While I wasn’t a massive fan of school, back then our summers were summer and September always seemed to bring an almost instant change to the weather. The days would seem to be instantly shorter and the rain would come, days would get cooler, not necessarily cold, but certainly cooler.

These days we don’t get the same summers but we still see an instant change, the temperature is dropping, the days are rapidly getting shorter and Christmas rapidly approaches.

I love this time of year, I love the cold and winter feeling. I love having to snuggle under big coats, woolly hats and over-sized gloves to keep warm. I love the dark nights getting earlier and earlier. It’s not so much the cold that I like, it’s the feeling it brings with it. In winter, everything seems so snug and loving, people huddle together to keep warm, we light huge open fronted log (gas) fires and sit in front of the TV almost communal-like.

I love the run up to Christmas, how towns look so lovely with a street-light tinge and dark night back-drop, people hurrying round trying to keep warm, their breathe visible in the cold night air, the comforting feeling this time of year brings with it. I love all the old Christmas songs, especially Andy Williams. I love how it gets busier and busier the closer we get to Christmas, people fight to walk in a straight line down the high street as the crowds grow daily, the long string of lights you see in your mirror as you drive down the road, everyone trying to get home after a late night shopping spree for those last minute Christmas items.

I love how this time of year brings people together and no one even notices just how so. They assume that we come together at Christmas parties and on Christmas day, most people exchanging gifts just for the gifts, not knowing what Christmas is actually about. I fully admit I know nothing about the religious side to Christmas, mainly because I couldn’t care less, I’m atheist and happy in my belief. This time of year isn’t about bonfire night, Halloween and Christmas, it’s about the cold, wrapping up warm and feeling snug in our winter outfits, while most people don’t like the cold, it brings us together. That giant, warm coat? Makes you feel cosy right? That’s what this time of year is about. Being cold, feeling snug, hugging the ones you love.

I actually hate Christmas and generally don’t celebrate it, mainly because I’m bitter and spend every year alone, not just in the single sense, but actually on my own. I can see why this time of year gets difficult for some people, but it’s not Christmas that makes Christmas time special, the cold does.

Next time you go out in the cold, no matter how miserable you are that you can’t drive to work as quickly as usual, or how you are sick of the snow, spare a thought and look around. How many more people do you speak to because it’s cold? How many more people get close and cuddle because it’s cold? How lovely do people look under their umpteen layers of clothing, walking down the street? How many more people do you huddle round the kettle with for a communal cup of coffee to warm up?

This time of year is special, not for the celebrations but for the human nature of congregating together to keep warm, be it a pub, work, a shop, we all feel instantly better when we get out of the cold. I love this time of year. I love the cold.

I’m not interested in men in the slightest. I do however, enjoy a good knees up (and that’s not a euphemism) so Saturday (28th) I found myself heading to Manchester dressed as a character from the film “An Officer And A Gentleman” intent on partying the whole day. The only reason I agreed to go was; I figured party + lots of people + lots of booze = good times.

Saturday morning I woke nice and early, way before my alarm, so arose to get my morning fix of porridge and coffee and waste some time before heading over to the fancy dress shop. I hadn’t immediately thought that fancy dress was a valid idea until the others said they were going in fancy dress, while I was aware what the gay scene was like on parade weekend with drag queens et al, it was my assumption that only the floats and followers dressed up. Not wanting to look the odd-bod I said I’d go dressed up too.

Had my recent weight-loss programme worked a little better, I was looking at something that flaunted ones stomach, alas, I don’t quite have that flauntable stomach just yet so decided against anything that showed unnecessary excess flesh, excess being the primary word here. The fancy dress shop lady opened early specifically for us and so we went in and discussed the options. She did suggest some rather daring costumes, to which my bottle went from “yea, I’ll wear anything, the gayer the better” to “I don’t have the balls to wear that” and settled for the aforementioned costume which I thought was a bit subtle really, although pulled off quite well being my height.

The car journey to Manchester raised some funny looks from others when they looked round to see a car containing 2 tarts, an officer, a sailor and a rather camp looking police officer although it was not as embarrassing as when it came to actually walking round Manchester outer-centre heading into the parade area when it became all too apparent that absolutely NO ONE else thought that fancy dress was a good idea. I really do mean no one. We walked up to the queue for the tickets (wrist bands) and proceeded to join the back only to be gaupped at by the other two hundred or so people waiting patiently in line. Maybe it was the fact that my trousers were actually see-through (good job I put white boxers on that day!).

