HMS Noodles

Christmas is on the way and although some stuff has happened since August i’ve been too lazy to write anything, so here’s the highlights.

• Played a gig
• Moved into my new flat
• Went to i35
• Saw Less than Jake
• Started play WoW again (fail)
• Watched Jack Bauer beat up some AK wielding motherfuckers

My I Hate Shit Websites post has had another comment from a complete crazy. She accuses me of abusing my spouse (lol) and my kids (double lol) and then worst of all insults my grammar. Calling me a wife beating child abuser is one thing, but challenging my mastery of the english language is crossing the line. I know she is very serious because the whole post is written in  upper case. Caps lock means business!

I’ve also started dieting again (yawn) but this time i’m doing the Tesco GI diet plan. Apart from the occasional random recipe choice it’s not too bad, although it does have a worrying obsession with cottage cheese.

So my band are getting back together after 4 years for a one off gig in aid of cancer research. Our first practice is tomorrow, so pretty hyped! Come see us live, you wont regret it!

Click the flyer to visit our myspace page and listen to a few songs and other such social networking cabbage.

who cares they hated it!

I did promise him a pair of tits, so…

Sorry to anyone who tried to access my blog over the last couple of days and was hit by a virus warning. I had been too lazy to update my blog software and a vulnrability with the version I was using allowed a non-registered user to edit my posts without my knowledge.

Seems that they injected an iframe that had some infected content in it. I’ve removed all the injected content I found and have updated to the lastest version of wordpress.

Although the latest version seems to have broken all my categories, it does have alot of extra features and the interface is easier to use. Let just hope I remember to update this one.

One of my developers at work is having a hard time cash wise so I developed a plan to reduce monthly outgoings. He currently spends much cash on expensive sandwiches from “The Grub Club”, the food vendor that visits our offices daily. The plan is this: for a month he will switch his expensive lunchion habbits for the traditional packed lunch. To show him the way, I have agreed to make his lunches for a month along with my own, taking £5 a week to cover the raw materials.

Lunchtime one is now complete, today’s lunch cost £1.06 to make and consisted of two ham and pickle sandwiches, a penguin, a packet of crisps and a carton of orange juice. I even splashed my own cash and bough him the retro lunch tin pictured above. A trip to Lidl next week will ensure that each lunch weights in at under a quid.

I recently sorted out a massive amount of old PC Hardware I had to try and make a couple of complete PCs for use at work. The Spec didn’t need anything much, just enough to run normal desktop and web applications on Windows XP.

After gathering everything together, and spending a few quid on second-hand spares I ended up with 8 CPUs, 7 Mainboards and a small mountain of Hardrives, Graphics Cards, Ram and other assorted odds and ends. Alot of this stuff turned out to be faulty, and the K6-2 550Mhz was just too old to use, but we had quite alot of luck with some of it, Ben and I got another two reasonable desktop PCs up and running, an Althon 64 3200+ with 2GB of ram and an Athlon XP 2000+ with 1GB ram.

We also managed to get a 2nd Althon XP 2000+ with 1GB ram was working, although the case was missing a front. Obviously this was unacceptable, so I enabled Blue Peter mode and constructed this custom front. Note the Biro lid on/off switch and the stylish company logo.

Monday the 6th was a pretty funky day. We headed down to the London Studios, near Waterloo Bridge to see the filming of the new series of QI (Series ‘F’). After a long queue, and quite a few worries about not getting in, we finally arrived at the front and were directed through a side door and to the studio.

After everyone was seated they started with a warm-up comedian to get in the mood. To his credit he was pretty good, and after 10 or so minuites they showed us one of the special features from the series C dvd, and then brought on the cast. Tonight’s panel was Sean Lock, Ben Miller, Rob Brydon and of course, Alan Davies.

 The filming went on for about an hour, and I was impressed at the lack of interference from the production team. No constant stop-starts for retakes, no flashing “applause” or “laugh” signs and the whole show just felt like a longer, slightly more adult version of the program that you see on TV. At the end of filming they re-shot a couple of lines and added one little bit for continuity, but this only took 5 or so minutes.

Really enjoyed the whole evening, and it’s definatly something i’lld like to do again.

Being on a diet has had a direct effect on the amount of takeaways I am allowed to eat, reducing my intake level from “whenever I can’t be bothered to cook” to “almost never”. I find myself actually cooking almost every night now, and it seems my repitoir is expaning.

