September 2004 Archives

I sat at my pc last Sunday and wrote lots of posts for the blog. I was getting into my stride and thought "yeah, I have a few day's worth of waffle there, I'll post them one at a time and that'll make it look like I'm really doing this every day" (coz as we all know, I'm not exactly a "finger-on-the-pulse" kinda guy). Anyway, you can guess what's coming next. I didn't save the file and 24 hours later my pc locks up completely and I lose the lot. Who would have thought that would happen? After all, I'm running Windows. I'd rewrite it all, but I honestly can't remember what it all was in the first place.

So, while we wait for normal service to be resumed, here are a few links to keep you occupied for, ooh, minutes. Literally.

Tom Lehrer's Elements Song (Flash animation, and very flash it is too)
Doh! The Humanity
My Neighbours Are Hoors
You Rock!
Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy online game
A Collection of Great Pirates of Penzance Parodies (with one of my favourites being the Animaniacs one)
There's a Rainbow (in every teardrop you're crying) - another flash animation from the same guy that did the Elements one above. This one is wonderfully twisted

That should keep you busy while I try to remember what was on my mind 48 hours ago. I may be some time.......

I've been busy this week. Too busy, in fact to even spend ten minutes scribbling down something pointless and boring to put on the site. Until now, that is :-)

I joined Screen Select last Friday. For fifteen of your British pounds a month (none of that mamby-pamby euro rubbish over here, thank you very much) they will post you as many dvd's as you can watch, three at a time. When you've finished, simply post them back in the pre-paid pre-supplied pre-gummed pre-addressed envelope. Mt first dvd's arrived the following morning (11 out of 10 for service! Top quality.) So this week I've been trawling through the first season of ER, which, as you can imagine, has taken up quite a lot of my time. Eighteen hours, so far.

My ex and I watched ER religiously when it first started, for about the first four or five series or so. Then I lost interest a bit, and when I got back to it all the main characters had changed. So it's been good to watch the first series again, a bit like meeting up with old friends after a long break (did I really just say that? I believe I just did. Oh well). Only problem is, the box set of ER stretches to 4 dvd's and Screen Select only send out three at a time, so I'm going to have to wait until they decide to send me the last one. Some discs they send out in sequence, some not. ER is one of the ones they don't send out in order.

Grrr.

Space, according to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

This thought brings two subjects to mind. The first (and perhaps more important of the two) is that there is a new series of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy starting on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow evening. Or, if you're reading this tomorrow, then it's this evening. And if you're reading this after 7pm tomorrow then you've missed it. Except you haven't, coz it's repeated on Thursday and will be available to listen to on the Radio 4 web site for a whole week. So there's absolutely no excuse for you to miss it. Unless, of course, you're reading this some time next year in the archives because you've discovered this incredibly witty and insightful blog and thought you'd go through all the old posts to find out how crap it used to be. That'll teach you. You should have been with me from the very start, so you don't miss little gems like this.

I mentioned earlier there were two subjects. Time to move on to the second one, I think, before you all die of boredom. I've joined seti@home, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence ... er, @ home. I'm sure everyone has heard of this by now, and when I went to check out the site a few weeks ago I expected it to be in the last throes of a dying fad. But no, far from it. Once I'd downloaded the software and watched it draw pretty 3-d shapes on my screen for a few hours, I went to check my statistics. There are over 5 million registered users, all using their PC's to analyse radio data gathered sometime last year or the year before in the search for little green men. You can see on your stats page how you move up the "top 5 million" chart of busy little bees (I'm currently 1,260,827th), and you can see how you compare to the other people who joined on the same day you did. I was absolutely staggered to find that on my day of joining, September 3rd, 6,780 other people also joined in the search for life out there..... and this is hardly a new project, it's been running for years.

Anyway, download the seti software. It runs in the background, on a very low priority, which means it only does stuff when your computer isn't doing anything else. And listen to the new Hitch Hikers series.

One of these two activities will give me more satisfaction than the other one. I'll leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to decide which one that is.

Saturday September 18th, 7:00pm. 1/60 at F4.8. Click image for a larger version.

Ahoy me hearties! Listen up, ye land-locked lubbers...tomorrow is International Talk Like A Pirate Day... so get yer grog out, fire up the hornpipe, and have a day full of silliness and merriment. Or I'll buckle me swash all around yer innards, so I will....

Arrrr...

