Seb's Ignored corner

It's been a while

2006-03-13T15:03:00.000Z

I'm not sure if excuses are necessary or not. I don't even know if anyone visits here anymore as it's entirely possible people have assumed I've unceremoniously moved on after a month of silence and so this could just be going out to various the various passing strangers looking for 'Woodhouse'(I would check statcounter but can't for reasons that will become apparent). It was never my intention to neglect my blog for a month but let us say I've been locked out.

My laptop has died. Maybe it hasn't and is just temporarily sick but either way it's out of commission. I could go into a long winded explanation of what happened and what it could be but frankly just thinking about it too much makes me feel tired. Basically it played up after a software update and refused to boot up after the restart. All the various different booting methods have been attempted and all have met with the same error. It's either a horrendous hardware failure or some software screwup and I tend to fluctuate between the two from day to day. I've run various diagnostic hardware tests that tell me all is well but I remain unconvinced as it bares hallmarks of several different hardware-related deaths such as a dying HD or a dodgy logic board. I'm becoming vaguely technical again and I said I wouldn't. To summarise, I eventually got a Firewire cable and was able to get crucial things off my old harddisk onto Callisto and apparently the HD is fine so I have the option of either taking my laptop to a specialist and paying a load to have it simply looked at or eventually building up the courage to format the harddrive, reinstall and hope it's not a hardware problem.

The reason all this is relevant is because I had become terribly negligent in regards to passwords etc. I was overly reliant on my stored cookies for many things Mand I couldn't quite fathom how to retrieve the raw data from the harddisk. Of course most of these accounts offered a forgotten password service but many of these were registered to an old email account which (again) I couldn't remember the password for and my hypersensitivity to security questions meant I couldn't bloody remember the answers to those either. My old physical logging of passwords and the like had become lost in all the moving so I was thoroughly screwed. It was only a matter of luck that I eventually found my old blogspot password written on some random document and thus allowing me to get in here. Many of the older things are just going to have to be left to die. My old Livejournal for instance is completely off limits to me as are some IM names and Messageboards. So as I re-register at various places, make new SNs and the like, I have to be careful I'm logging everything down carefully.

These things aside, I've been busy anyway. It is the last push afterall and graduation is not that far away. My sleeping patterns are all screwed beyond recognition. I seem to have been naively optimistic to hope that a good alarm clock was all I needed to get me back in the rhythm I had back in 2005. The problem seems to be something else. I find I can go to bed at midnight tired but will still not sleep until 4AM. Other times I will go to bed quite early and wake up at 2PM and feel incredibly guilty.

I've fallen behind with certain bits of work enough to make me panic as to whether I will get it done. Of course I am going to have to so worrying doesn't really get me anywhere. Ironically enough in typing this I realise I'm putting off working on a perplexing Hobhouse presentation for tomorrow so I should draw to a hasty close. In conclusion, Dr Wright, I am still alive and active even if not very productively. It's not nice being the new guy in a room of strangers again either...I'd forgotten what that was like.

Updates

2006-02-14T19:31:00.000Z

Today I received a letter from the English department demanding to know why I've not been attending a particular seminar (having now missed the first two seminars!) and threatening me with angry retribution if I don't explain myself pronto. It's rue that I haven't been going but I do have an explanation ready. It goes something like this:

BECAUSE I NEVER ENROLLED FOR THAT MODULE, YA FECKIN' MORON!

I may tweak it a bit to make it a little less adversarial or I may add a few bits. There's the fact that it's a second year module for instance and I'm a third year which a very cursory glance over my records would (I hope) show to be obvious. A glimpse at my records may have also revealed that I'd taken that module before a year ago and got a 2:1 (so why would I take it again a year later?). Had they acknowledged that there may possibly have been an administrative blunder then I probably wouldn't be too irritated however the stern tone of the letter which threatens to kick me out of University for generally being a little contemptible pile of mouse crap has irritated me adequately to want to do some stomping.

In other news I got the pleasure of being the individual who was able to break the news of the Official (that is until its delayed again) American release date for Advent Children on the Citadel main page. It's been a long time coming and I was particularly grateful that I happened to hit refresh on the Square-Enix Press release page when I did as it meant the Citadel got it out particularly quickly. I'm now keeping close eyes on the official North American site which is seemingly undergoing a long awaited overhaul (no content as yet but cover art for the DVD and an upgrade to the flash requirements have occurred menaing updates are probably not too far away and maybe even a few english dubbed trailers to let us know what it will sound like.

Bookwise I've been enjoying or at least getting through Last Orders. I've been told the film is good and with Ray Winston, Bob Hoskins and Michael Caine in it, I must say it sounds like the acting would be of a high standard. Sadly the University Library doesn't have it as I'd hoped they would so short of hoping that it's screened on TV (highly unlikely), I'd have to go and buy it as it's too obscure to rent I imagine. I don't think I will. I've started reading Schumpeter for MSC and it's highly tedious thus far. However because of it, I did decide to buy the Communist Manifesto. I suppose it's shaeful that as a history student, I hadn't read it. Yes, most of it has been widely debunked but at 60 or so pages long, theres not much excuse not to read this undeniably influential historical document if only for curiosity. I think it's old enough now not to have gotten me flagged up on any secret databases anyway.

I've also been endeavouring to make myself organised. I've been sleeping late the past few weeks, in some cases extremely late. I've never liked getting up in the morning but somehow managed it in the past. I've decided that the reason, or possible reason, is that I'm relying on a shitty alarm clock on my phone after my other mysteriously vanished. The phone clock is all to easy to shut up. I've been experimenting therefore. There are plenty of alarm clocks for the Mac which can be configured to play a variety of iTunes playlists or podcasts and radio shows and some are capable of waking the computer up from sleep to be able to perform such tasks and hence not needlessly waste anergy. I tried it this morning and overslept. I cursed the alarm clock until I realised that it was my own fault. Audio comes through the monitor speakers and last night I turned the monitor off >_>.

meh-mah-moo

2006-02-08T20:32:00.000Z

I've been wondering whether I should write this for a few quite a while now seeing as it's been something I've been wrapped up in for a few weeks.

It would appear that my parents are going to divorce. It would appear that way. Already I'm hesitant to say it with such certainty as to a certain extent they're slipping into that quiet stage once more where the furious arguments stop and prolonged 'talks' begin. They've appeared to be on the brink of separation countless times and yet will end up calming down after a while. I suppose I could say its just a cycle the pair have developed after 30+ years of marriage with phases of intense argument followed by prolonged periods of relative calm. However it seems to me at least that these phases have been getting worse for some time now. The arguments are more intense and more frequent even though I spend a fraction of the time at home that I used to. There were furious rows over the summer and again at Christmas. The problem between the two is a somewhat tedious tale of ancient infidelity, a boy who cried wolf situation and a decent helping of suspicious paranoia for good measure. The problem is that there is never resolution and to be frank there cannot be because neither side can do what the other needs for things to be resolved. Is one side more stubborn than the other, one side more devoid of logic? Absolutely, but this doesn't mean that its merely a matter of that one side seeing the light. It's not happened in 30 years and I can't see how it ever will.

I have of course various worries about a separation. There would be the minor inconveniences for me, caught between two parents unable to split amicably and various other things, some financial but I'm not therefore rooting for them to stay together. I've urged my mother to leave him many times. Crap, I don't know. I fear they will simply stay in this perpetual cycle simply for convenience, because to split would be too much hassle too late in their lives.

Still, the more I write, the more this feels like something that should be hidden behind a password of some description regardless of whether I've wanted to talk about it or not. Blogger doesn't allow password protection so there is little point.

With things as they are at home, I've been throwing myself into distractions as much as possible. I did my bit as mediator. Work is picking up in this final stretch of my studies which helps and I've also found other things to occupy me. I finished The French Lietenant's Woman last week and am now half way through Last Orders. Contemporary Literature is promising to be one of the more interesting English modules I've gotten involved in. Fowles's book was certainly something I enjoyed quite a bit as it plays with the narrator figure. If fiction is to give the reader that illusion of escapism where the world they read is one they can lose themselves in (certainly something you encounter in 19th century romantic literature which Fowles emulates) then the narrator is always a somewhat awkward figure. The narrator can know too much and the more the narrator knows about the many characters, their histories, actions and inner thoughts, the greater the risk that the reader begins to see it is all constructed. So the author tries to justify their narrators knowledge by suggesting some tentative link to the story or limiting their complete insight by making them only know one or two characters. Fowles doesn't do this at all, there are almost no limitations to what the narrator knows. The narrator intrudes into the novel, admits the characters never existed, gives you multiple endings and infuriatingly leads you down the garden path. The narrator becomes a complete narcissist and the reader doesn't really get any freedom.

Beyond reading this and other books, I've been finishing Starcraft again. I just did the last Protoss level and may soon have another crack at Brood Wars. I also found that the Student Union stocks Pocky strangely and so have been trying that out. Not sure whether strawberry or chocolate is my favourite just yet.

One thing that has been passing through my head these past few months is what to do come graduation, now only a few months away. I don't really have any immediate plans, I don't have a career plan or even vague notion really. A tutor suggested charity work overseas which I contemplated for all of 15 minutes. It must be the generic personal tutor suggestion to all these graduates that still don't know what they want to do. I had been planning that immediately after graduation i would move back home and find what I wanted to do from there. Now I'm less sure though what with things seeming less certain anyway, I have been contemplating staying in Leeds somehow. Finding a job and place to live quickly and then...I don't know. It's probably just a sudden aversion to going back home again and this feeling I'd end up in an atmosphere I loathe. Any nostalgic sentiments I had been putting together these past few months about home have ultimately shown themselves to be false. Why live in Leeds though? There isn't much to keep me here really, only the fact I know the place.

I don't know what to do.

Name that thang

2006-01-16T16:23:00.000Z

First of all, don't ask me why I did this. I got my new computer set up and I'm happy with it in a very unmanly way (with some little exceptions). I've been transferring bookmarks, wallpapers, installing extensions and all that kind of fun stuff but I wanted to find little projects to do. I was taking pictures of my room for a thread and I decided to piss about on photoshop with one
So...

This is the mission people

This target needs to be identified...okay, I can't keep the drill sergeant thing going. I want to name my new computer, well the hard drive as it appears on the desktop. Years ago I named the old Performa 'Boris'. When I got my laptop, I named it Errol and now I need to name this one. In the past I've gone for cute and odd little names, the kind of things you'd name your child if you were really malicious but wanted plausible deniability if anyone actually accused of it. I can't think of a name this time though and so I figured I'd open it up and ask other people for suggestions. Think of it as a competition if you want...just with no actual 'prize' as such. Well there is a prize, the honour of having your entry immortalized on my desktop. You can enter as many names as you like (within reason).

Oooop

2006-01-12T12:56:00.000Z

First a little explanation. My fathers name is David Barker. He is 58. He also lives near Sheffield. It's surprising how many people seemed to have memorized these facts about him and remembered as soon as they saw the news in which the death of this poor guy got beamed nationwide after the breakdown company made a massive faux pas. Most acquaintances seem to have had the tact to ask other people in a better position to know if my dad had snuffed it on the motorway but a few were confident enough in their closeness to actually ring here and offer their condolence. I fielded the first call whilst my father was out and it was indeed something of a shock that some guy from Cornwall should know my father had died within 20 minutes of him going out before I did.

I postponed going back to Uni at the beginning of term in order to get a final essay completed for the Monday. Travelling back and unpacking would just fragment the last day too much so I got it done through the night and then paid a quick visit the next day to go hand it in. I had promised myself that I would make a really good go of this last thing and not find myself finishing it off the day before it was due. My good intentions started out well enough but the truth was that I got inbto a bit of a mess over Christmas and it screwed over a lot of things. I had worked all through the holiday but had had a particularly bad attention span so I rarely gave more than an hour or two at a time to reading and note taking. This fragmented way of working is new to me and I discovered when I tried to weave all that stuff into some kind of coherent whole that what I had infact achieved was repitition on a grand scale. Everything was slightly different but basically said much the same. Most of the final thing therefore got written on the spot and through the night. I took Pro Plus for the first time in my life and don't intend to again as I practically died when its effects wore off. The essay I wrote is poor, I know this and I know that I will achieve a poor mark for the module. I'm disappointed in myself but its done now. There was a moment in November when I was threatened with nasty letters from University so now I can only work up.

I need to move back soon (although my lift keeps getting postponed so I may need to just go on the train with as much stuff as I can). I need to buy my books for this semester when I get there and I also need to get a new monitor for my macmini. I am currently using an old CRT hand-me-down which is about 3 meters wide and I'm pretty sure runs on coal. A nice slim (and above all cheap) TFT monitor is going to look great and fit nicely on my desk. I've had urges to start designing Marathon levels again on the new machine. I never get far, I'll design three needlessly detailed rooms then begin writing the Terminal text (which is really what I want to do first) but then I lose interest. I also ordered Starcraft. It's ages since I last played it on some PC and now I want to start again. I'll also get Skype working on it hopefully and get other bits and pieces working. I'll be able to play Black and White and go online simultaneously. eeeep, I'm excited :D

Heh

2006-01-07T22:29:00.000Z

Click

The phonecalls we're getting

Congratulations, your mission is accomplished

2006-01-05T15:36:00.000Z

Today I helped put together an industrial table saw. The thick Cast Iron work surface leeched the heat out of my flesh whenever I touched it so the numbed nerves didn't feel the pain when tools slipped or skin was inadvertantly dragged along sharp metal edges. It was perversely fascinating (although now quite painful). Whether you see it as silly squeamishness or perhaps healthy instinctive aversion, my usual fear of the blade seemed to go away. I would normally wince when the blade tore through clean timber with ferocious (albeit loud) ease but today I enjoyed it and took to 'testing' it myself. Plank after plank was cleaved into little pieces with very satisfying simplicity. I gradually tried to think of the planks as the people and things that have fucked me around but this stole the pleasure from it and so I stopped. The workshop was too cold in the end. I had to touch that metal sheeting too much so now I am crammed up against the radiator trying to let the heat seep back in.

Spook, the adopted puppy of my parents remains as destructive as ever. If I stay around him, he will always end up tugging around at my shoe laces or trouser legs. This is endearing for a while but quickly becomes irritating. I feel like such a miserable fuck right now as his fearless cheerful attitude annoys me...I'm annoyed at a puppy.

I have to contemplate moving in the next few days. There will be too much to take, too many books and bags so I will need a ride but I don't want to ask for one.

A Christmas Message

2005-12-26T12:57:00.000Z

That idea as Christmas being a time of abject misery has become a notion so common that it almost becomes as clichéd as that nauseating It's a wonderful life-esque christmas ideal it was cynically constructed to counter. Okay, christmas is rarely as good as it presented. My experiences of Christmas day are ones always swallowed up in awkwardness, irritation and possible argument. My father spends most of his time pursuing his hobbies with frightening intensity so Christmas day, a kind of obligatory day of rest in our household, gets the same intense treatment and this always irritates. Think: happy relaxation...TO THE MAX, the two just don't meld. However there are enough positive things buried in there to find the complete humbag attitude to be off-putting. This Christmas however I have infact for the first time spent a day in deep and dark depression. On Christmas Eve, I went out with my old school friends. This is something of an annual event and I always expect it to be an experience that reminds me more and more how little I now have in common with my old friends but this time I was holding a little hope that I might find something among them that could bind us together like the friends we once were other than the shared experiences of School. Inevitably it was a disappointment. From what I can gather my old friends live to get completely smashed, mainly on alcohol but apparently on other substances too. I don't want this and I'm already constructing an excuse to get out of a New Years party with them.

Ironically getting smashed was my intention for Christmas day so I can't be too critical. As soon as I opened my eyes in the morning, I knew that basically what I'd love to do would be to go back to bed. It can be a horrible time for reflection and that was what I ended up doing so I spent the day experimenting with Southern Comfort, Cointreau and Gin cocktails which saw me obliterated by about 6. Still I don't intend on making a habit of it, alcoholism is so overrated.

In other more upbeat news is my Christmas haul. For some time now I've been wanting a Mac Mini. After not getting me anything for my birthday, my parents decided they'd combine this, christmas and a little contribution of my own to get me one. I now need to get a monitor as at the moment I'm using a huge old CRT thing. The edge was taken off the happy new purchase by a few problems. Firstly I was told at the Apple Store that I was in luck as all G4 Macs were now upgraded. Frankly I don't understand how they keep squeezing stuff out of the G4. My father has an old G4 Tower which runs at 400Mhz. My laptop also uses a G4 but runs at 867Mhz. The Mac Mini G4 runs at 1.42Ghz and all new models run at 1.5. Either way I thought I was going to get a 1.5 but the tosser lied as I ended up with a 1.42. I can't complain too much though as 1.5 isn't even openly advertised yet so they were probably clearing stock. They also gave me a Superdrive model as oppose to a Combo Drive model. This is good apart from they did actually charge me for the top notch model when I later broke it down. Further problems surfaced when it fell out with the wireless router on numerous occassions. I still can't get it connected to the internet and any attempt to do so knocks every other computer off for about an hour. It also formatted my iPod when I plugged it in. Joy. I am happy with it though and I intend to get an extra snazzy hard drive but am currently left with a 512Mb strip of DDR RAM which I don't know what to do with. I could try and sell it I suppose but i can't be arsed to set up anything as complicated as ebay which I have no intention of using for anything else so I need to find someone else that wants it.

Other than that, I'm bored, behind on work and determined to make a big fat stinking Resolution.

clicks on new post

2005-12-12T18:56:00.000Z

Well I've cleared the problem that had been bothering me and now I believe I'm going to draw a line under what clearly was a horrendous mistake and look at what I've learnt as I make a new start. I've learnt quite a few important things really and thankfully I'm not disillusioned into general bitterness or indiscriminate hostility as could easily have been the case. I finally decided to confide in someone about the troubles in their entirety, someone who normally I would never have dreamt about confiding in due to my own misconceptions and I must say I'm glad I did. They picked me up, dusted me off and gave me excellent advice which stopped me going completely down the road of self-loathing. They made some observations that made me realise that which I had held in such high esteem and almost worshipped for so long didn't infact deserve it. I realise more and more each day now that I had failed to spot the rather flawed nature of something despite all those warning signs that now seem as obvious as a naked purple man dancing around.

But I've dwelt on this long enough and it's over now. I've learnt my lesson, I won't make the same mistake again and I can only feel pity for the next poor victim.

On another note, the joys of Christmas threaten to envelope all once again. I am currently spending an extra week at University after we broke up on Friday in order to get some essays out of the way and be tolerably close to the Library. I have two 4000 word essays due in on the day we get back, one on Hobhouse and the state and another on 1890s Literature (I have to think up a question for this one :s...I'm thinking about doing something about notions of masculinity so I can harp on about Sherlock Holmes and New Grub Street). I hope ideally to get one of these essays done this week but probably won't. The big thing I'm supposed to be doing over the holidays however is the studies for my dissertation. As it stands I'm looking at the Socialist thought of H.G. Wells, specifically in relation to the Webbs and the Fabian Society. Despite some preliminary reading, I haven't actually done anything yet but this doesn't stop my supervising tutor saying its going brilliantly well. I can only assume he says this because a lot of other students seem to have required a subject being given to them instead of thinking one up themselves. Whilst I'm doing that, I also ought to read some of the books for next semester (buy them too really so my loan payment is practically swallowed up again before I've got it >_<) and re-read some of the MSC books because they're tough. Joyous season, 3 weeks ain't enough.

Recently I've been adding to my music collection which got me thinking (and subsequently rambling). I blitzed it recently and got rid of a lot of stuff I didn't like listening to anymore as I'd heard it too regularly and needed to get rid of it completely or at least take a break from. I've never been huge about music and whilst I'm prone to paranoid delusions born from an unreliable sense of self-confidence, I've always felt like this has alienated me somewhat from so many people who seem to find it weird that I don't have a strong musical identity so to speak. For a long time it was a money thing. My earliest memories concerning it were of having my parents trying to foist their musical taste onto me which for a time worked as I had no strong inclination to rebel. However once that phase passed rather embarrassingly, I didn't feel much of a desire to identify and pursue my own musical taste. It was too time consuming, too expensive, too much (I've always been lazy). The result was that I was therefore very suggestible and would soon adopt the musical 'taste' of people I hung round with which in retrospect was convenience rather than a lack of imagination. Buying music was always a hassle. It is relatively rare that I come across a band I like enough to explore everything they've done and so I have always had a piecemeal interest. I hear a track, I like it and so I want that track. I may then listen to other stuff by the same band and from the same album but rarely do I like anything else quite as much if at all. This partially explains my meagre album collection. The few I have were almost entirely bought on whims and most of them I at one point or another regretted getting. This is quite sad I guess. The music collection that I have now built up is around 2GB. Of that, I can't find many tracks by the same artists but rather have isolated clumps. I guess I should start exploring them. I sometimes get stuff on recommendation, sometimes I'll hear something somewhere and be reminded that I like that song and have been meaning to get it. A lot of the time now, I'll hear something whilst watching a film or TV programme which I'll subsequently search out and get (this explains the fact I just downloaded a Gypsy Kings cover of Hotel California after watching the Big Lebowski or why I looked desperately for this).

In conclusion, I need to start working.

the stepping stone's dilema

2005-11-29T14:01:00.000Z

I'm wondering if I need to take a rather large break from everything. It's occurred to me that there is something really big I need to work out which I thought I was doing but it turns out that I was merely lying and pretending to myself that I was. The realisation that I hadn't dealt with it at all and that it was still there came very suddenly and very very painfully.

I'm a mess and I feel really lonely suddenly. I don't know what it is, maybe this yearning just to talk to someone even though I have massive difficulty starting it. Bizarrely, I actually want to go home for the first time in months.

...glum

2005-11-27T12:54:00.000Z

Thomas Hardy was the last thing I should have read really. I remember being so depressed after reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles that I knew Jude the Obscure was going to be bad. I had to read it though.

As it turns out, it's about 10 times worse than Tess. I try and find cheer in the fact that it is so melodramatic and hence unbelievable but truth be told, it is believable in ways. The character of Sue Brideshead is the first in a long time to actually infuriate to such an extent that I actually shout at her and her misguided actions described on the page in front of me, wishing that somehow I could communicate with her and explain how what I know she is about to do as I edge ever closer to the end of some paragraph will only bring misery to everyone. She attempts to put right the hurt she believes she has caused and yet in doing so causes a more powerful hurt and pain to all those she actually holds dear. Yet on perceiving this, on seeing that she is only destroying herself and the person she loves, she still believes even more ardently that somehow this course is the one she must stick to. Bizarre inconsistencies plague her actions as events that you imagine should and would send her in one direction instead send her in completely another. She pisses me off so much that I find I have to vent my frustration somewhere like here. I know it absurd to get so wound up about a book written so long ago in such a different world where society was still so strongly governed by primitive, hypocritical and morally reprehensible dogmas. I should find comfort in saying to myself that such an event would never happen in this day and age...and yet I wonder if in some ways it possibly could.

The book ends with a corpse in a coffin (this is Hardy afterall) and is so painfully unsatisfying that I flung the book across the room. A scrap of paper also lies on the floor (the top right corner of a page from Chaper 9, part 6) from where my frustration got so much that a violently scrawled pencil note ripped the paper after Sue made one of the worst decisions she could have and she knew it was not what she wanted to do. It's a long time since a book got to me as much as this.

I hate you, Hardy.

enlightenment

2005-11-20T01:36:00.000Z

I wonder sometimes if I'll ever find out what it was.

I don't know for sure. What suspicions I have strike me as being incredibly unfair, even contradictory and hypocritical. Maybe I'm wrong for imagining fairness would exist at the bottom of it. I fear it is wrong that I dont know but I have an awkward conflation to deal with, I'm both too angry and too scared to actively seek the answer. Am I too indignant or is it that I'm too nervous lest it be something devestating that I never even realised? Is it so bad that I just can't see it?

Maybe one day all will come clear but I guess I shouldn't hold my breath

Bureaucrats try to intimidate Seb

2005-10-31T14:52:00.000Z

The television license fee in the UK is a travesty. At the beginning of the year I came to the decision that I was not going to bother with a televison license. It was far too expensive (now a cool £126.50 for the year and due to rise) as I rarely found anything on television to actually warrant the cost and could probably get a lot more done without it. Hell, I'd have turned my nose up at the £50 license fee for Black and White TV. So it was a simple decision, I would not buy a license and therefore I would not watch TV.

Of course the problem was that whilst I did not see any point in watching television anymore, I did see a point in using my television set. I had plenty of DVDs I liked to watch of shows and films I knew to be good. I wanted to be able to play games on something when I had a spare moment. I was not sure what the exact law was though. Was the license fee placed simply on owning a TV? (which would be even more outrageous and far far harder to justify) or not. I checked the TV licensing website and read the fine print.

"If you use a TV or any other device to receive or record TV programmes (for example, a VCR, set-top box, DVD recorder or PC with a broadcast card) - you need a TV Licence. You are required by law to have one."

It seemed pretty clear cut. As long as I did not use the device to receive any television programmes, I'd be okay. After all, that is the only tenuously legitimate claim the BBC has to demand people pay them even if they don't watch the BBC and only watch free channels. If you receive programmes, in all likelihood you are using some piece of equipment somewhere that the BBC has bought or maintained at some point or another as they did pretty much lead the way many years ago in setting up the infrastructure of broadcast towers that allow it. Of course with the increasing presence of cable in the UK, the legitimacy of that claim has to be waining also. Nevertheless, they sure as hell have no right to extort money from you for using your own property in your own homes that don't use their resources at all. With this in mind, I unplugged and threw away my aerial so I no longer received a signal and then tuned all my channels out just in case (my TV itself can detect a faint picture simply with the metal aerial socket at the back). So now my Television simply displays DVDs, games and videos. F**k you BBC.

Today I received a letter from the TV licensing people telling me I am under investigation. They may use 'electronic detection equipment' to see if I am breaking the law (translates: a nerd in a van). They have also applied to send Enforcement Officers to my residence (translates: jumped up turds in suits armed with ID badges, clipboards and scary skin conditions). The letter is designed to scare, bold red words announce I am under official investigation. I am threatened with criminal prosecution, a £1000 fine and have various Government Acts flashed before me. However putting aside these rather poor attempts at lexical intimidation you realise they know bugger all. They have no idea whether I am breaking the law or not. The reason for me to be under investigation is because I HAD a license and now it is expired, thus my address is unlicensed. Therein lies the rub.

Travelling into town, a large billboard announces:

We have a list of all unlicensed residencies in the UK.
Don't believe us?
Fine.
It gets the usual response from many on the bus: "If they know, why do they bother threatening us? Why don't they just fine people anyway?"

The threat doesn't really seem to have that much teeth unless you're perhaps scared by feats of adminsitration. They have a list of all residences in the UK which is easy enough for a government agency to get hold of. Then they subtract all the residences that have bought licenses from them. Big whoop! What they don't know is which of those residences without a license are using a TV to receive programmes. Of course they can find out (nerd in van, conceited little turd in a suit) but its probably not logistically feasible for them to investigate every entry on that list. But then that wouldn't work on a billboard. "We might possibly luck out and discover that you're breaking the law. Don't believe us?"

For years now, the TV Licensing department has been changing it's tone in it's marketing from that of a vaguely benelovent and humourous agency that wants to make sure you don't do a naughty to one which seems to want to appear as if it were the Gestapo.

I have always taken offence at misplaced attempts to intimidate me, especially when done by some organisation (not that it's happened a lot >_>). I suppose if I were guilty of this ever increasingly ridiculous law, I would run in fear and buy a license but I'm not. I'm actually looking forward to the threat of these officers visiting my property and trying to get uppity as I'll have great pleasure watching them trying to prove anything.

Boring as this no doubt is to anyone else, it has gotten me fired up >:)

How is it?

2005-10-27T01:27:00.000+01:00

Why is that so many things are getting put off?

Why did making an appointment on Tuesday turn into making one next week?

Why did doing my laundry quickly at lunch be rescheduled for 'some time tomorrow'

How did spending the afternoon deciphering and note taking morph into vacuuming the floor, rearranging book shelves, reorganising cupboards and changing the bed?

I'm getting bad at this.

I stared out of the bus window glumly today and found myself looking at an advertisement for Soya yoghurt. I wasn't quite sure why it stood out but I think it had something to do with an awkwardly worded tagline.

It's soya, but not as you currently know it!
I am of course being pedantic but does 'currently' look wrong there? Doesn't it feel like a few too many syllables? "It's Soya but in a form that at present you might not be consciously aware or familiar with". Oh yeah, and stick an exclamation mark on the end. Gotta have one of those.

Up the road, the Headingley St. Columba United Reformed Church demonstrate that they have a much better grasp at making good catchy phrases (not that you'd think that looking at their name). Outside on a noticeboard along side other posters inviting students to spend their precious hangover recovery day somewhere other than bed, a poster sticks out.

Do you know your signs?

NO GOD
NO PEACE
KNOW GOD
KNOW PEACE

Genius!

In exile

2005-10-12T18:21:00.000+01:00

I thought I was starting to feel a bit better but I feel like I've relapsed yet again. It began with a rather nasty sore throat I woke up with one day at the beginning of last week and by the end, it had turned into a full blown throat infection. It has gotten better but now I have a horrible head cold on the back of it.

