Author: Greg

Never one to buck trends, I’ve went out and got a new Sony Ericsson T610 mobile phone that comes with so many extra features in such a small package it’s downright scary!

It takes pictures which I can send to other MMS capable mobile phones or even to email addresses.

It can send and recieve email, and as it does I’ve set up a simple email redirect address in case anyone wants to reach me while I’m on the move via mobile[at]scamcity.co.uk

It has High Speed WAP so I can access the latest news, anywhere, anytime.

I can even update this place via it too, modern technology eh?

I had the weirdest dream last night (the one thing late nights are good for are the weird, trippy dreams they produce). I dreamt that I invented a new holiday called “Cheaters Day”, in which people celebrated by having sex with someone other than their spouse or romantic partner. It was celebrated, of course, on May 31st, my birthday, and the whole idea was that you and your partner both celebrated Cheaters Day at the same time, with each other’s full approval and blessing. It was envisioned as a sort of complement to Valentine’s Day a few months before – a day to celebrate not dedicated monogamous love, but rather the fact that there were so many other sexy motherfuckers out there in the world besides the person you had chosen to spend your life with.

There was this whole formal procedure to Cheaters Day, much like a formal dance… For weeks beforehand you would carefully check out the people in and out of your life, neighbours and co-workers and classmates and even the clerk at the cafe where you get your coffee every morning. At a certain point you would then ask the person to be your “cheatie sweetie” for May 31st, at which point they could either politely accept or decline. Hallmark, seizing an opportunity, had even started a line of “Will you be my cheatie sweetie?” cards, which in my dream had turned into their third most popular type of cards after Christmas and birthday ones. It was customary to rent a hotel room for Cheaters Day as well, which meant that the hotels were fully behind the holiday, most of them running Cheaters Day specials in order to drum up business on this totally random day of the year.

In my dream, Cheaters Day had become really popular, really fast, mostly because of the nature of the holiday itself, it was actually seen by most as a romantic gesture, an opportunity to let your spouse have this incredibly hot sex once a year with someone besides yourself, without having to worry that it was a prelude to your spouse leaving you. In fact, most couples reported that their own monogamous sex lives took a dramatic upswing in the weeks following Cheaters Day, simply from the thrill of celebrating the holiday in the first place. I, of course, being the inventor of Cheaters Day, received dozens of invitations every year to be people’s cheatie sweeties, and while I was trying to figure out how I was going to maintain an erection for 24 hours as I met up with four or five different people over the course of the holiday, I woke up.

Damnit!

You may have seen them about… Those little 80×15 buttons that give you useless information about weblogs…

For instance why use when a fancy will do. I’ve resisted going down that blog road thus far, as I’ve only had 4 buttons all nicely formatted, but for some inexplicable reason I was looking through blogshares.com today and this place is listed, sweet, and some guy owns shares in here, double sweet… So I registered to overthrow this hostile takeover and reclaim Scam City as my own once again. But of course you need to advertise to push up the share price (or something like that) and nothing beats a button.

Now, remember I said I had my buttons nicely formatted? Well the blogshares button screwed that right up. So I went in search of a place that has those little generic ones and found it here and there I found a button for just about everything and anything… So I expanded and added a few more bits of useless information. Time for another comparison.

or ???

No contest really… I may get bored and return to the old 4 button format soon enough but in the meantime.

Nice to know my “administrator” cares enough to tell me by virus filled emails, his ass is so fired once I find out who he is…

Is there anyone who still fall’s for these stupid things nowadays? If so then they should all be frogmarched onto an airstrip and shot because they deserve nothing better.

For more info on this just go here, call it a heads up.

