I’ve made a semi unconscious decision… I’m not going to make any negative posts here.
Positively Positive only, I’m positive…
It really expalains a lot that’s been going on in my head, I never really believed in shit like horoscopes, but sometimes, just sometimes, they really got my number.
For those who know, no explanation is necessary.
For those who don’t, no explanation is possible.
“Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart”
Such a dramatic conclusion but not entirely unexpected, doesn’t mean it hasn’t killed me a million times over in the last hour and a half… I’ve swallowed a big chunk of pride already, I best make this as amicable as possible…
I got my tickets yesterday for my week long trip to Atlanta, Georgia to visit the Walker-Arnold household…
It’ll be good to get away as this year has been the first in four that I’ve not went abroad at some point…
Examples:
September 1999 – New York City, NY.
October 2000 – Detroit, MI.
January 2001 – Oslo, Norway
July 2002 – Dublin, Ireland
August 2002 – Boston, MA.
So I’ll be happy to get away from it all, if only for a week…
Not bad for a guy who had a heart attack and a double heart bypass operation in June of this year…
“The racing,” he said, had been “very knackering on our legs.”
There’s an understatment…
I hate Spiders, it doesn’t matter if it’s as big as my hand or the size of a pinhead, they all make me cringe, scream then run away… So some bright spark over at the University of Washington has created a virtual “Spiderworld” to help prevent pussies like me bricking themselves at the mere sight of one…
Some of their tactics sound downright disturbing.
“In the final session, the visitor is confronted with a virtual tarantula.
This is no ordinary tarantula though. It is the size of their fist and eats birds as a snack.”
What the hell? Eats birds as snacks?
“They are asked to reach out and grab the virtual spider.
At the same time, their real hand grasps a furry model of the tarantula.
“For them, the virtual spider was furry and solid,” said Hunter Hoffman, one of the scientists behind Spiderworld.”
Call me old fashioned, but if I reached out to grab a virtual spider and some mook dangled a furry model in front of me, I’d kick his ass… After my multiple heart attacks and months of rehabilitation to integrate me back into society.
Really, these last couple of days have been hectic, joyous, bittersweet and retrospective but I wouldn’t change a thing. Getting the Moblog to work was a bit of a struggle, but I managed it, even though it’s not using the system I first thought of but if it’s not borked then don’t fix it I guess. Now I just need to post in it to justify the effort.
Then the events of yesterday threw me a bit but today I’ve been approached to co-write a book on on-line relationships and the social aspect of this… Heavily leaning towards my time in Bmans Pub.
I’m ready to throw myself fully into this, so much so I’m resurrecting the website and giving it a nice new millennium facelift and a proper domain name. Should be fun looking back on some good, good times. Funny to think it was 5 years ago I first logged into that sixdegrees chat room.
*sigh*
But that’s a story for another day and another medium, lord knows if this book will ever be published, but it’s something to aim for.
Ani Moller has suggested I change the look of this place as it’s “the default template” so maybe that’s another thing to do, looks like I’ll be busy busy busy over the upcoming weeks.
Referrer Activity Analysis
Analysis for the Day of Wed Oct 29th, 2003.
Total sessions served during period : 2530
Total search engine referred sessions : 0 (0.00%)
Total referred session : 2260 (89.33%)
Total blind (no referrer) sessions : 270 (10.67%)
Total referring domains tracked during period : 17
Top 10 most active referring domains during period:
yayhooray.com with 2040 referrals made (90.27% of all referrals)
thevishal.com with 113 referrals made (5.00% of all referrals)
ex-rev.com with 56 referrals made (2.48% of all referrals)
ideamouth.com with 23 referrals made (1.02% of all referrals)
animoller.com with 7 referrals made (0.31% of all referrals)
ezboard.com with 6 referrals made (0.27% of all referrals)
google.com with 2 referrals made (0.09% of all referrals)
userland.com with 2 referrals made (0.09% of all referrals)
scamcity.co.uk with 2 referrals made (0.09% of all referrals)
technorati.com with 2 referrals made (0.09% of all referrals)
That’s a lot of referrals for one day for me
130mb of bandwidth used… I only linked 2 files to YayHooray, each about 70k in size… Thats just crazy amounts of downloads/page views.