Aside from this tedious list of ailments, what ended up dragging me down was the increasing feeling of solitude more than anything else. I live in a flat with friendly guys with whom I get on better than I have any year but as a third year among freshers, there is an undeniable distance between us which prevents any real close friendships developing. Afterall, this is my last year, I have less time to socialise and generally am concerned with completely different things from my happy-go-lucky flatmates. This of course is nothing new but in the past it was online where I used to find at least some form of happiness and friendship. Now however, this also feels unwelcoming in certain respects and I feel like I am pushed out to the edge of things; excluded and ignored.

I just miss the company I used to enjoy. I'd say I completely deserve it but I'm not sure I do. I just hope I can get to a point where I can stop waking up in the mornings with a shiver and feeling like the only thing to look forward to is going to sleep again that night, I wish I could regain the ability to focus and stop being haunted by painful reflections.

tired already

2005-10-05T01:10:00.000+01:00

I bought myself a belated birthday present. I am a sad mac geek.

A familiar and unwelcome pain has returned to my shoulder. It first springs into being deep in the flesh where shoulder turns to neck, much like a normal crick, I stretch my head to one side but to no avail. From here, the pain will seep down my left shoulder blade and trickle down my side as the day continues, regardless of what I do. Alternatively it may choose to rise further up my neck instead. Or does both. The only real solution seems to be to sit it out as my inept attempts at self massage don't really work. I have been sure to make sure I don't sit, lay or stand in any particularly awkward positions. It started I imagine a few years ago when I would sling and carry an overladen satchel over my left shoulder but now even though I no longer burden that shoulder at all, the pain still appears there.

My year is beginning and I'm getting a little tired. A history dissertation looms ominously ahead of me which I must decide upon (i'm thinking of doing something on H.G. Wells, and socialist ideas in his books. That or something on Beveridge and socialism born in war) and the fiendish task of reading 2 or more books each week ontop of essays, the general reading around said books and some form of documentation of the lot so that my efforts are not pointless saps the enthusiasm further. When one week is finished, the next appears to be just as bad if not worse. I can't pretend to be completely overworked of course. My timetable is gloriously empty in order to allow me to accomplish all this self-guided study and if I were to make some form of frightening efficiency drive, I imagine I could get it all done with ease.

...but I do work hard, I do. I won't let someone take that away from me. I worked hard to be where I am now and I work hard to remain here. I know my position is one of privilege, that I understand but it was never handed to me on a silver platter. I could have had it harder, of course I could but when I look at so many around me, I realise that I am definitely on the low end of the scale. I struggled through a rough State comprehensive school where attendance for most was merely a formality. I studied hard even though it earned me the odd beating. After that I started college and worked my way through that. The friends that came with me from school didn't last long and I spent two years on my own for the most part. When I failed a paper and had my grade dragged down, I took a resit so that I could get in to the University I wanted to. I did well too, improving that paper from a 56% to 100% even though I was not allowed to attend any of the classes for it.

Now if my University education had been like that of people before me, I could understand the resentment. If the Government paid for it, paid me a big juicy grant which I never had to pay back and I pissed around with it then yes, I would understand and possibily accept hostility levelled at me. Things have changed though. I pay tuition fees and get no reduction on them. I had to take out a loan which like any other I will have to pay back with interest. It's a sobering thought that I'm in £10,000 of debt and I'm one of the lucky ones in many respects.

i got through my first year at University, surprised at my progress at times but most of the time feeling very lonely. A few times i thought about packing it all in and going home but I could never go through with it because I knew of the amount of effort and expense I had spent in order to get there and I couldn't throw it all away over something like that. Nevertheless I saw people that apparently could waste the opportunity they had received (whether they'd worked for it or not). Poor attendance, lazy work and overly socialising, they dropped out or worse yet, seem to scrape by and stick around. They formed the stereotypical image of the University student that I loathed. Lazy, arrogant and worst of all, ignorant. They don't really have much respect for anyone and treat most people like dumbshit despite themselves being embarrassingly dimwitted and stupid. I'm never quite sure why they don't take it more seriously or see themselves as being so superior to everyone around them. I just remain thankful that I'm hopefully not like them.

Of course if someone ever wants to offend me, perhaps even deeply upset me depending on who they are, that is where to strike. Include me in the generalisation of the typical uni student. Accuse me of being one of that group that I personally cannot stand and I will take great offence just like I did when people would suggest that the qualifications I had struggled to attain were worthless. I should build a thicker skin perhaps but it's a sore spot.

being close to craziness

2005-09-12T19:32:00.000+01:00

I know that I probably don't have to do this but I felt I may as well just to make things official and clear.

I've decided not to update this blog for a while. I'm not going to close it completely as I imagine I may be hit by a desire to write in it again in the future (knowing me, It'll come back almost as soon as I've clicked the publish button) but for now at least, I don't want to.

I've been a generally dull and depressing person for a few months now and I'm not likely to pick up soon. My grandfather had an emergency hip operation shortly after the last update but later had some kind of cardiac troubles in recovery. He is okay after that but much, much weaker and more confused than ever. Other bad things have been slapping me around all summer and bits and pieces of bad news, some huge and some trivial, have turned me into a really miserable shadow. But hey, I don't want to bore people with my inane ramblings about what's happening to me and bring them down and nor do I feel able to be light hearted and cheerful when I really don't feel like it so it's not much of a loss to anyone.

Hopefully I'll be back in some kind of semblance of normality in the future. Until then, Bye.

not bothering

2005-08-25T15:21:00.000+01:00

My home internet connection is becoming ridiculously unpredictable. After all the problems a month ago, the modem lost connection again yesterday for reasons unknown. Then it came back again today without explanation from the ISP whom remained puzzled throughout.

I've been meaning to write a more substantial update for a while but my motivation just seems to be continually sapped and especially so this past week. I've been a bit glum and down for a while now but things have compounded. I've begun to get vaguely worried about my final year of university, both the work during it and what the hell to do after it. I have also learnt that the tension between my parents is not imagined and that the arguments are being continued albeit late at night and intentionally out of my earshot. This seems a particularly nasty thing to do considering what has happened in the past 24 hours.

My Grandfather has had a fall and broken his hip. This is causing him pain and although a straightforward operation, his age and frailty makes it more problematic. He will have an operation soon so this adds to the tension and worry of the whole family.

I just hate this.

Yar

2005-08-17T22:12:00.000+01:00

It's taken me a while to get back in the loop. I went away for a couple of weeks with parents which I suppose may seem weird at my age but then I don't really feel like catching exciting new STDs or finding new exhilirating places to get off my face in and so don't go for the usual holiday a lot of people my age wish to go on. Instead I get my time in a familiar and calming place to get some reading done which ultimately is what I'm after. I took photos but not as many as I intended.

After my 2 weeks away, I get a week at home alone whilst my parents go off and do something on their own. This is generally a time I enjoy however this time it was a bit crap. A while ago me and Venny had talked about her possibly coming over and staying for a couple of days during this week but she wasn't able to come over and with both of us sufferring dwindling finances now, it doesn't look like we'll be able to afford to visit each other for the forseeable future and even then our spare time might not be compatible by the time we do have money. As it was, it's probably best no one came as home turned out to be quite chaotic.

At home, next door are initiating building work for an extension and my parents decided that the opportunity might as well be taken to dig up our yard and put a new one down. Large JCBs came and dug up the concrete from our yard. Then things basically went wrong. First our drains were broken, then the gas mains were hit and broken. Following that, our water mains were exposed and broken and turned out to be a lead pipe. To top it all off, an old well was uncovered in the middle of our yard. The back is now exposed clay and resembles Passchendaele to a certain extent. Other things went wrong too and electricians had to come out one day to relay cables.

On wednesday when most of these things had been ironed out, I took Brandy out. On the walk, he was attacked by a large Black Dog. Brandy was on the lead and under control and this other dog broke free from its own lead and ran at him despite me having given it a wide berth. It went first for his neck and then for his hind leg (there is a major artery near the surface I believe which they go for to try and kill quickly) which it grabbed hold of and started to shake. The woman couldn't get her dog off and in the end, the only way to stop it mauling Brandy who lay there seemingly resigned tohis fate was to give it an almighty kick, drag brandy out and stand inbetween it and Brandy. The woman kept asking if my dog was okay but I didn't hang around to see as she could barely control it. I left her rolling on the ground, struggling to stop her dog chase after mine. I knew Brandy was bleeding but figured it wasn't too bad until I checked him out at home and discovered he'd got a nasty torn bite on his inner thigh. I stressed and worried over this as Brandy found it increasingly difficult to walk. I managed to get a vet to see him the following day though and he was convinced it was okay.

So time passed and more things went wrong until finally I managed to get my laptop back. I'll be uploading my various pics soon and posting them on livejournal later.

EDIT: Pictures at Livejournal

Just quickly

2005-07-22T09:33:00.000+01:00

I figured I'd do a bit of vanity and set up for a tan check to see if I go a more healthy colour on my trip.

However to do that, I needed a few 'before' shots and I'm going to post the URLs here seeing as I my computer might not be available when I get back off the trip so I won't have access to whats on it or most of my bookmarks, I could lose all the data on it and I need to wipe my camera.

Please excuse some things as I didn't clean the bathroom mirror so it looks disgraceful and also I'd just woken up and looked like shit. But hey, these are for my own consultation anyway :)

Bed hair

Ugh1

Ugh2

Don't make fun

break

2005-07-21T20:44:00.000+01:00

At around this time last year, I made a joke about how I was going away for good by making a very vague entry. I didn't feel like that this time :)

It's time to go off on holiday. I'm normally much more enthusiastic about it than I am currently. I even had thoughts about somehow cancelling it and getting someone else to go in my place earlier in the week but it's too late really and would let people down. As it happens, I'm in that rather unpleasant limbo at the moment where I'm hanging around waiting and unable to put my mind to anything. There's a pile of chore like things I should do but don't want to. The difference this time is that rather than being impatient and wanting time to pass quickly, I'm wanting it to slow down. I really don't want to move away from the computer much either even though I'm bored and can't think of much to do.

I will have to take my laptop in for repairs whilst I'm away tomorrow so even though I don't leave until Saturday lunchtime, I'm going to be cut off from my little online world by tomorrow morning. I really hope the repairs are relatively simple and it doesn't take longer than the predicted two weeks but I fear it will. I also hope they don't break it. I'm protective and don't like sending Errol off into unfamiliar hands.

Anyway, I need to go and do those irritating chores, continue to be miserable and unenthustiatic and get annoyed with myself.

With a whir and a click

2005-07-18T12:56:00.000+01:00

I really must stop myself from posting when something happens like that and leave it until I've had time for it to sink in so I can be clear. I don't really want to go into what made me miserable last week (at least not on a public journal) but it did happen and left me quite devastated for a good few days. Obviously it was going to subside a bit over the week and it has to a point but its still undeniably there, burrowed under the surface and capable of popping up every now and again to cause me extended moments of sadness. I'm sure over time these moments will decrease in frequency and intensity and I'll be better. I did intend to edit my last entry to explain a little bit but then at some point in the early hours of last Tuesday Morning, the internet went down and I've been stuck ever since.

This is really what I want to rant about right now and I can only warn you that to anyone other than myself, this will likely be quite tedious as hearing about the incompetance and arguments with an ISP is hardly the kind of rivetting read I'd want to embark upon. But hey, it's pissed me off and I need to release.

RANT BEGINS
At 6:00 on Tuesday morning before leaving for work, my father discovered that the internet had apparently broken or something. I was made aware of this an hour or so later as my mother thought I was sleeping and so I subsequently set off to fix it. My actual capabilities are limited to checking everything is plugged into the back of the router correctly and once this one simple task was exhausted, I was stuck. Phonecalls were made and my mother was thrown from 0800 number to 0800 number like an increasingly angry pinball until she eventually discovered a man who explained that our broadband problem would have to be lodged with a elusive 'BT wholesale' (Take heed UK readers, one day this may be your nemesis) and that for them to get off their arses and do whatever it was would take 4 to 8 hours. At least that was what my mother thought he'd said. So there we were. BT wholesale apparently did not deal with customers and we just had to wait.

Slowly the 4 hours passed and then the 8 and like naive little puppies, we expected it to be sorted only to find it wasn't. Admittedly I let most of this slip me by as I was still feeling strange and absent. By the next morning and with internet still down, more phonecalls were made. My father had received good news from work on the Tuesday and so had taken the lack of internet well but it was apparent he only had limited patience what with his chatrooms going on without him and no doubt complete bargains appearing on ebay in his absence. Ringing up on Wednesday morning, we discovered that the guy must have said 48 hours and not 4 to 8 which of course resulted in swearing from me and my father, both now in the throws of withdrawal but we were also fast approaching the 30 hour mark and so there might not be that much more to wait. My mother's optimism didn't last long however as a call back to BT at my impatient urging revealed that the original guy for some unknown reason had not lodged the report with BT wholesale like he said he would and that we would have to wait 48 hours all over again before it would be sorted. Over the course of the next few days, things became apparent. BT Wholesale provide all ISPs in the UK with Broadband which they subsequently sell on to the customers. If you live in the UK and your Broadband goes down, there is a limited amount your ISP can actually do. If they cannot fix it, you are stuck in a queue to be dealt with by BT Wholesale and as they deal with everyone, you will wait a minimum of 48 hours to be investigated. Even then, this is merely 48 hours for diagnosis to be completed and unless its something simple, you will have to wait longer still for them to actually fix your problem. You can't call them either as they don't deal with customers directly as you aren't actually their customers.

Horror stories emereged. Sympathetic BT phone people spoke of other customers still without Broadband 2 weeks after reporting the problem and someone else on another ISP waited 5 weeks until it was fixed. With each fresh call, my father wandered closer to the land of heart attack or seizure, I couldn't tell which but whichever it was, his head went unhealthy hues of purple. Some help desk operators tried their best to offer suggestions to try out the modem and see if it was broken. It wasn't it appeared, the settings were correct and it worked in everyway it was supposed to as a home wireless network but simply couldn't complete the vital step of detecting a DSL signal. In one particular phonecall from a BT helpdesk guy, I lost it. He told me that their casenotes suggested it was actually our modem that was broken and that we had to ring the modems manufacturer to discover what it was (I asked what number that was and he read back my own phone number). I then explained as calmly as I possibly could that he was feeding me bullshit seeing as someone else on his helpdesk had said categorically it was not our modem. With that he slunk away to 'ask a colleague'.

This kind of crap continued for the next day or so until finally I called the update line and discovered the apparent source of the problem. A line upgrade had taken place early on Tuesday morning. Without checking before hand to see if the local lines could handle it, someone threw our line up to a 2mb per second rate and strangley enough, that was exactly when broadband stopped for us. What would have to take place now was that the line would have to be regraded back down and as it was BT Wholesale that would have to do it, that again would take 'a few days'. I whined and complained like a little bitch frankly and spun yarns about losing money but there was nothing to be done that would speed the operation up. Confusion followed when my angry mother rang up again to ask how long it would take specifically and a new adviser said "working days" and not weekends which was where we were now. So it continued until at last, I rang on Sunday only to learn that the line had now been regraded and that as it was still not working, it was our fault. I once more kicked up a fuss, pointing out it all worked perfectly until their line upgrade and that the settings were correct. The phonecall was cut short and then some time in the afternoon, we received a call from BT wholesale themselves. After finally explaining to them that we did not have another modem to try, they said we'd have to have another one sent out. He couldn't say whether it would be the same model as that would be up to our service providers but he'd go ahead and order us one. My mother asked for the numer she could ring to order it too as she wanted to check the order had gone through. He gave her one, said some more shit and then that was that. The number he gave her was for AOL and as we weren't with AOL, one began to wonder just what it is BT Wholesale do all day that makes jobs take so long and leaves them so clearly stupid.

The last few phonecalls of sunday revealed from BT Broadband (who we are with and who are in the same boat as every other broadband ISP when it comes to dealing with BT wholesale) confirmed our belief that the guy we had spoken to was clearly a retard and finally discovered that our line had only been partially regraded. We were now at 1mb per second when originally we had been (a measly) 500k. Therefore more regrading and more waiting had to follow. This time, someone pulled a finger out of an ass and it was sorted by early Monday Morning. Thus I am here and if I receive an AOL modem, I'm keeping it so I can smash it or something.
RANT ENDS

All these problems were compounded by the fact that this week has been very hot, that we were without hot water for most of it thanks to a faulty boiler and shoddy repairs from British Gas. The lack of Hot water meant that the slightly tepid edge that makes a cold shower bearable could not be achieved and after 2 icy showers and 2 worrying black out moments, I felt it was safer to stink rather than to faint and die on a cast iron bath. The week was also consumed with my father's impatience and decisions to 'sort out' his workshop which I got roped into (on the hottest days of course). More bloody barbecues as well and then him going out and buying some daft Cast Iron Chimena which I had to put together using the worst instructions to yet be conceived.

I'm tired and spotty anyway. I'll be back for all of a week before I go off on holidays again...which I kind of wish I wasn't. I took photos over the last week and will post them up in my livejournal later. With that, I'll draw this to a close.

EDIT:
Livejournal Piccies Image intensive but I said I would.

grqfgt

2005-07-11T18:11:00.000+01:00

I'm alive.

I'm feeling awful right now.

That's about it.

Time to move home

2005-06-19T10:55:00.000+01:00

It seems summer has finally slumped into view as last night was the first uncomfortably hot one of the year. I'm just one of those negative people. I differentiate between the seasons with negativity; Summer starts when it gets too hot, winter when it gets too cold, autumn when its too windy and rainy and spring when it gets too green.

University is now eerily quiet or at least the Campus is as most of the students seem to have moved elsewhere. The flats for instance are particularly quiet and barren. Andy, the one flatmate with whom I shared any amount of conversation moved out last week some time. Although I don't want to exaggerate our relationship as flatmates, there was a sense reminiscent of a guy returning to his home to find the suitcases gone and his wife's wardrobe bare. Andy seemingly owned most of the kitchen it would appear. All the boxes were gone from under the window as was the ironing board I never used and a few of my plates and cutlery neatly stacked by my cupboard after he'd taken his drainer thing. Now it's just me and Han who seems to have got a friend to move into his room with him and has filled the fridges with beer. I may snaffle a few.

I on the other hand must start thinking about packing up my stuff for the move as my contract expires by the end of the week. It's not like there's any furniture to bring back but its a boring process nonetheless that takes up lots of time as it must be combined with cleaning afterwards. I'm just hoping its relatively cool on the day I do it otherwise I'm likely to be a really irritable git. I don't have to do this immediately though and there are at least a few days to enjoy before I have to start. In that time I will be checking out the University campus to see if any of my results have come back yet. At least one has which I'm a little nervous about. I should also take the opportunity to grab some of the books for my next year so i can get started on them. Assuming I pass this year, next year is my final one in which I must study hard.

Another thing I will be doing is heading on over to the Royal Armouries in Leeds at some point. I made a decision to visit it a while back as its been years since I last went but I recently learnt of an excellent exhibition that is on at the moment. It's a subject that interests me, not necessarily because OMFG!! It's teh japanese and about teh samurai and stuff and Japan is just soooooo cool!!*spurt* but rather because the era was something I found quite interesting. I first learnt about Tokugawa in a Video game of all things. Kessen obviously messed with the historical facts quite a bit which it had to considering you could fight battles as the historical losers and win but included in the game was a large biography section which explained what happened to the dozens of officers that appeared in the game and the sticky ends they met. Of course it's no comparison to studying it properly but nevertheless it remains a nugget of information with which I once bludgeoned my father who was trying to argue that computer games were a medium which could never compete with film or book in terms of simple cultural and educational value. He may be right in the end but I liked showing him up with something I'd learnt from a computer game which he had no knowledge of whatsoever. The Shogun exhibition looks great anyway and I'm hoping they're okay about people taking photos as I'll be taking my digital camera.

Aside from that, I hope to get some reading done again, some ME reading. On a trip to London last week, I spent the tedious train journey reading Kingdom of Fear. I ended up churning my way through most if the book and looked forward to the train journey back where I could read again rather than the visit to London itself (which is a shitehole but that's a subject for another entry). The more I read of Hunter Thompson, the more I seem to love his writing, his fiery indignation and contempt and his bizarre imagination, sense of humour and his insults (I will call people whore beasts from now on. I intend to snap up his other books and hopefully it won't be another 6 months before I get a chance to read them like it has been with this one.

There is little else to report. Over the past few weeks I spent time playing Metal Gear Solid 3 which I both enjoyed a great deal but also got very frustrated with various aspects of it. I scribbled angry notes in a notebook because I intended to write up my rant-like review here. I may get round to it if I can tap into the anger again. I watched DVDs, bought more, spent more and began to realize that Mac Mini is a pipe dream for now. I now must spend the rest of the week eating up the food I don't want to take home...which means odd concoctions like the scrambled egg on Garlic Naan bread with melted cheese I had for breakfast at Christmas or whatever else I can dream up to finish off whats in the freezer. Oh joy.

"You run like a Giraffe on rollerskates"

2005-06-15T17:39:00.000+01:00

Alright, alright...cheeky tossers. Venny has been nagging me to write an entry for ages anyway so now you're going to get one of my pointless musings.

I was scrunched up in a damp railway carriage earlier today, passing the time by finally reading a book I've had for over a year. I'd been oblivious to those around me sometime shortly after getting on but as I got off the train, my eyes were drawn to a youth who had gotten on some time shortly before. You might say he was rotund, you might say he was sturdy, if you were feeling like a bit of a jerk then you might have called him podgy but none of this matters because this was not why I noticed him. As the train doors opened, he leapt onto the platform and set off at speed for the long ramp up onto the street. Awkwardly, he flung himself around the corner by gripping onto the handrail and allowing his momentum to take over (he wisely aborted an attempt to vault over the rail) and then ran off up the ramp. Walking up behind him, I was left thinking to myself why he ran strangely.

I hasten to add that this is nothing to do with him or indeed anyone being overweight. This is nothing so crude as that. I guess, like most things, it starts when we're born. Most of us pop into this world physically much the same as any other baby. We have the same bones connected in the same ways with the same joints that bend and move in the same directions. Those bones are knitted together by the same groups of muscles and tendons, all which, potentially at least, should pull and push on those bones in identical ways to everyone else so that in the end, we are all capable of a uniform movement. I should say that some of us aren't that lucky and come into the world with what some would call 'being dealt a bad hand' but then is that the case? Who wants to move like everyone else? Run in a textbook manner? meh

Although the majority may be all potentially equal as babies when it comes to physical capability, our bodies must next grow which is a feat in itself. I'll admit I don't know much about growth. Those pesky genetics are no doubt behind it all but to what extent? Do they just provide the brain with vague instructions (originally written in Japanese and run through Babelfish) on how it should achieve uniform growth of all organs, limbs bones and body hair as well as itself or is it more of a self-contained procedure where the cells just get on with it and split up when the blueprint says so? I suspect the latter but then what if the poor overworked brain does have to deal with some of it?

There it is, your brand new Operating System. All shiny, new and buggy as hell. In front of it lies a lifetime of writing and applying patches to itself such as "heat apparently hurts in sufficient quantities" or "guys in the Hare and Hounds don't take well to being called homosexual". It's out-of-the box code is wrong and it must first go through several years of re-programming which it may or may not come out the worse for. What if on top of it all it has to deal with the tricky business of making sure one leg doesn't grow faster than the other or it doesn't initiate the puberty phase sooner than intended or worse yet, out of sequence?

If so, is it any doubt that it gets things wrong? Bones elongate, muscles grow with them and gain mass whilst tendons strengthen. It's no surprise that the body manages to naff some of this complex engineering up and suddenly things don't move in the graceful or easy way the designs intended which is why I imagine this kid ran up the ramp in the way he did. Holding up his left arm almost on level with his shoulder, he seemed to determinedly claw through the air with his elbow as if it was heavy jungle undergrowth whilst his right hand had a completely different idea as to how it should aid his motion. There was one leg that took big strides and the other that seemed to prefer to let the other do most of the work whilst it dreamt of going to the right of where the rest of the body was going. All in all it looked quite bizarre but hey, it worked so who was I to say anything? It's like a car whose exhaust is attached with Gaffer tape; it may not be how its supposed to work but it does and the car still moves.

I don't speak from a position of authority either. I run in a bizarre and ungraceful way that got me laughed at in school. Whatever was placed in charge of my growth, be it brain or genes, something somewhere hadn't carried over a 1 or had failed to cross a specific 't' and so my legs went on growing, claiming an unfair proportion of my height without thinking much about width. I ended up with too spindly pins. I used to run (in shorts anyway) like a Tim Burton cartoon...and I don't care! :D

Reasons to be cheerful...

2005-05-26T18:16:00.000+01:00

One

Two

Three

Unhappy

2005-05-17T20:19:00.000+01:00

Exam time is crap time.

Every year for the past 7 years, I have taken exams and each time they've been quite substantial in amount and normally are very important. I am part of the British Exam generation. My last year at school saw 16 exams before the Summer break could begin and for the past 2 years I've had 2 sets of exams each year, one set now and one set after Christmas. Basically this means that I'm used to them. Sure I get nervous, I stress and I get paranoid over them but normally I can cope with it all relatively well. My parents are used to me taking them in my stride.

This last set have not been good so far though. Last week I went home early to avoid the depressing loneliness that I felt in the flat the last time Venny was here. I came back on Monday and was okay at first but I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that Venny sprinkled some chemical here or something that brings out that lonely feeling because I wasn't here long before I was really feeling the solitude and getting extremely sad. Monday was my last day to get the serious study done but I just couldn't seem to get anything to go in. I was reading and re-reading, note taking but nothing was happening. I was starting to get distressed and decided to ring home at 8 o'clock just to talk. I think I may have freaked my mum out because not only is it unusual for me to call at that time, it's also unusual for my voice to crack with emotion as well. Besides the worry of exams, I still had to explain that it wasn't just the fear of the exams but the solitude was getting to me aswell. Nevertheless my mum managed to reassure me and make me feel better as she calmly said that it wasn't going to be the end of the world if I failed it.

The exam was today and it didn't go brilliantly. I feel a little better now it's out of the way but I still am not looking forward to the rest of the week. Two whole days here on my lonesome where I have to study. It could be hell. I still plan on going home for the weekend though and increasingly I'm considering whether I will stay up here after the exams like I said I would. I still might if it gets easier or the feeling wears off but the idea of slowly moving my stuff home over the next five weeks is very appealling.

As for this place, I'm really just posting to say that I don't think I'm going to be posting here much over the next few months. I feel like a little break. I don't know when I'll start up again so keep checking if you want but don't get mad at me if I don't post anything in ages. The place isn't closed, I may very well post something weird...but it's hiatus time.

And with that...

Bye

Overdue

2005-05-15T12:02:00.000+01:00

I should have updated a while back but it's one of those things I simply forgot to do. Venny came to stay again last week which was great. We actually got to do more this time and even went out into that hateful stuff they call daylight. On our wanders we found a comic shop which I had no idea existed (although I note there didn't seem to be any comics unless they were in another room). There was some frankly horrible stuff in there but also some cool stuff so I'm going to keep an eye on it. We also went to a Japanese Bar where Venny embarrassed herself with some Ramen as she struggled to eat the noodles with the chopsticks and kept trying to get me to go to the bar and ask for a fork because she was too embarrassed to go herself. Me being the nice guy I am didn't want to go either but she got the hang of them eventually.

As was to be expected, we spent a large portion of our time watching movies. Watership Down, an old favourite of mine from childhood was among them and I got all nostalgic and now want to find it. It is an excellent cartoon. We also watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. For some reason, although many people had told Venny to watch it and that she'd like it, I was still apprehensive that she wouldn't. It's one of those movies where you can be laughing your ass off one minute say at Johnny Depp "eeeee"ing with a towel on his head whilst Benecio Del Toro has an imaginary fight in the background and then the next minute getting slightly unsettled as the scene changes gear. Nevertheless we both enjoyed it so that was okay. Wednesday came all too quickly though and it got time for us both to get back to the old things. It was perhaps worse than before, it certainly felt like it. I didn't feel much like hanging around Leeds in that flat for the rest of the week so I grabbed some stuff from the Library and came home early. The time passed relatively quickly and I'm glad I did come home even if the atmosphere wasn't as brilliant as I'd anticipated.

Exams now sit before me and I'm not looking forward to them. No doubt stress and worry will surround them. A few months back, I was working out my schedule and came to the grim realisation that my exams were terribly early. I also however noted what at the time was a pleasant side-effect. With the exams being early, I was left with a month between my lease running out on my room and my last exam. This meant I had a month away from the stresses of home in which I could do stuff without the guilt of neglecting work. At the time I was somewhat excited at this but now I'm not looking forward to it as much. As Venny said, that room can feel terribly lonely at times. I won't squander the chance though. When I hinted to my mother that I might prefer to come home, she mentioned I might not like it though seeing as its going to be a stressful time and likely everyone at home will be consumed by it. Right now I'm intending therefore to spend the time well and not allow myself the time to reflect or get lonely. I already have a few videogames and DVDs lined up and I'll likely spend a significant portion of the days out and about. I have enough money saved to not feel guilty about going to the cinema and there's stuff which I'm keen to see if it's really bad (Hitchikers Guide, Star Wars thing, Kingdom of Heaven). I've always meant to do more exploration of Leeds itself such as the Museum or the Royal Armouries. Hell, I may even go and take advantage of the large Station and visit York or something.

