Monthly Archives: February 2006

Going (London) Underground

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Explicit

I very nearly managed to go a day without posting, but that would have really buggered up my resolution to blog more so I put my thinking cap on and came up with this. What about if I linked to the wonderful Amateur Transplants website, I first became aware of them after my mate made me listen to the ‘London Underground‘ song. Its verry funny, you should definately listen to ‘Northen Birds’ too.

Having watched the ‘London Underground’ video I was in the mood for some more spoof videos so found this, the rather 80s sounding ‘Star Wars – Musical Tribute‘ and even better is ‘Grocery Store Wars‘.

Not my cup of tea

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Well its official I won’t be going to T In The Park this year. I was logged on to three PCs this morning at nine o’clock when tickets went on sale but try as I might was unable to get weekend camping tickets. They’ve all sold out in around 40 mins. I’m a bit gutted really cos its a while since I’ve been to T and really wanted to see The Who live. Oh well maybe next year.

UPDATE – Thanks to the NME website I’ve been able to get some tickets. It was a little costly however since I had to buy individual day tickets, so I’m now £261.90 poorer, plus theres still the cost of some camping to pay for. The one advantage of not camping at the site is that a decent nights sleep might be had. So if anyone would like to come to T with me then let me know, if not I’m gonna have to try and sell myself and the spare ticket on e-bay.

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Today

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It’s been a hard day so far, I’m working is Stockton so true to form it’s been very quiet. Before lunch I read a book, in fact that is how my whole morning was filled. I sat around a read a book; it was my effort to look busy. The fact that it was a fictional novel rather than anything educational is neither here nor there.

At lunch time I started configuring SMF to see what features it had and if it can be a useful addition to my site. It does seem quite feature packed, but the only downside is that there doesn’t appear to be any bridging between it and WordPress, meaning users would have to register twice, luckily this is hardly a major concern since the numbers of visitors I get could be counted on one hand.

It was then time to go for my daily walk. I always try and go for an hours walk everyday. I put on my iPod and just walk as far as I can for an hour, it’s a great way to clear my head before returning to the boredom that is my desk. It’s always strange walking around in Stockton, it must be quite a culture shock. Imagine signing up to Durham University and being sent to Stockton Campus. They’d leave home imagining a lovely old historic city and arrive in a chav town.

So now I’m back at my desk, only 45 mins to go then I can leave with only one more day to work until the weekend. I like Fridays, it’s the last day before the weekend, I obviously like the weekends too but on Friday you can look forward to the weekend, by Saturday lunch time the weekend is pretty much over.

House keeping

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So after recovering from my rather sore head this morning work hasn’t been too bad. There have been quite a few people off ill at the moment but still we’ve coped mainly due to it being quite quiet. Who’d have thought it perhaps the students have been busy working.

So today I thought that I’d take the opportunity to upgrade wordpress to the latest version. Since I was doing this I figured it would be an opportunity to give a mention to the plugins I’ve been using on my site. So first of all you may have notice the recent theme change to the excellent Hemmingway theme, for ages now I’ve been looking for a nice simple dark coloured theme so was really happy when I’ve found this. Another theme related update is the rather splendid Tiger Style Administration, which is a lovely backend update which reminds me as the name suggests of the lovely Mac UI.

Since I’m such a terrible speller I also make a great deal of use of this Spelling Checker (although at the moment it doesn’t seem to work with WP2.0 so hopefully an update will be available soon). Counterize is excellent plugin which saves IP, timestamp, visited URL, referring URL and browser information in a database, and can display total hits, unique hits and other statistics in WordPress webpages. Finally in this day of spam I’ve added a nice contact form so that users can contact me without having to publish my e-mail address.

3 little words

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“I’m quite pissed”, today I made the mistake of going straight from work, to the gym and then to the pub. This is a bad idea, I’d only eaten a pork pie and an apple. I’m now feeling quite drunk. I’ve just eaten a chip butty but unfortunately this hasn’t had time to take effect. I hope the room stops spinning soon!

Smoking ban

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Today is the day when MPs get to vote on the controversial proposed smoking ban in England and Wales. As a non-smoker I’d like to see this happen as it will be great to go out somewhere and not come home smelling like an ash tray. There are however a few problems I see, firstly that can’t seem to make a decision upon which kind of ban to introduce:

  • Total ban in all pubs and private members’ clubs
  • Ban in licensed premises except non-food-serving pubs and members’ clubs
  • Smoking ban for all premises except private members’ clubs

Secondly how is such a ban going to be policed? You can just imagine it, a man walks into a bar and lights up, he is asked by the landlord to ‘kindly extinguish his cigarette’, the man refuses and so the police are called. By the time they arrive where is the evidence.

As a non-smoker I don’t like the smell of other people’s stale smoke, but since I’ve got friends who smoke its something that I’ve just got used to. It’s all very well and good proposing a ban, but just how will it be implemented, how long before the government is sued for contravening somebody’s human rights. It also seems a bit harsh, just think how much money the government makes from tobacco tax; we’d be screwed if the whole population decided to give up. So in summary, its a nice idea but I just can’t see how it will work. Maybe after the votes are counted and the decision has actually been made then we’ll here some proper information on how it will all work.

UPDATE – MPs have voted by huge margins to ban smoking from all pubs and private members’ clubs in England. [More info can be found here on the BBC website.]

Your first computer

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News.com is asking industry pros to tell us about their first computer. Well I may not be an industry pro, but its my site so I’m gonna tell you about mine. My first every computer ever was a Sinclair Spectrum +2 but thats not very exciting, my very first PC was bought in 1996 (I think). I bought it from Performance Computers in Darlington and cost £1700. It was a 120MHz Pentium machine with 32mb ram. It had a Diamond Stealth graphics card, 14″ monitor and a 4x cd rom drive. It was running the amazing windows 95 on a huge 800mb hard disk. When I think back at how much it cost it amazes me since it was crap. But at the time it was cutting edge, all my friends were still running 486 machines. Incedentally on the first weekend I had it I managed to bugger it up and had to do a full reinstall of windows.