I think i might suffer from PMS, despite the physical impossibility implied.  Every 3.odd weeks I have several days where every single thing pisses me off and it begins with waking up.  The sound of family members cleaning their teeth through the walls pisses me off, a creak in the floor board as i droop out of bed pisses me off...  I could fill an entire bible of things that piss me off during these several days but it just wouldn't make for very good reading.

The other day I bitched at Dave for not tagging me for an anxiety meme, the reason being that it won't be very long until even my passport says anxiety as my occupation.  Now someone called kevin saw my rant and did the honours.

Unfortunately due to the PMS i'm really not in the mood to do it, i'd be much better at 5 things that make you anxious which would go something like this...

• Bitching about not being tagged for a meme and then feeling heavily pressured to give GOOD answers to it.
• Having to answer the fucking phone (does a martha wainwright impression).
• Being left to talk to people i really don't know very well.
• Feeling pressured into completing my weekly goals.
• Remembering that I have to live this stupid life.

Ah well, here goes, i suppose i have to do this thing now and apologies in advance. I've put them in order of severity, the first being something that only works with mild anxiety...

1. Jump around to loud music.
2. Code something (depends on the clarity of mind and is very touch and go).
3. Watch a beloved comedy, such as day today, I'm alan partridge, family guy etc. Strangely south park doesn't work.
4. Leave the house for a 5+ mile walk to nowhere, only turning back when the vale dissolves.
5. Lie in bed and try to doze off to softly softly chopin type piano.

A testament to diversity is Neil who for his answers included both Talking to parents and Reading blogs, 2 things i would rate quite highly as major stress inducers, especially when bloglines says i have over 700 entries unread which invariably happens after several lazy days.

I'm supposed to tag 5 other people but that's way too much pressure

This has been happening an awful lot lately on bloglines, does anyone know what causes it?  It's damn annoying because obviously clicking on a folder marks them all as read, and using the "display last 24 hours" on all of a folder simply causes the same thing to happen so i have to go through each feed individually.

It's Interpol on Monday and I had completely forgotten, don't chya love it when that happens, the tickets arrived today and I held them as if i'd won the lottery, jumping up and down. haha.  I've seriously waited years to see this band.  It's at the octagon (Shef Uni's venue), haven't been there in years, it has a school assembly hall type feel and the acoustics are always really great.  Its gonna be soooo goooooood!

Forgot to mention that tuesday i went past sheffields Marriot hotel, which is in a pretty leafy suberb and because of the G8 peeps staying there is all bordered up and theres army green barracades and tons of police patrolling, it was actually quite scary, i thought i was in northern ireland for moment. haha.  There was nothing in the way of a demonstration but they are here for a few days and the main demos are taking place in the city centre, the majority of which is being blocked off to traffic and even people for the 2 days that they are actually in talks. Rather disgraceful, the only place that they are letting people demonstrate is the other side of town, the G8 reps won't even know they are there.  There was however a house opposite the entrance to the hotel decorated in makepovertyhistory stuff, not very well done i might add, looks more like someone has T.P'd their house.

Click image for more juicy frollicks

In the early 90's as silly little scamps a friend and i wrote an adventure game creator/editor for the amiga, nothing too fancy, just text adventures with the odd graphics and sounds.  It was genius because we came up with a way of making it extremely easy to do, just by clicking here and there, oh and it was called Seka, haha.  Anyway, for some reason this popped into my head today, and then immediately afterwards so for some reason did GPS.  And then i put the two things together and what a great idea!  Instead of using fictional locations for your adventure game, you could use real ones.  When you go on your country walks for a bit of exercise, see if someone has uploaded a game for where you are and make entertainment out of your walk.

Would anyone like to be a venture capitalist for my Seka GPS Pro hand-held project?  If my quick mock-up isn't enough to wet your appetite then hell, what is!?

Yeah

How it works is this... you are given ten questions, and then have to enter your answer into Google Images to see what comes up for each one. You can either take the first hit, pick a favorite, or however you want to do it so that your answer ends up being a picture...

1. The place you grew up.
2. The place you live now.
3. Your name.
4. Your grandmother's name.
5. Your favorite food.
6. Your favorite drink.
7. Your favorite song.
8. Your favorite smell.
9. Your favorite shoes.
10. Your favorite number.

Speaking of sheffield, we're the 3rd (or 4th depending on whether or not we beat manchester) to get an apple store in the UK, which is kinda cool but i can't help but wonder if the execs have actually been here and know what a dump it is.

OMG, the six feet under season opener was so depressing! It killed me, it really did.  Still, its so great to have it back and already i can smell many strong storylines are on their way. It's the final season so it better be potent stuff and if it's anything like last year you know it will be all i talk about on here until the finale..  When this season is finished i am so gonna be struggling for great shows.