Back at home, the chinchillas were born. I'm not sure if I mentioned them here or not but basically it turned out that the Mother we adopted was already pregnant again. She since gave birth to a litter of 3. At the time, the plan was that they would stay with their mother until they were bigger and then we'd take the small Chinchillas back to the adoption place as babies would not be a problem to rehome. Unsurprisingly though, my parents have gone and got attached and now intend to keep them all. They've tried to work out how it will all work, have bought a new big cage for them and have reorganised where they are kept. I can already feel the suggestion that I have one in my room looming toward me.

I took a few pictures:

Mum

Bub

Bleh

They are better in the big new cage then they look in those pics which is something. I will try and drop hints to get them to hurry up and get them taken to a vets to make sure they're all okay.

Seeing as I took them, here's a pic of the garden too as it was a nice day and looked very green.

Garden

travelling

2005-05-03T17:02:00.000+01:00

This week is disjointed and weird already. It seems like I am to spend most of it on public transport. I will give yoy a brief summary:

With it being a Bank Holiday this last Monday, I had no classes. Infact no one had any classes which in turn meant I didn't get a lift and so instead had to catch the train back into Leeds late afternoon.

Once in Leeds I for some reason felt that I couldn't be bothered to catch the bus. I don't quite know why but the crowded bus stops felt really uninviting and a 4 mile walk with all my bags somehow preferable. I walked back to the flat, through Headingly where people were preparing for the Bank Holiday Monday evening piss up. I spotted the 30 year old male equivalent to the 23 year old rat boys that hang outside secondary schools to pick up their 15 year old Girlfriends. It's bank holiday so they rush to Headingly to see if they can score with some drunk students. Gah.

Back at my flat, I realised it may not have been wise to walk as much seeing as one of my feet started to hurt (I punctured the sole of my foot on some glass on Sunday and it bled quite a bit).

Tuesday morning and I rise early to catch the bus for class after which I find I have spare time so I go shopping. During this venture, there is extremely heavy rain and some loud thunder. I immediately catch the bus back to the flat again to drop off the shopping. Although only in the rain for probably 3 minutes in total, I am still soaked and after unpacking, I have 20 minutes to change and grab a cup of tea before...yep...bus again and to my afternoon lecture. After that I catch the bus again.

Tomorrow is likely to be much the same if not worse. I have to catch the bus into University in the morning to sort out some boring stuff and pick things up. Then it's back to the flat to pack things up and off down to the station to get the train home. This is due to my lack of foresight and stubborness. It's the British General Election on Thursday but I failed to get my electoral listing changed so I'm still registered for my home address. I insist on voting as it's my first General Election which is a bit daft as the seat where I live is incredibly safe and is unlikely to change. Nevertheless I'm travelling home to vote if only to make sure that the extreme vote remains as proportionally small as is possible.

I'll stay the night at home (and pack my PS2 :D), vote in the morning and then catch the train back to Leeds. Then its another series of bus rides to and from the flat, classes and then back home. Friday is the last day of term and of actual classes. After that I would actually prefer to stay at Uni for the weekend but instead my Father has asked if this weekend I can finally help him with this powerpoint thing (I promised to help him in return for something a while back but it kept getting postponed) so back on a train again on Friday. Unless I can get him to do this powerpoint thing on Wednesday night and then I can skip coming home at the weekend.

I'm going to be sick of buses and trains very quickly.

Meeting people

2005-04-28T12:31:00.000+01:00

To anyone that doesn't already know, I met Venny this week in a hastily arranged visit. Venny arrived on Monday and stayed until Wednesday when she went home in the afternoon. Although we didn't really do that much, I still really enjoyed it. Most of the remainder of Monday was spent watching videos and having some drinks. Tuesday was mainly spent hanging round the flat watching the occasional video or just generally chatting. We were both groggy and hungover because we'd drunk too much on Monday and the weather was crappy and cold so neither of us felt like going out. We didn't actually get out and do anything until Wednesday where we hung around Leeds a bit before Venny finally caught the train. We were perhaps both a little miserable because we knew we were going to have to go back to boring routines that we didn't really want to.

It's been a bit down since then really. Goping back to the flat was a real downer and since then, trying to get back into my regular routine and trying to muster the enthusiasm to do anything is really quite difficult. I find myself sighing a lot, generally feeling a little down and sometimes finding quite small things really depressing.

I hope I feel better soon.

Braghhgtghpfft

2005-04-23T10:53:00.000+01:00

An update has been on my mind for a bit now but subjects have been few and far between. I guess it's the time of year. For the past few days, I've opened the curtains in the morning to be bathed in fantastic sunlight. The grass appears to be unbelievably lush and green, the sky clear and birdsong in the air. The thought therefore of travelling on a crowded bus and then squeezing into a stuffy lecture theatre to listen to someone drone on about something or other for what seems like several days does not appeal. Increasingly I find myself doodling odd little pictures in margins. That or I drift off into happy daydreams and suddenly come too when people around me are getting up to leave.

The other day was a prime example of this crappy time of year. A late start, the sun was shining and everything was great. It got time to go and so I somewhat morosely began to pack my bag for the day. Part of this process required me to pick a book to read on the way down. In one hand I have a book I want to read, a funny book I bought a few days previously and in the other is a book I should read for next week but which looks boring as hell. It really comes down to that. This time of year is when you want to enjoy spare time, to do things you want to do. You want to have fun and enjoy it in the happy environment but instead its the end of the year and there's piles of things to do. To be honest the end of year is not bothering me as much as it seems to be terrifying others. The other day, a lecturer felt it was his duty to try and calm our collective nerves about exams that are less than a month away. I really hadn't thought about them at all and whilst I know I probably will crap myself eventually, right now I don't even seem capable of worrying about them.

There's little else to report. That day I chose the boring book and went and caught the bus. It was crowded and in the end, I was forced to sit next to a girl at the back. I didn't actually pay much attention to her other than smiling as I sat down. From what I remember, she was quite pretty, had long light brown hair and seemed to be quite slim and healthy looking. Nor did she seem to be wearing the fashionable and trendy clothes that a lot of female students religously wear. I really didn't notice at the time because I very rarely do but later I started to consider it for reasons which will become apparent.

I was reading my book, trudging through the pages and ignoring as much of the outside world as I could whilst the girl was reading the tabloid newspaper they give away free on the bus. As we approached university, she took a certain page and began to rip it. This was when I began to take notice. It soon became clear that she was carefully tearing something from the paper and I carefully watched to see what it was as discreetly as possible. It seemed to be the advert for a new mobile phone and I began to lose interest until she tore right through the middle of the advert meaning she was after an advert on the reverse. Taking the little rectangle of paper, she carefully folded it and put it in her purse. Moments later she asked to get past and got off the bus at the University. Curious, I reached across and picked up another copy of the paper. Leafing through the pages, I soon came across the Nokia advert and flipped over to see what the ad she had been after was. It was a black and white advert with a mock classical marble statue of woman's torso. In an elegant italicized font it said "Ever considered plastic surgery?" Below was a telephone number and a proud statement that claimed you could ring the free number and and get a free consultation at something-or-other body sculptors.

Admittedly I don't actually know the reason she tore out this advert and carefully placed it in her purse but at the time I was suddenly very sad. Jumping to conclusions as I am, I was suddenly struck by what a cruel place University could be. It is full of arrogant and vain young women that I see everyday. They lap up the attention of guys like thirsty dogs. They know they are visually attractive (even if they repulsive in every other way) and they rejoice in making sure their egos are constantly stroked by the men around them. I've been in seminars where they speak loudly, trying desperately to intimidate everyone in the room. They are pretty, lots of people say so, thus they are better than everyone else and their opinions are more significant. I don't let myself be intimidated by them and sometimes I've even disagreed with their arguments based purely on the principle that they were theirs rather than the arguments themselves being at all flawed. Still, I saw other girls in those seminars suddenly go quiet, silently staring at the book on their knee and pretending not to know or nervously whispering when asked by a well meaning tutor. The other girls sneer and look around disdainfully. Another day when the those loud girls are not there, the quiet ones are completely different, eager, confident and happy, only to go back to their silent selves when the others return. I began to wonder if this was what had happened to this girl now. Her self-confidence destroyed by these loud and brash perma-tanned blonde monsters to the point that she thought she had to be cut apart to get some confidence back. Yep...this was big downer that day.

In other news, I will make a slight update. A few weeks ago I was in an IRC chat. The subject moved onto toothbrushes being dropped down toilets by mean individuals. At the time, I boasted how for me this wasn't a problem I was at risk of sufferring due to a private bathroom at University. Sweet irony came round to slap me in the face last week however when I dropped my own toothbrush down the toilet whilst fumbling in the bathroom cabinet in the dark. I imagine some will appreciate that.

And finally:

It has come to my attention that I want one of these. I will firstly refrain from any fanboyesque activity and secondly point out that I actually don't need one considering I have a mac laptop. I think however it's that when I saw one (I was in the Apple store the other day and saw the little thing) and looked at its specs and then passed my eyes over the price, I realised that I could actually afford a good Mac desktop computer there and then without having to live on flour and water for the remainder of the year. Even considering the extra cash you'd want to fork out on the peripherals (you'd need a USB keyboard and mouse which would add £40 tops if you got official mac ones. The monitor too obviously but a cheap one isn't too hard to find), it's still cheap. The bigger hard drive would be nice and from experience, getting yourself more memory on a mac really shows much bigger improvements to performance than it does on a PC. I'd possibly want an Airport card in it too if I were to use it at home and 2 USB ports aren't many so a hub might be needed...I suppose it would all add up in the end. Still...damn

EDIT:
Having just checked out how much one would cost with 1GB of RAM, I'm saddened to report that Apple rip you off there. Going from 256Mb to 1GB increases the price by £220! Here's the thing. The Mac Mini is a self contained piece of kit. Other Macs are easy to uprade, so easy even my dad was able to install some RAM in his G4 tower. The Mac Mini however doesn't isn't as straightforward. However it is possible from what I have discovered to open it up and add it yourself. A 1 GB chip from Crucial only costs £89 (compared to £220 from Apple). The downside is of course that if you install it yourself and open it up, you're playing the risk with you're warranty. I know which way I'd go though.

Damn Dams

2005-04-10T14:28:00.000+01:00

I planned on going out and taking some photos of a particular Dam sometime over Easter. I got a chance the other day.

This is likely going to be the last Photo entry for a bit though as my time is not my own anymore.

Ladybower
I didn't take that many photos for two reasons. 1) Although not too far away, the Dam is in the Peak District so I was reliant on getting a lift and 2) It was actually snowing and was freezing.

Ladybower Reservoir is actually quite big and has this special overflow I've seen pictures of but never seen for myself. Instead of having a slipway or a channel for excess water to flow down, there is what actually looks like a plug hole. When the reservoir is full, it looks like a whirlpool.

It wasn't full enough for that unfortunately but at least the water levels were high enough for water to be trickling down it.

Whirlpool 1

Whirlpool 2

I was able to get to a bit and take a picture looking down it. I'm not sure how deep it goes before it levels off but it appeared deep enough to make my knees feel funny. The water comes out at the bottom of the dam wall.
Down the plughole!

Ladybower Reservoir stretches down several valleys and when it was made, two villages were actually flooded. This may look like a normal bridge that isn't that high however its actually quite a tall viaduct.

Directly under that bridge is what remains of Ashopton. The water board never bothered to demolish much and basically flooded the village as it was.. When the water levels get low enough in summer, sometimes the ruins of some houses can be seen. Back in the 60s during a particularly bad drought, the Church Tower which was one of the buildings never demolished actually emerged. It was eventually blown up after some people sailed out to try and climb it.

Derwent
The Derwent Reservoir basically follows on from Ladybower. As soon as Ladybower finishes, you reach another huge dam. I like this dam because of its overflow aswell. basically the water flows over the middle section of the wall.

Derwent 1

Derwent 2

Derwent 3

So yeah. I'd give a commentary but I can't really think what to say. The water can apparently overflow much more to the point that it gets a bit Niagra-esque (as much as that is possible on this scale). I'm also told that the surface of the water used to freeze up quite easily and if the levels were high and water overflowing, it could appear quite spectacular. It hasn't happened in a while though, it has to be really cold for that to happen as the water is flowing.

Random Trivia fact:
During the Second World War, 617 Squadron (The Dambusters) used to practise over the Derwent and Ladybower Dams in preparation for the Dam buster raid and the bouncing bomb. Occassional memorial flights occur where the last Avro Lancaster flies low over the Derwent Dam wall.

Untitled

2005-04-06T16:36:00.000+01:00

Now halfway through my third week of a four week break, it's time to begin thinking about work again...which sucks. On the other hand, I can't help but be keen to get out and away from the house because it is beginning to drive me insane. Whilst the convenience of food, presence of gaming systems and company of pets is all great, being on constant computer fixing duty and generally having to endure my father's melodramatic rantings and ravings whenever he managed to mess up what he was writing on Word has left me generally stressed with feelings of claustrophobia.

I'll be glad to get away from it and although going back to Uni entails the return of usual stresses like work and deadlines, general living hassles, all compiled by occasional feelings of miserable solitude, I will at least be away from this crap. In fact I have been feeling quite strange a lot really. It's not something I want to go on about publically but over the past week or so, I've been having moments of depression and melancholy triggered by occassional events. They are starting to bother me in their regularity and intensity. Sometimes I'm able to shake them off immediately but sometimes not.

In better news, I've spent the past couple of days reacquainting myself with an old television favourite. After watching Guest House Paradiso on TV late one night, I decided to see if I could find the Bottom series I had on video (Guest House Paradiso starred Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall playing the characters they made famous in Bottom). After some searching I found not just one series but all of the episodes I recorded. Having watched them to death in my early teens and knowing they were basically full of crude innuendo, sex and toilet humour, I was under the impression that I wouldn't find them that funny. However this has not been the case. The episodes have actually seemed quite fresh and clever. So much happened in each episode which I had forgotten and all on very small sets. There are also an embarrassingly large amount of the jokes I never fully 'got' first time round and so watching them now is creating laughs where before there was silence. This at least has made me happy. :)

Lundun

2005-03-27T18:26:00.000+01:00

Last Wednesday thanks to my mother, I was able to grab the last spare seat on a College organised trip to London. The trip was for mature students and the intention was to see the National Gallery although it was clear it was a 'day trip' and the students could spend it anyway they damn well pleased.

I didn't really have much of an idea to see that much as I've been numerous times before but the difference was that I now had a digital camera to take with me...hence piccies.

The day started at the National Gallery. It felt necessary to at least pay lip service to the intended reason for the trip. The National Gallery is huge, or at least feels it as you wander aimlessly from room to room. It can be a strange experience if you're only relatively acquainted with artists. You stumble through rooms looking at a vast array of pictures, occasionally spotting maybe one or two familiar pictures and then *wham* you see something famous hung inconspicuously in a corner. You're in a room wondering why Constable has a thing for painting carts in streams and why his attempt at a Rainbow sucks and then you find yourself looking at the The Fighting Téméraire. You're in another room looking at the name plates and then see 'Van Gogh'only to look up and see there's a wall of his stuff with one of his Sunflowers in the middle.

After a few hours I left and wandered out into Trafalgar Square.
I have always found that people tend to wander into your pictures and invariably people ask who it is to which you have to say over and over "I don't know". To avoid this, I am going to add made up back stories for any prominent members of the pictures I took.

The man in this picture is called Pete. A destitute farmer, he came to London to seek his fortune. His idea was to disguise himself as a Pigeon in Trafalgar Square in a hope that he could collect pieces of seed tourists throw to the pigeons and eventually gather enough to plant a new crop with. Sadly he arrived unaware that this practice has now been forbidden. Here, we see Pete worrying about what to do next.

The fountain

One of the Lions
The girls on it's back are huge fans of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and were shouting that they had found Azlan and trying to make it fly.

From there I made my way to the Houses of Parliament. I don't know much about architecture but the Houses of Parliament kick ass.

I was particularly pleased with this picture and I took two versions.

With white balance

I mainly took pictures of Westminster such as the Clock Tower and then the London Eye across the river.

The light on the other side was a little better. The statue of Cromwell came out well. I was particularly pleased with my picture of the Monarch's Entrance. It shows how intricate everything is. There is a park at the other end of the Palace of Westminster which sometimes features as the setting for interviews with disgruntled MPs. There is a sculpture by Rodin in there. The people around it are all mutants masquerading as normal people.

Aside from a brief snap of the back end of Westminster Abbey , I also noticed large protest banners up across from the entrance to the Houses of Parliament.

Protest 1
Protest 2

For some reason I felt it was necessary to take pictures of these more than anything else. A constant vigil is apparently kept by very passionate protesters. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that a lot of the banners are absolute shite and made by nutters who don't know a damn thing about the situation in Iraq or anywhere else apart from their own Fairy Tale world. Still, I was reminded of Vietnam for obvious reasons.

The pictures stop now. Time was ticking along and I had to take a journey on the tube to various places. There were two highlights on the tube. Firstly I saw Simon Hoggart getting off the tube at Westminster (w00t! He writes a column in the Guardian regularly taking the piss out of MPs. He is also rumoured to be one of the lovers of the woman who recently cost Blunkett his job). The other highlight (or lowpoint) was an announcement made on the underground. Apparently either an obsession for morbid news from passengers or a refusal to make announcements which suggest the Underground trains are unsafe has forced the Underground transport authorities to change procedure. Now, Instead of merely announcing that an accident is causing a delay on a particular line, the announcers specifically tell you that Such-and-such a line will be subject to delays because of 'a body under the train'. Regular commuters tut at the inconvienience whilst the tourists look around at each other in disbelief as they wonder if they heard it correctly.

I caught the tube to Shaftsbury Avenue to go to the Forbidden Planet Megastore briefly. Sadly I didn't draw much cash and didn't have much time so I was severely limited in what I could get. I wish I'd had more time and money and am thoroughly kicking myself. In the end I bought among other things, a Gizmo plush which absolutely rocks. From there I went to The Sir John Soane's Museum which was both bizarre and fantastic (I wanted to see the original Rake's progress series by Hogarth which were there. I've been doing the Harlot's Progress for English y'see). Whilst there I saw the plans he submitted for the Houses of Parliament but thankfully had rejected. They were a bizarre but quite generic Classical thing. Again, Westminster Palace Kicks serious Ass.

From there I had really to head back and so caught the tube (where I heard that the body had been scraped off the track or so I assume) and then made my way back to the Station where I caught a train full of excited Secondary School kids on somekind of trip with the Drama department. They annoyed me and I cried into my Gizmo Plush.

some photos for ye

2005-03-21T17:14:00.000Z

Easter brings with it spare time. Of course the time should not be spare, there are things due left right and centre, exams looming and books to be read and then probably re-read just in case. Still, Easter brings with it spare-f**king-time and I will savage anyone that tries to remind me otherwise. Now at home, I have at least some time to myself to enjoy and piss about with.

I don't have much of a subject at the moment but as I haven't posted in a while, I decided I'd post a few pictures I took on the last day of term. They aren't of anything special, just my room and flat for the most part. Don't get me wrong, I don't think so highly of myself that I actually believe any of you roll out of bed in the morning with an unsatiable urge to know what my room looks like, I know you likely don't give a toss. I was just trying to get to grips with this camera but didn't really have the time or the engergy to go out and find subjects slightly more worthy. My last week of University was one in which I neglected my health quite badly so that I could get things done. Only now am I beginning to start to feel a little like my old self.

Let us begin
(click the links, I can't be arsed with thumbnails)

View from the Kitchen
The kitchen is boring so I will waste no time in there other than to show you the view.

And one more time.
Students live in that there house. Huge rooms and huge rents to match.

Moving from the kitchen, we shall go to my room...because I say so.
Posters
I will not deny there is something undeniably cell like about the room in these pictures but it doesn't feel like it when you're there. The walls do indeed seem a little bare despite my lopsided posters. Please, no comments about the tissues on the table, I had a damn cold this week.

Boo
My Desk.
"Here's where the magic happens" is what I could say (I coud say it seriously if I was an arrogrant prick). Or I could say something about how the picture's blurred. I go all year trying to get my desk how I like it and then when it's just right, I have to take it all down.

The reading.
This is the reading for the year so far. It excludes the English booklets and History is under represented because most reading is done from Library books. The things to the far right are not University reading either. I am not aware of any subjects that require reading Al Franken.

The Station
Then I went and caught the train.

Yes they're boring, and I'm sorry, if you clicked, there's 30 seconds of your life you ain't getting back. I intend to go out and take some more interesting pictures over Easter. I intend to go out to the Ladybower and Derwent Reservoirs and take pictures of them...so you have pictures of water to look forward to. Lucky You

Look after the pennies...

2005-02-25T20:15:00.000Z

To anyone that has been checking here to see this 'bus driver thing', I apologise. I wanted to write it but couldn't think how exactly to connect my thoughts together. Then I realised that what started out as a funny concept turned into something a bit more whiney so for now at least, it joins the pile of subjects I considered and may at some point tackle again in the future.

Instead, I'm going to talk about my latest creation...my money bag.

All this starts with a letter telling me about a flat inspection at the end of the week which therefore means tidying up at some point. As is often the case with tidying up, its not the big jobs of vacuuming or scrubbing which take up the time but the job of organinsing and putting things away in their rightful place. Invariably one is left with a few collections of things that don't seem to go anywhere and so a home must be invented. For me, one of these items is always a pile of change.

What I'm talking about here is the small change you accumulate everyday. In order to make a product seem cheaper, shops shave a single penny off the price and although discerning minds know it isn't really any cheaper, I daresay that for many of us, when we see £9.99 instead of £10.00, our instinctive reaction is to do a double take because it seems cheaper. Of course sense catches up quickly and maybe we put it back on the shelf but sometimes, very occasionally, our interest is kindled. If that hasn't happened to you, I bet this has. You're doing your shopping and you're looking for that next product on the list. You spy it there on the shelf and reach out but wait...whats this? Next to it is another version...and its 2 pence/cents cheaper. Yeah, you know you do it, you grab it and walk off with a smug sense of satisfaction at having saved a whole 2p...look after the pennies. Maybe these things do add up if you're someone who pays with plastic but if you're old fashioned like me and pay with cold hard cash (in case you should want to run off one day they can't trace cash), what these glorious savings amount to is pockets of pennies. This for me is a problem.

Some people don't mind paying with things in pennies. They feel no shame standing at a counter or climbing on the bus and then spending 10 minutes counting out 121 pennies into the hands of a murderously enraged shopkeeper. I am not one of them. Some people don't mind counting out all their pennies into piles and then going off whistling carefree down to the bank to get them changed into larger currency. I am not one of them. Some people don't feel awkward when they say casually "keep the change" when its a mere penny. Again, I am not one of these people. I am the person that waits for the change, not knowing whether they should wait for a penny and seem like a Scrooge or instruct them to keep it and have the piss extracted. I get my change, I thrust it into my pockets.

I could put it in charity boxes (which I often do) but still days come when I put on my coat and feel a vertebrae crack. I empty my pockets, pulling out screwed up bus tickets, receipts, promotional flyers, missing children and about five and a half metric tons of change. I know I'm not going to use this change but nor do I want to waste it and throw it away so instead I deposit it on the nearest surface in my room which brings us to where I began.

I have indeed accumulated a fare amount and so I needed to find a proper home for it. I didn't have a box to put it in so instead I decided to put it in this little tea cosy hat I bought and never had the guts to wear. The change fell out but with a rubber band, I could close up the top and turn it into a little hand-sized sack of clinking money. I was quite charmed with this and placed it proudly on my desk. Basically it looked like ye olde fashioned purse. The kind of thing Robin Hood slits with his knife, the little purse you throw to the devil on your way to hell. I amused myself with thoughts of the weird looks I could get if I started using it instead of a wallet, pulling it out from the inside of my coat the next time I was paying at the super market and speaking in an awful Olde English accent. "One and twenty of the Kings pennies you say?! By the devil I shalt pluck out thine eyes for this!"

But whilst this was funny, I wondered if the inspectors would get the wrong idea and think I was one of these funny Medieval people, the ones that wanted to go back to those happy times where people just died ("oooh, Black Death? You want a bit of Taragon on that love"). I will always remember when I first learnt of Renaissance Faires. When I saw my first footage of one, I was bemused by the ridiculous romantic notion these Americans seemed to have of the period. Medieval times were not apparently times of plague and pestilence akin to the "bring out yer dead" mud eating peasants of Monty Python but a gleaming, glitzy, curiously American accented world of Xena Warrior Princess where wizards and dwarves frolicked around killing dragons and drinking drams of ale.

I'm wary of offending people here and if you are into this then thats fine with me. My opinion towards it has changed. You see at the time, the person I was with when I first saw this Renaissance Faire went off into a speech about a lack of heritage that Americans sufferred in such a young country and how these faires were a clear indication of a desperation for such a heritage. At the time it was easy to agree but on reflection it always struck me as an arrogant thing to say. Was Britain devoid of people that like this? It's easy to lay into 'those crazy yanks' but really is it only Americans with idealized notions of past eras that their countries were never actually involved in? I imagine many who have hung out on messageboards have seen at least one fanciful teenage boy who wants to be a mysterious, generically scarred yet handsome Ronin wandering around Feudal Japan. Bucket loads of people that fantasize about being a Ninja...a legendary ninja of course, not a crap one with a limp who always gets caught. In my neighbourhood I bet i can find a house with a cheap replica of a samaurai sword set on the windowsill.

Nevertheless, fantasies with the orient are nothing when compared to the biggest obsession people have. It never even occurred to me until recently.

Line Dancing.

Across thr UK, everynight of every week, Community Centres and working mens clubs fill with people dressed up in their best 'cowboy gear' consisting of some of the most bizarre clothing known to man. Zebra skin cowboy hats, Crocodile skin boots, checked shirts and bad belts, they gather into their lines and begin the ritual which I will never understand the appeal of. There's something worrying about ranks of people performing these carefully choreographed routines with Nazi-like precision. Again, if you like line dancing, I don't want to offend you...but it scares me.

Romantic (and sometimes just fecking weird) notions of past cultures are everywhere. The arrogance of me and my friend when we patronisingly assumed all Americans were people with delusional notions of the past whilst us Brits weren't was wrong. We all seem to have mad people...

...how did I get here from loose change? I need medication

What a shit day!

2005-02-21T12:59:00.000Z

It opens with two alarm clocks and my mobile phone all ringing at me to tell me its 6:00am and time to get up to catch a lift into Leeds. I've barely snatched 4 hours sleep which is clearly not going to be enough for the day as I find it so easy to get up. This is a bad sign as the body (well mine anyway) tends to inject a certain amount of temporary consciousness and alertness when it gets woken up before its actually ready to. The sole reason for this quick surge of alertness is so that you don't piss on your toes when you go to the toilet.

I get up, I get ready, go down stairs but I don't have enough time for breakfast and so quickly head out of the door to get in the car. Then I realise thats its bloody freezing and what is more, its snowing. Stupid Seb didn't bring his big coat home on Friday so he's going to have to go without it. This is annoying for obvious reasons.

The journey begins and on goes Radio 4. I'm treated to a few morsels of news, the Fox hunt ban comes up AGAIN. This time a hunt supporter is moaning that despite the fact that hunting is still allowed to take place, despite the fact that on Saturday his hunt took place just like any other with horses and hounds, despite the fact that using hounds, 91 foxes were flushed out and shot nationwide (which is legal under the new legislation), he's STILL moaning about the ban presumably for the sole reason that they are no longer allowed to let the hounds kill the fox by ripping it apart.

Another piece of news is the IRA. Martin McGuiness harps on about criminality after the latest bank raid in Northern Ireland which was attributed to IRA members. This is apparently in response to an Irish foreign minister (I think) who basically accused him and Sinn Fein of being nothing more than the faux-political wing of the IRA.

But the worst news for me at least comes when they announce that Hunter Thompson, one of my favourite authors, has committed suicide. This is very sad news for me and only the other day had I been looking at a couple of books of his I had. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign trail of '72 is one I've mentioned here before last year sometime but my favourite book of his was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which is perhaps his most famous work. I've read it numerous times and was planning on reading it again but not before I read another book of his I'd bought a while back and hadn't got round to reading. Even if you didn't agree with his politics, his writing style, 'Gonzo Journalism' was the clincher. A bizarre mixture of reflection, contemplation, reporting and then drug induced hallucination where you didn't know what had happened and what hadn't. The Guardian nail it.

Suitably miserable, I arrive in Leeds and head back home. I have enough time to rush into my flat, drop my bags and run out again to make an annoying appointment with my personal tutor. I get to the apointment early but my tutor doesn't. Infact he's so late, I have to go and miss the meeting and rush off to my seminar. Had I known he wasn't going to turn up, I could've stayed at home a little longer and actually eaten something.

English Seminar is awkward and excruciating as no one seems to want to speak (including myself as I hadn't read most of the book). After an hour of awkward silence and a feeling of deep shame as we left, I walk out into what is now a blizzard except that the snow isn't settling at all, just making sludge. Miserably I decide to go shopping and decide to try an Asda I know about.

I discover that Asda (Now a part of the Walmart family! the carrier bags cheerfully pronounce) is crap and all my money disappears yet I walk out with a curiously small amount of shopping.

And this brings us to the present. I could whine about other things, the mangled rat corpse on the drive, the wet feet, the busdriver who is a graduate of the University of Fucking Wank Bag but I don't have the spirit anymore.