It's been a while since I posted anything here, and I'm sitting here now trying to work out exactly why that is. Maybe my potential depression has taken over my mind and relegated the blog to a much lower priority. The summer hasn't gone quite the way I expected it to go, I was planning on doing lots of walking and cycling and getting more exercise and I just haven't. I know the weather hasn't really been up to much, but that's not much of an excuse. It hsn't rained 24 hours a day for god's sake, it just seemed like it. And I'm not looking forward to the winter, I hate the dark mornings and the dark evenings, and working in an office with no windows means I get very little daylight. I've got to pull myself out of this slump, I need to find things to do to keep myself occupied.

I called the local adult education centre yesterday afternoon to register on a photography course, but it was full. They've put me on the waiting list in case a place becomes available. While looking through the brochure after that I noticed a creative writing course and a painting/drawing class, so I'm going to call back today to see if I can get on one of those instead. I've always wished I had some talent for writing, drawing or being creative generally, maybe this is my chance to find out one way or the other. And besides, it's something to do, isn't it?

Yesterday I found this and set it up on my PC. Very neat indeed! It sits in the top corner of my screen and looks like this:

Can't argue with that now, can you?

I wrote previously about how I'm feeling low at the moment and may be depressed. So I went to the doctor this morning and poured my heart out to him. As much as I could in ten minutes, anyway. The good news is that he doesn't think I'm depressed, or if I am it's only a mild depression. He's going to think about everything I've told him over the next couple of weeks and then I'm going to see him again for another consultation.

At the moment I'm feeling ok, I've been up and down all week thinking about this. I reckon the solution for me is to keep busy and have try to keep a Positive Mental Attitude (wherever I get one of those from!) more than medication.

More updates as and when...

This is a nothing entry. I have nothing to say, apart from the fact that I'm bored. And I may also be depressed, the thought of which has kept my mind occupied while it's not being distracted by anything else. It's a looooong story to explain why I might be depressed, suffice to say that neither my career nor my marriage went the way I was planning for them to go, and although I can just about afford to make ends meet I can't afford to go out and have any fun, not that I'll be much fun in this state of mind...

I'm going to see the doctor on Friday, let's see if he gives me some happy pills or just tells me to snap out of it. Till then, nothing to see here, move along....

I've just been told about this helper application that sits in your system tray and notifies you when new mail comes in. Very useful stuff :-)

After setting up my gmail account yesterday, I did some reading around on the net, and found some interesting information, which is all collected in the Gmail wiki. People seem to be concerned about the fact that google's computers can scan your emails and target ads to you, and also that they discourage emails from being deleted. Their line of thought is that with 1Gb of email storage, who needs to delete anything? Other people are concerned that deleting a message from Gmail does not actually delete it, and that google can use the information in your email archive to find out more about you. Quite what they may use this information for is not clear at the moment. You can find links in the wiki to other arcticles which explains other people's concerns.

My personal take on it is that if you have something to hide, you shouldn't be using email for it anyway, let alone a web-based email account. There are plenty of other ways of communicating with people other than email, use one of those methods instead.

Having said all that, I have four Gmail invites to give away. If anyone wants one, let me know.

OK, I've finally succumbed to peer pressure (or whatever you want to call it) and accepted an invite to a Gmail account, and because this is not going to be my main email account I'm going to use it for correspondence from this site. So if you want to send me an email, feel free to do so :-) That will be a good test of Gmail's spam filtering heheh.

My son has never quite got the hang of hide-and-seek. Not when he's been playing it with me, at any rate. A typical game goes like this:

"Daddy, I'll hide and you can find me"
"ok"
.......
"Well start counting then!"
"Oh! ok.... 1... 2... "
he runs off and hides
"... 18 ... 19.... 20! Coming! Ready or not!"
"now..... is he hiding under this plate?"
(I hear giggles)
"Is he hiding in this DVD case?"
(more giggles)
"Is he inside this magazine?"
(laughter)
"Is he hiding in my pocket?"
(fits of laughter now)
"Oh I give up, he can't be in here anywhere! I'm going to have to eat all the cake myself if I can't find him!"
"I'm behind the sofa!!"

And this little gem from last weekend:

"Daddy, can we play hide and seek?"
"Not right now, this is a big park and I don't want you running off where I can't see you"
He looks around and thinks for a second. He points. "Well, I'll be right behind that tree over there then."