In response to this inflammatory remark in the latest Strong Bad Email, I thought I should reply in a witty way like:
“I’d rather be squirrel handed than wearing boxing gloves…”
Or
“Gregor is a weird name? Well, yo mamma musta loved you to call ya Strong Bad”
But I’m better than that, and although it’s not directly referencing me (despite my many attempts to get a SBE read out), I’ll think it really is cause how many left handed Gregor’s do you know?
I finally have got the DNS address changed over to my RUWebby webspace. So any linkwhores out there should change the link to www.gregorsmith.com/blog/ stat!
Other than that there isnt much else to say, the bosses are away on a weekend away in the Republic of Ireland (yes, another trip away) so I’m on unofficial server watch until they get back. Here’s hoping it’s as uneventful as last time.
Today I sat for about 8 hours watching live football on TV, been a while since I’ve done that… That’s usually reserved for major events like the World Cup or European Championships so this was a nice distraction.
It all began around 2pm with the build up to the Scotland vs. Faroe Islands game on Sky which Scotland won 3-1… Then over to BBC1 for Englands tricky trip to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia which they done their usual come-from-behind victory to steal the game 2-1… THEN it was straight over to BBC2 to see Wales showdown in Italy, but in the end it was really men against boys. Despite a spirited performance, Wales were humiliated 4-0 and were lucky it wasn’t more.
I had two very different interviews today… One was insufferable and the other was almost joyous. How often does one get to say that?
Interview one was at The Black & White Mortgage Company and I DID not belong there. A recruitment agency put me forward for it and to be honest, I want to know what that person was smoking at the time when she did it. Because before the interview I got literature off the company and it clearly said they were looking for “Fully CeMap qualified Mortgage Advisors with minimum 3 years successful track record in mortgage sales”.
Yeah, like that’s me…
So anyways, I smiled and tried to bluff my way through the HOUR long, torturous interview as best as I could, relying on my past experience of working for Scottish Amicable/Prudential… Hmmm, maybe that’s why they thought I was good for this job, but I never done sales or anything remotely near it, and I was only there for 2 months.
So yeah, lied my ass off throughout the interview and, hell, even I was starting to buy it towards the end… If it wasn’t for the fact I can’t sell for shit and I’m dangerously unqualified, I think they would have offered me the job there and then. C’est la vie, moving on…
Interview two was surreal, It was over at iomart and it was for a job in my chosen field… Web Design, so I was simply oozing enthusiasm for this position as it’s what I’ve wanted to do for a great many years (well, the last 5 anyways) and finally all my hard work could be paying off. And basically I had to talk the interviewer through my work (3 versions of Scam City and some Content-Monkey stuff outlined in my portfolio) and I got the vibe that the guy was somewhat impressed.
“When could you start?”, he asks… “Monday”, I reply, always a good sign I think. But he’s interviewing people on Monday and I’ll get an answer then to provisionally start on Wednesday. So finger’s crossed.
In the meantime, I need a $1000 loan to buy Macromedia Studio MX 2004. Sure, I could wait for a *ahem* copy to surface but, dammit, I want the exclusive limited-edition Macromedia MX 2004 T-shirt!
Where have I seen this before?
Asteroid heads for Earth
September 2, 2003Scientists were today warning of a possible asteroid collision with the Earth.
An asteroid around 1.2 km wide could hit the earth on March 21, 2014 and has been classified as “an event meriting careful monitoring” by astronomers.
But they say the probability of the asteroid hitting Earth is just 1 in 909,000 and the risk of impact is likely to decrease as they collect more information.
The newly-discovered asteroid, known as 2003 QQ47, has a mass of around 2,600 million tonnes.
Its orbit calculations are currently based on just 51 observations during a seven-day period.
The giant rock was first observed on August 24 by Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Program (LINEAR), based in Socorro, New Mexico.
The observations were reported to the Minor Planet Centre in Massachusetts, a centre for all new discoveries of asteroids and comets. The asteroid has been given a classification – known as a “Torino hazard rating” of one – defining it as “an event meriting careful monitoring.”
March 21st 2014 you say? That would be Melody’s 36th birthday, nice present huh?
Anyways, I’m lazy so I’ll steal a few stats from The Copydesk…
The 1.2km-wide asteroid, known as 2003 QQ47, has a mass of around 2,600 billion kg, and would deliver around 350,000 megatones of energy if it impacted with our quiet little planet.
The Hiroshima bomb – named ‘Little Boy’ – was dropped by the Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 bomber, at 8.15 in the morning of August 6, 1945.
Its payload was roughly 12-15 kilotones.
When it exploded above the city of Hiroshima, ground temperatures reached about 7,000 degrees, and it wiped out approximately 140,000 people.