After waiting for 30 minutes or so and enduring a few short but excessive downpours we were finally heading to the parade to watch the floats. At first I thought to myself “well, this is interesting” with a sarcastic tone to my inner voice. I guess I’d imagined more of a Brazilian-style parade (more extravagant, bigger, louder, etc) but instead got a few poorly designed floats (some still bearing the “Salford” van hire logo), some great dancers, some great looking guys in drag and equally great girls just looking hot, quite frankly, along with some equally terrible polar opposites. It wasn’t until a group of marchers came down the line that I realised the meaning of the entire parade. It wasn’t about who could look good, or dance the best, or pass off for most extreme transformation from their daily self or even the best float most skillfully crafted, it is about being able to be yourself, regardless of your sexual inclination, celebrating acceptance and diversity, fundraising for the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community and raising awareness to ‘members’ and non-members alike.

At first I felt a little strange, not because homosexuality offends me but because I felt it was widely assumed that everyone at the parade was gay, and as I was there, this also included me. Not that this was a problem, it just felt, different. Then it started. Two women randomly pulled me aside, playfully groping my every appendage, telling me how good they thought I looked towering over them as a 6’2″ Naval Officer.

Moments later I received a tap on the shoulder, 2 lads wanted a picture with me, which I gracefully accepted. Then another tap, 2 ladies wanted a photo with me as their male friend took the photo. Minutes later, the male friend returned and he wanted a picture with me. I, being the only straight male of our group, was loving the attention and made the 2 gay members jealous! I began to relax and from there on in it became a game to see just how many people I could attract.

The parade finished and we headed into the “Village” to find a pub, there were thousands of people all over the streets and the pubs were insanely busy, waiting 20 minutes to get served became a common factor that would last the entire day. Once the beer became a factor in our day, it pretty much featured heavily for the next 8 or 9 hours, drifting from pub to pub just to say we’ve been in them. In the second pub we visited, I was confronted by a, well, dirty old man, quite frankly, who decided that I looked “fucking gorgeous” (his words) and attempted to _passionately_ kiss me, at which point I made emergency diversion tactics my utmost priority and decided that although side-stepping out of the way was my best option, it could have been offensive and played the old “turn the head” card instead. I did expect people to cheek-kiss but hadn’t even thought of the possibility that people were there for “more”.

After being told I wasn’t gay by another member of our crew, he took offence and walked off, only to follow me round from a distance for a short while until being told in no uncertain terms that continuing to do so may result in unnecessary force. He was harmless enough, I think that some people had been on the beer longer than we had so we carried on to another pub and forgot about it.

Throughout the next unfathomable number of hours I drew in more photo shoots, gropes, bum pinches, kisses (on the cheek only) and suggestive looks and loved every single one of them! It was great having so much attention, regardless of the fact none of them were in the slightest bit attractive to me, nor would they become after several more Guinness but it was fun ‘going with the flow’ and accepting that if you dress up at gay pride, you WILL attract attention.

We didn’t really see many people in fancy dress, maybe 100 out of the thousands of people there, which meant we got lots and lots of people asking for photographs. Once one person saw that we were OK allowing people to take photos, more and more people came over to ask for photos, it was like we were part of the entertainment more than just every day folks enjoying a beer.

The nicest part of the whole day was that everyone was so at ease, they could truly be theirselves, holding their partners, dressing up if they so desired, just enjoying the fact that there was no trouble, no fear of being outcasts. It was nice to see so many beautiful women too, shame I wasn’t their type

I went for a beer and came back with new friends and new understanding.

At this point, most of them decided to go about explaining the layout of Wave and which box does what, none of them, however, actually sold Wave.

For a few weeks I’d pondered whether to bother asking Google for a beta invite or not and many a time filled in the required form, but never got round to submitting the request, mainly because I don’t know anyone else that has Wave access and thought it was pretty useless without knowing someone to collaborate with. How wrong.