I shouldn’t post this right now, no one should read it either but things have to be said…
This morning I found out Rich Baran had died in a car accident near to his home on Tuesday morning. I never knew him personally but over the last 18 months I’ve had enough interaction with him on various design and creative communities to classify him as an acquaintance, I wouldn’t say he was a friend as I didn’t really know him that well. But reading the news that he had passed away shook me to my core and threw me for the whole day… This was at 9am so getting through to 5:30pm was a hard struggle, a struggle in which my mind was constantly wandering back and forth through various subjects but mostly centering on the time when my best friend died some 8 years ago.
Still seems like yesterday, sitting at home on a Sunday morning in August 1995 when I got a phone call from his mum to say he died the night before and standing there in silence for what seemed like hours… days… possibly months… Constantly wondering what if I went round to his house that night like I was supposed to instead of changing plans at the last minute, could I have done anything? I probably couldn’t have and the trauma of watching him die would be far greater than the trauma I suffered. I remember going round to his parents house a few days later, still unable to say anything. It was the same at the funeral, and looking back I’m pretty sure it wasn’t till the casket disappeared that the realisation that I wouldn’t see him again hit me hardest.
I’m somewhat thankful that it was the first and, thus far, only funeral I’ve been to.
But not a day goes by when I don’t think about him, if only for a moment. And that brings me to todays events… It seemed a bit unbelievable at first, a bit surreal but also very “there”… And most weren’t sure what to make of it, it took a while to sink in but once it did there was a massive, and I do mean MASSIVE outpouring of grief, memories and self made tributes including my own little front page tribute.
Rich, we had a few good arguments based upon a difference of opinion but I always loved your crazy writing style on Cotworld and respected the work you put into the games you made…
And as someone said:
Hes probably gonna post on God’s o8.
He’s probably all like “God, I hate what the new o8 has become.” and God will be all like “OMG I know.”
Take it easy man, wherever you are…
Cooooooo…
Some days I wish I wasn’t at work, because I have an idea swirling round my head and I’ve got some 5 hours before I can get home and get to work on it…
Basically I want to put a moblog together after finding a site that uses b2 to do it… They even provide helpful source codes to do it so it *shouldn’t* be too much bother.
But easy things always go invariably wrong. So in the meantime here is my world in very low resolution.
I’d love to say I had a productive weekend, I really would, but I was playing Pro Evolution Soccer 3 on the PlayStation 2 for most of it.
It was great… You really can’t measure the pleasure a sweet Jon Dahl Tomasson strike that rockets into the top corner like a missile leaving the goalkeeper grasping at mid air brings to your soul, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
“Dear employer, you commanded me
Your commendations now don’t mean as much
Cause I’m a lost cause, causing a problem
But I promise not to be out of touch”
A strange thing happened yesterday… But I’ll give you a bit of background first. I was designing a shitty site for a shitty removal firm who paid shitty money for it, so we’re basically told to give them the bare minimun of what they specify. And I do, but I try to make them look decent…
So I get the brief for this site and it basically says “refer to brouchure”. So I do… and not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a mess, how this firm gets any business is beyond me, but I digress, I put a bog standard site together… Front page is about the company, second page explains their services in a bit more detail and the third page gives contact information.
So I put it all together and upload it and think nothing of it, till my bosses boss (top level boss) comes over to me yesterday to say this guy has put a complaint into Watchdog…
Fucking Watchdog?!?!
She said I should redesign it, but not change the content, just make it look better, it seems that this guy bought a Reliant Robin but was expecting an Aston Martin DB7…
I was so pissed off, I was ready to call this guy and call his bluff, or appear on TV telling Nicky Campbell that the firm could eat my ass with a spoon! Or even better, tell that to Kate as she chases me down the street with a camera crew!
Funny thing is, I don’t really care, I threw together another site and we’re awaiting a response, if he doesn’t like it then screw him… Plenty more business to get on with.
This is how the bottom of my desktop looks everyday… With the scope of information thats assaulting my senses day in and day out, it’s a wonder I get any work done.
First up there is the constantly updating BBC and ESPN News Tickers that make sure I’m up to date with all the news from around the world, the UK and American sports… Some may say that’s a bit of overkill, but I like to have my finger on the pulse when the moment is needed.
Along the toolbar you’ll see (or not see, depending on how good the shrinkage is in photoshop) iTunes, which currently has 295 songs, or 21.3 hours cycling through it. Outlook so I can send and recieve e-mails relating to work. My own web based e-mail so I can send and recive e-mails through scamcity. Dreamweaver MX so I can actually do work.
Pretty crowded huh? Shame you might not see Trillian Pro 2.0 sitting in the system bar as I leave it running hidden in the background so I can converse with various people during the day, when I have time of course…
These are my daily distractions, but they don’t distract me that much…