If 2003 QQ47 impacted on Paris, almost all of Western Europe would be obliterated within 10 minutes.
The current odds of 2003 QQ47 impacting Earth are 1 in 909,000 – just shy of 1 in a million.
The odds of winning the jackpot on the UK National Lottery are roughly 1 in 13 million.
Of course, the chances of it hitting Earth have been shot down in a media frenzy but thats neither here nor there… One story yesterday made light of the initial chances of 2003 QQ47 hitting Earth.
Sky News said a bookmaker was taking bets on the prospect. A spokesman for William Hill bookmakers likened the 1-in-909,000 odds of doom to the chance that a manned expedition to Mars would arrive and discover the Loch Ness Monster there, or the equally probably scenario that Elvis Presley would reappear and marry Madonna
We now know that the latter two scenarios are far more likely than the world ending in 2014 due to an impact by asteroid 2003 QQ47.
So I guess it’s best not to smoke ’em if you got ’em just yet.
I’m bored/boring. I don’t do much…
I invariably spend most of my day hunched over this computer but I don’t actually do anything. I visit a handful of sites (some of which are listed down the side, some are message boards) and maybe I’ll download a few choice songs but really… Where does my time go?
Mostly it goes on Instant Messengers in which I’ve been noticing a continuing trend…
The No-Shows!
14 of a possible 144 people I know are online (8 of those are either busy or away), now I’d never expect everyone to be online at one time, but I have noticed fewer and fewer people are signing on nowadays. Has the golden age of IM programs finally passed as more and more people embrace the “real” world?
Or do I spend too much time here taking note of the fact no one else is here?
I mean it. Whatever you’re drinking, swallow, and set it down. ~stevenf’s The LJ Times, random LiveJournal excerpts presented in the style of a serious newspaper, has the potential to be dangerous to your nasal passages otherwise.
The OmniWeb feature that inspired it, the ability to view-source, edit it, and see your changes, sounds wonderful, and I don’t know why other browsers haven’t stolen it.
And as fun as it is to make fun of LJ-style writing, I still think it’s a wonderful thing. There is exactly one way to become a good writer: write. Not everyone writing “omg: Kevin’s sooooo hot!!!!” will turn out to be a good writer, but every one of them will end up a better writer than they were when they started…
Actually I think blogging is damaging my writing skills, or at least allowing them to atrophy.
Seriously though, just writing will help you improve your writing a bit, editing your work will help you improve dramatically. It is the editing process where you really learn what does and doesn’t work, and become cognizant of your voice as a tool that you can use with intention.
Blogging discourages editing. I occasionally go back and edit old entries, but no one will ever see those except a few lost souls Google sends my way.
Seems like there should be a way (for a certain type of blogging) to productively re-shape the metaphor; change the blog’s role into a wiki-style recent updates page that points into an actual web of contextualized content.
As Hemingway said “there is no such thing as good writing, there is only good re-writing”…
Is there anyone who is truly 100% satisfied whenever a list that spans “all time” crops up? Of course not, there will always be a difference of opinion but now the Rolling Stone takes a shot at the 100 Greatest Guitarists OF ALL TIME!!!
It’s just sad, man!
OK, I don’t mind Jimi Hendrix being number 1 with a bullet or that Stevie Ray Vaughn is only 7th… But a few glaring errors appear thereafter, just off the top of my head, people I can’t believe didn’t make the list:
Yngwie Malmsteen
Joe Satriani
Steve Vai
Marty Friedman
People I can’t believe DID make the list:
Kurt Cobain
Kirk Hammett
Jack White
Ike Turner
Kim Thayil
Jeezus pleezus faithful readers, they have The Edge of U2 down in 24th, BEHIND the likes of Jack White and Kurt Cobain who have yet to show (or in Kurt’s case, ever will show) me any kind of guitar playing skills that will last the test of time… Who’d I miss? Who’d they miss? Oh, and dear Rolling Stone… If you were hurting for female guitar players so bad, did you have to put Joni Mitchell and Joan Jett above women like Bonnie Raitt and Jennifer Batten?
It’s true, 15 year old’s still edit the Rolling Stone…
I was fiddling around with a few things today and spied a link to technorati.com where you can put in your URL and see what hot linking whores are, well, hot linking you…
So I spies a link to my site I hadn’t seen before and took a gander, and it cheered me right up as he was referring the Big Grammatical Catastrophe entry from a week or so back… Not only that, but GeoURL says he lives just down the road in Cumbernauld, small world.
So now I’m trying out this TrackBack thing to see how it works. What, you were expecting something interesting or enlightening?
I’m back home from my weekend away in London.