Today I randomly played around with Twitter, searching for XMPP mentions and decided to give a quick search to Wave to see what people thought of it, luckily enough I stumbled upon (no, not StumbleUpon!) a lady who had just tweeted that she had some invites available and I sent her a quick message to see if she would be so kind to invite me so I could finally put my mind to rest (I’m like a kid at Christmas when it comes to new geek toys), luckily enough she did (I won’t mention your name incase you get invite-request bombed, but thanks again!) and 10 minutes later I logged into Wave for the first time.

At this point I was quite disappointed, I’ve seen screenshots before so knew what Wave looked like but mine was so empty! The only contact I had was the kind lady who invited me in the first place (who I don’t actually know) and she was no longer online so effectively, I had absolutely no one to test this thing with. I did what geeks do best, googled for articles on Wave to see how to use it more efficiently, that is when my disappointment turned into amazement.

With a simple search for “with:public” in the Wave search field, I was a-flood with public waves I could intrude on, who needs friends on contact lists when you just opened up a can of whoop-ass.

I gave up looking at public waves around the 471 mark, at which point I’d found a few I was interested in to start off my Wave career. I chose a sudoku wave, a “We’re from the UK” wave and decided to hop onto a few RPG (role playing game) waves.

The whole picture

Wave is, first and foremost, a collaboration tool, a tool for like minded people to get together and discuss, plot and plan on any subject they so desire. As with many ‘tools’, they can be used in ways they weren’t necessarily built for, but work non the less, and this is where the whole public wave thing comes in.

Waves don’t have a limit per se but can quite easily get out of hand, if you try viewing a wave that has 300 or 400 messages on it, you will soon get lost and bogged down by your browser trying to compute it all, this is where it struggles as a “public” not-what-wave-was-built-for-but-still-works application. At this time, public waves can be edited by anyone without rules, so in theory, someone can really piss on your parade by deleting everything or writing a bucket load of faff, alas, Google is working on this and while it is possible to “play back” who has done what, once waves get this big, the playback feature will just die a horrible death.

I see a lot of people talk about Wave as a replacement to IM and email. While Wave does have similar features, for example, I had written something earlier and actually saw the person replying to me typing, letter for letter, typo for typo, I don’t think it is meant to replace anything at all, I think its main feature is as previously mentioned, to make it easier for teams to work on projects or ideas as a closed entity, behind the scenes tool.

As a closed collaboration tool, Wave is exceedingly good, even in beta form. Everyone can edit everything (closed waves will only have people you invite as members) and I can see this being a very useful, much required tool for development teams of all kinds.

The thing that makes Wave special, in my eyes, is not only can people of a wave access everything (unless options change later) and there is a clear timeline of who has done what, there are also gadgets and robots! I won’t go into massive detail here but the basic difference between gadgets and bots are gadgets are ‘client interactive’ (such as maps, etc) and bots are ‘server side’ (they work on waves without your interaction).

Gadgets can be simple things like highlighting tools or, as mentioned, maps plugins. Bots work “behind the scenes” and can do any number of tasks such as turn @word into a link to twitters’ @username automatically or send you an IM when a wave has been updated or edited. People have no “say” in what robots do, once a robot is added to a wave, it does what it does best (depending on which bot you invite, depends on what actions it takes).

Google are obviously, first and foremost, search giants, and it is quite obvious when it comes to Wave, there are atleast 20 different search terms to get the best out of Wave, whether this will decrease or increase once Wave is finally received is yet to be seen.

The current truth

Wave is still in beta and by my reckoning still has a good 3 months hard coding before it is released properly, the main problem with it at this moment in time is the sheer lag everyone experiences. It does feel a bit like I’m trying to interweb on a 56k modem all over again, one minute everything is running smoothly, the next everything is frozen while it buffers or updates or whatever it is doing.

If you are lucky enough to get an invite and use firefox, I suggest leaving firefox to your normal browsing and download Chrome just to run Wave. For whatever reason, firefox seriously struggles with running Wave after the first few minutes while Chrome seems to be able to handle it better.

As with most beta software, there are lots of things that need ironing out currently, such as random “crashes” (you’ll be asked to refresh, not restart your browser), the fact that there are no “settings” yet and there needs to be a few more thousand servers added to make things quicker but all in all, I’m impressed.

Verdict

As a project/team collab. tool, Wave will work wonders, it already does and it’s not finished. I can’t wait to see more bots and more gadgets and the super smooth response times/useability that we have come to demand and respect from Google.

