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.

Re-Frederator the podcast is great, it’s an offshoot of Frederator and it shows a classic/antique cartoon every single day. The other day they presented an ancient episode of Casper, and in one scene, whilst the camera panned across a dark room of drapped belongings I spotted an object that can only be described as phallic, so suggestive does it look that I cannot imagine it being unintended. Those dirty animators.

The other night I was itchy intensely the entire night. It was one of my worst flare-up’s for some time and I felt absolutely terrible. When it was time to get up in the morning I just didn’t want to move, had the whole feeling clammy and yet dry, and sore and creaky. I didn’t want to move a single limb an inch. Looked so red and blotchy, I took a photo, cropped it to a tiny segment for embarrassment reasons, but suffice it to say my skin was as that photo all over my body. Thankfully, it gradually wore off throughout the day and by the next my skin wasn’t too bad. Hope the photo doesn’t put you off your food. Hmm, wonder if I can find a point where it can tile/repeat, could make a great gross out texture for a game.

Hey scan.co.uk is going straight to the top of my favourite online retailers. When I ordered the RAM I knew it was out of stock and didn’t mind waiting a few weeks. When I ordered they sent an email, separately to the confirmation to tell me its out of stock but that they expect a new batch to arrive on the 25th. Then they sent me an email to tell me the item has arrived and is awaiting to be despatched to me… then a few hours later an email arrived to tell me it has been despatched. It arrived on Friday! How is that for service! They tell you exactly what’s going on at every stage, plus you’d ordinarily expect to pay a premium for such a service and yet this memory was less than half the price of most places. Awesome. After installing the RAM (which is easy peesy lemon squeesy on the iMac CD) the first thing I did was check “about this mac” to see if it was running at the proper 667MHz speed, it was. Next I booted into Apple Hardware Test and did the extended system test, this Passed. Then ran MemtestOSX which this time managed to lock 1715MB for testing, I left it going and went downstairs ‘cos this is a really in depth test and takes freaking hours. I let it complete 3 test cycles and it didn’t make a single mistake. Next to check its running fast enough. Ran XBench and the memory actually scored ever so slightly faster than it did with the 1GB, this is possibly because it can take advantage of dual-channel optimisations when there are 2 sticks inside. Also, for completeness sake I rebooted into windows (boot camp stylee) and ran PCMark ‘05, just as with Xbench it scored slightly more than when it was 1GB. So hey, you don’t always have to pay the extra! Now all i’m regretting is that Apple don’t allow you to buy the iMac with no memory installed, would have saved about 75 GBP per GB. Sure I could have got the iMac with 512MB, but i would have had to sell the 512, otherwise end up with a mismatched pair adding up to 1.5GB.

So I neively ride on into Christmas town casting aside all doubts that it will be my usual sucky accident laiden yule-tide hell. It started off so well, we went to my brothers who put on a great spread, his first time preparing a christmas dinner and it’s always entertaining watching my brother stressing in the kitchen whilst I generally get in the way. We spent most of the day drinking far too much, being merry whilst making fun of Eddie, who was SO well behaved! He surprised us all, such a good doggy Well mostly, first mistake of the day was leaving the turkey on the table when we left the dining room. Some time later Eddie sneaked off, we looked everywhere and found him under the dinning table with a huge chunk of the turkey, with bone, growling at us to keep away. He must have reached onto the table and bit it straight off so my brother was pissed swearing that in no way is he going to save the rest of the turkey now. Haha. Eddie takes the funniest photo’s, how mad does he look there! I don’t know how on earth the camera made his hair all stick up like that, and since when did Eddie have a big brown beard??? Sure, its getting a bit dirty looking from his saliva stains, but seriously, it looks no way near that brown in real life. Stupid camera.
Read the rest of this entry »

This here is a blog, well mostly a blog, its a blog with extra bits tacked on the side, thrills and spills for all the family. That’s right, you can think of this as Disney World, but without the suspect burgers, sweaty costumes and lame rides. Itch & Be Merry hmm? Firstly I know its a dreadful use of English but I don’t particularly care, how many of you verbalise an itch, you all have without giving it much thought. English is messy mongrel language that has always bulged and progressed through misuse. So lets not get too anal about it now. And the meaning, well the itch is my nasty eczema and the merry be my prozac. 2 Things which have shaped my behaviour and by extension can most likely be found between the lines of anything I write on here.

I suppose now is as good a time as any for the biog stuff. I was born in Warrington, England moving to Sheffield 6 years into being. Here i have laid ever since only shifting slightly to study in Leeds and occasionally vacate. I suffered from eczema early on, at around about 3 years and spent a significant time in hospital, this probably didn’t help my social skills and I have also suffered from social anxiety since childhood and have yet to shake it off. Making matters even more complicated is being gay, which is difficult enough without shyness adding to the veil of darkly spun secrets. It’s not the act I have a problem with, its the whole effort involved with meeting like minded folk; I can count my number of relationships on one hand. I work a lot with these new fang-led computers, both developing software and also dynamic websites. I also hate writing about myself, and despite the numerous time’s i’m forced to do it for counselling i do not get any better at it.

Writing a blog is therapeutic, and I’d recommend it to most people. It really doesn’t matter if no one reads it, just the act of writing one is a good thing. Unfortunately I tend to go blank from time to time, so this blog will no doubt suffer from some gaps in writing.

N.B, this entry may change from time to time.