• Get plenty of sleep!!! Do not stay awake till an ungodly hour downloading music off Soulseek because no matter how good your cable modem is, you’re always going to be no quicker than a 56k modem, especially if you’re downloading a handful of songs off Ani Moller. Also, it will make no sense that she can rape your collection at incredible speeds at the same time…
• Calm down with the hot linking of Ani’s site… Dude, she can generate enough visitors without you shoving it down people’s throats, I think they get the picture.
• DON’T ever use the word “dude” in that context again, dude!
• Wake up when your alarm goes off, that’s 7am… not 7:05, not 7:10 and certainly not 7:15.
• Don’t brush your teeth while you wait for the shower to heat up, cause dude (there’s that word again), karma states there isn’t much hot water left.
• If, and only if, you decide to leave your PC on to download music while you go to bed, remember to turn it off before you leave.
• Never rely on bus timetables, 7:41 is a variable time that ranges from 7:35 to 8:10. Also, never decide to walk up the road a little bit to catch the express bus, cause at that time in the morning the M8 becomes a glorified parking lot.
• The 109 bus will get you to work faster than the 40 bus, simple fact.
• Remember to bug the receptionist into getting you a key card so you can enter the building, this will save a minute or two each morning.
• As much as you despise the coffee out that machine in the lounge area, continue to get a cup each morning. It’s better than nothing and with nothing you’d be snoozing by now.
• Tune into Core Radio before you do anything, because music soothes the savage beast. Also don’t think too much about why someone in Scotland feels the need to listen to a New Zealand based internet radio station, also remember to thank Nick for his late night, drunken recommendation all those months ago.
• Invest in headphones, or even that iPod you really like, because as much as you want to rock out… you can’t.

And that’s all for now

Well, rolling on from my recent successes (getting a job, learning PHP) I’ve taken to the fine art of video editing…

And when I say video editing, I really mean pasting a few clips together on my PC…

And when I say pasting a few clips together on my PC, I really mean I opened up Windows Movie Maker 2 and it done it for me.

I’ll probably get scorned for using WMM2 but damn, it was just so easy… Import clips/drag and drop/choose effects/save/watch.

It was the goals from Rangers 4-0 win over Heart of Midlothian today. I know a site that has the goals individually but it’s like 1mb per goal as it’s .AVI, and I knew I could get all 4 for half the file size, shame it’s in .WMV though.

But it’s not bad for my first effort.

After testing out a few different looks, I got back to finding a way to allow people to change between them whenever they want. This is where PHP really makes my day, A List Apart had a nice easy tutorial that was even easier to modify for my own means, so all it really took was about 5 minutes.

Full instructions can be found here, so play away until you get bored. I’ll be adding more styles over the rest of the weekend.

I’ve been messing around making a new stylesheet (as you can see). I’d love to give credit where credit is due, as this is the same font and colour scheme as the old “greenish” stylesheet on o8, but since that’s gone kerplooey I can’t check who made it, but over the next few days I’ll be trying out different styles (such as “2Familiar” by Tim Schavitz, “Greyscale” by Ani Moller, “ASCII” by Richard Morrison to name a few, and those are the only ones I really remember who their by) and hopefully I’ll learn how to incorporate a style switcheroo thing so you can choose which one you like and, as if by magic, it’ll remember that for you next time you visit… Personally I’d like to get it to alternate a new stylesheet every day ala Cotworld, that would be cool.

But now as I’ve messed around with things I’ve noticed that stupid horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. Was that always there? I’m sure I would have noticed something as glaringly annoying as that… And now I have no way of getting rid of it and it’s really pissing me off as I’m pretty much an anally retentive perfectionist when it comes to this place.

A little update to yesterdays story, Susan wasn’t on the bus this morning which I guess was a little disappointing but I don’t really care either way. On second thoughts ignore that, it makes me sound like a really creepy stalker.

EDIT: I’ve since found out the scroll bar is just me, which frustrates me even more knowing there is NOTHING I can do about it.

Have you ever had that moment on the train or on the bus, where you spy someone out the corner of your eye that you haven’t seen for ages? Be it someone you used to go to school/college/work with…

That happened to me today as I was on the bus about 8am, struggling to keep awake, when on comes someone I once knew many years ago, though I didn’t know that at first. So I’m sitting there, trying to remember where I know her from and who the hell she is, all while trying not to act all creepy and stare. Then it dawns on me. Susan from college way back in 1997/98…

Hmmmm, now I’m faced with the daunting prospect of saying hello, but when is a good time? By now the bus has reached the final stop and, as fate would have it, she actually stops to let me out my seat (which is always a nice thing to do) so I say thank you and hello. Not a single sign of recognition whatsoever, well it has been about 5 years so I guess not everyone has as good a memory as me.