As a public chat tool, it won’t replace IM or forums or email but it will compliment them nicely, people are already coming up with unique and cool ways of using Wave (such as the Wave Adventure RPG (Role Playing Game)) that already has players.

I use StumbleUpon like it’s going out of business, I’ve now just added Google Wave to that list.

Any decent fella, boyfriend of victim or not, would stand up for a lady and chow down some clown who thinks he’s “cool” by being a prick and ruining someone elses night, that’s, no doubt, a given. What is strange is how someone, or some people, think it is then OK to take one step further and beat a man to death for sticking up for his lady friend. Even these low-lives that clearly have less than half a brain cell can see the utter stupidity in such an act, so why do it?

Not only have you just ruined the girlfriends life (possibly?), the family and friends’ lives of the victim but you’ve also just ruined YOUR life and those of your family. Who is gonna employ a murderer? Who is gonna be a brother, sister, aunt, uncle, mum or dad to a murderer? No one, clearly, so when you get your sad little life out of jail, lets hope you walk under a bus, or something equally fun, ‘cos no one is gonna want to know ya.

Aside from the murderers and other random pricks who start fights for no reason other than to make a “point”, there’s the other low lives who steal or commit other mindless criminal acts. Why? Why do you do it? So you can’t afford nice things, go get a job you scrote!

I utterly believe that any person who commits a prisonable offence, or intends to commit such an offence, should lose ALL human rights there and then. How do we stop criminals when they have nicer homes IN PRISON than most people can afford out of prison? I can’t afford an Xbox 360 or PS3 yet prisons have them. Lock the scum in cells with no windows, no beds, rooms too small to stand up in, feed them gruel, let them out an hour a day. Will they commit an offence again? I doubt it.

Then comes the law, the good old fashioned British rules and regulations that are meant to set us head and shoulders above other countries, put us at the forefront of civilisation. Only in Britain can a suspect become a victim and win MORE RIGHTS than the intended victim? How can someone who commits a crime (for example, breaks into my home) then gain more rights than me should I decide that I’m brave enough to defend my own home and end up the one being PROTECTED by the law and me the one seeing a prison cell for ABH.

This is where my anti-human rights law comes in, should a criminal invade my property, they should lose all human rights thus giving me the power to knock seven barrels of shit out of them in order to protect my property. The anti-jeopardy human right law should then kick in stopping me from being a criminal (and in turn, losing MY rights) as I’m protecting my property, my god given right.

How can a criminal turn round and say “oh no, this nasty man protecting his property hurt me, I want him done for ABH”, if you weren’t commiting a crime in the first place, you wouldn’t have gotten your arse whooped!

British law is an utter crock of shit to the point it is actually becoming shameful to be classed as British. Should anyone try to harm anyone I know, I will gladly use all force possible to stop them, including every second of Martial Arts training I’ve ever endured and will gladly face the consequences, after all, laws are there to be broken, right?

Anyway, no doubt there are a few bugs in the new design and I may need to redraw something, yet again, but so far, I’m quite pleased with it, its a new design route I’ve never explored before, using a landing page that is still technically a page with content, just different to the other pages (so as to not put people off, the kind that skip sites when they get a “splash” page, as they have no content other than “enter here” usually).

Hope you enjoy!

I’ve been online since year 9 of high school which would have made me about 13. Back then I think 28.8k modems were all the rage and meant you were ‘super fast’ compared to the 14.4k versions. I remember my first time online with MSN, I had spent a minute connecting to find that there was absolutely no difference online to offline, atleast, that was my first thought.  Then I discovered Microsoft Comic Chat and it changed my world. I spent hours on MSNs IRCX chat servers talking to people from across the pond although I was a kid, I had no sense of maturity in “real life”, let alone online, and swiftly became banned from MSN for being a general pillock.  Who knew a SysOp could actually ban you from a chatroom!

Well, this is where my learning about PCs actually began. After my 3 day ban from the service I was back in the chatrooms under the name “PeterPan” (I have no idea why I picked that!), I got talking to some American lady who proceeded to rename me “Woody” (at which point I didn’t realise it was rude!) and so I changed my name.