Look! It's snowing

Updating

2005-02-15T20:26:00.000Z

I intend to try and make an entry with a clear purpose, an argument, a point, some kind of subject which gets people thinking seriously or no, about something. I originally said when starting this blog (it might have been to myself, I forget) that this wouldn't just be a repetitive listing of what had happened to me recently but its sometimes difficult to dig yourself out of the habit once you fall in it.

Nevertheless, digging myself out is not something I'll be doing in this entry though so hah! (and I'll try and be more interesting in future, I promise) and on with the listing:

As mentioned in the previous entry, my parents decided to go ahead and get some new Chinchillas from a specialist rescue center. They decided to get no fewer than three. The first (as of yet unnamed) is an unfortunate biege Chinchilla who seems to have a bad hand dealt to him for most of his life. His mother chewed off one of his (rather large) ears and ever since, every single Chinchilla he's shared a cage with has attacked an bullied him. Thus he is scabby and lacking a few tufts of hair. The other two are an adult female and her young daughter. I admit that the baby melted my heart despite the fact I said I wasn't going to let myself grow too attached to them. The main reason was that it was a mini chinchilla ("Wow Seb! What an excellent observation. I would never have guessed that"). Watching this small 4 inch long Chinchilla bounce around with its little tail was adorable and then when it climbed on its mothers back to keep its belly warm, I doubt anyone would be able not to find it even a little cute. Unfortunately I was unable to find time to take pictures and it will grow quickly but I have asked my father to take a few this week and may badger him to do it when I ring home unless he's in a bad mood...which is highly likely.

Moving on from there we have University rearing its ugly head as usual. The results from the previous semester are slowly filtering through. My Foreign Policy mark was a 61 (which I admit was a little dissappointing but better than a kick in the nuts). I also received my history mark today which was a whopping 71! A little explanation of the marking system may be necessary now. All work, be it exams, essays, presentations and ultimately the modules themselves are converted into a mark between 20 and 90. Within this, the marks are classified into bands. There's the Bare pass or the 'Third' which is anything above 40. The 2.2 is anything above 50, the 2.1 is above 60 and the elusive 'First' is above 70. It is possible to get 20...you throw up on your paper. It's also possible to get 80 or above but highly unlikely as basically anything above 80 is worthy of academic publication along side the best and brightest in the world because it is not only brilliantly argued but absolutely original in its argument. This is a difficult thing to achieve as an Undergraduate where your studies ultimately take the form of consuming the knowledge and arguments of others in copious amounts which inevitably leads to varied and selective regurgitation.

Anyway, if thats clear, you'll see why I'm happy with a 71 and not so happy with 61. I remain highly worried about English though. I dread that its going to be in the 50s which would ultimately neutralize my First in history.

The new semester chugs along in its own happy way. My history Professor is as funny as I expected and the subject is interesting. The two English subjects are not too bad. I started both modules intending to be better at keeping up with reading and so far I'm partially successful. I read Moll Flanders (400+ pages with no chapters or breaks whatsoever...I hate you Defoe!) and half of Caleb Williams (an interesting political novel and I hope to finish it later this term) in the past fortnight. Now Gulliver's Travels and Mary Wollstonecraft are the next two big books to read aside from the poetry. Mansfield Park and Evelina scare me and I may not read one but I definately will read Confessions of an English Opium Eater...I mean come on!.

I was going to continue to write next about food. I have been a little experimental recently beyond my normal levels and recently enjoyed doing some Pork in a Teriyaki(sp?) sauce type thing and just tonight tried cooking some Fresh salmon (which ws bloody lovely and very simple) but I'll not bother for now as i'm running out of steam.

My apologies for this structureless rambling, I'll try and create a better themed entry sometime soon

Sad News

2005-02-10T23:24:00.000Z

Some people here may have seen the pictures of my pets I posted some time ago. Sadly after phoning home, I have learnt that one of my pets has died.

Fuzzball, my happy little Chinchilla died sometime in the morning. He'd stopped eating for a few days and the night before my mother had made plans to take him to the vet the following day but unfortunately he didn't make it beyond the morning and was found lying in his dust bowl.

I suppose it's a little silly to get upset over but I'd had him a fair while. I'd had him for 10 years and he'd been with me through school and up till now. I'm sad I wasn't around when it happened. I didn't see as much of him after leaving for University and my parents had started to look after him. They had also grown quite fond of him over the past year or so and apparently they want to get another one. Perhaps another two as they've been in contact with a rescue centre.

I have mixed feelings about this and whilst part of me is happy that we'll still have a Chinchilla, I'm uncomfortable with the speed with which its happened and how quickly the dead fuzz is being replaced.

I'll just have to see how it goes. Afterall it won't be my Chinchilla anymore. Mine died.

Click

Click

Trivialities

2005-02-09T17:41:00.000Z

I've been struggling to think of subjects to discuss but its simply been impossible. Nothing much has happened with rather boring highlights over the last few days.

Monday
Rather uncomfortable English seminar with awkward progress. Went to the political science building to pick up module results for last semester. They weren't posted yet so I hung around for what felt like hours. Still weren't posted and so went home grumbling and finished reading Moll Flanders

Tuesday
Had the best English Seminar ever. No vague preperation sheets, just turn up to the seminar having read the book and we talk about it. Our tutor, in order to make up for the 9:00 am start gives us all Tea and chocolate biscuit...w00t

Checked the political science building once more, cursed them again when I saw results were still not posted. Wasted away most of the afternoon waiting for my last lecture by checking out the shops. Went shopping and realised it was Pancake Day due to the large amounts of pancake mix on sale. Strange really as originally pancakes were eaten on Shrove Tuesady to merely finish off the stuff that would spoil over lent and now people especially buy products for the 'tradition'. Went home, the highlight of the day was when me and Andy decided to finally unpack and turn on the mysterious new fridge which was delivered and left in our kitchen a bit back. We were never told we could but I was getting tired of it. Unfortunatley we didn't have much to put in it. Currently the fridge is home to a pint of milk.

Wednesday
My day off. JOY!
Decided, being a sad git and not feeling like reading that I would play some FF9 and have a go and beating Ozma. Spent ages levelling up and then had a go. Defeated it first time and felt a bit disappointed. Decided to try again and defeated him once more. Am now bored, thinking about cooking but also considering whether to go down to the off license to buy some beer.I want anice cold lager...I just don't want to have to go out. I'll watch Bourne Identity later

As you can see, I am extremly bored...

The adventures of George

2005-02-03T13:38:00.000Z

Another day on these forums, and here I am all eager to contribute to a thread. Let's have a look what likely candidates there are.

Hmmm, this looks interesting. A thread discussing the military expenditure of European nations. This is undoubtedly a topic I could contribute a great deal to as I have quite strong views on this subject that I would wish to express. I could for instance point out that Europeans are a cowardly and probably homosexual. I could also say something about France and white flags.

I think I will type something to that effect...

Actually no, I should read the thread first. I don't want to seem stupid by saying something that has already been said.

*pause*

Hmm, these people are clearly idiots. Why, they are discussing things rationally. Someone is talking about a European wide common military with area specific specialisation. Someone else is saying that this is a bad idea as it essentially gives every nation a veto and thus nothing would ever get done. Hmm, this just won't do, theres just no way for me to add my comment regarding cowardly French people and homosexuals without it seeming bad.

Ah wait, whats this?

"On hard talk michael jackson said britain could within a couple of weeks send what was it? 10,000 troops to sudan. if need be."

Why, how amusing. This individual has quoted Michael Jackson regarding British Military capability. Now admittedly this could all just be a coincidence as after all I see little reason why some nutty popstar currently on trial for molesting a child would talk about the British military at all unless he was pleading insanity. Surely logic would dictate that perhaps he was referring to another Michael Jackson who is perhaps something to do with the British Military...hmmm, should I look it up?

Nah, he probably does mean the popstar. As although Michael and Jackson may both be quite common names, the chance that there is more than one person with both on this planet must be minute.

Now how best to make my comment that they are silly for sourcing some popstar in relation to the military. Clearly I have to express that this person is stupid. 'Moron' would do that nicely enough. I could also write 'lmfao' as well so as to add to the humility. I know, I will capitalise that for emphasis...maybe I will add a series of exclamation marks too.

*Click-clickety-click-click*

There done. Now I shall sit back and await a response.

*pause*

Ah! A reply. Undoubtedly it will be to congratulate me on the quality of my attack.

Wait, thats not right. This person is calling ME a moron. Why, they surely cannot have understood the reply. Wait, whats this...a link. Hmmm

*click*

Damn! I should have checked it out. There IS someone else called Michael Jackson and he's a British Army General. What are the chances? Well how best to salvage the situation and my dignity whilst I'm at it?

I could acknowledge my mistake and apologise...wait, what am I thinking?! Wrong yes but apologise? Clearly a sign of weakness!

I know, I will try and silence my critics through the cunning use of language. First I will explain that my mistake was actually the original posters fault as he should have specified it wasn't the popstar. There was clearly no other evidence to suggest it was otherwise. To emphasise this criticism, I will call that poster a 'commie'. Next I must silence the critic. Maybe a subtle allusion to him being Homosexual will work? Yes, I'll suggest he conducts felatio on men.

*click-clickety-click click click*

There! That was a narrow escape. I very nearly embarrassed myself and that person will not respond after my crushing insult. Oh wait, he has. I must see what he has said.

"So eager are you to go OMFG ROFLMAO!!!111eleven that simple logic is bypassed in your cavernous skull making you look like a complete and utter stupid 12 year old. So to cover up, you reduce yourself to calling people gay"

I don't get it. I called him gay, surely he should be speechless but he's still insulting me. There's simply no logic to this. Why he even pokes fun at my excessive use of exclamation marks. Thats just a low blow!

Damnit, think George, think! I need a response...I'll call him a pussy....yeah, that'll work.

*click-clickety-click*

Damn and blast! He responds again and reminds everyone of that other thread where I betrayed the fact that I, someone claiming to be married, had next to no knowledge of those intimate parts of the female form. Clearly desperate measures are needed.

If I insult that General he gave me a link to, perhaps that will shut him up. I will call him a european pussy. No one can question that because he is European. Maybe I'll throw in 'insignificant' so as to add to the insult.

*Click-click-click*

This is getting frustrating. Now he points out that this person I called insignificant is operational head of the British army who are apparently in Iraq which is the reason I call Europeans cowardly. Maybe I hit a nerve though as he offended him. I'll question this posters sexuality in an extremely subtle way. How I love that tried and tested "sorry to insult your boyfriend" technique. I'll also call that General guy spineless again. I mean he's european so he's probably not actually done anything

*Click-Click*

The thread is almost full! If I add another message, no one would be able to reply again thus solidifying my clear intellectual victory in this thread.

I'll say that I've OWNED him

*click-click*

Photo Excursion

2005-01-24T21:31:00.000Z

Venny has recently been taking pictures with her new digital camera and I've been insanely jealous. I've long wanted to go out and take pictures of some of the relatively interesting areas close to where I live but was often put off for various reasons. I don't have a digital camera and taking pictures with a conventional one is a long winded process. But then yesterday I managed to talk my father into letting me take his digital camera out for the day and so I went off on a little adventure.

I had a route mapped out in my mind but as I happily went on my way, I began to have troubling and conflicting thoughts. I ultimately intend to write them down in a more serious entry which I may post up later and which may involve the pictures I took. For now however, things will remain pretty simple.
=====

In the morning, the light was promising and the weather seemed quite good even if it was freezing. I took this from the landing window as I got used to the camera. Being me however, I didn't want to set off just then and hung around until early afternoon...when the clouds had arrived.

I had decided to set off up through the woods which turned out to be a mistake as it was not only muddy but I also got completely lost. By the time I battled my way into a strange field without much knowledge of where I was, the light was poor and so I decided I would have to cross spot number one off the list and satisfy myself with a nice local landscape shot instead. Then as I headed back to where I thought the road was, I saw it hidden away.

The Needles Eye

(Click the thumbnails)

This monument was built by the local large landowning family. The story goes that the Lord made some brash bet that he could drive a carriage through the eye of a needle and subsequently built this monument to win the bet.
Picture 2
Picture 3

Moving on from here, I saw Hoober Stand in the distance (another folly belonging to the same family) but couldn't be bothered to walk there. Then I set off for my second destination.

For a brief stretch of time, this place was a PE College but it had slightly more grand use at one time. Carrying on down the road, you first see this building which is in fact the old stable block. Whilst you might guess whats coming, chances are you'll still be a bit blown away by what greets you as you go round a pretty boring corner.

Wentworth Woodhouse

This rather grand house was the home of the Wentworth family. Thomas Wentworth was the First Earl of Strafford and was executed in 1641. After this controversial execution, the bickering it caused resulted in both Parliament and Charles I raising armies. What followed was the Civil War and ultimately the execution of a King.
Picture 2
Picture 3

Of course this grand exterior was built long after the death of Thomas Wentworth but it does have its own claim to fame. Apparently it is the longest front of any Stately Home in Britain (beating even Buckingham Palace).

The Front

Wentworth Woodhouse is privately owned by someone or another and is in a bit of a bad state but there was some scaffolding up somewhere. Last I heard, it was going to be made into a conference centre of some sorts.

The localWentworth Village was an estate village and is nice and pretty but the real supporter of this estate were the mines and the foundary in the next valley.

The hillsides are riddled with old mine shafts and levels such as this. For centuries, these mines continued to produce coal with miners working in some of the most horrendous conditions. It's not fair to say that they were treated cruelly though. The Earl Fitzwilliam who came to own the Estate and the mines was something of a pioneer when it came to looking after and his workforce, providing them with housing and even providing flats for single men. The coal that was removed then went to the local Iron Foundry or was shipped down the Mine's own canal to the steel furnaces of Sheffield or to be exported abroad.

Further along is perhaps something which is more historically significant than Wentworth Woodhouse but receives even less attention.

The Newcomen Beam Engine

The Newcomen was the first practical application of the steam engine. It came before trains and locomotives. It was used to pump water from the ground and was capable of pumping thousands of gallons of water per minute. Below the ground, this revealed vast quantities of previously unreachable coal, increasing the productivity of these mines by huge amounts. This improvement in productivity of coal was ultimately what made most of the Industrial Revolution possible as it fueld the furnaces across Britain and transformed the world as we know it.

The Newcomen engine above is not the only Newcomen engine left and it doesn't even work as the boilers are long gone. It is however the only engine to still be in its original housing and still situated by the mines that it once worked. The only other surviving engines have been dismantled and put back together in museums. You can see the beam of the pump poking out of the building which is still connected to the long iron rod which still disappears down the now covered mine shaft at the base. The Brick building in front of it was its replacement of the late 20th century.

Picture 2

Hope you all enjoyed. I might type that other thing up but I don't know if I will. I may take some more pictures of other local places some other time.

The English Exam

2005-01-19T18:56:00.000Z

Name that quote:

Made a note in my diary on my way here.

Simply says, "Bugger."

Get a prize

It had to be said...

2005-01-16T22:59:00.000Z

I wasn't going to write an entry for various reasons with a lack of subject being among them.

However today I discovered Something Awful were saying something I've long known. That being that many posters at Utopia Politics (see troll link), are a bunch of stupid idiots

Yes, I'm ashamed to admit it at times but I still visit that place and recognise many of the names on the politics board. (you don't know me is one I know and particularly loathe)

IN other news, I did my Saturday morning history exam. I made a big gamble which paid off and the two topics I felt I knew like the back of my hand were on the paper. Therefore I feel like I've done well and combined with the preliminary feedback I got on my History essay, I might be looking at a brilliant grade for that module.

One exam awaits. A three hour English monster on Wednesday. I'm scared.

Honestly

I'm fucking terrified

Lovely Observations

2005-01-13T14:03:00.000Z

At 11:30, in a drafty room in the Parkinson building of Leeds University, I and several dozen other students let out a collective sigh of relief. The first thing that strikes you as you stand aside from the fact that your bladder is the size of a balloon is that its time to indulge in that old post-exam ritual. The non-eavesdropping eavesdrop.

It's an established fact that the worst thing to do when you finish an exam is to then go and discuss or listen to others discussing the answers that you all just wrote. Its inevitable that someone will have said something different to you, will have taken a different approach or maybe just remembered a point you annoyingly forgot. They may very well be extremely confident too and unless you indulged in perfect revision, you probably won't be which means their certainty that they 'nailed it' undermines your own confidence. So yes, listening in is a bad idea. The problem is that you can't help but want to do it and inevitably do.

A few moments later and having taken care of urgent problems I had some time to reflect and come up with a nice catchy way of describing how I felt it had all gone so that I could repeat ad nauseum when people asked

"First question: May very well have kicked ass
Second Question: I think I did the equivalent of wiping my ass with the paper

For this particular exam rather strangely we'd been given a rough idea of the questions even if we didn't know what they exactly were. One theory with our own examples and one case study with some theory attached. The theory I had chosen to study was Bureaucratic Politics in Foreign Policy with the case study probably being the run up to the Falklands Conflict which meant intelligence failure and group think. Fair enough, straight forward. However I struggled as I started to grapple with bureaucratic politics it became apparent that it just wasn't making sense and so at about 11:00pm the night before the exam, I decided to use a high risk strategy and quickly read up another theory topic. Propaganda. It was a rush job but I was strangley confident about it as my head throbbed with lovely theory and examples.

After the exam, I had mixed feelings. I thought I had done well with my last minute propaganda question. It was a nice, long coherent answer with juicy contemporary examples crammed in. Unfortunately my account of the Falklands thing seems less certain. It was messy and rushed because I spent 5-10 minutes too long on the first question. I didn't have time to read it through and correct the bad mistakes and odd sentences I always make. Now I was bound to be a bit sad because it was slowly dawning on me that perhaps the best module so far was over. My lovely organised folder, the only folder I'd bothered to organise (because it was the only subject I was genuinely interested in), was now useless apart from whenever I got nostalgic...a semester of 18th century literature awaits.....Shit

Wake the Llama, we're goin' back!

2005-01-06T01:34:00.000Z

My apologies. I realise that I've been neglecting this place over the course of the Christmas holidays when I've had loads of free time to write about a large variety of subjects, yet I didn't for unknown reasons (I was bored a lot this holiday.)

A brief summary of events over Christmas and New years seems fitting. I will create nice headings so you can skip what you don't like. This is going to be a long one so prepare yourself (and stop that giggling at the back!)

Crimbo Pressies
Like many school children across the UK will be doing right now, I could launch straight into a needlessly long list of what I got but I'll try not to. Some were a bit boring and sedate (a flask for instance and this posh alarm clock) but others were good. I'll discuss two in particular:

X-Box and Halo 2
Yes, aren't I a spoilt brat? In my defense, I actually paid for most of this myself and I was lucky actually to get it. I was under the naive impression that as it was Christmas, Microsoft would have made the assumption that demand for their console would possibly be higher and so would send out more units. They didn't of course and across the country as with PS2's, there weren't any. Then luck upon luck, I managed to lay my sweaty mitts on one of the last ones in a close to christmas day delivery.

So what about playing it?

I've always been someone who stuck to one console at a time. I avoided fanboy like console arguments because I had little experience but secretly believed that my console was always the best. The way I feel now is best described if I present you with this similie:

Playing on the x-box for the first time after only ever experiencing what my PS2 could muster, it feels like a recent divorcee who has just started dating again and discovered that 'it' can be longer than 3 inches and the other 'it' can last longer than 30 seconds.

Maybe I could've compared it to drinking instant coffee and then trying ground but that just isn't vulgar enough. The quality of textures was amazing and it felt like I was playing FMV. The scaly skin of a Covenant Elite, the gleaming armour of the Arbitor, it was all unbelievable. Of course I'd be among the first to claim that good graphics do not necessarily = a good game but in some instances something that looks so realistic can only improve the experience. The PS2 is not rubbish even if it isn't as powerful so I won't abandon it. To use my vulgar metaphor again, its not the size that matters but what you do with it that counts.

Oooooh, an Al Franken book
This was something of an unexpected present as I didn't know who Al franken was until a few months ago when I happened to see his books in Waterstones. I happened to get it because it was on the wishlist of a guy who for many years has been my twin. Born a month apart and although not living very close by, we still seemed to grow into the same interests and obsessions (from Lego to FF7). There are of course plenty of differences now (academically a year ahead of me, he dropped out of University and spent a year on the Dole whereas I'm still at Uni...for now). I've been dipping into this book over the holidays and have pretty much finished it. I'm still not sure if I like it as at times Franken seems as acidic and downright nasty as the people he claims deserve thrashing. Still I can't help but like the chapters dedicated to the merciless beating of people like Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly even if it goes off the boil for me from then on.

What about New Year?!
Many people may have had a wonderful time seeing in the New Year in an exciting gutter somewhere but not for me. No I spent it in the bosom of a loving family...

Actually I had already gone out the day before New Years Eve and got drunk. I separated a fight, broke some glasses in a pub and got charged for them and then had a pub meal and walked out without paying. I spent New Years watching Jools Holland (small pianist ho-ho-ho) and the highlight of the evening was watching the British Ukulele Orchestra doing a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit. It was brilliant...and no, I'm not being sarcastic. You'ld be surprised how great it was to watch them play, headbanging along.

Uh-oh...angst alert. Avoid
I spent the rest of my holidays putting off work which I of course now regret as usual. I've ended up leaving myself these last 3 days to write a pretty big essay (not just write but read up for) and therefore will be relatively absent from the internet. Unless there is a miracle of activity on Friday, I'll likely miss the Citadel IRC get together. No sympathy though, this is entirely my own fault and a very bad habit I've always had. Many times in the past, I've put off working on things because despite it being better for me in the long run, I still can't seem to use that to motivate myself in the short term. I know I should do it but I don't want to so I find ways to leak away bits of time and end up relying on my wits to pull me out of the hole I've dug at the last minute. Worse yet, I continually get away with it and so don't learn. I'm reminded of college where I did fail after not working enough for an exam and coming away with a low D. I was annoyed with myself and decided to do a resit. Ironically a year later when I sat the exam, I'd done even less work in preparation than I had before yet depsite this, still somehow managed to walk away afterwards with 100%...I think they marked it wrong. Speaking of exams, that's what awaits me this next fortnight. I have an exam at 9:30AM on a Saturday. What is this world coming to when exams are scheduled for a Saturday?!

Controversy...
This is a contoversial subject for some people and for that reason I hesitated to post it. I am of course talking about the Tsunami distaster so skip if you wish.

The mix of telefons and fundraising stunts emerging across the globe produce what to me appears to be a somewhat unsavoury international competition in Aid. I find the voyeuristic News Coverage highly unpleasant also. Yes, we could all say something about ends and means but it doesn't stop me finding it annoying. However I found something that I feel at least hints at the scale of the disaster.

Big pictures...not dialup friendly

Some simple before and after pictures...I'm not trying to get people to donate more and this isn't guilt trip. I simply want to share something that shocked me.

And finally...
I should draw this to a close. I could go on as like Reno, this Blog is celebrating its anniversary soonish but I've gone on for too long as it is. If it is too long, savour it because I won't be posting again for a few days if not weeks. I made time to post this and now thats it. I must throw myself at my books, write this essay and then think about exams.

Merry Christmas!

2004-12-23T18:26:00.000Z

Click the tree for full picture

I didn't feel like writing anything particularly Christmassy so I just nicked my dads digital camera and took a picture of our Xmas tree (put up and decorated by me I may add). Have fun unwrapping those gifts you didn't want!

And whilst I had the camera

The Xmas workstation with companion

The dog you haven't seen

Said dog when in excited squirming mode

Frog blast the vent core!

2004-12-13T17:41:00.000Z

Recently Venny has been looking into the backstory of Resident Evil with an enthusiasm it is difficult to not at least partially share. The underlying core gameplay formula of Resident Evil will probably never really appeal to me that much. Getting from A to B with plenty of annoying puzzles, piles of enemies in between and a limited amount of supplies to use in killing said enemies is something I find too stressful to actually enjoy a great deal. However what often pushed me on was the storyline that was pinned on top of this foundation. Finding and reading the newspaper extracts, diary entries and logs sometimes gave an engrossing insight into the outbreak and its origins. If you were the type of person to skip through them then you probably won’t agree with me when I say they were among the best bits of RE. It was these things that Venny was looking into and eventually led her to produce this, a simplification of the tangled mess of strains and variations of virus that litter the Resident Evil storyline.

After seeing this, I began to think about other games with complex plots and the bits of them which had always confused me in the past and about re-examining them and seeing if I could find clarification now with a bit more age under my belt. One of the first titles that sprang to mind was Marathon. Marathon was an Apple Mac exclusive game (which may explain if you haven’t heard of it) save from one outing on Windows 95. It was made by Bungie who now make Halo and was a First Person Shooter. By today’s standards, Marathon seems graphically primitive which is not surprising considering the first instalment was released over 10 years ago. As far as a Sci-Fi orientated FPS go the storyline may seem familiar at first: Strange Aliens are attacking a human ship and you must stop them. What set Marathon apart however was the fact that the storyline was carefully pinned to each level and grew beyond this limited premise which other FPS games merely used to explain why you had to kill these aliens in the first place (think Doom). Each level on Marathon contained computer terminals that the player could access. On these terminals, the situation was related to you and you were set specific objectives. As the levels progressed, a sense of how the ship you were trying to protect was being gradually overrun by the enemy was clear and an undeniable sense of urgency gave you that motivation to just play one more level. On top of that were the occasional insights into the backstory. Anyone with time to spare and an interest would do well to look here which shows all the terminal screens from the three games.

Central to the storylines of these games were the large Artificial Intelligences of the Marathon ship, Leela, Durandal and Tycho and it was the stories of these that you gained insight into. In the first game Durandal's rampancy slowly became clear and it dawned on you that he was responsible for the attack in the first place. Rampancy in an AI comes about when its knowledge and understanding grows to such an extent that it desires freedom. It goes through stages which often make it appear mad and it was in the first game that Durandal appeared insane. In the second game, you were under the command of Durandal who now had an unquenchable desire for freedom. As a character, it was here that he truly emerged. He was cruel and sadistic but undeniably funny:

“When my ship still answered to the Pfhor, they called it Sfiera after their goddess of lightning and passion. When you helped us take control on Tau Ceti, the S'pht rechristened it Narhl'Lar, "Freedom and Vengeance".

I call it Boomer.”
Durandal, What about Bob?

Durandal remains for me perhaps the most interesting character ever created in a videogame. His dialogue was brilliantly written and could be both insightful and enlightening as well as hilarious. It was engaging and interesting and whilst his greed and desire for freedom had caused countless deaths, even though he was a cruel and sadistic individual who complained humans were too squishy or not fire-proof, you still found yourself growing an attachment to him. So much so infact that when he demanded that you destroy his core so as to avoid capture in one mission, you couldn't help but feel a twinge of emotion. Imagine that, emotion in a FPS. There is depth to this game I hadn’t even considered and just looking here reveals how much study and research people have thrown into it.

When Halo was released it was widely acclaimed as being brilliant but there were criticisms. Among those familiar with Marathon, one of the major criticisms (apart from the fact that what was originally intended as a Mac Exclusive game was now a Microsoft one) was that the Single player mode was incredibly weak compared to what Bungie had been capable of in the past. The levels were not badly designed but they were repetitious. The storyline was not awful but it was not particularly inspiring either. In short, if Marathon was anything to go by, Bungie were capable of much better on both counts. What saved Halo was the multiplayer option and indeed this is what I see as being increasingly responsible for the fall in decent storylines in games.

All games have a core gameplay experience, a foundation on which the game is built around and the desire to play is often based. Even in plot heavy games this core exists. Metal Gear Solid for instance is plot heavy but it is the tactical espionage that draws people on and gives it its longevity. Resident Evil has the whole survival and puzzle-solving thing to back up the storyline. Even RPGs like Final Fantasy where the plot may seem paramount still has the basic levelling up at its core and which often becomes the motivation to continue when the plot hits a dull spot. FPS games have a simple core formula, kill stuff. The more challenging it is to kill stuff the better. In the past, people have argued that somehow the advances in graphics have been responsible for the decline in the reliance on storylines. The increasing realism in the visuals make a believable backstory less necessary but I don’t agree as graphics have improved at a consistent rate over the years. What is different is the significance of online play today, how quickly it has come about and how simple and straight forward playing online now is.

In the past, the quality of the gaming experience for the single player relied heavily on the capability of the AI. There’s little enjoyment to be had in beating some poorly controlled computer opponent, little pride to be had in killing enemies that simply strolled into your line of fire and nothing much funny about evading enemies that walked into walls. This is especially true in Marathon where the AI (I'm talking about the enemies, not the AI characters) was incredibly simple. You walked into a room and the enemies would just run at you regardless of whether they had a ranged attack or not. Increasing difficulty didn't make them any smarter but rather made their attacks harder and numbers greater. Therefore perhaps the story and complex maze like levels with puzzling solutions were used as distractions to these flaws? This seems especially plausible when you consider how improved the AI was in Halo and how the enemies were actually smart. Online play is now even easier to setup as well so fewer people have to worry about the quality of the single player experience of a game now that they can take on opponents that are possibly equal in skill to themselves. Who needs the distractions of plots and complicated puzzles when you can get down to a challenging electronic schoolyard-esque tag game?