• Oooph i'm all sweaty.
• I've been forgetting (again) to keep a journal thingy for counselling.  Damnit to hell and back again.  But i bet a thousand dollars i still don't add to it after writing this.
• I think i've just discovered to my horror that mysql 3.x does inner joins extreeemely slooowwwwly.
• I keep sneezing.
• Someone is ignoring me.
• For some reason on x-plane 8 london-Heathrow appears to be in the middle of the ocean.
• The new royksopp LP is hugely disappointing.  My favourite tracks on their début were the blips-and-bleeps ones.  But all the tracks on the new LP are pretty much smooooth lounge music like blue states, zero 7 and all that nonsense. There's one track i adore called "What Else Is There" involving some female vocalist who has a beautiful fragile child like voice.  Makes yer hairs stand up. I reckon Only This Moment will be the first single, you can tell 'cos its so over-produced that its ended up a blurred nothingness.
• I've a fair few tracks to get through and judge before i poke a big finger towards it, but the best LP's of 2005 half way mark is almost ready.  You can see it as it is so far here, this year it's being compiled automatically by my super duper code.
• And thats all the weather.

Oh my word, i wanted to have a play with inkscape so i started designing some icons.  Haha, they were supposed to look cute but they've turned out, yucky. Just done the usual browsery icons so far.  I'm sure i'll be bored enough soon to complete the set. Gawd. You'll have to be a clicky-wicky to see them in their full horrifying glory.

Why do i always end up somehow resenting people who are friends / were friends?  I must remember to get to the bottom of it i certainly think it would be an avenue worth pursuing.  It's only natural to think that your own feelings and behaviours are normal and its difficult to rethink them.  Shit.  And i'm fucking doing it again.  I'm so worried that now i've ended up making myself perspire and its gross. yuck.

What do people fucking expect of me?

Chris Martin: "We're like an eager dog just yapping around their heels, and they're trying to kick us away," he jokes. "It's like unrequited love. I'm in love with a lot of things. Some of those things love me back. And some of them don't -- and one of them is Radiohead."

www.ateaseweb.com/...

Write something that is at least as good as Radiohead's worst and maybe they'll talk. Sheesh.  OK, maybe i'm mean to them, there are bands even blander than coldplay but god, i just know that as soon as x+y is released it will be all we ever hear about for a least a month. I'll scream, I really will.

Woah, the scariest thing about this is the colour scheme.  Ouch.

Now I can do it too with Kandoo!

But not with ubuntu. Haha, hell am i talking about?  Oh yeah, i thought i'd see how smoothly ubuntu imports from a camera/mass storage type doo dar.  Started off well, i connected the camera via USB, at first it appeared as though nothing was going to happen, there weren't any visual cues and there wasn't the choking HD activity you tend to get when windows is looking for device drivers.  But after around 10 or so seconds a dialog popped up asking if i would like to import the photo's.  Neat, that's a good sign.  I click Import and it automatically loaded some app i haven't seen before called gThumb.  Looked a bit like a photo management app but with very few features.  One thing i wasn't very impressed with was that even though there were only about 15 photo's on the camera it took about a minute to gather thumbnails and whilst it was doing this the app was not frozen but extremely unresponsive, worryingly so.  After it had finished i was pretty much left to guess at what I was supposed to do next, it hadn't actually imported them at that point, it was just showing me by thumbnails what was on the camera.  So i selected all the photo's, went to File->Import and a hopeless thing happened, a dialog popped up in which to select a folder destination, but also an error dialog cropped up telling me that it did not recognise the camera... So Bloody What??? Thats no reason not to allow me to copy the files, which it didn't BTW.  It has obviously got access to the photo's otherwise it couldn't have made the thumbnails. Stupid Stupid Stupid Stupid.  So i tried a different thing, I checked that you could drag the photo's, you could but i hadn't opened a folder window yet so i let go on top of the gThumb app thinking that as seen as the source and destination was the same that it wouldn't do anything.  But oh god, it did, it kept popping up a dialog asking if i wanted to overwrite the existing photo WTF?!?!?!?  A couple of these (i had all photos selected) and it got so confused that it crashed.  Nice.

So i invoked the app to appear again by turning the camera off and on and tried again.  Opened a folder window and dragged the photos from gThumb to the nautilus window,  it started ok, copying the files as normal but it stalled on the 11th photo. I couldn't do anything and had to kill the app again.  Sigh.

I give up.  These kinds of problems just aren't cricket.

Watching the Liverpool victory parade at the moment, such lovely scene's i wish i was there.  Would have been an absolute impossibility to have gotten into the city today though.  I've been to Anfield a few times and its magical seeing it on TV right now with what looks like millions around it,  and its a cramped victorian terrace type area so it must feel like such a huge street party.

Ever wondered what the scarf is that i'm wearing on the cover page of my website?  You know, the pic HERE.