I racked up some pretty major phone bills in my first year of the online word (I think the record was £300 in one month and sadly this was quite a regular occurance). I found some chatrooms on the MSN servers called #England, #13-19UKTeens and some others I can’t really remember. I made friends with lots of people (some of which I still know today!) and began my entrance into Geekdom.  It first began with “script kiddy” antics (I used ShowDown Pro for mIRC) that allowed me to do illegal things (Denial of Service fellow chatters) and takeover channels so I became the temporary owner. The more I got into the takeovers, the more I got involved in a “gang” which soon entered into a war with a rival gang, we would constantly fight to own channels, albeit a “friendly rivaly” in the sense we would all visit the channels no matter who owned them, with maybe some banter thrown in. The longer this went on the more we looked into ways of keeping ownership of the channel so we looked into IRC bots (a piece of software that acts as a person but has a permanent internet connection unlike our dialup modems). At one point, myself and a guy called Chris even looked into seeking employment with Microsoft as SysOps for their chat network, which we would clearly abuse the power of, so that we owned the channels constantly, at which point we became friends with an Australian lady called SysOp_Mermaid (who just happened to be one of the hottest women on the planet!).

My lust for power drove me to learn more about IT in order to overcome my opponents, this drove me from learning about how to install and use software to learning how to write my own software.

Fast forward a few years and I started DJing with a friend from school, at which point my name was “DJ-Woody” which after a while, looked a bit silly so I decided to change the y to an e and so Woode was born, alas, this looked even more silly! On this day, DJ-WoodE was born! Eventually, as things do, my time as a DJ stopped, and so I dropped the DJ- part, and that is how I became known as WoodE.

WoodE was my online alter-ego, my escape from the real world. No one at school or work, as I got older, knew anything about WoodE and vice versa, no one who knew WoodE knew who Grant Bennett was. WoodE was, over a long period, a chatroom owner, a bot owner, a botnet owner, a chat network oper (SysOp), a man of all things technical, a man online with a life offline. All the while, Grant Bennett was at school, a DJ, a boyfriend, a son, a worker (post-16) with a life online. Never did these two seperate entities cross paths.

I’ve met a lot of people from first meeting online, I’ve been to many “meets”, my first one was when I was 17 down in Essex, I met a lot of people from the old MSN #England room, I had the phone number for SysOp_Mermaid (Victoria is her real name), I had “power”, I had anonomity, and then Facebook was born.

Facebook forced me to, for the first time, combine the two seperate people in me, it forced me to become Grant ‘WoodE’ Bennett. Something I tried to avoid for 15 years. There’s no dark reason for wanting to keep my “lives” seperate other than I was different online to who I was offline, I acted differently, online I had more confidence and more prowess. I would still prefer that my lives be seperate, I would prefer those who I went to school with not know WoodE, not because I’ve done (much) wrong as WoodE but because it isn’t who Grant is, the Grant that they know. I don’t mind people who know me as WoodE now knowing me as Grant but I guess I preferred being WoodE as I liked being anonymous and was paranoid about people finding out too much information about the person behind WoodE.

WoodE was the geek in me, the (at the beginning of my online ‘career’) “hacker”, the war monger, the web developer, the IT man. Grant was the guy who went to school.

Facebook changed me, Facebook ruined me.

I have always been interested in IT and 100% believe it is the way forward in better organisation and increasing efficiency in our every day lives, from promoting better work productivity to making life easier at home, as such I recently began actively seeking better ways to do things I already do, all reinvent-the-wheel-esque.

I have several PCs/Laptops and each one has its own specific use which I tend to stick to, for example, I have a PC that is way too old to keep but I just don’t want to throw it away (a Pentium 450Mhz) which I use as a web server with PHP & MySQL running for my web development, my main PC which is used for browsing/emails/gaming/the odd page code in notepad, my development laptop which contains all my graphic, office & web development software and another laptop which dual boots Ubuntu and Windows XP which I use for my “tech” requirements (diagnostics/IT engineer/blahdy blah).  I used to have 3 or 4 other machines that over the years I just hacked up and used to build other machines but I seriously needed a clear out and thus, removed some redundant machines.  I do however require another desktop, maybe 2, but I’m in no rush to build them/lose my recently reclaimed space any time soon.