At first it started with Microwave meals. These are the next direct step down in effort from takeaways, as they require mininum effort. After eating rubbery chicken and cardboard rice for a few weeks, you crave a little more and naturally try and recreate the good takeaway taste, but still want to keep effort down to a mininum. Luckly, somone thought of this and invented stir in sauces. Put meat in pan on hob, put sauce in pan, wait, meal ready. It’s not a nice as a good curry from the Gulshan round the corner, but its a damn sight better than the cardboard korma you’ve survived on for the last month.

At this point you’ve got a steady meal on the go. The quality of stir in sauces is reasonably high and you can construct a respectable meal out of one. Infact its so easy you almost forget that you’ve also got to boil rice/potatoes/pasta with it. After a good month or two you realise that by the time you’ve choped up the meat, added sauce and done the rice that you’re almost cooking a full meal, so you might as well actually cook a full meal.

So thats where I am now. I’ve arrived at the end of the 4 part takeaway recovery plan and constructing my own food, without a turkey drummer in sight.

Today I shall highlight such a person that has annoyed me. Her name is Suzanne Shell and she is a disgrace to web masters everywhere. Her site, http://www.profane-justice.org/ is worth looking at if you are thinking of building your own web page, as it does an excellent job of showing you what to avoid. I’ve highlighted the worst parts.

Asthetics - She manages to use about 8 different fonts, 16 different colours and background colours and 10 different text sizes, all on the front page. Perhaps her computing degree didn’t include the words “continunity” and “theme”.

Random Small Ads - God damn I hate this. People that plaster paypal donate, get firefox, get adobe, goto amazon and other crap all over the page. It’s a great was to make your page look like a link farm!

Javascript Abuse - Why god why does this site want access to my clipboard when I visit it. Why god why does it give me a copyright notice when I right click and FOR THE LOVE OF JESUS why would somone put Javascript code in to prevent people from highlighting the text.

This woman is so paranoid of people copying her precious work, that she actually sued Internet Archive (Authors of Way Back Machine) for making a copy of her website. Thats like trying to sue Google for seeing your website in Google cache. It’s like holding a copy of a book you have written up to a mirror, then suing Ikea for making the mirror.

 There is a good article on her http://www.westword.com/2005-02-10/news/beyond-contempt/full thats worth reading. Seems that having a bad website is quite tame considering the other things she gets up too.

She’s been ejected from courtrooms by judges and attacked in a hallway by a convicted child molester she was trying to capture on film. She’s been arrested in Wisconsin for refusing to turn over her video equipment to a police officer and detained at the Colorado Springs Airport because she forgot to remove a .380-caliber pistol from her carry-on items. The mere presence of Shell and her camera put a halt to a Colorado legislative hearing on a family-rights bill a couple of years ago. And she still receives treatment for back pain resulting from being run over by a neighbor’s car in her own driveway; at the time, she was dialing 911 on her cell phone, reporting the driver for making threats to her husband in a dispute involving chickens and dogs.

She thinks she is a very powerful woman, using her superior knowlege and skill to fight the causes of the innocent. It seems most of the time she’s actually doing more harm than good.

Lawyers who’ve gone up against Shell say she can hurt, rather than help, her own clients. “Suzanne’s involvement helps me,” notes Rocco Meconi, a Cañon City attorney who represents the Fremont County Department of Human Services in D&N cases. “I get paid on an hourly basis. When she’s involved, we always have contested hearings, and I make a ton of money. But it doesn’t help the families or the kids.”

Just like to make a little addition at the bottom here. I don’t much care for the actual issues Suzanne Shell is dealing with, it’s happening in a different country, with different laws than mine, and I don’t pretend to know anything about the legal side of child protection and family rights. What I do know from spending a couple of years as a professional web developer is that people judge you by your website. Suzanne if you ever read this, I suggest looking for a propper web development company to construct you a professional looking, modern and functional web site. You’ll be amazed at the difference it will make to your image.

I can say i’m pleasently supprised. Jimmy Eat World put on a damn good live show, and recognising a few of their singles easily made up for a few of the more emo songs they played.

All in all a great night, a tastey Subway, a few beers in “The Ice Wharf” by Camden Lock, and a great band. Shame the beer in the venue was warm! The roundhouse is a great venue, good sound and a great building, just don’t put anything in the cloakroom!