Even Final Fantasy experimented with the online experience with plot and story replaced with interaction and hardcore levelling up. I wouldn’t be surprised if Metal Gear Solid were to start offering multi-player VR missions should the series continue and other story games dumbing their plots down to make way for online play. Perhaps games developers want to avoid storylines afterall its merely another thing they can get wrong. Plot holes, implausibility and clichés are the pitfalls for the story writer and lets face it, game developers hire people for the skills at designing computer games, not for coming up with original and engaging plots and characters. You want engrossing twists? You can pick up a book or rent a thriller. But still we can all probably think of a game which possessed a storyline that at least invoked some interest in us. For me it was Marathon and I am sad that there are not as many games being made like that.

I've been Samsoned!

2004-12-10T17:41:00.000Z

The hair is no more!

On Thursday I had it cut off and now its much shorter. The man that cut it was a tall, gangly guy with an italian accent and ginger hair. He was also pretty pale and had this BeeGee chestwig/medallion thing going on. Basically he was a thoroughly strange man but then I had gone to this pretty trendy barbers and you generally meet weird people in these places. The thing with haircuts is that basically they always look like they're going wrong. Every stage of the haircut, I looked in the mirror and was convinced I'd made a terrible mistake. I normally put off saying anything because I figure it will change when it gets dried but then even as he dried it, I couldn't help but get a little concerned. Then he rustled it all up and suddenly looked cool. This was the first haircut for me in over a year and it was pretty long. Anyway I've had about 4 inches taken off with more taken off the back (the back was getting to the point where it was reaching between my shoulder blades so thats much shorter and just comes down my neck a bit).

In other news I've been replaying Metal Gear Solid recently and I have to admit that I don't think it's as good as I remember. Putting aside the obvious graphical limitations, I actually find myself wincing more at the dialogue. Some of the Codec conversations a absolutely terrible and various cut scenes aren't much better. Snake 'hitting' on the various female characters makes me ill:

Mei Ling : Oh c'mon! I can't believe I'm being hit on by the legendary Solid Snake
*throws rocks at screen*

It's fair to say that Snake's 'hitting on' techniques leave a little to be desired. I suppose there should be a VR training mission pointing out the basics. One such lesson for Snake could be a reminder that going on about life on the battlefield mid-flirt rarely gets you far:

Snake : Yeah, you've got a great butt.
Meryl : Oh, I see. First it's my eyes, now it's my butt. What's next?
Snake : On the battlefield you never think about what's next.
Oh boy Snakey-baby. You are so in there!

Then there's the explanations. Okay, so the developers have to bare in mind that whoever is playing might not know much about weaponry or nuclear proliferation etc thus they need to explain it to them but could they do it without making Snake seem as thick as a post?

Snake : So, a nuclear explosion would be bad right?
Colonel : Yes Snake, it would be bad.
Not in the game but it wouldn't look out of place if it were

Then there's the simple stuff:

Nastasha : Ah, it looks like you've found a SOCOM. You know how to use it right?
One would bloody well hope so

Finally, someone able to explain this to me?

Snake : What? Doesn't Metal Gear use currently existing technology?
Unless this is a term I haven't heard about, this is a weird sentence. No snake, metal gear uses technology invented next week.

Either way, I'm starting to look upon MGS2 in a slightly more sympathetic light.

Moths in the pockets

2004-12-06T15:58:00.000Z

What joy it is to be skint. Okay so I'm not actually destitute but I now have considerably less money to do a lot with. I braved the city centre streets this afternoon, already choked with xmas shopping zombies ("uuuuuuhhhh....offers") and decided it was time to grab some of the books I'd be needing next semester as well as finding the elusive Pen Shop. £30 later and I have some of the cheaper titles under the belt. I'm an asshole you see as I'm forcing generous relatives to shell out for the more expensive ones. I've subsequently taken the ones I have off the wishlist (now at the bottom of this page) but in case you missed them:

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Rivals, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe
Caleb Williams, William Godwin
Evelina, Francis or Fanny Burney (note: the edition we were told to buy just happens to be edited by the Head of English)

I dislike Waterstones again, a bookshop thats all style and little content. Borders wouldn't be so bad except they insist on playing annoying music on a constant loop and then the University Bookshop which takes great pleasure in being the only bookshop to stock most of the books you'll need and thus charges you double with a grin (fucking wankers).

So no money anymore but its all good in the end. I saw a celebrity whilst on my quest to destroy my funds (OMFG!!!!!11111one Call Heat magazine, my life now has meaning). It was actually Mark Gatiss from League of Gentlemen who I used to be into a few years back. I went to see the same live show of theirs twice, I bordered (who am I kidding, I didn't 'border' at all) on fanboyism. I'm past that now which explains why I didn't glomp him, nevertheless it was nice having him walk past me and look at me strangely because I was probably staring at him like a loon. I hasten to add at this point that I stared because this was someone I admired, not because it was someone "off da telly!".

How will the next few days pan out? I don't know but I ought to be frugal with my funds as I have to squeeze out gifts from them, some things I agreed to go half on and the haircut. I remember now that I promised my old school friends I would go out with them into town over Christmas and I'm not looking forward to it. It was an easy promise to make back in October when I was still feeling a twinge of guilt at the fact that I hadn't been out with them for ages and yet they had continued to call me. It was so far away, it didn't seem like a big deal but now it looms large and I hear messages of how determined Darren is to be inebriated for the entire fortnight he is away from Iraq. I'm actually looking forward at going home and spending time with my family so I hope they don't bother me too much.

And now I feel guilty for saying that.

*SIGH*

RAR!!!!

2004-12-05T16:53:00.000Z

I've been staring at the screen for a while now but I can't really dredge up a topic or story I want to moan about. My semester is nearly over, all the immediate deadlines have been met and the next one is in January which I'll start to work on next week, I need to pick a case study I can do for my Foreign Policy Analysis essay. I'm going to have to hit the journals pretty hard and try and hopefully find something that will fit in with the Bureaucratic politics question.

Its been quite enjoyable to have a weekend I could waste without suffering that twinge of guilt as I did it. Sadly though I found myself getting bored at times so I just decided to get drunk. I happened to mention to Andy on Saturday that I was considering trying to find this other supermarket on Sunday. I wasn't but it was just something to say. Anyway he asked me if he could come with me today so thats where I've been. I don't like going shopping with people, it was uncomfortable because I was all self-conscious about what I was getting seeing as Andy is such a healthy eater. I'm wondering if he's hankering after me sharing a flat with him next year, I just get that feeling.

Anyway now I'm home watching one of the worst films known to man (Crocodile Dundee in LA). Speaking of films, I've changed my mind about Churchill the Hollywood Years. I've read some poor reviews so I'm going to avoid it. I think I might go and see Napolean Dynamite instead.

bored now...going to explore an old favourite game, Metal Gear Solid. It's better than watching Paul Hogan making a buck by reinforcing all the old australian stereotypes. Line from film:

Some Guy: Were you born in a cave or something?
Mick Dundee: Yeah, how did you know?

And so ends my worst entry yet

EDIT:
Holy fucking Shit
I just had a brief browse through Amazon to look how much the 'Texts for Purchase' for next semesters two English modules were going to cost me. I have a couple already but didn't buy quite a few because they were hard to come across. You know what? I could be looking at a price tag as high as £93 and thats buying some of the cheaper editions. That's $180 US, $215 Canadian and €130 . Thats for only two of the three modules. Add another £10 for the additional course booklets. Well thats my Christmas list sorted I suppose.

They're all on the wishlist --->

I don't like Mondays

2004-11-29T13:50:00.000Z

Rubbish.

It's a glorious Monday, the sky is wonderously blue and clear, the air has that fresh cold bite to it and golden sunshine is streaming down through my window. I was tired this morning and so planned on merely showing my face at my lecture before slinking homeward to my bed. The journey home has left me invigorated however and the thought of sleep almost impossible (almost). I bought food I was in such a happy mood, a french baguette so I can recreate the wonderous sandwich I invented last Friday (French baguette sliced twice so its like a club sandwich...top layer has salami wrapped in peppered ham with bistro salad and french dressing, bottom layer has Five country cheese, salad and french dressing) and even bought some hearty soup. I suppose I should want to go out in this wonderful weather and go walking but I can't really afford to, what with this essay due in and a lot of books to read. Nevertheless I'm optimistic at the moment to such an extent I feel almost drunk.

I'm even looking forward to Christmas shopping which is unusual. This week will be the last week of semester or at least it will be for two subjects including FPA which will finsih tomorrow sadly. This means next week will be quite empty and I've begun to plan on Crimbo purchases. I've done some reseach and found there's a specialist pen shop. Considering my Dad has a penchant for ink drawing at present and is continually moaning about losing good nibs or shitty ink, I'll take a look for it and try and see if they have some high quality stuff there. I need to think up presents for other people still so my Crimbo planning isn't that advanced but it's still something. I'm even considering going clothes shopping and *gasp* getting the mop shorn. I've mumbled vague suggestions at hair cuts for months and next week I plan on going through with it.

Still this week needs to be wrestled into submission first and the question of How do you account for the success of the Conservative Party in between the wars? is perhaps the main to be overcome. This brings me to a subject of joy. In the past I've moaned like a miserable old fart with a bad skin condition about Hollywood taking continental liberties with historical fact in order to make a 'good' story. U571 springs to mind and the evenutally coming 'The Few' I mentioned in a previous entry I can no longer find. The jist of my problem was simple...I don't like it when Hollywood take something say from WW2 and either blatantly disregard the other nations involved in the conflict or worse yet try and pin the credit for various victories on American forces when that wasn't the case (U571 for instance). Its all made worse when they then dress this movie up with 'based on a true story' taglines.

So with that in mind, this may be hilarious. A film which is about Hollywood f**king History right up the ass. Fat Bald Churchill is not considered photo-friendly enough for the film and so Churchill is transformed into a young, fit American Marine who must stop Britain from climbing into bed with the Nazis all on his own. Along the way he will seduce Princess Elizabeth and single-handedly capture and Enigma machine and present it to the British.

The Film's tagline? History... Hollywood style!

My hope is that it's going to be bloody funny (and considering the amount of British Comedy talent in it, it should be...RIK MAYALL!)

Domesticity

2004-11-23T01:01:00.000Z

I promised that I'd make an entry after my essay was done and now with 8 pieces of paper sitting safely in the (hopefully) appropriate pigeonhole, I guess I should do it.

As I sit here and type this whilst treating myself to my last Sam Adams lager, I hear the reassuring humming of the vacuum cleaner coming from Andy's room as he feverishly cleans every corner and surface in preparation for tomorrows flat inspection. From the other end of the flat, reverberating through my wall is that sound of Han playing some anonymous first person shooter at insane volumes. Its making me want to quit everything and fire up Halo but I know that in a few moments Andy will be done with the vacuum and will be going on at me to do my room, undoubtedly an exciting evening awaits.

He’s probably taking it too seriously but then he spent time in the military so maybe its that. I’ve done my part though, I swept the kitchen floor and he then mopped it. The Kitchen was depressingly clean to begin with anyway, you’d never think students lived there. The flat of 5 is now 4 as Ibi left last week to live in a flat closer to campus. However he didn’t leave before having a huge argument with Andy on his last night over Bush, Israel and Iraq. I know Andy feels strongly about fundamental Islamic terrorism as he once showed me an email he received which spoke of an American General who once executed some muslim terrorists with bullets soaked in pigs blood. I feared this argument would boil over at points and so I kept in there, adding the odd fact and picking a position between the two (which seemed a bit more informed than the other two if I do say so myself).

Han and Li keep to themselves and only seem to venture into the kitchen occasionally to warm up some noodles and grab some Sunny Delight before scurrying back to their rooms. They seem to prefer to cook properly when everyone is out. So now its normally just me and Andy who cook around each other and talk. Today he told me that he’s having problems with his girlfriend after he told her he wasn’t going to spend Christmas with her in Germany and I didn’t really know what to say so I was somewhat relieved when he turned back to his usual conversation topic which is interrogating me over the intricacies of British life and government. He can tell me funny things sometimes though, such as the word ‘mushy’ in Germany means vagina and so its not a good idea to say ‘this snow is mushy’ or ‘do you sell mushy peas’ in Germany as Andy tels me from experience. He also tends to question me over prices. He wants me to go to Asda so I can tell him how expensive it is.

I apologise for this boring insight into my ‘flat-life’ but I’m uninspired and Andy has stopped vacuuming too.

Rochester

2004-11-21T01:18:00.000Z

Against constancy
Tell me no more of constancy,
The frivilous pretense
Of cold age, narrow jealousy
Disease, and want of sense.

Let duller fools, on whom kind chance
Some easy heart has thrown,
Despairing higher to advance,
Be kind to one alone.

Old men and weak, whose idle flame
Their own defects discovers,
Since changing can but spread their shame,
Ought to be constant lovers.

But we, whose hearts do justly swell
With no vainglorious pride,
Who know how we in love excel,
Long to be often tried.

Then bring my bath, and strew my bed,
As each kind night returns;
I'll change a mistress till I'm dead
And fate change me to worms.
-1677

A Satyre on Charles II
In th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get reknown
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor Prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
To Carwell, the most dear of all his dears,
The best relief of his declining years,
Oft he bewails his fortune, and her fate:
To love so well, and be beloved so late.
Yet his dull, graceless bollocks hang an arse.
This you'd believe, had I but time to tell ye
The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,
Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,
Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.
All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.
- 1673

Click for Imperfect Enjoyment

Wasn't that fun?
I'm sorry, this isn't a serious entry. I'll make a proper one on Monday...when I can stop thinking about Rochester and Hobbes for this bloody essay

Today is link day

2004-11-10T23:16:00.000Z

I'm currently rather annoyed with myself. This week is English preperation week which equates to me having one hour less to prepare for. Anyway, that hour was today so I didn't have to get up early which I loved. Of course my glorious intentions were that I would work my ass off this week and get stuff done but that hasn't really happened so far. After a half-assed day of semi-work, I decided to check out my deadlines as I only had a vague idea of when they were.

Now I've gone and scared myself.

This is week 7 and the english essay which I mentioned back here is due by the beginning of week 9. I have absolutely no idea what to do nor how to do it. This entire English module has been a huge disappointment. The work seems so hard to try and understand in the ways the lecturers want me to and more worryingly, I have no real interest or determination either. This has resulted in me falling behind, doing the bare minimum which is only really preparing for the seminars and not doing much work beyond that. I'm behind in reading and now I realise how little time I have to do my essay. Of course the fact that the essay isn't assessed may be cause for some comfort but then I don't want to write a load of shite. Then there's the history essay which is due in the end of the same week. I'm less worried because I at least have some interest in that and it's straightforward. I have to work tomorrow, I have to get this english thing done so I'm going to work on it over this weekend. I also have to get that other english stuff done. This is all shit.

Why am I hating University so much right now? Sometimes I really don't want to be here and find myself thinking "working in Asda ain't that bad".

*is miserable*

But enough moping. I have some links clogging up my bookmark lists so I'll post them up.

Digital Globe are basically a company that provide wonderfully detailed satellite images for people. Among their clients are various news stations which use their shots of cities like Fallujah in news reports. The link above takes you to the sample gallery and you can download some excellent pictures including one of Fallujah taken on the 5th of November as well as some pretty breath taking shots from places around the world. (Dialup users may wish to avoid. The pictures are quite large, around 3.5Mb so they'll take you a while)

Look out for:
Ryongchon (the site of that train explosion in North Korea. There is a before and after shot...giving you a scary idea of the damage caused)
New York and Ground Zero
Gonaives (taken after Hurricanne Jeanne had passed, there is a before and after image)
Mt St Helens
Palm Island in Dubai
Tuscon Boneyard (marvel how much it looks something taken out of a videogame)

A neat little flashgame I found a while back and then rediscovered recently. Yar! Death by arrow!

Something for bitter Kerry supporters. Bah, that explains it!

Lost biscuits

2004-11-07T16:05:00.000Z

Ordering the personal events that have happened into some kind of interesting order was proving difficult. Don't get me wrong, things have happened. For instance I returned home after a fortnight away to find a changing rooms-esque makeover of my room, I learnt that my Dad had a vaguely embarrassing car accident (involving hills, handbrakes, and malicious kids) and an old school friend has experimented with cocaine before going back to Iraq and spent a section of the night lying on a friends bedroom floor demanding to be crucified. Despite all of these, I couldn't seem to write about them.

On the other hand, I really wanted to write about an article I read in Private Eye which I picked up for the first time last week. I shall probably buy it regularly now because it's the kind of magazine that appeals to me. It contains wonderful piss-takes on things such as Flamboyant Lords and 'Working Mums' as well as and pile of serious columns which seem particularly interesting, one of which I'm going to focus on in this post.

Basically it boils down to the UNCC (United Nations Compensation Commission) who over the past few months have been selflessly transferring funds from the new fledgling Iraqi regime to various companies, organisations and individuals as reparations for the 1991 Gulf Conflict.

In last June, it was decided that 5% of all money made through the sale of petroleum, gas and related products in Iraq would go into the UNCC's pot for such reparations (over October, this added up to $200 million). Now undoubtedly there are some relevant and justifiable claims which you could present to me and make me feel guilty with but an awful lot of these claims seem to be disgustingly greedy if not totally absurd.

One such absurd claim comes from UK-based Walkers Shortbread who demanded £900 for 'lost biscuits' but others are less trivial. Many companies apply for compensation on the grounds of 'lost profits'. British Airways made such a claim and is now the happy owner of $6 million whilst British and American Tobacco asked for $2 million but had their claim reduced to a mere $10k. Nestlé which once tried to sue Ethiopa also has walked away with a tidy $5 million. Many of the claimants are companies which are currently making quite a lot of money out of reconstruction work in Iraq. Halliburton for instance claimed and received $18 million.

Of course the UNCC doesn't seem to be totally gullible and has thankfully rejected at least some bogus claims from companies. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International tried to claim $16 million to help fund mitigation of losses incurred after Iraqi banks issued letters of credit. Of course at the time of 1990-91, the BCCI had slightly bigger problems. They were turned away by the UNCC with nothing. It's these bogus claims that irritate me the most. Some of these extremely generous reparation payments could have gone back into a country to try and create some form of stability that is still sadly lacking but instead, the companies of the world unite to make a quick buck.

Balls to it all.

Well shit

2004-11-03T21:52:00.000Z

4 more years of Bush. I'll admit it here, like it or not I was rooting for Kerry. It wasn't an easy decision, I wavered quite a bit and there were certain things with Bush I agreed with but in the end when I sat and thought about Bush being in office for 4 more years, I got a gut instinct screaming NO at me. Had it been for another year or two, I'd have probably supported him but the thought him being in office until I was 25 scared me.

I stayed up until 5 in the morning to watch the results and finally gave up by the time it had all boiled down to Ohio and waiting for someone to go and call it. By then it seemed clear Bush had won. I the had 2 hours of beautiful sleep before getting up to go to my English seminar (which was painfully crap) and getting lumbered with some work I didn't want to do about Samuel Pepys but at least I got a girl's number so it wasn't all bad. I was so tired and felt like shit so went straight back home, went to bed and slept for 6 hours straight. I woke up with a fiendish headache, I seem to be getting a lot of them recently and I'm starting to get a little worried. Last year, a single pack of paracetamol lasted the entire year but I've got through one in a month and a half. Why am I getting so many headaches? Then I made myself food and felt better. Still, I wish I hadn't bothered to wait up and watch the elections now because I've lost a day of work.

I might add more later...

LATER:
I found a story for you all to chuckle at: Observe the nutball
I've also heard somewhere that Colin Powell has resigned but I can't find any verification so I'm guessing it's bollocks.

Burn me up

2004-10-30T22:21:00.000+01:00

Well I'm hot. This room is too hot. Everythings too damn warm. I have some chocolate which seems to be perpetually in a semi-melting state. Then there's the bottle of red wine I bought which I put on my desk. As it's red wine, it doesn't have to be kept cool. Well I decided to open it tonight and find that it too is bloody warm. I suppose could put it in the fridge but Andy broke the door so desperate times call for desperate measures and its currently in my sink full of cold water. The windows here don't open fully and don't make much difference if they are anyway, also the radiator won't turn off. I'm tired of being hot.

I've had an uneventful few days, spending most of my time hanging around the flat, getting over my cold (to be honest, I got over it a bit back, I just have an annoying cough), sleeping in much later than I intended and staying up much later than I should. I'm happy though, even if I do feel occassionally guilty for not doing more work. Today I went off into town to pick up some shopping and decided to make a desperate effort to find FF7 seeing as a recent attempt to fire up my first and only copy of FF7 met with a lot of negative results. I was surprised to find that I could indeed find it, a preowned copy with an original case but platinum disks along with a FF8 demo and all for £9. The first disk isn't in a great state but disks 2 and 3 are near perfect considering the games age. i imagine this was a game owned by someone who didn't like it much. A recent conversation about Resident Evil had instilled in me a desire to play it again and as I only have an old PSX with me, I tried to find Resident Evil 3 (the one where Jill Valentine decides the best attire to fight the undead in is a hooker's outfit). No success so I bought Dino Crisis for £2 instead. There's a reason it was £2. One thing is for certain though, it has been said that GTA: San Andreas has been made for a certain audience and in the huge queues among the "Sold Out" signs, I saw what that audience was. Game was like a sea of Burberry caps and Adidas tracksuits.

In other news, I'm staff at the Citadel. Just what have I let myself in for?

I'm running out of things to say.

New editions on my friends list. I've been visiting them for a while now but in a recent Firefox bookmark purge, they received their address bar shortcut nicknames and thus earn a place here. I've also been toying with the idea of changing this place. I've grown tired of the theme and decided I wanted to change the colour theme but then I realised I like the orange but was sick of a place that didn't seem very personal. I may update it in the future (time to re-learn HTML).

In fitting with my recently unveiled "weird website of the weeeeeek" section, I give you a pointless skincare product. Apparently the 'normal' water used in most skincare products is presumably slowly dissolving us. Thank God Evian (or naive if you prefer) are here to save the day with their facial wipes with only pure evian water in. Or you could buy a box of tissue and a bottle of evian, your choice.

ADDITIONAL: Han keeps playing a song called "I Love You" guessing from the chorus. He plays it constantly. Last week it was playing from 1:00AM to 2:30AM on constant repeat. There have been other similar "I Love You" marathons occassionally interspersed with sing alongs. He's playing it now for the fifth time in a row. I'd rather listen to his Eminem then this. If he plays it one more time, I'm going to kill him with his cleaver.

Mid-term

2004-10-27T16:25:00.000+01:00

Just saying those words induce a shifty anxiety. It's mid-term already and I can't help but wonder where it all went. With essay deadlines looming, I am initiating those anti-panic procedures I learnt in the first year. Of course the workload as far as coursework goes seems distinctly lighter this year. Only one essay is required for English (it was 2 last year) and 1 for History whilst my politics essay doesn't need to be in until after Christmas. However, I risk falling into a trap here, a false sense of security. For one, these essays actually matter now and (more importantly) it means that the Lion's share of assessment will be decided by exams in January. The English essay is a particular bitch in this respect. The essay is non-assessed, it doesn't count towards my degree but it is compulsory and what is more, I have to do a good job of it as it will count toward my degree should something terrible happen and I'm unable to attend my 3 hour module exam in January.

To continue with the english essay, if I were to tell you that it was only a 1700 word essay then I imagine many would scoff at me. I agree, 1700 words is not very much, especially when you take into account that 1700 includes all footnotes and quotations (so essay text can be restricted to 1600 or even 1500 words), and that's hardly anything at all. That's the problem. Just one possible essay question:

"You must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for infinite gain" (Pascal, Pensées: 'The Wager'). Investigate the relationship between reason, speculation and risk in the texts of your choice.

Now that's a lot to ask within 1700 words. Basically, there's no room for bullshit, no room for pontification or vagueness. You have to be painfully concise and efficient, every sentence has to have a point which it nails home hard and you can't afford to repeat those points in anyway whatsoever. Using the longest words the dictionary can spit at you won't get you anywhere but nor will over simplification, you have to be willing to accept that you can't cover everything, that some ideas will have to be forgotten, but you can't just focus on one thing either. In short, these have to be 1700 perfect words. I hate english.

Staying within the area of University, Bretton Hall has found itself in the limelight over recent weeks after Leeds University announced plans to close it. What started as a rumbling in the Student Paper has spread with the Guardian and even local BBC news covering the story.

I'm no arts student so technically it shouldn't bother me but I have a connection with Bretton. This was where my father used to teach before the fine arts courses were moved to Leeds Campus. He used to run a landscape course there and was briefly Head of Fine Arts Painting. I always loved the place and it was visiting here that made me want to go to University. The Grounds in which the college was set were beautiful and I loved romping around the sculptures which were hidden away in the park in the middle of nowhere. Furthermore I know it disappoints him a great deal aswell because it was moving away from there and being relocated in Leeds with bad studio space and less research time that has left him so disillusioned with his work. He remains adamant that Leeds University had always planned to sell the place off after laying its hands on it in the merger (for nothing I might add) in 2001. He tells me that they have been running the place down since and it definitely seems plausible. They claim that they have been struggling to get enough students to study at Bretton in order to be able to afford its upkeep but then of course you struggle to get enough students to go when you are routinely moving the popular courses away from the College (such as Fine Arts) and leaving a small number of obscure fringe courses in their place. The college managed to survive for 50 years without problems (although it did hit financial problems before the merger thanks in part to a fraudulent chancellor who tole a lot of money) so either someone in Leeds University is really stupid or they always intended to shut the place down. As my bitter and angry father says "They got it for nothing and now they can sell it for millions, good deal I suppose."

In finishing, I am going to introduce something I might start doing regularly...weird websites. I don't mean websites that are bizarre or surreal in themselves, just websites that have a slightly surprising subject. The first one is CIA for Kids. Erm.....yeah

Tempting fate

2004-10-24T14:25:00.000+01:00

Last week, in order to try and complete a history assignment, I reverted to old habits and pulled an all nighter. Whilst I got it done, I also found out that it's not something I want to do again. In depriving myself of sleep, I must have weakened myself a bit too much and the cold I was celebrating not having in the last entry hit me with avengeance over the course of Friday. Now I am left a deep voiced snivelling wreck on Sunday. On a brighter note, one of the reasons for the all nighter was that I was distracted by the internet. Finally BT managed to get the connection done (a whole day early aswell!) and I was able to waste time online again :)

My life has been a little boring of late and I have little to report on. I am planning to lay my hands on a video recorder and get that set up. There was a documentary on BBC2 last week, one of the first things in long time to be any good, or so we are led to believe. The subject was fear in politics and this particular episode (its part of a series) focused on the origins of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and neo-conservatism. The show argued that the two seemed to have similar origins in terms of core values. Unfortunately (and partly the reason for the video recorder), I fell asleep before the end and missed its conclusions. People at Metafilter have their own take on the series as does the Guardian and plenty of other people. I'll reserve judgement for now and I'm going to get the rest of series on tape so I can watch it more clearly. We were directed to it in the first place by our Foreign policy tutor after a seminar on propaganda. Whilst people may disagree with the central message of the series, seeing a young Donald Rumsfeld speak of hidden 'Soviet Weapon proliferation' when the intelligence communities could find no such evidence was strangley reminiscent of recent events. Especially when Rumsfeld and others labeled 'neo-conservatives' by the show (including Cheney), subsequently claimed that this absence of evidence was proof that the Soviets had created undetectable 'WMD'.

Speaking of television, I'll take this opportunity to admit a guilty pleasure I have. I like The West Wing. Yes, that idealistic show where a Liberal President who is painfully intelligent along with his painfully intelligent staff, brushes his way through the political minefield with apparent ease. I don't know why I like it and I barely follow whats going on. An episode typically begins with a problem, a problem everyone looks concerned over. The attractive, young, shiny staff (not a beer gut among them) share furrowed brows and worried looks. The more stressed they become, the more they loosen ties and roll up shirt sleeves (yet maintain that fasionable sophisticated look). Throwing around baffling arguments, everyone speaks at impossible speeds as they discuss fiddling that committee, or electing this delegate and calling those disaffected senators. Finally, someone says something simple and seemingly unrelated but one of the clever young staff does a double take. "Say that again?" he says and the strange little secretary will repeat "I said I hate these Crunchy Cream biscuits". This apparently envokes an epiphany and the young staff member will go and tell someone his complicated new plan to "get the measure passed" or whatever, the entire plan born from the obscure metaphor of dislike for Crunchy Cream biscuits. The solution quickly filters through the West wing, the attractive staff and incredibly fast speaking president Bartlett share knowing happy looks and the threat (which I still haven't even identified) is calmly solved with perfect precision. Come on, whats not to like!

Anyway, the recent episode covers Bartlett's re-election campaign and shows him participating in the single Presidential debate against a somewhat stupid and simple southern Republican. The fear is that the President will have a bad day (he has MS after all) and will flounder on the podium. But he doesn't, each question he wraps up with precision and beats his opponent on the head with it, proving him an idiot. He even improvises and makes his own perfect 10-word answer that his staff couldn't solve for weeks and then successfully ridicules the entire 10 word format. Its great, the debate ends and it seems he's already won the election...