One of my rituals I stick to, quite OCD-like, is my start up and window positioning.  When I start my main PC I like to start things in specific order; Email, Browser, Social clients and finally music if required.  Even my browser tabs are started in specific order, usually BBC News, StumbleUpon, Social sites, personal sites (any of the 4 or 5 websites I control) and then things are placed in their correct place (which windows obviously remembers so this isn’t really a “task”).

As I have dual screens (I don’t think I could go back to one now) I use my second screen as the “messy bedroom floor”, any random item that doesn’t have a permanent place on there (like music/messenger) gets slung on there out of my way.

So recently I decided that rather than suffer with inadequate software and “make do with what I’ve got” (I don’t tend to change what ‘works’) I’ll look round for tools that do the job right, even if it meant downloading software for things I rarely do, and here is what I’ve found.

Email
I’ve always had a bit of a do with email, many many moons ago I used Eudora which served my purposes well, however since then I’ve never really found one that I think is perfect. I hate using free providers (hotmail etc) as I have my own domains mainly, but other reasons also and I try my utmost to stay away from the Microsoft ones (not that I’m an MS hater, they’re just targeted more) so I’ve settled on Mozilla Thunderbird. I also use a few plugins; provider & lightning to synchronise my google calendar to my desktop and vice versa (which also syncs on my iPhone, if you’re wondering why) and another plugin to stop the “your email.domain.blah is coming up as isp.domain.blah, it could be fake when it isn’t” message.

Browser
Personally, I think I prefer Opera as a browser, I think it looks sexy and it has some awesome features which I cannot live without (speed dial and mouse gestures) plus it starts quickly and has loads of other handy stuff built in. Alas, I use Mozilla Firefox. I just couldn’t stand any more “this site does not work with browsers other than IE and Firefox” and as I just cannot use IE (its awful, doesn’t abide by css/web standards and is again, centre of most attacks). I am a bit annoyed I have to use Firefox as it is unbelievably slow to load and the default ‘skin’ is pig ugly, it also lacks the features I have come to love in Opera. However, I have learned to get on with Firefox and I must admit I do like the flexibility through plugins.

The Firefox plugins/extensions I use are as follows: Mouse (all-in-one) gestures (yay!), AdBlock Plus (pesky ads be-gone!), Evernote web clipper (handy for clipping parts of websites), Speed dial (yay!), Read it later (a god send!), Delicious bookmarks and StumbleUpon. Read it later is brilliant for those pages you don’t want to bookmark (with delicious) but really want to read for whatever reason, it’s like a temporary bookmark and is bloody useful! StumbleUpon is the king of “find it the random way”, I have found SO many useful websites and brilliant bits of software using this things (also utter shite), BEWARE this thing is addictive and you WILL lose days on end doing nothing but clicking “Stumble!”. I obviously use a load of other plugins on my development laptop that are all web developer based.

In order to actually be able to look at Firefox I had to install the Chromifox theme which changes it to look like Google Chrome in a lovely blue, much nicer!

Music
A quick leap off-topic, anyone who has an iPhone and even the smallest love for music NEEDS to download Shazam (it’s free). It will record 8 seconds of any song, go away to the interwebs and return with the song title and artist so you can then go and buy the track!

I have iTunes being an iPod and iPhone owner but don’t use it for my mp3 collection, this I used to trust to Winamp as it’s free (the basic version anyhoo), small, attractive and I liked the features, however recently I have began testing Mozilla Songbird as it has some cool features (the best one being an iTunes replica of smart playlists (ie, one of mine is “play anything that is NOT by placebo/bjork/madonna)). So far I’m quite happy with it.

Passwords
I usually remember my passwords and never write them down or even let my browser remember them, not because I’m paranoid but it’s good practice and my passwords are easy to remember because I use them so often (hell, I remember most passwords from work too and just think how many mortgage lender/life insurance websites I have details to), my passwords aren’t easy to guess either, they contain capitals, numbers and letters, like a good password should, although I’m now starting to use a lot of password generators when it comes to coding especially (so a password could be ‘#@~Wsk;$%’ for example) and these are hard to remember, so I looked for a solution to save having to tax my brain with these things. Luckily I found KeePass a software solution to keeping passwords safe and secure. It has an encrypted database file which is password protected that stores all your passwords. You can configure it to clear your clipboard (for copy/pasting passwords) after you have pasted the password once or after a set time, etc.

