets light. The paper their electricity bills are printed on is likely to be about the size of a small tree~ o.O I’m actually rather fond of those cascading lights, and the occasional neon-looking strip, but everything in moderation. Is it really necessary to create a permanent Christmas disco on your doorstep? Perhaps I’m just not in the festive zone right now, or something. >.>;

Speaking of which, I was asked the other day by my parents what I want as a gift. Now usually one asks for a DVD, a CD, or perhaps some jewellery. I was the only person in my entire family to request a secondary hard-drive. Does that make me weird? My mother is yet to notice that I replaced the angel on the top of her tree with a silver cone and a ping-pong ball with a smiley face drawn on it. ~XD