My eyes have suddenly gone extremely sore and swollen, it’s driving me nuts, how many anti-histomines do I need to take for gods sake.

The Ryanair guy, Paddy O’Hare or something is running around calling foul about the strict security checks/restrictions at our airports. I’ve flown Ryanair just once and I have to say it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. All of the passengers run onto the plane causing a crush because there aren’t seat reservations, you really do feel like peasants, oh and thats if there’s even a plane to get thrown onto because they cancel flights at a whim. Not because of technical problems or scheduling mishaps simply because they haven’t sold enough tickets to be bothered running the flight. And they don’t tell you in advance, you can even be stranded in a foreign place, all because they prefer to leave you that way than to lose even a few punts on a half empty jet. Thats the kind of company that moans about security. Who would rather we all die in terrorist explosions than to see a dint in their profit margins.

Scatter Cushion Affair again today. Strange Capitalisation there, S.C.A. What could it mean?

VIRGIN MOBILE DIGITAL TV (or VMDT) Our Telewest STB gave up the ghost the other day, a faint duvet covered mass floated up into the nether. So, today came the cable guy and it wasn’t Jim Carry, thankfully. The box had to be replaced, but he replaced it with the exact same model, bastard, it really is a crummy piece of crap that thing, slow as molasses, whatever molasses is. The strange thing is though, the guy rang on the doorbell again some 15 minutes later my first thought being that yet another telewest employee had misplaced something because a year or so ago a telewest engineer lost his test modem and came to our house panting desperate that it might have been left here. lol. But no, he said that he had just done a test and my cable modem’s signal was too strong. Wha? The mind boogles, how did he test that from outside? Well, I haven’t had any stability issues with my internet access at all for god knows how long, but I let him do it anyway, he attached some kind of extra screw on thing to the CAT5 screw on thing. But now i’m wondering, have I just been bugged? Have MI5 requested that I be spied upon? Eek, its so Veronica Mars.

ETCO AT MY BASTARD FRIEND Has anyone figured out how to add MT 3.3.1 style Tags to entries from within ecto yet?

WORDunimPRESSed I’m going to change my website for the new season… sometime. I want to take longer over it this time, unlike what I usually do which is suddenly think to myself, “Hey! I fancy changing my website” and then spending less than a day on it, including both the illustrator nonsense and the coding up. I do have some dandy (that’s a hint) ideas for it already. Anyway, one of the things I was going to do as well was to migrate from Movable Type to Wordpress because that seems to be the IN thing these days. But after reading Dave2’s experience I’m not sure there’s any point. Ah well.

MANTS! Gabi is ill She’s been ill for about 4 days now, I’ve given her some medicine each day and at first she seems better, but then the next day she’s fallen back ill again. It’s so sad. She’s my girlfriend in Animal Crossing and I love her to bits. It’s eating me up to see her suffer like this.

A scatterbrain entry just for kicks

At Five! I’m trying to avoid tomato based dishes but it’s tricky, it more or less halves what you can eat, especially from Italian cuisine. So occasionally I’ll allow myself just a bit as a treat. I’ve just had spaghetti and meat-balls. Already I can feel the tomato meanies rushing through my veins. Ugh.

At Four! I’ve ordered a Nintendo DS Lite. Oops. Ha ha. Buyers remorse and i haven’t even received it yet. Just ordered New Mario with it for now but it’ll be enough I’m sure! I absolutely adore the old 2D style mario games. I’ve probably mentioned before how mad I am about SNES Mario world. It’s pure charm.

At Three! I finally got around to packaging up my busted hard drive on wednesday. We cleared the loft out because sheffield is had a collect your unwanted stuff day, you could dump just about anything, like old bikes and chairs and shit outside the house and they came to collect it. Nice of them huh? Anyway, I found amongst the stuff in the loft a box and some polystyrene that was just perfect for packaging the hard drive exactly as hitachi demanded. Quite incredible though, the post office only dispatched it wednesday, to reach hitachi on thursday and yesterday (friday) I received an email that they have dispatched a new hard drive to me. I was damn impressed. Almost makes up for the cufuffle with the packaging.

At Two! I forgot to mention that a week or 2 ago I tried out Neooffice 2 for intel. I’m sure the people at Neooffice are nice chaps ‘n’ gals but I’m going to find this very difficult to word without sounding cruel and hateful. It’s just, I can’t help wondering if the Neooffice can possibly be proud of their product? The intention of Neooffice is to improve Openoffice and make it more mac-like. But, they’ve managed, once again to actually make it worse! It’s slower and more clumsy even than running Openoffice via X11. You can actually see it redrawing the window. Oh yeah, and the only thing as far as I can figure out that they’ve improved for mac-likeness is the menubar. The rest is the same! Even the open/save dialog is as it is in openoffice. If I worked for Neooffice I would demand that they bin the whole thing and attack the project from another angle. Something fundamental is wrong.

And straight in at number One! I’ve nothing else to say today really.

I really hate photo’s being taken of me, I hate even more uploading them for all to see, but totally at odds with the ordinary I had a rare urge to photograph myself the other day. I figured I’d better get it done quickly before it passes and I go back to being camera shy. So hurry, he’s a rare publicity shot of myself, with crazy hair (its going in so many directions)… and why does it look like my top is wet along and under my chin?