Desktop
I dislike having hundreds of files on my desktop, although as a developer I often get lazy and save any code files to the desktop so I know to look at it the next time I turn the PC on, however, I do get random fits of OCD and clean it all up. I’ve found a nice little app that, while it doesn’t keep your desktop clean, it does help towards you wanting to keep it clean. Fences produces a nice little box (or several) on your desktop that you can place icons in and it keep them nice and tidy, you can also name the boxes to group certain icons together.

I have more software that I have started using, that I may get round to posting at a later date, open source software is becoming more usable, more powerful and more obtainable, giving the big boy paid for commercial apps a run for their money.

Usually, with my decorating spree, belongings are moved from room to room until everywhere is complete and then they get put back where they came from, regardless of if it has even been worn/used in the past X years.  This time round, however, was one of those every-ten year jobs that sees you bin everything that hasn’t been used, worn or even seen the light of day for more than a few years, which left me with a minor dilema!

About 16 years ago, we bought a “stacked hifi” (one of those with individual components rather than the “mini” hifis you get today) which still works perfectly today (and imo, looks sweet!) but I also have numerous mini hifis which are obivously newer, have 3-CD capability, Mini-Disc, etc etc etc.  So, which one do you part with and which do you keep!?

Nowadays all my music-listening is catered for on my trusty PC, all my old CD’s have been ripped to mp3 to preserve the CD’s from scratches and make choosing songs and playlists as easy as clicking a button (with over 2,000 songs, this is a god send) but I couldn’t bring myself to part with my trusty teen-hifi even while it was redundantly sat in my bedroom, not even plugged in.  The only problem with the PC is the volume is restricted to the limits of a tin-pot cheap 5.1 surround sound system amplifier which sometimes just doesn’t cut the mustard, cue lightbulb-above-head moment and that old hifi has a new lease of life!

With a phono to 3.5mm jack cable I can now run my mp3′s from the PC through the hifi with its own dedicated amplifier and much bigger (watt wise) speakers, this is all done on an audio switch (one of those basic speaker/headphone switches, utilising two seperate speaker systems instead of headphones), plus I have the added ability to revisit my youth with the twin tape deck, cd player (obviously) and of course the record deck.  Hoorah!  What’s more, it looks pretty darn good too!

Ignore the visible wires, they were all hidden in the end. Apologies for the poor quality images too, iPhone’s aren’t the best cameras in the world.

What is the difference?  It’s simple really, a diary is just that, a log of your day to day life, maybe thoughts or adventures, either in note form or a more story-based form, maybe intended for a few close friends with the hope or acceptance that someone may stumble across it or simply for yourself to look back on from time to time.  A blog (web log), however, is written with the intention that people will willingly look for it or read it, with the hope that anyone who stumbles upon it, will come back again and again to read what wonderous issues you have to ponder today.  It should be written with the express intent to entice people into wanting to read more, for either good reasons or bad reasons, these of course both being valid reasons non the less and only does it become a valid blog once people actively engage in it.  There is no point having a blog with no visitors.

There are many a different type of blog, either personal blogs where upon a person may vent his or her anger, love or affection for something that matters to them, blogs that promote a specific product or brand, family blogs or hybrid-blogs where a site may use a blogging CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress to run a website not necessarily blog-like but because the tools are so powerful.

Whatever the blog, the reason is the same; to be seen.

Blogging software today is massively powerful in that it combines the ability to run a dynamic website with the ability to create a community and share your views with the world and most importantly it is easy enough for anyone that can use a keyboard to do.  It has opened up endless possibilities for people to share with the world things they wouldn’t normally be able to share, for talent to be seen through a haze of professionalism, for people who are not heared to be heared and for people who are not seen to be seen.

In order to create a successful blog you must meet a minimum of 3 basic criteria:

1. Design; your blog doesn’t have to be designed by a professional just make sure it is neat, tidy and is easy on the eye.
2. Content; be original, be honest and be true.
3. Audience; appeal to an audience, listen to their views and always respect them, when replying re-visit rule 2.

Don’t expect to be blog-famous on day one and don’t expect to make everyone happy all of the time (it’s ~impossible!), don’t try to do something you can’t (such as review products you can’t get your hands on or post reviews of products that are old (no one reads yesterday’s news today)) and don’t leave it too long between posts.  A blog with one post a month won’t get as much attention as one with daily posts.

