Finally! Hardware Update!

its been a long, long struggle now peeps. there have been hard times and harder times. many a man had to be left behind in the wilderness for the success of the group, but it was oh so worthwhile. finally i can merge the contents of four separate hard drives into a single unified disk, oh dear readers it brings a tear to my eye…

in other news, i also got a new hybrid TV tuner which i’m regretting as i can’t pick up any composite signal but get lovely reception on the terestrial and dvb side of things. i was hoping to merge together two components but that just doesn’t look like its going to happen anymore. the user interface of the program is absolutely terrible. there are separate individual programs for each input method, so to switch from dvb to radio the original app calls the radio one which kills the video. all in all, i get stuttery playback in both while its working for a minute or so afterwards as well.
to top it all off, the remote control doesn’t work either.

Parcels and the Like

as much as i dislike the whole over commercialism of christmas i suppose that i should buy some presents for a few peeps. today the first arrived, huzzah. amazon didn’t steal my monies afterall, ‘cos y’know amazon… right?
a few more things due either tonight or tomorrow and a couple more orders and i’ll be done for a year. phew.

Moosics on the Wubz

whenever i download music online i usually expect it to be in some recognisable file format and at least moderately well tagged, i just don’t see why people have such trouble typing in brief details about songs so that when you’re sorting through folders of thousands of files you at least stand some chance of finding what you want. a universal and standard method of tagging files should be implemented, i hate going through files fixing the casing or just blatant misinformation that is now common place. so here be a fairly crude list of things about the all powerful digital music revolution that annoy me:

file formats, namely the m4a file format. i see absolutely no reason for its being. why would anybody possibly want to use a file format that doesn’t natively work with windows (itunes is taking over peeps, join the revolution) when windows is the most popular operating system. wma also scores badly for me for similar reasons, both are DRM-able which we’re all trying so hard to stop.
incorrect casing, this is another thing i just can’t seem to understand. i mean i type pretty much everything that i do casually in lower case but for my music, its all strictly capitalised in the right places. there shouldn’t be any circumstances where you type the ID3 information in either totally upper or lower case.
and finally, as i’m getting fairly tired… conflicting information. this is probably the biggest annoyance, when you get conflicting information on albums. if you can’t decide the year or certain contributors to an album then look it up. jesus why is it so difficult? there are a smattering of tools available purely for this purpose. with all said and done digitalised music is a truly great thing, but it does have its downsides.

Some Hacks be Afoot

as part of my update of web technologies i’ve been learning php and to be honest coming a long way with it. i’m now in the process of making a wordpress theme for an offline installation i’m in the process of maintaining.

sofar most of the goings on have been simple edits to themes or to wordpress itself, examples include small removals of ads build into templates, replacing all the godawful “Howdy’s” everywhere with the more formal Hello, fixing the ‘non expanded source’ and just generally cleaning up the code. i’ll give a full list of modifications and make a script if i’m feeling adventurous.

oh well, here goes for my first post written offline. bye folks.

Mighty Boosh is Back!

so i may be about a week late, then again… who cares? shadap-a your face.
series three started on the 16th of november with super low quality pre-air versions available on the bbc site in the super sexy real format. if these 50MB of pixelated crap were even remotely watchable then i would jump at them but as i ruined series two like that i’m staying well away.
so on to the show, i originally had some worries about how the series would turn out with mainstream acceptance and subsequent fame since series two ended, needless to say it hasn’t lost any of the ’stuff’ that made it good originally with lots of laughs as per expected and some cameos from some characters from the previous two series . if the rest of the series caries on as the first episode did this will be another DVD i’ll be adding to my collection.

A New Musical Milestone

so, i bring news of completing a new milestone for my music library. a week or so (i love how accurate my reports are becoming) ago with the new addition of the anthrax discography i finally beat the 15,000 song mark. you can see a complete playlist here (beware as its about 700kb).

so how useful and practical is it to store so much music when i have a slim chance of listening to it all anyway?
essentially none. i just like to turn on my computer and listen to the whole lot on random. there’s no telling when you’ll get some of my favourite songs in a row or an immense shift in genres. if you don’t like a song just skip past it and its smooth sailing once again. its hard to convey how it feels.

as for future plans, i don’t actually have that many. i’ll be going to a friends house to ’share steals’ which may inspire me further. as for an immediate future i would like to complete my flaming lips discography (1-5 btw) and possibly venture more into prog rock or stoner rock as i like the genres more as each day passes.

Web Stoof

as part of my regaining the touch of the interwebz codings as you do, i’ve been building a few sites and seeing if i can get them valid whilst having indented PHP nailed. so enter example one, this was the first site i’d designing from scratch in a while. it features some shiny show hide menu JS and a few scraps of PHP for includes and statistics. all in all not my favourite but not necessarily a bad site.
so now enter example two, now this is my favourite of the two, it has a nice clean design, matching colours, general evolutionary changes to code structure and styling and most importantly a minimum of 4 validation errors due to my crap css skills. features include variable php headers, a file repository, changelog, statistics and most importantly a nice layout. as for how it will look with numerous blog additions who knows.

so, what’s the point of all this?
well i play to show off to the boss at work with a site as he hinted at getting one made when i was first being interviewed. i’ll let you know how it goes peeps.

Yay Holiday!

as some of you will know i’ve recently been on holiday to italy, i stayed in a town called viareggio which was close to the sea.
as for the holiday itself, it was a mixed affair. it rained on no less than 4 out of 7 days and when its raining you can’t really do all that much except wonder around the shops and stop at every other bar you see which is always nice.
on the days when it wasn’t raining we went around to see the sights like the massive stereotypical tourists we all are. we went to sienna and two similar places that i don’t remember the names of. i took some pretty good pictures and had a fairly nice time.
as for sharing pictures, you bet your ass i won’t be. it was enough of a big deal for me to finally let peeps know what i looked like lol.

anyway, a meal out every night and a closed pool could summarise it all so, that’s where i’ll leave you all.

Serenity?

well as followers of the site may know, there hasn’t been many updates until now or visable progress on all project fronts. there are a number of reasons behind this.. the first being lack of enthusiasm on my behalf. usually when i start working on a project like serenity i have a clear cut list of jobs that i’ll want doing by the days end however recently i haven’t been able to list jobs that need doing or the ones that i list are too difficult, especially with the quality of the iso overall degrading (possible restart again, great). secondly my host stevey, who is actually tom… i think went down for some time (my massive usage being the apparent cause) i now need to start uploading everything again. it seems to me as though a complete restart is in order. then i can start by integrating all the updates, ie7, wmp11, mc and mc extras and remove everything instead of using batch to do it later. i can also rebuild office 2003 to integrate SP3 and a custom icon suite and theme.

as for progress, i’ve been building an icon collection which should be remeniscant of vista but still retain that longhorn magic that i’m hoping to keep.

z0mg, Christmas Stoof Already!

as i wander around town and what do i see but christmas crap! already! hell it isn’t even halloween yet and theres already advent calendars and mince pies everywhere, i have been seeing these for over a month now. just when is it too early… august maybe?
anyway… 68 days to christmas. whoop-dee-bloody-do. more rush and panic as we all buy the same crap that we don’t need and send each other pointless cards and celebrate another ‘religious’ holiday.

damn this is worse than easter. so, does this make me sound bitter..? good.