To be honest it was slightly disappointing but what can you do? Maybe I’ll see her another morning and maybe she’ll say hello to me. Maybe she’s sitting at work thinking she might have actually known me from somewhere. Probably not though.

A moments silence…

Checking the news this morning, the corporation which owns a 60’s group called The Beatles is suing to get money out of iPods. The comments at MacCentral have some funny titles: “Ringo Starr sued by Astronomical Association”, “What are The Beattles?”, “AppleCorps to sue farmer for growing Apple”, “The Power To Crush Other Fruit!(tm)” and more.

But some points did catch my eye as I was browsing

It’s trademark, not copyright
The original issue was that somehow people would confuse Apple Computers with Apple Records, hence the agreement that Apple Computers wouldn’t produce music. Now that Apple Corp is a dead entity and no longer produces anything (oh but they might in the future, yeah right) the issue is moot. Regardless, Apple Computers is not producing music any more than Best Buy or Tower records does. What’s even more ridiculous is the dispute over the iPod, which only plays music. Would a music producer want to sue a manufacturer of CD players, tape decks or record players?? This is just a plain stupid attempt to make some money. It’s a loser and I’m surprised they found a law firm to even file it for them.

Ahhh, the good ol’ days of the Apple Computer which came with the oh so cheeky “Sosumi” (So Sue Me, geddit?) sound when the shit hit the fan… Which it invariably did all to often, infact it was my time in high school screwing about with Apple Macintosh Classics II’s, the one with the inbuilt monochrome monitors that our high school used to show the wonder of mail merging on, that really soured my opinions of Apple and Mac’s…

But I digress, this seems to be a lot of hooha over nothing… Apple (Computers) aren’t making and producing music, merely buying and selling. Apple (Records) are just trying to make a quick buck by hoping Steve Jobs will settle out of court.

I, for one, am going to wait a few months before I finally purchase a 20GB or 40GB iPod and maybe even a badass 17″ iMac. Using one in Croydon has made me realise that Mac’s arent all that bad, I’ve even got an XP theme that makes it look like OSX (sad, I know). And now, as I look around the Apple store, I’m taking note of all the stuff I want and it’s depressing me as it’s so damn expensive.

Time to start saving…

So, it’s been two years since the two planes hit the two towers of the World Trade Center. How much has been accomplished in those two years?

The Taliban were driven out of Afghanistan, but most of it remains a No-Go zone. Iraq was “conquered” but soldiers are still dying today on the lawless streets. Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein still remain at large.

And that’s it.

America vowed to go it alone against terrorists and those who harboured them and screw the rest of the world. Britain, naturally, jumped to America’s aid and are only now realising the consequences of following “Dubyah” into a war they had no right being in.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sad, sad day (f’in “patriot” day) and I still recoil when I think about that day, watching 3,000 lives disappear live on TV. But I had almost forgotten about it. It was only yesterday I noticed that date was 9/10 and that got me thinking about all the shit that’s went down since.

On a more positive note, my new job KICKS ASS! I spent yesterday loading my brand new PC full of software. I wish I had a CD Burner, but oh well, software piracy will take a back seat here… Today has been about hard work (strange concept if you ask me) and I’m churning out the goods like it’s going out of fashion. Infact I better get back to work now.

Firstly… Remember that great job interview I had on Friday? No? Well you should, it was only Friday after all… Well I got the call yesterday to say I actually got it and I start tomorrow morning.

Does this mean my life of shitty temping jobs has finally come to a close? I sure as hell hope so, as most of those jobs were soul sapping and mind numbing, but it also means all my comedy material has gone, no more temping related jokes… None. EVER!

At least I hope not.

But anyways, It will be good to get back into the swing of things, probably means no more watching David Blaine go stir crazy in his box, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it won’t get good till the 3rd or so week.

See? Not a helluva lot happening now. I hope he makes it through the full 44 days though, just to see how loopy he becomes. Should be a good enough warning for anyone.