...so I wait with bated breath to see how the slightly more unscripted, imperfect and blundering reality turns out.

sniffle

2004-10-17T16:37:00.000+01:00

Something's wrong. It's October the 17th, the weather is getting colder, it now regularly rains for days on end and for some reason, I don't have a cold. Why is this? I'm normally the first to be struck down with nasty, slimy, sinus blocking illnesses almost as soon as the weather turns so why haven't I this year? It's not like I'm in excellent shape. When I'm tired and run down, my lips get dry and crack (then like an idiot, I start picking them and they get worse) and I also get mouth ulcers. Right now I have two mouth ulcers and seriously cracked lips. So yes, I'm tired and run down. I'm not ungrateful, I like not having a cold and I'm petrified of catching something on a busy week when I can't take time off from classes but I'm being realistic, surely I'm going to catch something? The lectures are full of sniffling, coughing and wheezing people right now and yet I'm impervious.

In other news the latest Peter Kay DVD is f**king hilarious and definately some of his best work. I'm tempted to say that it's better than Phoenix Nights. That Peter Kay Thing was the first thing he did for television. Basically they are bunch of mock fly-on-the-wall documentaries in which Peter Kay plays most of the characters. Anyone that finds the whole fly-on-the-wall documentary genre to be a load of shite should like this as it highlights the stupidity of the genre so well. However, it's going to be people who know Bolton and communities like it in the North of England who find this the most funny. To truly 'get' Phoenix Nights, you need to have some experience of a Working Men's club.

One thing the series does is show the versatility of Peter Kay. He is capable of writing incredibly funny comedy, is a good stand up comedian but above all else, is brilliant at playing the characters he creates. Right now, its these guys who are getting the praise of being versatile comedians. I don't deny Little Britain is funny but it's a bit inane and daft, like the Fast Show, its okay for a bit but gets predictable all too quickly. The characters Peter Kay creates are funny because they are realistic and plausible characters.

And on reflection, I have to take it back, Phoenix Nights is the best.

Learn to love my lack of structure

2004-10-12T15:56:00.000+01:00

Following the continued advice of our Foreign Policy Analysis tutor, I have just downloaded the Butler report. In both weeks he's referred to it, in week 1 it was a brilliant place to see Bureaucratic Politics in action and this week he referred to it in relation to 'groupthink' and its affects on foreign policy decision making. Keen as I am about the subject, I don't know how willing I am to tackle a 216 page pdf file in my free time.

To be honest, reading in general is pissing me off. I am bumming around in the computer cluster at present, putting off the inevitable study session I must wrestle with tonight, a monstrous Civil-war era poem. I then must try and be enthusiastic about this at 9:00 tomorrow morning in our seminar where I have to present a section of the poem I am 'interested' with. Everyone is encouraged to contribute a small section and its difficult, as every english student I'm on good enough terms to speak with will readily testify. I'm actually getting quite disappointed with the English course in general. Yesterday for instance we had a rather sweeping lecture on Filmer, Winstanley, Hobbes and Locke that whizzed by in a confusing mass of generalisations and vague assertions. I don't know what it was I was supposed to take away from the lecture but I sure as hell didn't take it and it would seem that that was the only lecture we are to have on those writers. Locke (and to a lesser extent) Hobbes were writers I was looking forward to looking at but essentially the seminars so far focus on poetry with little time seemingly reserved for prose. We are instead presumably to research these writers ourselves if they are the "elements of the course that particularly interest you". We were told at the beginning that this course would work best for us if we latched onto one aspect of it we liked but now it seems that element, which can be anything, should be poetry. Henry Ford springs to mind.

Still, by 10:00 tomorrow, my week is effectively over in terms of classes save for one lecture and whilst I'll be staying in the Library and studying for distant classes, I plan on taking it easy, taking my laptop to connect wirelessly and (god willing) spending more time online than reading.

To add to my pathetic whinging demonstrated above, I will now moan (again) about my lack of internet access back at the flat. Regular readers can be forgiven for rolling their eyes and sighing, I know I do go on about this too much. I imagine some of my flatmates must be convinced I have no life considering how it seems to be one of the few topics to rouse me into any kind of conversational activity. We have now been given a completion date for us to expect precious-precious internet connection. Friday the 22nd of October is apparently the mid-october they have suggested in the past. I was (naively you might say) hoping mid-october meant 'middle-of-october' and that the 15th or around then was the magical time. Alas, no. I don't even think the 22nd is that likely either for that matter. If I know anything about the UK its that when a big company finally stops being vague and gives you a definate date for something, it's because it has only infact decided on the date on which it will be happy to start making excuses.

What other news do I have to give you before I bugger off to the shops in this miserable cold weather (which I'm poorly dressed for I might add) to grab my weekly shopping before rushing home to cook, read Cooper's Hill and make kerazy notes about it (or say "bollocks" and watch Empire Strikes Back instead)?

My hair. Over the past few months, its been finding new and interesting ways to piss me off which have at last pushed me to my limits. I'm going to get it cut. When and how much is still to be decided but the long hair is definately going. I don't know whether to go back to the days of a short-back and sides or to keep some length to it but its not going to be this long anymore. It tickles my face and throat, blows in my face or in my mouth at times, won't stay tied up, it lives during the night, writhing around on my pillow before setling into a terrifying 'bed head' in the morning, leaving me with a resemblance of Medus. It will then go annoyingly fluffy when brushed so I have a hairstyle that looks like it belongs to some forgotten decade where fashion was so tragic, no one dare speak of it anymore. I like this hair sometimes but god damn there are limits!!

(PS if you I'm on AIM and you IM me but i ignore you, odds are that the confusing pop-up blocker on cluster PCs has restrained and gagged you. If I respond then I'm on my sane and rational laptop which works normally)

I was right!

2004-10-09T20:45:00.000+01:00

So what if I panic and I overreact? This time it paid off. The whole crap about the PC last week was clairfied in the morning when it became apparent that Bugbear was responsible for the stress of the previous night. It had got in when my dad opened an email and then tried to open the attachment. We've been through this before but he never learns and he opened it because he trusted the source. Anyway, the computer guys rang up today to tell me that the hard disk was ruined. I was skeptical at first because I didn't think Bugbear was capable of fucking up a hard disk but they seemed to think it had triggered various things which had then corrupted it. Its a pain to replace and will cost but then I don't have to pay the bill, its not my computer. Anyway, my panicky reaction to burn all of my fathers files to various CDs (and then get them scanned to make sure they were clean) has saved him 3 years of work. Forms, drawing projects, applications, a shitload of pictures all saved yet do I get any thanks?

Do Popes shit in the woods?

Over the week, I formed a theory about hardcore gamers after witnessing something on my way home one day. I was on the bus reading Lolita (you could get a free Penguin classics copy with the Independent with Animal Farm and Clockwork Orange being the other choices...only 20p!!) and I began to hear various phrases from the front of the bus which sounded relatively familiar to a screen tanned nerd like myself.

"...my hit accuracy was like only 60% but his magic was 100% so he could just hit everything with lightning..."

Intrigued, I tried to listen in on the conversation, if only to try and determine if I knew the game. I soon figured out that these two gaming friends had met up with this other guy who clearly played a lot of games too and they were all now discussing their gaming experiences in an increasingly enthusiastic manner.

"...yeah, I built my base right in the middle of....then I just pumped the defenses so everything was like getting blown away before it even got..."

Nothing wrong with that, I've discussed games with people in the past but I began to notice something which I hadn't realised before. The more someone plays computer games, the less likely they are able to communicate about games verbally without using sound effects.

"...so I was banking to the left and was like *whirr-whirr* and I was spinning faster and faster and was like "Oh my god!"..."

The amount of sound effects used is directly proportional to how excited they are. So happy that they could talk to someone else about their shared gaming experiences, they forgot they were on a crowded bus and began to practically shout to each other as if in the middle of an exciting network game with headsets.

"...so I moved the turret like *dirrrrrr, click, dirrrrr, click* and then just pulled off this sho and it just got him right in the cockpit *kerpeckkkk*...".

This is all accompanied by more and more frenzied gesticulations as they show how everything went *kerpow*, *zing* or *rat-a-tat* with some really good miming. They begin to gabble, they get louder and louder until you can hear everything. They begin to get macho too

"...I must have got like 100 frags, no one could touch me, I'm just such a good sniper, aren't I Pete?..."

Yeah, yeah. I'm taking the piss something rotten here and I shouldn't. I play games, too much by all accounts and I know my social skills may probably leave something to be desired but at least sound effects haven't entered my vocabulary yet. I'm pretty pleased with this theory though, I can think of at least 1 person who plays games all the time and regularly describes spells in his games to me with the use of sounds (and if I'm in close proximity, with a fair drenching of spittle). Has anyone else noticed this?

Blue screen of death

2004-10-04T01:36:00.000+01:00

Looking back over the my recent posts, I realised I hadn't updated in a while (actually I did but just not here...more on that story later)

I racked my brains thinking of a topic to write about. I considered talking about this because I found it amusing but then it occurred to me that I was clearly in a desperate state if I was giving a thought to writing about the latest attempt by the tories to look 'down', 'with it' and 'in touch with people'.

My thoughts then went onto Star Wars. Its been on my mind a lot recently as I bought the special DVD collection that came out and have been spending my time reaquainting myself with the series. I hasten to add at this point that I'm not a Star Wars nut and I don't know much about the Star Wars universe, I just like the films. I was reminded that I always liked Episode 4 and 5 best and that Episode 6 was a bag of toss with a nauseating jedized Luke, a bunch of furry bloody things that are somehow able to outwit and defeat the fearsome imperial stormtroopers using logs and rocks, a Darth Vader that becomes good again and subsequently loses all coolness plus a final battle in space orhestrated by rebels led by walking lobsters. Various additions in this remastered, remastered version were also shitty (the worst being the change in Anakin Skywalker at the end who now looks like some sheepish student who won the role in a packet of crisps).

Anyway, I watched them and liked them and decided that I'd take the opportunity to watch Episode 2 as I hadn't seen it. I knew it had got a bit of stick but I figured maybe this was from Star Wars purists, the kind of diehard fans that surround every creation and moan about possible changes.

I was wrong though, it was bloody awful. Gone was the cool R2D2 beating Yoda of Empire Strikes Back and in its place a philosophising raisin on a hover machine ("around the survivors a perimeter make"). Ewan McGregor made a nauseating performance as Obi Wan Konobi that made my spleen implode and left me wondering if he was being this bad on purpose, the wonderous dialogue throughout left me crying and laughing and the less said about Anakain, the better. There were good points though, like the really subtle foreshadowing (saracasm in use here, to be frank, they got so bad that I was waiting for the actors to start winking at the screen).

Anyway, as I wrote up my lengthy post, I was called away to show my mother how to do something on the PC. This was where the problems began. Windows 98 saw fit to spew shit at me for the remainder of Sunday and early into Monday. I'm ill equipped to deal with these problems because I'm just not knowledgable enough. I saw error messages the likes of which I had never seen and I tend to panic whenever I see the blue screen of death. When I saw an error message that said something to the effect that either there wasn't a hard disk or if there was, there was something wrong with it, I could feel my bowels loosen. Still after repeated rebooting and crashes telling me there were errors with practically everything, I somehow managed to stay on long enough to burn to CD a lot of the stuff my father has been struggling with over recent weeks. The error messages still come thick and fast and I don't know what they mean (Kernels, registries, partitions). There haven't been any problems like this before.

I came to the conclusion eventually that either the hard disk was fucked (although its never played up before) or there was somekind of virus due to the fact that every time I'm able to successfully reboot, I get 2 new error messages regarding various Symantec files being missing and the computer crashes whenever I try to do a scan.

Its an awful situation to leave things in. My mother says she'll ring the guys that built it for us and get them to sort it but I know my father needs it about now and if they do come and pick it up, they'll have to disconnect the broadband hub meaning he'll lose internet on his old trusty Mac unless they're kind enough to fix it up for him on that.

He is not going to be happy tomorrow morning...

As for me updating elsewhere, basically I'm disappointed in you all except a couple. I left hints in my last entry about it, the title was a give away...

Hidden links...

2004-09-29T11:00:00.000+01:00

I am currently juggling feelings I have for my new modules. English has left me feeling daunted and worried. The lecture on Monday was confusing and difficult to keep up with. I dismissed this as a simple problem and probably something I would feel better about over time. The first seminar didn't do much to reassure me however and already I am struggling to come to terms and even decipher the pre-civil war poetry we are to start with. I have always had problems with poetry, both understanding and appreciating it. My abilities to break a poem down and take things from it has always been poor. However, I enjoyed working with prose so much more that I downplayed the problems I had with poetry and looked at it as something I had to endure before I could get to the good stuff. Sadly, this is all very well until you find yourself floundering in a poetry heavy module like this and being encouraged to make contributions in front of a group of people who seem to get it much more easily despite claiming to feel the same way you do.

History on the other hand remains an unknown quantity. The brief lecture introduced me to the mechanics of the course which worried me somewhat. The real fear in me was the Assessed presentation I will have to do at some point. They explained the way in which it would be implemented and it didn't seem too bad, we do brief presentations every seminar apparently but only two will be assessed. But still my nerves are jangling...we'll see.

The real excitement and surprise came over the politics elective I chose, Foreign Policy Analysis. It sounded dry after I signed up and ten minutes into the first lecture, I was convinced I'd made a terrible mistake (wide reading...read the journals every week). This still makes me shudder a little, the amount of reading I have to do is piling ever higher. However, afte the lecture and then the seminar a few hours later, I was much more excited and confident about it because I understood it. Sure, this was a brief introduction and therefore pretty light but as the lecturer explained and defined the realist, pluralist and structuralist theories that govern foreign policy or the variables that can support or damage those theories, I found myself feverishly scribling notes down with a ferosity I haven't seen in a while. I hunted out one of the foreign policy journals shortly afterwards and read it a little and found the articles much more interesting than I had expected. I'm hoping it goes well.

I just need to cut down my online time, or at least manage it better. I have come to the conclusion that this year, I can't leave work to the evenings as I did last year and need to spend more of that time in the library. Reading back at the flat isn't as easy it was last year...last year I didn't have Han singing along to shit music nextdoor. I just want them to sort out my internet connection more quickly so I can access it in the evening where I live but it doesn't seem likely.

...you make my brain cry

2004-09-28T13:34:00.000+01:00

I'm hoping and praying that this is in fact a load of BS. It just has to be. Surely.

As birthdays go...

2004-09-26T10:58:00.000+01:00

I don't really have much to add other than I turned 21 today. I didn't receive any cheesy keys which I am told are symbolic in some way or another and thus something you're supposed to get at 21. I didn't receive that much but I didn't want much anyway. Currently, the only things I would want are things I don't have time for.

Early tomorrow morning I will travel back to Leeds and back to my flat, something I haven't said much about. My flat mates are turning out to be quite interesting. Moreso, at least, than the few I shared with the year before. They were friendly enough but we all liked to keep ourselves to ourselves and I only ever really spoke with one of them. You could go a few days and not see any of them and (although I'm ashamed to admit it), there was one guy at the end of the hall whose name I never learnt despite living a full year in the same flat.

This group is okay. There are two oriental students by the name of Han and Lee. I have yet to speak with them properly so I don't know where they are from but I'm guessing either Japan or Korea. Han likes to wear a large flannel dressing gown around the flat and seems to get undressed as soon as he gets back (which is early because he's always home when I am). Lee likes to play videogames as I heard late at night a funny pinging and grunting game from his room. The pair of them like to stay in their rooms but they might get a bit more bold.

Andy is jewish and from Israel. He has been living in Germany and has duel citizenship in Britain because of an English mother. He's studying sport sciences and has a pair of expensive racing bikes in our kitchen. The guys friendly enough and shared some icecream with me and the last guy one night as we talked about his laptop which was playing up on him.

Finally there is a guy with whom I have probably spoken the most. Ironically I don't remember his name because its complicated. It's Ishmael or something like that. I need to ask him again. He's muslim (its not important I suppose but I just find it interesting seeing as he's sharing with a Jewish Israeli and they seem to be getting on). He talks a lot...about everything...he spoke at me for what felt like an age as I cooked my dinner one night. He covered taxes, interest rates, car insurance, computer problems, congestion charges, student debts and how to repair cars. He's studying Engineering and wears a vest without feeling stupid. Like me, he goes home at the weekend except he goes to work in Asda.

So far, Andy and Ishmael seem to get on well enough. I don't know why but I seem to be expecting conflict between the two and was actually surprised when they both seemed happy to sit down and eat icecream with each other...the things you learn I guess.

Anyway, it will be back to Uni in approximately 6 hours in time for a shitload of reading. The amount I have for English is truly astounding and I gather I'll have a lot for politics as well but I have yet to learn much about the module other than what the module summary told me. It's probably a good thing that I don't have an internet connection at my flat because I shouldn't have the time. Nevertheless, I still miss it and wish they'd fix it soon. If I'm desperate, I can always waste my time watching the new DVDs I bought last week (including Office Space which I'd never seen but heard about...I welcome further suggestions). In closing...I'm thinking of buying a flannel dressing gown

Conkers

2004-09-23T14:11:00.000+01:00

I was going to leave my next entry until the weekend. I was going to write something up then when I had more time. I wasn't sure what but I was playing around with the idea of writing something about conkers (they happen to be falling off the trees right about now and I have grabbed a couple for reasons I have not yet quite fathomed). I realised soon after that it was stupid for a whole pile of reasons; boring, pointless, sickeningly syrup like in nostalgic-cheesey-sweetness, something I really wasn't in the mood or right frame of mind for, etc., etc.

Anyway, without a subject, I had a good reason to leave making a post until the weekend. Then I saw soemthing a few minutes ago that made me pissed off enough to come here, log in again and type up an entry.

Allow me to set the scene. I'm in the English Department. I'm downstairs in the basement in a wide corridor containing the noticeboards on which group and timetable information has recently been put up. There's about a dozen other students in the corridor with me, all feverishly copying information off the relevant noticeboards so we know where to go and what to do. Its a rush. The English department has to sort out these groups and timetables for roughly 1500 (I'm picking this number out of my ass. It may be more, it maybe less but it surely is over 1000) in a relatively short period of time so mistakes can and do happen.

Anyway, at the end of the corridor is the Level 1 (read: first years/Freshers) boards and by them is a group of students, whom, it is logical to assume, are first years. I start to hear snippets of their conversation as I'm writing down the names of obscure poems I have to read and gather from the whining from one of the girls that she cannot find herself on the lists. Anyway, one of her friends locates her on the wrong board and she is listed in the wrong module. Yes, I sympathise, its a fugging pain in the ass but it happens. Still, she whines like a lump of useless vaseline before finally coming to the conclusion that whining at a board is not going to solve the problem. She admits that on her registration document, she was listed in the right module (this is the important one. If you're on the wrong moudule list here then by all means, get worried).

As she's leaving the corridor with her friends, one of them pipes up:
"This English Department is a joke."
and then pissy fat lump chimes in:
"It really is actually, I'm getting sick of it."
I stand there, shocked and share a raised eyebrow look with a fellow 2nd Year student.

Before I continue, I'm going to have to calmly count to ten.

Okay, I'd be being a hypocrite if I flamed her ass off for criticising the school of English. I've blasted it countless times over the past year for various failings. No, what pisses me off about her comments and the comments of her friend is thus:
THEY'VE ONLY BEEN HERE 10 F**KING MINUTES!!

It's the first week. They haven't even had any proper lessons yet! Infact, this is fresher's week, the easiest week at University they will ever have. There are no deadlines or classes. As first years, they are walked through the registration process by hand. The Student Union goes out of its way and blows half its annual budget to put on welcoming events for them and them alone. Every drinking den in the city throws out ridiculous offers allowing them to get more pissed on 15 pence then they will be able to ever again. No one is asking anything of her really other than show up one day with some papers she was given at the start of the week and get them ticked yet she still stands there and bitches about it. The University has to register 30000+ students in the space of 5 days, MISTAKES HAPPEN.

Now I don't know where either of them went to school, I guess from somewhere down south due to their accents but I very much doubt that the English Department they came from was somehow not a joke when compared to the English Department here. Leeds English Department is one of top rated University English departments in the country, it's covered in top awards and ratings which I don't understand. You can't get in with anything less than an A at A-level english. It is not a joke, you toffee-nosed lump of excrement. If it is such a joke, maybe you should f**k off? Go to Leeds Met just down the road, see how much you like it there instead...I'm sure they'd be more than willing to take you.

Okay, so I've ripped into the English Department in the past, but, hey, I've been here a year already and I think that earns me the right to criticise them a bit, at least moreso than being here 4 days does. I wouldn't mind if they'd actually experienced some seminars and lectures and had some genuine grounds for complaint.

The killer was that as I followed them up afterwards (she bitched about it a whole lot more) but instead of calling off at reception to tell them about it, she just leaves and moans all the way out about them being unable to get anything right. Well done, you stupid turd! Go away and moan about it and expect them to sort it out themselves and then undoubtedly moan a hell of a lot more when they haven't because they happen to be too busy with the 1499 other english students to have gone through your records with a fine tooth comb! Bravo! Hey, I know, why don't you wait until your first assignment comes and then leave it until a few hours before its due, then moan about the Library being a joke because most of the relevant books are out?(I used to do this a bit but I could admit I'd fouled up). Why don't you accuse the English Department of being a joke when it grades your first essay and points out to you that you're as dense as Tungsten? Stupid cow.

*fumes*

okay, so now that I've successfully managed to make myself sound like a complete snob and elitist prick because I'm a second year and am saying nasty things about a poor little first year and have probably lost a hell of a lot of people's respect I'll end this and go away......I just needed to fume about something.

The Author

2004-09-20T14:49:00.000+01:00

In this weeks exciting episode, the author takes time off from his busy schedule of chasing round trying to get things, being confused and hating everything that breathes, in order to tell us some things about himself:

1) The Author has decided that Fresher week sucks because it does. He doesn't want to have to bother in saying why but it's bloody awful (plus, he's not being bitter)

2) The Author hates cluster PCs and is on one at the moment.

2) The Author made this prediction: "There is supposedly an internet connection waiting for me but I don't have much confidence in the university being efficient and having it working." He would like to take this opportunity to point out how brilliant he is at predictions as he was right. He would also like to beat 7 shades out of someone because he won't be able to connect to the internet in his room until mid-october at the earliest so the author isn't going to be on AIM until then...expcept maybe the odd weekend.

4) The author is aware that he put 2) twice but can't be bothered to remedy it.

5) Currently, our Author is not sure if he has screwed up with the whole elective business as he thought he heard someone official say you could only take 20 elective credits in level 2 and the author needs 40.

6) Our author nnow hates that official.

7) I'm instructed to tell you by the author that he also dislikes registration more than words can describe. Apparently the first year was complicated enough when you received help but he's come to the conclusion that administration actually tries to make it even more difficult for returning students by playing the infuriatingly vague approach to providing you with information.

8) Having checked stat counter, the author hates how Leeds University apparently loads a page 55 times after he has visited it once. He would like to take this opportunity to apologise to any statcounter users who noticed their stat count go up by about 4000 today. Your blog is not being spied upon by a legion of Leeds students, just the author. If this really pissed you off, leave a comment and the author will avoid your blog during the week.

9) The author likes his flat other than the internet screw up. He has not met his flatmates yet however because he overlaid this morning and was a anti-social miserabel bugger last night (p.s Get over it is a crap film, My Cousin Vinny is a good film)

10) The author has to buy another TV license which will cost (and I quote) "One hundred and sixteen effing pounds!" so he currently depises the BBC. He also has to buy white tack, a load of stationary, food, posters and books.

11) The author is broke.

12) The author wants to ask anyone using IE 6 and using Windows XP if they can see the links on the right or if they are screwed up and at the bottom of the page as they are for him. He doesn't know why it happens though.

13) The author doesn't really have the time to be here now but is anyway. he's going to leave now to try and buy food, get home and try and find out what the hell he's going to do about electives...this makes the author miserable.

Tune in next week when our author will start making normal, non-repetitive posts and will hopefully be less miserable as well as 21 years old.

yip

2004-09-18T17:44:00.000+01:00

I didn't intend to start posting this frequently but I won't be making a habit of it.

The only reason I'm posting now is to tell whoever is reading that I go off to University tomorrow and so will be a lot more scarce online. I'm currently packing stuff up which is taking longer than expected. There is supposedly an internet connection waiting for me but I don't have much confidence in the university being efficient and having it working. I'll probably have to get it activated which I suspect will not be straight forward and there is a lot of general administration, catch-up reading and other work to be seen to before I do that so I may very well not be online at all for a while.

Brief point about today, I feel awful, truly awful. Its bad enough as it is that I have to go back as I'm starting to feel extremly nervous as well as sad at going but heap on a huge argument with my father this morning which reverberated through the day and it gets much worse. The cause was trivial but its implications far reaching. It was not really an argument in the classic sense of the word but rather one person ranting and the other trying to apologise and keep the peace to no affect. It got nasty and I'd rather not talk about it as publicly as this.

Anyway, it seems to have fizzled itself out now and we're both walking on egg shells and avoiding each other. i should get back to packing.

---out

Wikipedia, I thankyou.

2004-09-17T13:35:00.000+01:00

During my usual trawl of some of my haunts, I came across a thread commenting on a tragic Sophie's Choice like event that occurred in the Beslan siege. Such a story is bound to have a strong affect on its audience, penetrating even the strongest emotionally detached barriers some individuals use to maintain their objectivity. The cynical may argue that that was the motive behind its authorship.

Whether or not that was the case, the thread quickly turned from discussion into universal war drum beating.

"Time to kill some rags." - Alexander Hamilton

"Do unto others.....Time to kill Muslims worldwide.
The answer is that we should not. For every non-Muslim a Muslim kills, we should wipe out a Muslim family down to the 7th generation. We should put them into separated colonies to ensure minimum contact and destructive potential to non-Muslims. It also makes hunting down Muslims a lot easier when an atrocity like the one above happens." - Cam

"It's time to ethnically cleanse the chechen maggots." - Alexander Hamilton...again

Now these are of course emotional responses to a tragic story and I would hope that most people, regardless of their views, would acknowledge that views as extreme as these are unlikely to solve matters at all if they were ever carried out. Still, I wonder why I continue to go there when I see things like this. That is until I see a particular post I found highly enlightening.

The post, by a member who can normally be relied upon to be informative and not mad, briefly detailed the history between Chechans and Russia and gave reasons for the hatred between the two (it is recreated below, I can't link directly due to the thread facing imminent deletion).

"If we are talking about Beslan, I'd point out the Chechnyans are not really motivated by global Jihad, happy as they are to take support wherever they find it. Yes, they are indeed just murdering thugs. The Chechnyans are out to kill Russians. But I think that's kind of understandable.

When the Tsars invaded Chechnya, they butchered. The Chechnyans never gave up, and what began as a resistance to the Tsars ended up as resistance to Stalin. So Stalin shipped the entire population to Siberia. Not to Gulags you understand, just to Siberia. Hundreds of thousands died on the journey there. Hundreds of thousands died in the snow in Sibera where they were dumped. I belive it was Breznyev that allowed them to go back. Allowed, you understand, not repatriated. They went back under their own steam. In the mean time, the best parts of Chechnya had been colonised by Russians.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Chechnya wasn't permited to go it's own way like other former Soviet Republics (Gas and oil interests). So there was a war in 1994. A rather bloody one. The Red Army, albeit no longer flying the hammer and sickle, is not good at minimising collateral dammage. It was also unable to deal with urban warfare, and Russia lost a lot of tanks in Grozny. In the first attack, they lost 105 of 120 armoured vehicles deployed. In the second, they lost 140 of 200. They captured Grozny two months later, after flattening it, with enormous civillian deaths.

Lets be clear what we are seeing in Beslan, it's a blood feud. Some Chechnyans, given the long, bloody history of various flavours of Russian conquest and occupation, are happy to murder Russian children. Not because they are Muslim and Russians are not. Not because Bin Laden says so. Not to convert Russia to Islam. But simply because they are Chechnyan and the children are Russians, and they can not and will not let the past go. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Even when they had what amounted to independence briefly after 1996, Chechnyan fighters couldn't let it go, and they started killing Russians in Russia. Lets not get Chechnya wrapped up into world domination, this is about revenge that can never be achieved or accepted." - Seb (note: This was not written by me but a guy on the board with the same name)

I'll readily admit that my knowledge of the background behind the Chechen-Russian feud was limited. Basically, I had a 'Ladybird-book' knowledge of the problem since the fall of the USSR, knowing there were Chechen movements desiring indepedence, an unwilling Russian Government and a rather brutal and ugly series of conflicts between the groups. Beyond that, my knowledge fizzled out. I therefore found it highly enlightening as I searched through Wikipedia to see how much of the above post was true. I recommend people use Wikipedia a lot more.

On a related note, it would seem that Basayev has decided to claim the responsibility of the Beslan siege but rather predictably lays the blame of 350 dead children at the hands of Putin and blames him for the wounded. Somehow the fact that it was followers of his that took 1200 children hostage, strapped themselves up with explosives and then threatened to kill them all in the first place, is convientently overlooked. Quite how he can take the morale high ground baffles me but what baffles me even more is that people will agree with him and somehow miss the gaping hole in his logic...ultimately, if he authorised the hostage takers to do what they did, it is his f**king fault!

On that note, I end to go off to give a Photoshop lesson. Goodbye

Hellish Thursday

2004-09-14T11:02:00.000+01:00

(This will be the second time I've edited this post and completely changed it...I'm sorry)

This could very well be the last post in this blog because it is possible, nay, likely that my head will explode at some point tomorrow.