Talk about having a good time… I would love to go into great detail about what was going on but it really was a “you had to be there” kind of thing as many jokes would go right over your head. Instead I’ll show you a few choice pictures of the weekend.
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It’s 5am and you’re still awake…
I was feeling sleepy around midnight when I took a shot of Absinthe, god damn you Absinthe… Green death flavour indeed…
Since then I’ve been out in the garden laughing my ass off with Andy and Stu talking about The Simpsons for hours on end under paraffin lamp light. Watching complete and utter shit on TV, like REALLY old episodes of “Roseanne” and “Mork and Mindy” while knocking back a rather delightful cup of tea.
Now I face the prospect of sleeping on an airbed (sans duvet and pillows) in the office with the constant hum of PC’s in the background and a cat that’s surely trying to kill me, not if I kill him first….
But house rule number 17 clearly states “NO ABUSING THE CAT!!!!“… It never said anything about self defence though.
It’s gonna be a short ass sleep, mainly because I’m blocking the main throughway to the kitchen so as soon as anyone wakes up with a case of the munchies then you can bet I’ll be woken up… I’m giving myself 2 to 4 hours tops.
What a weird, strange, slightly surreal day…
Well, day and a half really… It all begins around lunchtime on Thursday.
My “bosses” ask me if I can make it down to London this weekend, I say “Sorry man, got no money, don’t you read my website? I mean, you host it afterall”, they reply “No biggie… We’ll pay for you to come down, hang on while we transfer £200 in to your bank account”, I say “Wha??”…
So I wait and wait but no money arrives, I’m beginning to worry ever so slightly.
6pm rolls around and no money comes, so Erika says “OK, I’ll book your flight, when can you come?”, I say “Anytime really…” but due to some real shitty rules she couldn’t book my flight, “We’ll try tomorrow then”.
Today rolls around and still no money appears much to my chagrin but Phil says “I can book your flight today, get your shit ready and I’ll call you when it’s done”. 11am rolls around and I leave the house en route to Glasgow airport when I receive word that I’m booked on the 12pm flight.
Great, cue some Wacky Racers like action by me to get to the airport on time, which I do and scored an emergency exit seat on the plane (my first time EVER!). I arrive in Gatwick and Phil meets me to take me back to his house in Croydon where I’ve spent the last 8 hours drinking, playing uno, drinking, eating, playing the “Name Game” drinking game, drinking and finally typing this shit out…
Not your average day by any stretch of the imagination but I’ll see how this goes…
I’ll be back home Tuesday night, no doubts to a proverbial shitstorm but meh, you only live once. Maybe I’ll update you during the weekend, maybe I’ll post pictures, we’ll see how it goes.
Whats with people wearing glasses when they dont need them? Why is it cool to wear glasses now?
I’ve been wearing glasses all my life and I’ve never been cool because of it… In fact I was picked on at school constantly for years because of it. Yet a few “celebrities” like Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams and David Beckham start wearing glasses as fashion accessories and it’s all cool.
What about me? I have to wear mine… I wish I didn’t. I’ll never be cool because I wear glasses.
Meanwhile on the other side of town…
Whats wit muthas wearing glasses when they dont need ’em? Why is that shiznit bomb diggity wear glasses now?
I’ve been wearing glasses izzall my life ‘n I’ve never been bomb diggity because of that shiznit… In fact I wuz picked on at school constantly fo’ years because of that shiznit, know what I’m sayin’? Yet a few “celebrities” like Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams ‘n David Beckham start wearing glasses as fashion accessories ‘n that shiznit’s izzall bomb diggity.
What ’bout me? I has wear mine, know what I’m sayin’?.. I wish I didn’t. I’ll never be bomb diggity because I wear glasses n’ shit.
Oh yeah. The Shizzolator
The time has come when I can no longer use my hospital visit as an excuse for not having a job. So I’ve dusted off the old CV, updated it and embellished it… You know, the usual stuff… I’ve also got an appointment with my old employment agency at 9:15am tomorrow so no late nights any more by the looks of it.
Not that I was ever up late of course.
And yes, the eagle eyed readers out there may notice that this is really entry #17, that was due to me screwing around way back at the beginning of this with test posts and what not.
Sorry.
I’m going through that whole “Why am I here?!” blogger’s phase, where you decide ten times a day you’re going to quit, and then think of something really cool to blog about, but you put it off, and then you forget to blog about the really cool thing and finally you forget what the really cool thing was, at which point you post an entry with a sentence that rivals the endurance of Forrest Gump and decide to tell people that you’re not dead, that you haven’t quit, that you’re just slightly apathetic at the moment and a little listless from lack of social stimulation, so you’re contemplating either closing down the blog or maybe just having a Vanilla Coke and seeing if that fixes things.
I’ll keep you posted…
