geek | subscribe
I tweaked the blog a wee bit so now there’s actually a search bar at the top, it bugged the hell out of me when I was talking to someone about a post I made and had to painfully trawl through the posts to find what I was on about, so yeah, enjoy the lovely new search bar, I had a lot of fun styling up the search results page so it looks all nice and neat and whatnot or notwhat.
“You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself”
The all kinds of crazy search bar!
In addition to that I thought I’d direct the attention on you LiveJournal users that I do actually have a lovely LJ feed account (thanks Stephie for making it) that you can subscribe to, so if you’re an avid fan of Livejournal and would like to have all my entries fed into your friends page, then feel free to add me and read up it up in the comfort of your own custom stylesheet (I almost make it sound homey!).
Tonight will be an awesome night because I shall be heading to the hoods of Shepherds Bush and checking out some hot Brazilian Electro Music from a band you all know as CSS. Hopefully it should be a biblical riot.
I suppose while we’re on the subject of blog changes, feel free to drop me a comment if there’s any features you’d like on the blog to help you navigate around it, and since I haven’t used polls in a long time and we’re on the same subject, here’s a poll.
Loading ... 
Here’s a lovely story for you photographers, and if you’re not a photographer, read anyway because it’s fun. This story originated from a random blog comment I made to someone, I somehow went slightly over top witih the reply and made an entire side story with it. Slightly commical but nonetheless CHILLING haha:
I was at a Lykke Li gig in a venue called Scala, located near Kings Cross London. Inside the venue I had spent the first 30 minutes sat on the surprisingly short stage finishing off Nineteen Eighty Four, angling myself here and there in the dim blue venue lights trying to achieve maximum illumination. It wasn’t the best place to read a book but I was near the end and things just got exciting. There weren’t many people at the front at first but eventually 3 rather annoying people stood by me, one of which was trying to budge me away so they could sit on the stage too. They were rather loud and obnoxious, the type who listen to Kaiser Chief (yes, come get me Kaiser Chief fans) and brag about the number of parties they went to this week. Fortunately I had my lovely earphones on so it was easy to drown their conversation with music.
Say hello to Eve, my lovely G9 camera
Ladies and gentleman I would like you to meet my new camera, a lovely Canon Powershot G9 compact camera. She’s new to this world and was assembled in the land of the rising sun. She’ll be my companion whenever I go to gigs where my big old DSLR is frowned upon and ridiculed. Not that it will stop me from smuggling my DSLR, I’ve got my smuggling technique down to a science (from ickle venues to stadiums and festivals), it’s just when I’m at the heart of the battlefield, the enemies (being security guards) can see me equipped with something banned from the lands of a mid sized music venues, that’s where they usually give me an earful and try to take me away from the DSLR 
So in comes my backup camera, G9 (or Eve as I call her, my slender camera mistress with a HUGE 3inch LCD screen (is there such thing as camera pornography?)) She’ll handle the venues that are more strict on DSLR’s and hopefully take a few videos in the process too (you know the ones you get in youtube that you can hardly hear a thing because you’re right next to the speakers and it’s distorting the music altogether but you still listen to it).
Sitting at the cafe, drinking a frappe
One day I was sitting at a coffee shop with someone when I suddenly asked them:
“you know how you goto school so you can study and get to college, and once you’re in college, you study hard so you get to university, and once you’re in university, you study hard so you can get a job… well now that I have a job what do I do now?”
They didn’t really know how to answer that. What do you do?
What do you want to do with your life?
The predefined goals and dates are no longer there, you become a blank canvas. The fact is, you are finally free to actually do whatever you want, the conventional education path is no longer there to guide you and it’s all there for you to build, a future you can build on your own, customise and sprinkle glitter over the freshy PVA glue’d surface, you are at the cliché metaphorical crossroads and it’s up to you to pick the right path.
Anyway, once you start working, pretty much most of your life will be dedicated in working and making money to survive, live and indulge in all kinds of pasttimes, activities and hedonistic tasks. But since there’s SO much to do in this world, perhaps it’s a good idea to keep track of the things you want to do, the goals you want to achieve, the things you want to see, travel and do. In comes the lovely site called 43things.
Overexposure
What do you get when you have a bunch of index cards spare after your last exam you had or presentation you made? Throw it away? Make paper boats? Create the most awesome castle made of index cards and live in it? There’s one person who’s made full use of index cards and never ceases to amaze me. If you’re a fan of venn diagrams, line graphs, statistics and humour then look this way (if not look anyway).
Indexed is collection of witty and funny graphs and diagrams scribbled onto index cards and scanned in for our viewing pleasure, I discovered this site through www.xkcd.com as one of the webcomics he enjoys (granted it’s not really a web comic but you know). Do check the site out as some of the things she does are all so awesome and creative.