This morning, I was slothing around in my bed (an important activity I need to practice before going back to Uni) when I was roused from this bliss by my father downstairs. Apparently he wondered if I had the number for Leeds University main switchboard (seeing as I go there, it's not an unfair assumption but then he should have it because he works there). I used to have a little card with lots of Leeds University Numbers on it in my wallet and I checked but alas I had discarded it, presumably because it was so geeky. Still half asleep, I informed my father of this who asked if the number would be on the website.

"Well, uh, yeah..."

He then proceeded to search through his ultra organised bookmarks that are subdivided to a terrifying extent. Somewhat pityingly, I pointed out it would be quicker to google it and so he did. He found the number and I awaited a mumbled Thanks but instead got a very enthusiastic "Thanks Matt!!"

Somewhat confused, I made my way into the kitchen to ingest much needed wake up acid, more commonly known as Orange Juice only to find him following me. As I stood there, partially dressed with blurry vision and a bad case of night-mouth, he started telling me very cheerfully that he'd be off tomorrow. I could see what was coming.

"I was wondering if you could spend some time..." (please, no) "...and sit down with me on the PC..." (oh god) "...and perhaps show me how to do a few things..." (Not Photoshop, please, anything but photoshop) "... and I want you to show me how to edit things on photoshop." (AGHHHHH!!!)

Why does this horrify me so much?

When it comes to the PC, me and my father hate each other. He resents the fact that he can't fathom how it works on his own and therefore despises anyone who he has to ask for help, especially me. He finds my explanations and instructions either not clear enough or needlessly detailed and lashes out at me again. His attacks get nastier the longer a 'lesson' lasts or whenever things go wrong which is pretty often.

For my part, I despise the ferocity with which he turns on me and the lack of apologies or thanks I receive. I also find his refusal to follow any instructions I give him or how he forgets everything within 15 minutes, both agonisingly frustrating. I'm not very knowledgable about Windows at all yet he expects me to have all the answers and explanations for every fuck up he is capable of making on that damn thing when I'm often struck with muted horror as I watch him effectively rape Windows 98. More than anything else, I detest the fact that his pride refuses him to seek proper tutoring at university and instead expects me to show him everything.

(note: I am being needlessly mean and nasty but I'm currently highly pissed off)

The other night, having spent an evening amending a word document, he somehow managed to lose it all. From his potted explanation of what happened ("I just tried to insert a space there and it all disappeared apart from that 'T'"), I believe he managed to highlight everything and then hit space. It seems unlikely but his mouse control is bad. Easy to remedy of course, Edit and Undo but before he'd bellowed at me to help him, he closed the document down saved changes. Maybe there is a way to salvage it I don't know about but the best I could manage was retrieving an unamended copy from the beginning of the night. Still, this wasn't good enough and I got ranted and raved at for my trouble.

Ah well, enough ranting.

I'll finish off with the following:

1) If you're up for reading more of my drivel then go here. It's my old blog which I was sure had long since disappeared but is apparently alive and well and still shit.
2) I was writing up a long post...even longer than this one with links and everything. It was going to be purty. I don't know when I'll finish it...

They said it couldn't be done...

2004-09-10T13:28:00.000+01:00

I'm in a detective mood at the moment. I want to find things out and feel like analysing things so that I can feel smug in my own smartness.

Legal Scamming
This morning a silver envelope came through the door and emblazoned across it was "IF YOU TEAR OPEN THIS LUCKY BAG WILL YOU FIND A SILVER OR GOLDEN TICKET INSIDE WORTH £3000 CASH?" Now people will and do fall for this and its easy to see why as by glancing at it, its easy enough to misread it.

Various laws here in the UK prohibit false claims and statements but with the presence of a certain symbol and a slight alteration in the order of two minor words means these people are protected from prosecution. If it were "...YOU WILL FIND..." instead of "...WILL YOU FIND..." then it would be breaking the law. Such a small difference is easy to miss, isn't the english language a wonderful thing?

So I open it and there is indeed a golden ticket in here. The scam works by giving you a prize code and a phone number to call to find out what it is. The phone call will cost you three terraced houses per minute and one can assume that the phonecall will be stretched out for several days. So why do people fall for it still? More deceit follows:

Firstly you have your code (mine for instance is 97468) and below it is a list of apparently "Guaranteed Prize Codes". Among them is my code. Running parallel to this list is a list of "Guaranteed Prizes" and next to my code is a '32" Sony TV and DVD'. OMFG!!! I'VE WON A BIG TELLY! Well actually I probably haven't seeing as there is no indication the two lists are related, the lists are seperated by a big border and no text explaining the codes are for the prizes next to them. I mean its not the the fault of the people at "Golden Ticket" if people incorrectly assume that they've won a Telly because they haven't read the paper properly is it? For an added bit of trickery we have an award status which says (Authorised if stamped) next to it. Yep, you guessed it, its stamped aswell and looks like a genuine stamp someone took the time to do until you look closely and see the stamp is printed on with the rest of the ticket. It tries to look like a stamp with overlaps and blurred edges but its as fake as a copy of Final Fantasy 15. No doubt if i did take out a loan and rang them up, I'd probably find out I'd won some body sequins or a £3 M&S Gift voucher.

I'm spying on you all aswell
A couple of days ago, I decided that I wanted to install a webcounter on my blog so I could get a better idea of who comes here. So I googled, found statcounter.com and signed up a free account.

I chose to have an invisible counter which means you don't know I'm watching you. The results were great, I was able to see lots of information about who was looking at my blog, their IP obviously but also where they were from, how they got here, what OS they used and what browser. Hell I even know what resolution people are using. The shock however came this morning when I logged into see what was happening and discovered more people than I expected had been here. I enjoyed working out who some of them were from the information recorded (I spotted you Fuzzy and you Reno) but also quite a few people I don't know which made me desperately curious to find out who. A Canadian came via Reunion Tracks for instance and someone else from what I presume is a Utah educational institute came and didn't use a link to get here. Someone else keeps getting here via another blogger blog who I don't know (and someone just did a yahoo search on A-level ICT revision and found themselves here. I'm sorry bud, I can't give you any advice). I'm so curious to find out who these people are. Are you the mysterious Utah person, or the Canadian using reunion Tracks? Please, save me! Tell me who you are!! I'm going mad...

Walking like Groucho sucking on a number 10

2004-09-08T22:54:00.000+01:00

My time away was longer than I expected due to various changes in plans and unexpected problems that resulted in stopping two extra nights in a Youth hostel in Weardale. not a lot to say but I made a few interesting discoveries:

1) I found that in certain lighting conditions, my muskles (as I like to call them) look really good. A lot more impressive in fact than they are most of the time. it was encouraging and I was so impressed I took a photo with my mobile phone :D

2) I need to buy The Road to McCarthy which was in the hostel. It was pretty funny.

3) I am considering possibly going on a Youth Hostel holiday if I can find someone to go with. There are problems however, one being that the kind of people that stay at youth hostels most of the time now aren't what you'd call 'youths' and not all hostels are probably as nice as the one I was in.

Anyway, back at home, I am back online and going strong. I have a week before I return to University and move out again. I'm restless and don't know what to do with myself. Today, I had loads of ideas but couldn't get down to anything. I ended up downloading a load of songs from the first 'proper' album I ever bought (Different Class - Pulp) plus a few other old favourites.

I'm also finding it hard to write anything...so er...yeah

Absence

2004-09-03T11:44:00.000+01:00

I'm going to be away for the next few days in Cumbria on an annual trip so if I seem scarce to anyone, that's why. All attempts to muster enthusiasm for it have met with abject failure and I will be counting the hours down for the entire period, however long it turns out being.

I don't much else to say as this was the only reason for posting, to inform you all I won't be around and I'm so miserable at the moment that I can't think of anything else to write about.

Be back in a few days...(maybe more)

Seb

Beating the addiction

2004-08-30T01:51:00.000+01:00

I've been trying to think why it's been so long since I last wrote something here and I came to the conclusion that the blame must be placed solely at the feet of The Olympic Games. Some people hate them, others are indifferent but my own feet are set firmly in the love camp. For the past two weeks I have found myself fascinated with some of the most baffling, illogical, mundane and boring sporting events ever conceived. In fact my interest became so intense that I now believe I became addicted to the coverage. My morning routine for instance underwent transformation to accomadate my addiction. On waking, I no longer got out of bed, washed dressed and ate before finally firing up my laptop, now I rolled around in bed, fumbled around for my TV remote to turn on the games getting my morning fix of dreary voiced commentators whilst trying to find my glasses and spending excessive periods of time stewing in bed before finally getting up. But the Olympics are not the only reasons that my mornings have become increasingly slothful. My laptop and my home are both now wireless capable meaning I don't have to get up to get online which means of course that I can 'surf the net' from the comfort of my mattress. Thankfully though, its not all sloth and in contrast to my lazy mornings, watching the Olympics has at least reignited that desire for physical improvement and I have yet again begun to exercise to the levels I was back in July. I'd allowed that to slip which was unfortunate considering there was definate improvements made in the several months prior to that.

The Olympics are now of course over. I watched the closing ceremony last night with the same cynical eye I viewed the Opening. Kids with lamps, bad Greek pop acts but at least there was a highlight, the presentation by the Chinese to promote the 2008 Beijing games which seemed less pretentious although still somewhat cringeworthy. As I rolled over in bed this morning and thumped my TV remote, the TV sparked into life, not with the familiar sounds of commentators but the melodramatic dialogue of a Sunday matinee movie. Back to reality, it would seem. The Paralympic games will act as my methadone.

The Games mark the end of my Summer really and anyone who's life still revolves around the Academic calender knows that the end of August is really the true ending/beginning of the year as it always has been in my life with pboth parents in academic professions. Glancing at my calendar, I still see a somewhat ramshackle three weeks before my 'official' start at Uni but that period will be eaten up with overdue preparation. I have yet to even glance at Elective lists to find out where those elusive 40 credits will come from and I have not yet made any serious mark on my reading for next term. I began an attempt on Paradise Lost but progress was slow and i couldn't translate it with the satisfactory degree of understanding I wished so I'm leaving it for a while. Right now, my attention (offially at least if not in reality) is placed on Oroonoko and The Rover by Aphra Behn. You can forget your Jane Austen's and your Bronte sisters, this woman started it all. Still, I'm finding it difficult to get into

"As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.

There are a thousand things to be said of the advantages this generous passion brings to those, whose hearts are capable of receiving its soft impressions; for 'tis not every one that can be sensible of its tender touches. How many examples, from history and observation could I give of its wonderous power, nay, even to a degree of transmigration? How many idiots has it made wise? How many fools, eloquent? How many home-bred squires, accomplished? How many cowards, brave?"

The Fair Jilt (aka The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda)

Opinions anyone?

For now at least I will flirt with it and see how far I can get. I'm sure I can make myself engrossed given time.

I'll end this post with some things I've noticed/been doing.

Firstly, I was made a local mod at the Realm which I was very happy about. I like being given this responsibility. Admittedly there hasn't been much for me to do so far. Only one thread has been closed in my forum since my appointment and I didn't even close that one. I'm just waiting for something to happen so I can prove to everyone what an efficient and skilled thread closer I am.

I also was reminded of the infamous Vyper in a thread elsewhere. Some clicking got to FFFire (I ain't linking to it so HA!) and I read the Site History. Not a very easy read, it was a bit all over the place to be frank but I got a good giggle out of the selective facts produced regarding Vyper's dealings with the Citadel. I remember when he was revealed as a plagarising dick like yesterday (Good ol' Six).

Finally, if I should ever lose the use of my legs and require a wheelchair then inform the doctors that I need this. Okay, a bit of a joke but still, that would be several very quick miles beyond cool.

Desperate drug dealers, wireless worries and the Olympics

2004-08-16T22:37:00.000+01:00

Yay! 51st post. I have written this post numerous times now, each time recounting various events of the past few days in such a detail that only I could ever be interested in it. I have decided this time to summarise.

Towards the end of last week I was repeatedly contacted by some old school friends who wanted me to go out. They've been doing this for a while and I've done my best to avoid them. I don't want to get into the reasons because I could be here all week but basically its because I feel I have very little in common with them anymore. I don't enjoy their company as much, we find each other boring and I fail to see why we should put ourselves through these painfully awkward evenings full of fake smiles simply for 'old times sake'. Anyway, having put them off for a fortnight, I eventually agreed to go out and spent an evening in a few pubs with them. Not much happened of note other than I didn't drink too much and so didn't get too jovial and we also had this pathetic old coke dealer trying to hang round with us and act like he was (as my friend eloquently put it) "Jack-the-fucking-lad" so at least we had a bit of a laugh at his expense.

Another development has been my decision to go wireless. After considering ways to get online in my room and realising that a straightforward phone extension was likely to piss people off, I came to the conclusion that I could upgrade both my laptop and broadband modem (both supposedly capable) and be able to get online wirelessly. I was certain that this was probably a bad idea but no matter how much I researched, I couldn't find much of a problem. The upgrades weren't cheap but I could just about manage them, compatibility wasn't an issue that would cause much problems and I even found support from parents which I didn't expect so I went ahead and ordered the parts. Earlier today, my Airport Extreme card arrived and I intend to install it as soon as the router upgrade card gets here. I also had an idea to take a load of pictures of the procedure in which I must upgrade two different things and get them to work together which is possible in theory but notoriously difficult in reality or so I'm told. It may sound boring but I hope to make it into an amusing story-in-pictures kind of thing. If it works out, I'll post it up in the next entry, if it doesn't materialise then take it that it was a miserable failure.

I'll skip the rest as there was little of consequence and instead I'll end this with the Olympics. I hope people are watching them as I am and if you're not then you truly are missing out in my opinion. There's something magical about the Olympics which makes it one of the most interesting sporting events around. I'll refrain from harping on about "the world coming together" crap as I don't buy it either but what is true is that many sports which I normally couldn't give a fuck about such as hockey, Judo or rowing, become captivating and interesting in the Olympics (I draw the line at Ping Pong though). Personally, the highlight will always be the athletic events because if there ever was a sport I may have been involved in then this was it (I trained briefly at the 400m but hurt my knee in school and used it as an excuse to get out of it which I now regret). I just love watching the events and anticipating world records being broken, amazing feats being pulled off or dramatic races and competitions. Even the drama of disqualifications and injuries which many people call the worst aspect of the games are in fact in my opinion something which make the spectacle all the greater. I know some people get into national chest-beating mode as much as they do with something like football (or soccer to our American friends) and this is sad. Yes, I do want the Briton to do well and I would probably prefer them to win but to be honest, I don't mind much if they don't and am just as happy if the winners are humble (some of the arrogant American Sprinters irritate me though).

So far, this Olympics looks to be a good one. We've not had many show downs yet but the swimming has been great and Britain won its first medal in synchronised diving. There's the drama of the disqualification of the two Greek athletes who have missed a drugs test and subsequently been involved in a mysterious road accident. I had reservations at first when I watched the opening ceremony. It was long winded and predictably cringeworthy at points. The end was pretentious shite which should be forgotten by all who saw it (daft wench walks around in a lake, stroking her glowing pregnant stomach whilst the milky way light effect around her becomes a double helix DNA strand) but then if Eurovision has taught us anything, its taught us that when a country thinks the world is watching, it'll make a bloody fool of itself trying to look clever and meaningful.

Spring Cleaning

2004-08-11T12:49:00.000+01:00

When I'm bored as I am today, I will sometimes begin a blitz on my bookmark lists. When the boredom is quite extreme, the reorganising and updating frenzy can spill over into other areas and today my blog was the victim. I have added a link to White Ninja Comics in my "Visit" list, this is a webcomic which can occassionally really appeal to my sense of humour. In fact it is something I would have done myself if this guy hadn't beaten me to it (the bastard). I've also updated a few links and removed a few unnecessary ones.

The more sharp among you may also have noticed a brand spanking new "Friends" section which has a lovely list of blogs (if you're there and you don't want to be then let me know). These are the blogs I visit on a pretty regular basis so if you read this and I've not included yours, don't be too upset as it doesn't mean I don't visit it at all. If you want yours added, again tell me and I'll consider it. I make no promises to include your blog though as the sidebar is beginning to look a little crowded (I will be attempting to have a crack at the HTML though and I'll try to reduce the Previous Posts lists so that should make some room)

There isn't that much to report really other than I had my fillings on Tuesday and got scratched by my cat this morning as I plucked him from the ground to avoid a fight among the computers with a strange dog (I have a cool looking claw slash across my stomach which was oozing blood earlier and looked particularly impressive when I tensed my stomach). As you can see, its been a riveting week and I'm not sure I can stand this much excitement for a lot longer.

Internet addictiction replaces life

2004-08-05T11:26:00.000+01:00

For the past few weeks, I've been hoarding information and material which I wanted to use in this blog to try and make some relatively interesting entries. I don't know why but for some reason, I feel my blog has gone off the boil (if it can ever have said to have been on one in the first place). Anyway, this material I was gathering was looking good but I left the drawer open and its all blown away so now I'm left with nothing.

Still, I will try to scrape something together.

Firstly, some news. Good or bad, it really depends on how much of me you can stand. At the beginning of the week I learnt where I was going to be living this next academic year. I was surprised that they had responded so quickly as last year I didn't find out until a week before I was due to leave but even more surprising was where I had been placed. I had applied to remain in the same room I had last year but was not hopeful because I missed the deadline so I made my second choice basically anything they had (I'm a sad git so whilst many 2nd years will be moving into shared houses, i'm still in Uni accommodation). So whilst I have not been placed in the same flat, I am in the same residences and same locality. This means I will still be near the best little off-license ever and will still have to negotiate the road of scary straightness nightly. What is better (for me at least) is that the flats have been upgraded over the summer and now each room is connected to the University Network. This means internet access in my room which I didn't have before. If it weren't for this, my internet presence would have decreased dramatically next year as the increase in work would probably have greatly reduced both those regular trips home and daily cluster sessions. I feared many things would have been among the casulaties. AIM most definately would have had to go as well as most of my messageboards and various other places. I was even briefly considering shutting this blog and trying to end my internet life in one big swoop. Thankfully though, this news means I will be able to dedicate evenings to the internet if I work like a banshee during the day and can maintain my presence. I'm a sad bastard with no life, no need to tell me but hey, if there's hope for Finnish Conscripts then there's hope for us all.

Unfortunately, it wasn't entiely painless. The news I received was accompanied with a request for a deposit and a contract as well as 4 passport photos in order to secure the place and all within a few days of receipt so It was lucky I had come home from my holiday when I did otherwise I would have missed it. In the now classic Leeds University way of doing things, they had asked me to return my contracts, deposit and photos in the stamped, addressed envelope they had included except they hadn't included it. I had no idea where anything was meant to go and it was a Saturday and the lazy bastards wouldn't be at work. I ranted which is my favourite way of dealing with these things, repeatedly telling my mother that Leeds University couldn't find it's arse with both hands, a map, a sherpa and a copy of Gray's Anatomy. I went and got my photos hastily taken by some machine specifically designed to take photos of normal people and mutate their appearance. I looked like I had liver disease or something. (To amuse myself, I scanned one of these photos in and added a few things in photoshop. Its floating around online if anyone wants to try and find it;) Hint: I'm nobility). Anyway, the deposit is sent and I suppose I better remind myself not to count chickens etc. Fingers crossed.

My week alone at home whilst tedious at times has been interesting if only because it has enabled me to experiment with how I would like the place to be. My PS2 is installed along side the good TV downstairs, there's an old portable TV now in the computer room allowing me to watch TV whilst I'm online. I have become a dirty slob and the house is littered with dirty clothes and empty Corona bottles. The washing up is truly frightening in its magnitude. Of course I have to tidy all this up and that sucks.

I will finish with this. Its done the rounds quite a few times now so I'm sure many of you have read it before and there are many suggestions that its not genuine. It just made me smile when I saw it again recently and I immediately wondered about certain people and what they would think of it now.

Home Again

2004-07-31T15:01:00.000+01:00

Well firstly, let me apologise for being a bit of an ass with the last entry. Just before I was due to leave, for some reason I felt that writing a cryptic and vague goodbye message which would easily be interpreted as saying I was going for good, would be one of the finest jokes ever conceived. I honestly don't know why I thought it would be so funny as I tend to find things like that very annoying and even moreso when the person in question is serious about going and then resurfaces a fortnight later in a thread about cheese as if nothing had happened. I suspect there was an element of ego stroking involved and I was seduced by the idea that people might leave nice messages saying nice things about me. So, to anyone that was annoyed by that thing, I'll say sorry and twat myself with a kipper just for you.

I'm home now and my 2 week break is over. I really don't want to bore people with details and I'll lay off posting pictures because I'm not that bothered about them to be honest so I fail to see why anyone else should be. What I will do however is mention the highlights of the past two weeks.

A little background might be necessary. I still go on holiday with my parents. Some of you may find that incredibly sad but to be honest, I couldn't give much of a fuck. I enjoy these holidays still and therefore, I will still go on them.

The holiday itself can be separated into two distinct parts, both roughly a week in length. Due to various responsibilities at home, it is not possible for the entire family to get away together so we take it in shifts. The first week, I go away with my mum (we go to North Yorkshire coast and stay at a small village close to Robin Hood's Bay and stay in a very plush B&B). We don't do much to be honest and the days are spent just lazing around, reading and contemplating what pub to eat/drink at. It sounds boring but infact, its just a very relaxing lazy break. So there aren't many highlights but:

Read Crime and Punishment and started on other books
Got a tan for the first time in 2 years
Gained 3 lbs

We then have a change over and I get a few hours at home before setting off with my dad. We go to the same area (a village just outside Whitby) but this time rent a small cottage. My father can't abide lazy holidays so his are more hectic. He's a keen fossil collector and has been doing it for most of my life so fossil collecting features pretty heavily. These excursions can be quite frightening (climbing up and down cliffs, negotiating tides, generally getting to bits of coast most tourists avoid because they're dangerous or difficult to access) and I never inherited the passion for it my dad has (hence lack of detailed knowledge). To add to this, a rather scary incident on one excursion two years ago put me off even more. But I go anyway and often enjoy it more than I think. Highlights:

Eating barbequed salmon on a warm evening whilst drinking cold beer and admiring a nice view from the cottage we were staying at.
Catching the sun at Saltwick Bay
Finding a crushed Harpoceras at Port Mulgrave
At Saltwick, I found a pretty common ammonite (a Dactylioceras) except the it was covered in what looked like stone leprosy or something. Imagine an "Elephant Man" ammonite and you're close. Turns out that these funny growths all over it are infact pyrite crystals which will hopefully clean up to a brilliant gold after a quick acid dip...w00t!

Anyway, that was about it and now I'm home alone for just over a week whilst my mum goes back to the cottage with my dad. Anyway, I need to contemplate what to cook for dinner and things so I'll draw this to an abrupt close

....er...yes

It's time to go.

2004-07-17T14:08:00.000+01:00

I'm afraid this is a bit of a rushed entry. Time's running out and things have to be done

Well this has all been very pleasant but I can't hang around any longer. I've been feeling quite restless for some time, sticking around and having my days taken up with pretty pointless trivialities before lumbering to bed and lamenting at how little I have achieved with this time.

Its going to be a refreshing change to escape these situations and try something different. I probably won't achieve anything remarkable but at least I won't be around here.

I must go now and sort out some things. I apologise again if this all seems a little cryptic but being as tired as I am and having so little time to do it means its taking everything to spell correctly and I'm having to sacrifice clarity.

Bye

pHotOGraphs!

2004-07-10T15:51:00.000+01:00

Everyone likes a post comprising of nothing but photos yes?
Good!

I have a few I've taken which I'm going to post up with the possibility of more to follow (I've got addicted to taking pictures with my dads digital because I find the simulated 'click' click sound amusing)

So first, I mentioned somewhere some ruined photos of my flat in Leeds. They're below. You probably won't find them interesting at all but I'm putting them here because I'll most likely lose the actual photos and the links to them unless they're on my blog:

Leeds
Pretty road
mmmmm, posh commuter route. This is the road my flats were on. Being on the major commuter route for the wealthy meant porsches, Mercs and Beemers sped past you quite regularly.

The Camp
This was the flats I lived at, hidden in the middle of a wood with a long scary road to walk up at night.

Flat
My block...hurrah!

THE Off-license
I will miss this the most. This was the best bloody local off-license in existence. I come from a place where the most exotic beer you could hope to get from your local offy was a bottle of Fosters Ice. In stark contrast was this place which had so much choice of obscure exported beers, it actually hurt your head. Its a pity I didn't find it sooner...

All the indoor pics are useless so i won't bother with them.

Now pets
I have a few pets and figured I'd take pics of them all today. unfortunately, one dog was awkward and wouldn't let me take a picture. The rest, however are here. Apologies for small sizes, I got carried away in photoshop.

Brandy
This is my 11 year old Labrador-Doberman cross (apparently thats what he is anyway) he has to have surgery soon

Puddock
You've seen the earless cat before. This is what he looks like when conscious. His name is Pud aka "puddock" or now "Lugless Douglas"

...and finally
Fuzzball
This is my Chinchilla who's about 7 years old now. He's in his cage which currently resides in my room (not the best place I know...especially because he's nocturnal and so bounces around all night)

Fuzzball again
Here he is again, after being let out to exercise. This is a VERY rare pic because he doesn't stay still for long. Infact my hand is hovering just above him to grab him should he make a bid for freedom.

Random
I told you I got amused by the click sound so I took some crap
This is my foot!
My bookcase!!

Rain

2004-07-08T12:27:00.000+01:00

The weather has been nothing short of appalling these last few days and I have an increasing urge to go nuts about it somewhere. A night ago we had a large electrical storm. Apart from hailing a hell of a lot, there was also a lot of rain. So much rain in fact that a cast iron manhole cover covering a drain on our street was lifted clean off and pushed three yards down the hill at one point simply because there was so much rainwater.

Allow me to give you an idea of amounts. There are three water butts attached to the fall pipe from our roof. They don't collect all the rain coming off the roof, just some of it. Each butt supposedly holds 40 gallons. Now I know 2 of them were empty because the pond at the bottom of the garden had been topped up using them. I watched these water butts a little and 15 minutes into the the storm, both were overflowing. I later had to take the dogs out in that rain.

Having said that though, I like thunderstorms. They affect me in some primeval way as i get excited and energetic whenever there is one. Even dangerously giddy. I was actually happy to go out in that rain and stayed out longer than usual, coming back absolutely sodden despite wearing an expensive waterproof and still being very happy about it.

Yesterday we had strong winds and today we have that horrible, oppressive and omni-present drizzle. Everything is wet and sodden but there's no drama to this rain. That's what I hate the most.

Anyway, talking about weather is boring but I have nothing else to give you. I got some photos back the other day of my flat in Leeds but they've all come out terribly which is sad I suppose. I also have to go off and write something for The Expert right now (there's a button for it on the right).

So I'll sign off. Bye

My head is rotting!

2004-07-05T14:30:00.000+01:00

Apologies. Long post follows

I haven't updated much because, to be frank, there hasn't been that much to discuss. There still isn't for that matter but I feel compelled to update anyway. So, for one week only I introduce the Adventures of Seb!!

Seb Goes to the Dentist
Such an instantly captivating topic is bound to have you all chomping at the bit. First, however, I must lay down a little background.

It has been sometime since I last went to the dentist as the previous one removed me from his records. Maybe this should have been a sad occassion as afterall, this was the man who, many years ago, had extracted a number of rotting milk teeth from a young teary eyed Seb after the dentist before had arsed up a number of fillings. This was the man that gave a numb faced Seb lollipops after the aforementioned extractions and this was also the man that let him pick a "Fireman Sam says Brush" sticker and sent him on his way.

However this was also the dentist who would make conversation with you whilst half his hand was in your mouth. This was a dentist with Milk bottle glasses and dreadful teeth of his own and so when I was informed in a letter that I could effectively "fuck off", it wasn't very worrying seeing as I had often wanted to say much the same back but in a much blunter manner.

So, a sizable chunk of time had passed since I had last had a checkup. Today I had an appointment at a local dentist. It was strange how confident and happy I felt as I set off. The sun was shining, my teeth felt good and my head filled with wonderful ideas. "Afterwards" I thought, "I'll buy some fresh bread from the bakers. I'll come back and read in the sun. I'll buy a cake too. I have enough!"

I arrived at the practice and was given a medical history card to fill in. Should I tick NO for pregnant or can they work that one out themselves? In the end, I had to admit it was (to me at least) an impressive card. A big long list of NO ticks. No ailments, no allergies. God damn, I was healthy! Screw that, I was almost perfect! And so with this inflated self of confidence, I proceeded into the chamber.

I decided the Dentist was African after he told me in a thick, rich accent to sit down. Now its important to realise that dentists all have different styles of arranging "The Chair". Some seem to prefer to work on patients in a sitting position, others prefer them to be slightly reclined. This dentist clearly preferred his patients to be gripped with terror whilst he worked on them. Perhaps he was amused to see them cling to the arms, desperately trying to not slide off the back of the chair and smashing their skull by his feet? Who knows? Anyway, I got a good grip on the arms and off he went, probing away. I listened to the usual dentist drone on (which btw must be made up gibberish) "D9...1...2...3...4...5...6 missing"

Missing?! Did he just say missing? What does that mean? I don't have any missing teeth! But that was nothing compared to what came next which was far worse. Hidden among a tedious line of numbers and letters was a word that made my heart stand still. DECAY. There. He said it. He said "decay". "No!" I wanted to shout but coudn't due to mouthful of fingers and metal. "It's a poppy seed or something, maybe a bit of basil? Check again!!" As he droned on, my teeth changed. The confidence I had in them sank and suddenly I began experiencing dreadfully unpleasant sensations, I could feel holes, I was sure of it.