Well it's this...

And because of yesterday it is now horribly out of date.  Whatever shall I do?  Damn you Gerrard and Dudek!

I don't think this is much of a solution...

Last nights excitement was too much to bare.
Annnnyway.

Played around in ubuntu some more yesterday and discovered a wonderful app i hadn't noticed before called Inkscape.  Vector based drawing apps can be great fun but most have such stupid boneheaded interfaces which get in the way and cause a hell of a lot of frustration (i'm talking to you illustrator). Its also one of the last software categories to have a decent opensource alternative, i think only music production is left. After playing around with Inkscape i'm really impressed, it may be missing a lot of advanced features but it gets all the basics so right.  The interface is clean and obvious, for instance all the pathfinding and boolean operation stuff is in the Path pull down, are clearly labelled, quick to do and have symbols. You don't have to mess around with a million fold-up floating window thingies.  Its also extremely fast, did i mention that?  Oh and something useful is that it has a built in xml crawler.  The file format the app uses (a modified verison of SVG) is xml based, and you can make tiny adjustments in the apps xml editor and the app will immediately reflect the change.  This allows them you give you precise control over positions and sizes etc without them having to make specific tools for the job.

Here's a screenshot from the app in ubuntu, with clearlooks and dropshadows every app looks delicious somehow.  The screenshots on the Inkscape site don't look this good.  And yeah, about the think i made, i was just trying the app out OK?  I think i've been visiting blogography too much.

I discovered that i didn't have the gnome interface extension to openoffice 2 beta installed.  It now looks like the original with gnome, only with them msoffice rip off toolbar thingies.

I'm seriously considering repartitioning my drive to give linux the lions share, and windows just enough for games and music production (the only 2 things i can't do in linux).

Oh and in other news, one of the wright stuff debates this morning was should crazy frog and the makers be murdered for causing so much misery, or something to that effect.  I'm kinda changing my mind about it all now because come next Sunday crazy frog will direct more misery chris martin's way than anyone else, and anything that can wripe that smug grin of chris martin's pusher of intense blandness face is alright in my book.

OH MY FUCKING GOD!!!

I'm currently playing through Super Mario World on an emulator.  Should have done this years ago, it isn't just in my Top 5 best games ever created, its in my Top 5 best THINGS ever created.  It really is a work of beauty.  Anyway, the point of this is I'm Gonna be a Record Breaker!

Thats a joke BTW, and not everyone will get it.

Sometimes it can be frustrating living in the UK, and by that i mean somewhere that isn't the US.  For instance, whilst Americans enjoyed legal music downloads it was over a year because we had even a taste of it over here.  When new services launched and i was to visit the site and try to sign up I would be told that the service is only open to US residents and quite often they would leave this crucial point right at the end of the subscription process.  Nice of them eh?  Of course that is only an example and there would be a lot more.  But all of that pails into insignificance when compared to the experiences of someone who is deemed an enemy of the free world.

This Fucking Border Linesome, an entry by some Iranian is fascinating.  Just check out the error given by the Java installer, the wording is hilarious and makes me think of pirates for some reason.  Thats pirates with parrots, not pirates with CD-R's.

Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security Notification

Real-time Scan
Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security has detected a virus, spyware application, or other Internet threat, and performed the action specified.

Infected file: C:\WINDOWS\wt\wtupdates\webd\4.1.1\files\wtvh.dll
Virus name: SPYW_WTANGENT.A
User name: Mark Gilbert
Scan action result: Denied Access.
Note: If Search for and clean Trojans is enabled and is executed after scanning, you can click Next to view final scan result information.

Any Ideas?

Google have some interesting things going down in their lab at the moment.  A newey is personalising the main page, you can have bbc news headlines underneath the search box.  It manages to be both neat and a load of crap at the same time.

But looking through the other stuff google have in their lab section i discovered another feature that is news to me.  My Search History.  Now this is pretty cool, just use your gmail login and it remembers your searches organised into days.  This could turn out to be really great, sometimes i'll find a useful site, but be at a different comp or booted into a different OS and i can't quite get the search that got me there quite the same.  Log in and the search will be there regardless of which comp you're using.  Makes me wonder how long it will be until google offer a .mac type service to sync your bookmarks and stuff.  Now that would be cool!

Also, the lab stuff reminded me of Google Suggest.  I'd completely forgotten about this beauty. It populates a drop down with the most popular searches that start with what you are typing.  And updates as you type iTunes style.  Problem is, i aways use the search box in firefox rather than the google page.  hmm, i wonder if anyones writen an extension to get this functionality into firefox... They have!!  Only it doesn't work so well :-(

I suppose it was a long shot.  As you can see the results drop down appears in the wrong place (for me anyone).  Also, you can't hit the down arrow to scroll the results, you have to grab the mouse and click on it.. Too much hassle.