I’ve really enjoyed today because I’ve been writing music for the first time in yonks, lots of yonks. When you’re in the right mood playing with sequencers and all that is the most fun in the world. I made 2 tracks and I kinda like them both and I’ve been jumping ‘n’ a dancin all around my room like a nutcase on acid. A friend who annoyingly earns obscene money bought logic pro the other day. I’m not jealous I’m not! Well, maybe a bit. The annoying thing about logic pro is it has supremely wonderful plugin’s/instruments, but they’re locked to logics environment. Crazily, even though you’ve bought the thing and should be able to do what you want with it and despite all the greatness of audio units, you aren’t allowed / can’t use its instruments in other environments. And I really have a soft spot for Ableton Live so i’d be in a total quandary, even if I could afford it. Silly chaps them apple people sometimes.

This here is an entry for providing a brief description and technical details of my new fang-led pod-cast. It may be updated now again as things change.
Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t written anything in 2 thirds of a lifetime. Actually, today at least I feel genuinely good about things, therapy seems to be going in the right direction at last and I’m filled with an air of optimism. Mind you, if I analyse it too closely i probably would discover that it’s ‘just a feeling.’

I was paid more than I expected for my PC repair by duress, so I guess that’s the silver lining. Oh, and my brother has managed to get hold of tickets for the Arctic Monkeys in Rotherham’s magma centre, sounds like he had to really battle for them so he’s back in my good books Should be potent, the magma centre is a really bizarre venue, on a usual day it’s a large science museum complex. The only other time I’ve been was for a Christmas spectacle, or was it new years eve, anyway lots-o-bands played including royksopp, and pulp’s last ever gig. Oh and there was a Warp stage, which was fun. It was cold as thunder though. God that seems like years ago.

Installed IE 7 beta 2, and my first impressions are a thumbs up. They’ve fixed the problem with my fruit salad bubbles and I’d like to think that was in response to my own personal plight. It seems very peculiar at first because they’ve done away with the menu bar, similar to the vista style they’re going for. I’m all for getting rid of the menu above every single window, but somehow it looks all wrong. Maybe in time… Oh one neat feature i’ve noticed, in the RSS view it lists all the keywords/categories/tags it can see in the feed and shows the relevant entrees (food haha) when you choose one, well I think that’s pretty damn neat. Haven’t had a good fiddle with web standards yet, but all in good time, sir… All in good time.

And that’s all the weather.

UPDATE:
uk.msn.com has seen better days.

So I go to read my feeds the same way that I always do in a morning, by clicking on my bloglines bookmark. But today something has gone horribly wrong, bloglines has gone all japanese on me! I don’t suppose I’ve a japanese reading friend who can help me out?

I swear I hadn’t changed any settings on bloglines! Help!

I’ve decided to start a supplies store right here at itch & be merry, beginning with an introductory offer on coat hangers. Keep your eyes peeled for more announcements soon.

Today, as usual I have no plans except that I seriously need to clear junk up from my bedroom. When I’m lost in some work on the comp (I shall call it work, yes) I have a tendency to just fling junk any which way. It’s so much easier than thinking where something should go in an organised manor. Who needs that hassle? I’m also a couple of days late. OMG! I’m late! Fuck! What am I going to do? Gotta think clearly. Yeah, I’m a couple of days late for my monthly backup. So I guess I’d better do that today. None of this makes for good blogging material.

The other day I came across a tiny brown box in our spare room. I guess it must have been left sometime by a visitor. I opened it up and inside I found a tiny rusty nail. I came up with an idea, so I flew down the stairs and out into the garage, turned the place upside down looking for the hammer. Once I had it I went up to the bathroom, I needed to see what I was doing and it’s the only place in the house with a decent sized mirror. I placed the rusty nail into the opening of my right ear, and being careful to ensure it was straight, hammered it with into the canal with 3 almighty funks of the hammer. And that was that, nail-be-gone, all sorted.

Just finished the Archiving chapter of Hillegass’ cocoa programming book and i’m not even half way through yet! It’s getting a bit deep, or maybe i’m too tired. It’s actually eating away at my very being, all I can think about at the moment is programming cocoa. I don’t know who to blame, hillgrass or apple, or NeXT.

Yeah I’ve sod all interesting to say. Now i’m wishing something would happen in my life worth writing about. I might be going to some group for gay ppl soon thats run by gay sheffield. Is that interesting? Doubt it.

Oh neato, just seen a commercial for an LG 3G mobile that uses one of my favorite autechre tracks.

I still can’t remember what it was you know.

OK, how homely is this pic! We had the first frost of the year this morning, absolutely freezing, but it was a good excuse to get snug in front of the fire with an espresso and the ibook. And then Eddie comes and takes my spot How can you disturb that though?

I’m actually enjoying the weather at the moment, despite the freeeezing wind coming from the north or whereever, the sky is a perfect blue without a cloud to be seen anywhere and the sun is shining down all sparkly, and of course just to finish the perfect autumn picture is the beautiful golden shades of the fallen leaves. I must be getting old to be getting excited by such a thing lmao. Dear god.