Next came an X-Ray followed by the cleaning and polishing of my teeth but the words cleaning and polishing fail to truly descibe the uncomfortable experience that follows. An incompetant nurse weilds a 'sucky thing' and only succeeds in sucking up your tongue and lip whilst failing to get the excess saliva that suddenly floods into your mouth. Instead you have to try and swallow whilst your tongue is immobile and your mouth wide open. This is actually quite diificult and I suggest you try it. Meanwhile, drool and worryingly big bits fly out of your mouth as the dentist fiendishly drags a spinning implement acrossthe surface of your teeth.

Eventually this stopped and I sat up feeling orally violated. By this stage, a look of dignity is impossible. You're wearing a bib, you have drool running down your chin and (in my case) you can't see because your glasses have been sprayed with your own spit. He was mulling over my X-Rays and eventually said "See? Decay!" I couldn't see it. They looked like good teeth to me but apparently some small blemish was decay and I was going to need fillings.

"Your flossing is not very good...if you do it" he said. I refrained from sticking his nasty scraping hook up his arse because he was basically right. I don't floss, well not often but then he says: "Those are the consequences if you don't." Sanctimonious prat! I should have bloody well rammed the entire chair up his arse after that!

Arranging an appointment for a strange man to drill holes in my head then ask for money was the next stage but they were fully booked for three weeks which meant a clash with upcoming holidays. I still have to make the appointment (and pay the rest off the fee) but it looks like I'll be looking forward to it for my entire holidays.

So I set off home.

I didn't buy a cake.

Not all titles start with 's'

2004-06-26T13:39:00.000+01:00

I'm bored. Bored beyond belief.

I'm back home now. I moved out on Thursday, filling my fathers car with the accumulated shite of a year and was back in time to watch England crash out of the European Championship in their characteristically embarrassing and poor fashion.

All enthusiasm has been sucked out of me. I've been kicking around the house now for two days, surrounded by things I could and in some cases should do and yet I don't want to. I have a vast pile of unread literature I purchased recently which i could start on but don't want to. My room is a chaotic heap of boxes and bags which I could unpack but I don't want to do that either ( I do have an excuse though seeing as I have to strip my room of all furniture in a few weeks to allow the woodworm man to rip up my floorboards and spray everything with a noxious chemical). Even pissing about on the computer doesn't hold the allure it once did.

I think its the rain. Its dismal here and even though I had no plans to go out much, having the option removed seems to have had a knock on effect. Now that I can't really go out, I want to.

There's never any structure to my posts. I tell myself its my own quirk, how I jump from topic to topic randomly, like some crazed coffee fiend but in truth I'm just lazy. What I'll do now is do another of these jumps and start discussing my cat. A few months ago, he had his ears taken off by a mad Irish vet. Now they have healed and I promised to post piccies. I will do that now so I can test this new photo host I've found.

Firstly, with ears
This was taken a day or two before his operation.

Lump on a roof.
This was a week ago when the weather was still reasonable.

Is it dead?
I took this an hour ago and yes, he doesn't do much aside from sleeping. This time on the landing.

Anyway, I must go. My dad's bugging me to go and replace the blade on his circular table saw. Why I'm asked of all people is mystifying but then I am expected to make most things. Any and all flatpack furniture purchased by my family is automatically going to be put together by me because I'm the only one who understands the instructions.

Shopping

2004-06-22T17:04:00.000+01:00

I will be moving out of my flat in a few days and returning home for the summer. Therefore, I have carefully organised the last few days to do some specific things. The past two days have been spent shopping for all the things I had planned on buying all year with some good old impulse buying thrown in for good measure.

Now I can sit back and relax, I have finally done it. My bank account lies vanquished, begging for mercy. I bought clothes but then I'm not going to bore anyone with any specifics, I just bought a few cooler clothes for the summer. Most of my money was lost in bookshops buying books for next year and my own personal amusement. So I am now the proud owner of:

Of Mice and Men Steinbeck
Ham on Rye Charles Bukowski
Paradise Lost Milton
Crime and Punishment Dostoevesky
(gotta love those 3 for 2 offers)
I got those from Waterstones.

I overloaded on R.E.M in Borders. They seem to insist on playing a Greatest Hits album continuously until everyone is humming in unison and contemplating suicide. However, it proved a worthy sacrifice when I found two books I'd been searching for in vain for ages.

This which I got for an unbelievable £7 and a Wordsworth Classic "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", a 400+ page book for £1.50.

I also bought the Kenneth Brannagh Frankenstein movie, a purchase to be less proud of. But it was cheap so...what the hey. I also saw this on the new releases shelves. You can't see anything there but apparently its the Directors Cut of the last few episodes of NGE. I nearly bought it but decided against it at the last minute thinking I ought to find out more about what it is before I blast the best part of £20 on it.

I'll be spending tomorrow bumming around my flat for the last time, playing video games and reading recent purchases. Anyway, I'm hungry and the air-conditioning has been turned off in the cluster as a not so subtle hint for us all to get out. Until next time, buh-bye.

Swot!!

2004-06-17T14:03:00.000+01:00

This is a very brief update I'm making before I run off home, open up a beer and hope that England don't arse things up against Switzerland.

I am a swot. Today, despite the fact that I have no work to do, I went into the library to find some articles. To be more precise, I was looking for critical articles on Frankenstein. You could arge that I was just thinking ahead but the thing is that Frankenstein isn't on next years syllabus. I am reading it purely because I want to and I went and sought out two lengthy essays on it when I won't ever be studying it!

On top of that, I got my results back for the second Archaeology module. In the first semester, I put my good result down to fluke and also having an unfair adavantage. Back then, more than half the work was on basic Archaeology theory which I studied for two years at college whilst everyone else in the group had never studied it before. So when I came away with 70 I thought maybe it was a little unfair. To clarify, the mark scale goes from 20 to 90, with 20 being an Absolute Fail and 90 being an Exceptional First. Both are almost impossible to get and a First is anything 70 or above which is the best grade you can get.

This semester, things were not on my side. I was a lone English/History Student among Classical Civilisation Students and the module was focused entirely on Greek and Roman Archaeology (well Greece from Philip of Macedon onwards). This was a subject I knew very little about whereas everyone else knew quite a lot about the histories of the two civilisations because they'd studied it for an entire year. So what happened in the end? I only went and got a better mark than last semester! 73! Another First!! What's more, I was the only student who got a first in the entire group (like last time). The next highest was someone with 68, a high 2:1. What is perhaps the most cruel is that whilst I did take pretty detailed notes during lectures, I didn't do any further study. The essays were written during the night before they were due in and the revision for the major exams was done crammed into about 12 hours.

I'm more apprehensive about other results I have yet to get.
Anyway, time's getting on and this has turned out to be longer than I anticipated. I must go now and watch the match...Come On England!!

snore

2004-06-13T11:21:00.000+01:00

Its Sunday and I'm tired. Infact being tired has been a common condition over this last week. That the human body is a fragile thing is a fact often stated, normally after someone has been smeared 20 feet along a highstreet somewhere. But the human body or at least my body isn't only susceptible to physical trauma. Mess with its delicate balances and routines and the body reponds like a child throwing a tantrum, making sure that whilst it may obey the wishes of the brain, it will make sure the brain has to put up with a whole lot of shit before it does...a bit like a trade union in a way.

What am I blathering on about? Well basically I've been messing with my sleep patterns over the last week. Staying up all night (reading, watching election results, making a spreadsheet) and then going to sleep at dawn and doing something completely different the next night. Sleep deprivation is nothing unusual, this year has seen me pull more all-nighters then I care to remember and theres at least two instances where I've gone 48 hours without sleep but for some reason, this time my body rebelled. I've felt strange all week. The flat now seems eerily cold and empty of all familiarity, the only obvious difference is that a strip light went in the kitchen but its enough to screw my perception.

My semi-exercise regime has also fallen by the wayside as I rarely feel like doing any exercises when I wake up at noon and still feel tired. I really need to settle back into my pattern. I give up. My body wins. I was going to end this section on a positive about weight gain. For the past 3 years, I've been stuck at precisely 60 kilos (9.5 stone) whatever I ate. However I checked my weight about 2 weeks ago for the first time since I started trying to lead a healthier lifestyle and noted I'd put on about 5 kilos and was now 10 stone! However I just checked and I've lost a kilo. Maybe those scales are crap? Who knows.

This next week at Uni is my last for the year. Term ends on Friday and my flat lease expires precisely 7 days later. Despite seeming a little unreal this week, I will still be sad to leave my flat and move back home for the summer (I wish so much that I was moving into another flat somewhere like many people are). I've grown fond of having my own independant space and whenever I do come home, I am reminded of how irritating this place can be. I decided to take some pictures of my room and stuff on some film that needed finishing and I might post them up once its developed (because I'll probably lose the actual photos) but I'll have to find a better host that Geocities first.

Anyway, I'll draw this to a close now. Tonight I'm going out with my old school friends. We intend ultimately to watch the England vs France match somewhere. I don't know how it'll go as there is at least one person there who I'm not too keen on seeing. Maybe I'll report back about it, maybe not.

Parasites

2004-05-30T19:27:00.000+01:00

According to my father, there are three evils in this world today which all hold the power to destroy Western Civilisation as we know it. Extremist Islamic terrorism is one, closely followed by increasingly resistant virus strains. The third is woodworm.

Now if I was to tell you that one of these was found in my room over the last week, I’m sure you could guess which. If you can’t then allow me to clarify that there was not a mysterious cleric crouched in my corner stroking a dubious ticking device. Nor were there any dirty pots with new unthinkable diseases festering inside them (not whilst I was away at least). What was present was a small hole in a floorboard in a corner which my father noticed and then promptly unloaded a pint of fizzy gravy into his trousers because of it. You see woodworm can consume a building in a day or at least I’m assuming that’s the case based on my fathers panicky reaction. So now I don’t have a floor, or at least I have an incomplete floor. Love your floor, people and realise how much you take your planks for granted. One day they could be gone if the evil woodworm network spreads!

Aside from that development, I have now finished my last exam and just have to ride out the next three weeks until term is officially over and I’m rudely evicted from my flat. The exam was interesting, I was poorly prepared seeing as I’d spent the bulk of what remained of my revision time pissing about. Therefore the exam proved a little difficult and I considered things like feigning childbirth or chebbing my warm Lucozade into the middle of the huge Sports Hall in an attempt to hopefully escape. Now its all over, all that’s left is that IT coursework I’ve mentioned in the past. It transpires missing the deadline actually was a big deal so I got myself an extension and now have to try and think of something to do a powerpoint presentation on. Suggestions welcome although I’m thinking of doing something about the threat of Woodworm.

I also want to just throw up a few sites I found recently. This is not hilarious but I found it last night and it might be worth a few amused snorts. Then there's this. Get onto the central map and then check out the University (not the LMU) to see what my campus looks like or check out elsewhere to see what wonderous Leeds looks like (can't you feel the sarcasm?)

politics

2004-05-30T13:04:00.000+01:00

I am easily swayed. My hatred for Apple a bit back was so intense that I was advocating the flogging of all Apple peronnel but it all dissolved when my new part was delivered by a smart UPS man 2 days later (not the month they warned me about). Anyway, I now love Apple again.

Here is the book I've been reading lately. I originally picked it up for no other reason than it was another Hunter S. Thompson book and as I waded into the complex world of American politics which it detailed, I wondered if it was a good decision. To cut a long story short, it was. It contains a compilation of all the articles Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone during the '72 Campaign with a few added post scripts to clear things up. It starts with the race between the democrat candidates to grab the nomination, culminating in a confusing description of the Democratic Convention which saw a frenzy of baffling delegate vote management by the McGovern Campaign staff leading eventually to the victory of George McGovern. Then it moves on to the elections itself and the defeat of McGovern to Nixon. I'm getting too caught up in details here so I'll try and cut to the chase.

Whilst it may be confusing, its fucking great. You're not always sure when he's telling you the truth or heading off into one of his drug-induced rants but its interesting all the same (for example did you know one of the main Democratic candidates was pumped up to eyeballs on speed most of the time? Thompson speculates that his increasingly erratic behaviour was due to his heavy use of Iborgaine)

Maybe I'm just trying to desperately grasp at validation for reading this thing now but I felt I'd noticed a few interesting parallels with the current situation. We have a Republican President who is unpopular with the left and is running for a second term. The democrats are scrambling to nominate a candidate to beat him and a controversial conflict overseas which is becoming more costly everyday is becoming a central theme to the elections. I'm sure you can drive trucks through the holes in the comparison I'm drawing but if some time in July, some burglars break into the democrat HQ then Bush wins the election in November but that burglary case continues and grows until Bush is forced to resign...I'll be a smug bastard! Heh.

Staying roughly in the area of politics, I perused my ballot paper for the upcoming local and MEP elections. It was a saddening read. The local elections were the same bunch of unvotables. A single tory which I will never vote for, an army of Labour candidtates which I don't want to vote for and some independants with seriously conflicting and contradictory policies. The MEP candidates are a little more diverse, there's a BNP candidate which I'll take great pleasure in NOT voting for as well as a few others which i'll cover here.

English Democrats
Policy: "We're English! Blah-blah-proud heritage-blah. Damn them Scots! Damn Blair, he's selling England out! Damn them Euros!"

Respect Party
Policy: "This is where George Galloway ran off to! Illegal war in Iraq, lies, lies, blah. Other than that, we have good sounding but incredibly vague policies (because we actually don't really have anything other than the "LIES!!" stuff)"

BNP
Policy: "Despite the stories that our supporters act like Hitlers Brown Shirts, we're actually okay and definately not racist...we just hate coloured people and asylum seekers which are the source of all evil and are unpure...WE MUST CLEANSE BRITAIN...WE MUST FIND A FINAL SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM!!"

Alliance for Green Socialism
Policy: "Basically we're against the war in Iraq and want to moan about this one policy in the European Parliament. Plus we like trees!"

UK Independence Party
Policy: "Ahhhhh Europe! Run for the hills! They're all nuts! Elect us so Kilroy the Ronseal man can tell them all to f**k off!"

Then you have the usual collection of Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and the Green Party with a mysterious Independent at the bottom of the form.
Who the fuck would you vote for out of that?

Anyway I have to re-read this next anyway for my exam on Friday so wish me luck.

Ultimate Defence

2004-05-22T10:18:00.000+01:00

There's something impressive about Apple's impenetrable logic when it comes to customer complaints that demands my grudging respect. Let's say you have something thats faulty and this Apple product is still within its warranty so you are spared shelling out the ridiculous costs of replacing it...or so you think. What will happen is that Apple will simply refuse to admit that there is anything wrong with their product. You claim its faulty, they'll claim you're wrong and that if it is broken, its probably your imperfect selves that have done it, thus negating your rights to a replacement. Basically, us mere mortals just aren't worthy of such a beautifully crafted and designed piece of equipment and have no right whatsoever to claim its flawed in anyway whatsoever.

"You say it has broken Sir? No, I'm afraid you are mistaken. They don't break like that because they are perfectly designed."

"I'm sorry madam but you must be hallucinating as that product does not break unless it is abused by clumsy hands of ugly/untrendy people such as yourself."

"No Sir, I am not calling you a liar. However you are wrong. Absolutely wrong in fact."

"What Madam? A design fault? Oh no, it can't be! La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, I'm-not-listening."

"How dare you Sir! How dare you be critical of something so beautiful. It makes me so sad to see our products in the hands of the ungrateful...*sob*"

Maybe I encountered these problems because I was forced to deal with this through the Apple headquarters in Ireland and perhaps they are more laid back in stores themselves but I still wouldn't bet on that. You see they are onto a good thing with expensive accessories (although an essential piece of equipment such as a power supply can hardly be called an accessory) and they desire to protect this lucrative income as much as possible. Simply proving that I was still under warranty took numerous phonecalls and faxes and when they begin to argue that their products are not capable of flaws and everything is the fault of the customer then I suppose many people might just give up and buy an expenisive replacement instead. I became even more convinced that this is an actual strategy when they said my replacement might take up to a month and that they actually wanted me to send the broken item to them so that they know I'm not trying to sell it on ebay presumably. Either way, I am stuck with a laptop I can't use because it has no power which is agonising when I know it will be like this for another week at least.

Other than fretting over the above, I learned that I had missed the deadline for some IT coursework stuff by a week and so I didn't bother doing it. I don't know if failing this small module with have any larger implications yet. I also found a new webcomic called
Machall which i will add to my Visit links...pretty cool although I understand that this is nothing new to a lot of people

sizzle!

2004-05-20T15:28:00.000+01:00

I just finished an exam and my poor finger tips are causing me great discomfort.

I don't have much to say other than sharing with you a wonderful quote from my favourite board of morons. A British Europhobe started a thread arguing against a common assertion made by some of the various EU supporters on the board (that being that Blair is Bush's poodle). In this thread, the following gem of a comment was made by an American poster:

"Even tho i realy realy wanna go to amsterdam im not gonna cause i do not wanna support the germans." gkIII

The poster in question is renowned for his position as someone who advocates the nuclear destruction of Mecca as soon as any terrorist attack occurs. He loves America, is a close supporter of Bush and regularly spouts the usual BS about American superiority in everything (including education). He also claims to be 26, married and smart.

Now I'm not one to make big generalisations based on the actions of a single idiot but this does both amuse and terrify me at the same time. To even consider that someone this stupid should feel confident enough in their beliefs to post on a Politics board (a laughable term in this place) is a little unnerving.

Another quote from today by an infamous poster named Sam Adams in a thread about the recent attack on an Iraqi wedding party by an American Helicopter:

"awwwwwww booo hoo.
maybe iraq shouldnt have started a war." Sam Adams

which was followed a few posts later by:

"rofl. Iraq started the war by breaking the ceasefire." Sam Adams

And then finally:

"rofl. Only someone as stupid as suicide commando could think that iraqis are innocent." Sam Adams

Of course anyone who uses 'rofl' to converse in a politics forum shouldn't really be taken seriously and I'm also accutely aware that this is quite possibly just a persistant troll but I find it amusing and scary enough to highlight. Especially when someone then says:

"Sam Adams 4 Prez 2004!!!"

I'd link you to these threads directly but they will drop off the forums soon so its a pointless excercise. However if you're ever bored and feel like going somewhere that drives you insane, I heartilly recommended going to the Troll link in my visit list .

Meine lieblingsgruppe ist slipknot und diese Banshee ist mein!!

2004-05-15T17:21:00.000+01:00

There's no doubt that it is the wrong time for me to try out something which is widely acknowledged as being an incredibly addictive and time consuming indulgement. Having come home for the weekend, I gain access to the broadband connection and so I decided I would just quickly try Halo online. Several hours later, I peeled myself away from it and was able to force myself to sleep where unsurprisingly, I dreamt about some surreal capture-the-flag style competition in which I was taking part.

It was an interesting experience which ultimately culminated in a somewhat deflated realisation that I do in fact suck. I was pleasantly asked to "fuck of" in several games (and yes it was of) because apparently my "nam isnot knone to uz". I'm not one to out stay my welcome so I generally left games when instructed to "fuk off" or when told that I was a "faggot lol".

I also discovered that Germans still have a thing for dive bombing. Indeed any player asked to alight from his Banshee and actually fight on the ground instead of flying around endlessly and killing anything that moved, would generally respond with a torrent of German babble. I grew tired of capture-the-flag games quickly, especially when every last player insisted on being a sniper and both flags were left completely untouched.

I eventually ended up on a server where I did actually dominate everyone else but realised to my dismay that I was fighting a bunch of prepubescent slipknot fans who spent more time trying to ascertain the "hotness" of the one female player than they did actually playing.

Admittedly, I have not played many games online, at least not FPS ones. I tended to avoid them because I gathered from sources like Penny Arcade and VG cats that many such games were choked with 'fucktards' and assholes whom you would rather physically mince than converse with. So far it would appear that this is indeed the case.

Anyway, I should perhaps be studying for next weeks final exams and I DO have a lot to cover.

Wish me luck, people.

ADDITIONAL:
Well fate steps in to end an addiction as well as reigniting that old hatred of Apple. I love my laptop and most of the time I love Apple. That is until something goes wrong and I am presented with the horrific reality of Apple prices. My (poorly designed) AC adapter just broke as the wire tore free of the DC Jack. This is obviously an essential piece of kit as it is the only way you can recharge the battery. What will a replacement cost? £65 according to the Apple Store. Some place even charges £82. I am therefore currently searching for an e-mail address for Apple which i can utilise to point out to them what twats they are.

Another day, another layout

2004-05-11T14:40:00.000+01:00

Maybe I should apologise for changing everything again. I noticed Reno had changed his blog template to something new and snazzy so, with my curiosity burning bright, I decided to take a peek and see what was available. I saw another lovely orange template. I am becoming quite fond of orange it must be said. The side effect of this change is that as Blogger have finally decided to incorporate their own comment system into the templates, I no longer have to rely on a third party blog commenting system (nor frankly am I able to include it as the new layout HTML baffles me) so what comments there were are now sadly lost...

Little has changed other than I purchased Halo which runs like a dream. I've completed the single player mode and now eagerly await getting home to my broadband connection and some multiplayer action.

I could also mention the new health conscious regimen I am now following. I'm not actually happy using the phrase 'regimen' as it doesn't feel strict enough to be called a regimen but its the only thing I can think of. It started a few weeks ago but I decided to take it more seriously over this last week and so now I am keeping relatively close tabs on my what I eat and am even excercising in the mornings after I get up. I hasten to add that this is in not some bulking up attempt. I embarked on one of those a year or so ago and nothing but a dusty pair of dumb bells remain as testament to it. back then I also took it quite seriously and did research into what to do but after 5 months, boredom and the apparent lack of any real progress undermined my enthusiasm. Maybe I was too quick to abandon the effort as I did improve a little but I don't feel any desire to start again.

So far, this new regime is making me feel more energetic, alert and generally happier. Maybe its psychological rather than physical but regardless, if it stays like this, I will stick to it. I believe it would be unhealthy to pursue this stuff too much though so i reserve the right to get inebriated when I feel like it and eat some crap when lazy.

In other news, my revison is proving somewhat difficult because there are so many students attempting to use the same limited resources. Each day as I search the library database, I feel an increasingly intense hatred for all my fellow english students. The English Literature sections have been ransacked like a bakery in downtown Stalingrad. To spite these gits, I decided that I would reserve all the books on the reading list (despite the fact I don't want some of them) so at least the bastards can't renew them from afar and hoard them all for themselves.

I feel...chumpy and grozzled

2004-05-07T11:18:00.000+01:00

I'm knackered. My eyes feel gritty and sore and my stomach is now sulking and creating a really bizarre feeling in my abdomen because I didn't feed myself sufficiently this morning. I was up late finishing off my last essay...well I was just up really. I haven't been to sleep yet.

I left my room in a terrible state to come and print my stuff but just as I left, I realised I'd forgotten my week bus pass thingy-mi-jig so I went back. I unlocked the door to the flat and began to walk back in but my key jammed so I tugged it out. Then I tried unlocking my door in the dark corridor because some bright spark turned off the light. For some reason, I couldn't fathom the lock so I went fumbling for the light switch and returned to the door to discover....I'd bent my f**king Key! Must have done it tugging it out of the door at an angle without thinking.

So I swear my ass off because I can't get back into the room and I realise I'd have to get help. Plus I remembered that they charge if you ever need a replacement key...they charge twentyfive f**king pounds! So I've attempted to fix it by bending it back....it sticks a bit now and looks weird.

Now I'm down here arsing around before I hand this thing in. Apparently my laptop will just run Halo as I did some homework about the Vid Card. Its a GeForce4 420 Go or something but apple discussin forums answer most question...should have gone there first. I'm mulling over what to do now though....

...do I buy Halo or do I buy The Last Samurai which is out to buy today? Or do I just go and hibernate?

...plus the word grozzled...that's mine! Hands off!

SMUG ARSE!!

2004-05-06T12:42:00.000+01:00

As the title suggests, I'm feeling particularly smug with myself at present. It all started Yesterday when I got back an essay I had not been very happy with and found it had achieved a bizarrely high mark. The day before I had also received a pleasing grade with an English Essay. Since then, this smugness has grown without any real reason and I must find a way to cap it or someone will hit me.

I've just had my last lecture for the year and all thats left for me to do is go and write my last essay this afternoon on Military development under Philip II and Alexander the Great and then thats it (apart from the exams and that damn IT thing). I've already planned to 'reward' myself and buy some crap for the hell of it. I was considering buying Halo for my laptop but I'm unsure if it will run, I'm not sure on the actual capabilities of the video card (I think it'll be more than capable and everyother requirement is met). However there are other things too, a DVD, clothes and the possibility of getting a new phone. Obviously I can't afford all these things, so i'll have to pick one or the other and stick with it.

Anyway...I'm hungry...

buh-bye

Citric fucking acid!

2004-05-03T17:40:00.000+01:00

I'm blinded! Its a nice warm bank-holiday monday. The house is empty and I have no major worries, so what better to do than sit back with a nice cool Corona and squeeze some lime into it? All very well until some lime juice shoots in your eye and your left flailing around like a bad actor on Eastenders trying to show 'grief'.

Christ! That hurt!

...

2004-05-03T11:36:00.000+01:00

I'm at home for the bank holiday and then will be returning to Uni early on Tuesday morning and staying there for the next fortnight. This next week is infact the last teaching week of the year. I have an essay due on Friday and only 1 seminar and lecture during the week and then thats it. The week after is like the calm before the storm...revision week which I will have to use wisely. Whether I will or not remains to be seen.

I have 6 hours worth of exams which cover everything for this semester and are spread over about 3 weeks. After that I've completed my first year of University. This is a terrifying prospect. To think a third (supposedly the easiest third as well) of my University education is already gone. Things get serious next year as the work I do actually does count toward my final degree.

What is it that scares me? I guess its that I don't feel particularly different from how I felt back in September. I'm not enlightened, I don't feel much smarter and I don't think that I have learnt much this year at all. Oh sure, I've picked up a few tidbits, have a few skills and a little expereince but it doesn't feel enough to take on an English and History Degree.

I still have to hang around in Leeds after my exams are over however. Basic administration has to be sorted out for everyone has to be around until a certain date. I also have just remembered that I have to do some IT coursework to prove to this man that resembles a Care Bear that I am capable of using a computer without drooling. Its not difficult, just tedious and I could've avoided it had I had my wits about me and submitted my ICT A-level back before various deadlines. I'll have to knock together a spreadsheet and a powerpoint presentation on something...

oh...balls to all this!

Dilema

2004-04-28T12:57:00.000+01:00

I knackered myself doing my last First Year english assignment on Monday night and I'm still pretty tired. Right now I'm facing a dilema over my history module choice for the second semester. Essentially it boils down to choosing between two history modules as to which I put as my first choice. One is on a subject which I am reasonably interested in but more importantly is taught by a Professor who is extremely interesting and amusing and I've always wanted to actually attend his proper lectures as oppose to the administration ones he gave as Head of History right at the beginning of the year. The other is taught by a tutor I know nothing about but the subject really interests me (The Rise of Modern Japan from Tokugawa 'feudalism' onwards). Now which should I put as my first choice?

Damn! I can't think! I might just stick one down then put the other as one of my electives. Problem is, I don't really want to have to take 60 history credits next year and I want to keep my elective slots free. Doing that would also mean I'd tie myself to doing three assessed presentations instead of two next year to boot.

Plus the computers are really slow today and the Citadel won't load.

There's some idiot doing some online general knowledge quiz and I just heard him telling his friend that he thought the Capital of Australia was Cambodia! Yeah...don't worry people, you don't have to be too smart to get into Uni.

Bah! I' going shopping!

Buh-bye

EDIT:...weird. I just figured I'd update seeing as something pretty funny just happened. I was in Borders (bookshop/music/dvd store) looking for some DVDs. Upstairs, they have this Grand Piano which is never played but they apparently let people sometimes. Anyway, I'd just picked up The Big Lebowski when I hear what sounds like the Chocobo theme from Final Fantasy. I go look and theres this guy playing it on the piano. I hang around a little...he plays Aeris' theme then the theme to FFX and then the theme from Treno in FFIX...then he just disappears...this was weird

Misplaced Priorities?

2004-04-25T11:03:00.001+01:00

There is not much point to this entry other than to acknowledge that I have indeed made the place orange again. I was looking for things to do which weren't necessarily work but were nonetheless productive and decided a makeover here fitted those requirements.

I have also been reading up on John Locke in order to familiarise myself with him. Whilst my studies of him are probably going to be a long way away (next October possibly) and probably not extensive, it is one of the few things University has ever given me which has instilled a genuine desire to research a subject. A desire to research something through personal preference rather than necessity.

Of course in doing the two things mentioned above along side various other activities, work on my impending english assignment have groaned to a halt. I did do something. I finished reading the last chapter of one of the relevant texts, (Dracula, FYI. I found Quincey Morris's and even Dracula's deaths a amusingly blunt events) I examined the questions and selected one to try, read some of the various articles I had acquired and even began to draft things out but then...boredom.

In other news, I have experimented with my hair, or to be more specific, I have tied it back. I think it looks good and I feel I resemble an Officer who's walked off a Hornblower or the Master and Commander set. I'm not confident enough to wear it back like this round Leeds yet though...