Would love to do something like this myself, but alas the things I do are pretty scattered, one day I’m taking photos of a gig, the next I’m taking photos of scallops I ate and random canals I walked by. Oh and hope everyone enjoyed talking like a pirate yesterday, I did have a lot of fun deciphering the Pirate language on Facebook (the google one was a bit lame) Anyway, below is another funny graph made from Indexed just to give you an idea of the stuff she does.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
So what’s the first thing you see when you open up Firefox, IE7, IE6, Safari, Opera, Chrome or whatever browser you use? Is it the muse messageboard? The official muse site? Google? Yahoo? A blank page or even Leekspin (that would be neat until it goes past the point of neat and back to annoying). What welcomes you the first time you fire up that browser in the morning? Knowing me I have to make mine pretty useful.
Screenshot of my iGoogle
I don’t think I’ve mentioned enough about the wonderful things Google does (neither does Google pay me enough to talk about them (eg no dinero), we all know about Google Mail (otherwise you’re most likely living under a bridge) and perhaps we all know a wee bit about Google Reader (because I wrote a crap review about it, remember?), but is there something that ties them all together? Surely there must be a way to tie them altogether. This is where the magical and wonderful iGoogle comes into play.
It’s been out for a long long time but there’s not enough justice made to it still. If you’re like me and an avid user to all things google, iGoogle is the glue that brings it all together at one glance, it’s your run-of-the-mill start pages (like netvibes or pageflakes) but made by Google. The best thing about it is the seemless integration with all the other Google apps you own. So from a glance I can check my mail, look at my feeds, check my calendar, look at when i’m getting paid, check out my notes, check the whether, learn french and check up on my to do list, ALL in ONE PAGE! (Insert Japanese School Girl Inferno)
The screenshot you see is a quick dump of what mine currently looks like, I’m using a slightly flashier beta version of iGoogle since it does a better job with space and also makes modules such as Google Reader and Google Mail expand when you interact with them. It’s all customisable from moving modules whereever you want, specifying how many columns you want to display, and even changing the theme to a Radiohead theme.
Not sure why i’m posting all of this really (but hey I can post whatever I want :D), perhaps it’s just my fascination with how a page can be so useful, it’s my lovely dashboard I use to work my day off and all. So yeah, something I’d like to share with you. it’s a highly recommended step if you’re already using Google related stuff so give it a go.
Anyway, that’s my homepage, what’s your homepage? Do you have any tips you’d like to share, feel free to comment and whatnot 
Pretty green ipod nano
Well today was Apple’s lovely “Let’s Rock” event, promising to update their ipod line with fancier and colourful ipods, and MAN they are fancy. I’ll skip the details but the product I was very keen on was the ipod nano. Mmm pretty green ipod nano. It features that sensor everyone’s been raving to put in every device, the lovely accellerroommeetterr (couldn’t be bothered figuring out which letters were doubled so i doubled them all) which detects when you tilt, shake or rotate the ipod. In this case you are able to put it on landscape and watch your videos and whatnot in widescreen but the coolest feature is shaking the ipod nano like a baby to shuffle a song. The price isn’t too bad either, £150 for a lovely 16gb ipod nano. Oh apple how you tempt us with your pretty alluminium musical players of doom (of the green variety).
As well as that the ipod classic (which i own) is updated to a lovely 120 gigalobytes. Enough space to store uhm… I was trying to think of something rediculous at 120 gigalobytes but failed, i’ll just use the lame attempt of hd quality porn (in a 320×240 resolution, makes total sense).
The ipod touch is also updated with a stainless steel back, built in speakers, volumn controls and nike+ support (sounds fancy but you need a pair of nike shoes and I like my black converse thank you). Nothing too fancy really, i prefer BIG phat f**k off capacity increases to store my music, videos (mmm futurama in ipod) and whatnot.
Other updates includes itunes8, apparently it’s fancy and has a genius inside, theres a lovely grid view where you can view all your album art in a fancy grid (suck it to those who don’t do house keeping on their itunes library!).
So yeah, if you’re thinking about betraying your creative zens, recently broke your ipod, or just want to be the coolest of the cats, go to your local apple store and order one of those bad boys (wish I had an affiliate link haha). And once again, please join me to say
“mmm green ipod nano”
Awwh
One of the problems I come across when talking to people online is that I rarely allow them to add me on instant messaging services, I’m sure we’ve all been there before when you have about 5 chat windows open, some of which are pure drivel and stuff you can’t stand, second to that is the fact that you add people for the sake of adding and never talk to them. Luckily a few years ago I knew I had to make some changes to that and basically started filtering out friends to my list of contacts is just a modest 18. Life is more productive after that and I’m spending more time working than bantering.
One thing I remember I hated so much about IM was the need to say hello for the sake of saying hello, below illustrates this quite a bit:
a:HEEEEEEEEEEEEY
b:hi
a:How are you?
b:i’m fine thank you, how are you?
a:I’m good
b:good
a:good
b:…good
…
The above usually repeats everyday, you eventually ignore them 
click here to read more »