If you have met the above criteria make sure you enjoy your blogging and always try to be interesting.  I find my problem is that with my blog (which is quite clearly a personal blog) I don’t do enough interesting things to warrant posting and therefore have 2 or 3 day gaps between my posts, I also have to make a conscious effort to not get too deep with what I write so I tend to stay away from the close personal posts.  While I also call my blog a “blog” and not a diary, I am aware that I don’t have a regular audience and therefore don’t fall into the self-defined “blog” category, yet.

If you want your own blog allow me to suggest WordPress.com as it is immensely powerful and simple to use, if you have your own domain and hosting and have enough skill to use FTP and create a MySQL database and wish to host your own wordpress blog (it allows greater flexibility and the installation of plugins) then head over to WordPress.org instead, it only takes 5 minutes to install (honestly!).  I am available to help with minor WordPress related issues (I don’t want to spend hours fixing your installs but will help where I can) and while I can create WordPress themes, I won’t create one for you, sorry.

I’m sure some of you may disagree with parts, or all of this post, but hey, each to their own

Happy blogging!

This week has seen several issues being debated in the news, one of which being MP’s budgets of £24,000 for second homes they demand they not only deserve but require to do their job.  I’m no expert but I know a bucket fuckload of people that travel well over an hour every day and don’t require a second home in order to do their job, let alone get paid to furnish one.  These people are running the country with salaries in excess of £100,000 a year and they need help to do so?  Do they really deserve the job if they can’t budget their money and travel smarter.  Some of the items listed from various people’s budgets included a cleaner for £6,000 (come on lazy boy, mummy taught you how to clean), broken toilet seat repairs (no real wonder, fat bastard) and various other random shite.

There is an obvious recession in progress at the minute, yet these people still get this allowance and no one actually sees any improvement in the work they do, the country is still in shit, people are still becoming homeless and jobless and these people abuse their allowance as added income.  What makes them so special that they can get this kind of “job extra”?  We, the tax payer, pay for it all and yet we have no say in it, why not, during the recession, reverse the allowance and give back to the tax payer the money we have forked out on useless MP’s, dole fuckwits and all the other scroungers of the UK.  Give back some money so we can afford our mortgages, continue to live on piss poor wages while our jobs are in jeapardy and regain faith in the UK Government, although this will not happen of course, because we pay to make everyone else rich and as we all know, the rich are always rich, the recession has not hit the rich, they will continue to be rich regardless of job issues or lack of interest rates.

Anyway, politics bores me generally, but what about this DNA database issue they’re whining about now? (can’t anyone stop fecking whining these days?).  I’m all in favour of a DNA database wether you’ve been bad or not (quite frankly, I think it should be done from birth), I have been bad before, and therefore deserve to be on this DNA database, but I know that A) being on the database means I’m likely to be caught should I decide to be naughty again (and therefore acts as a deterrent) and B) Due to A, don’t really wanna do owt!  The people whining about “invasion of privacy” are those that really want the freedom to do something wrong without the chance of being caught, otherwise why would you complain?

I believe it should be done from birth in order to avoid this ball-ache we go through every time there’s a crime, if we had your DNA on record already, you’d either be caught really easily or would think twice about doing it in the first place.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all against the “big brother” state, but there are some things that really require monitoring and crime-solving today is about as useful as sneezing. (while I’m sure sneezing is useful, my point is some crimes are too difficult to solve or aren’t even bothered with and a DNA database would deterr people).

Finally, Britain’s Got Talent! Woooooo, yea, we don’t have, really.  While I admit a lot of people on the show do actually have born-gifted talent, a lot of the people that get through to the next round have “skill” and in my book, there’s a clear difference.  In my opinion “talent” means being gifted, being gifted means being born with talent, it’s another vicious circle but it doesn’t generally include being skilled.  Being skilled is generally anything that can be learned.  Take me for example, I used to be able to do the splits, kick 8 foot in the air, do flying kicks and “routines” but that was skill, something I had learned to do, it wasn’t a born gift.  There are some truely talented people on BGT such as the young singers who have never “learned” to sing and some other random folk, but generally, the majority of people have learned to do something and have practiced so much that they have become good at it (such as most of the dancers).

Don’t get me wrong, these people work hard and deserve a lot of praise, but they aren’t truely talented.  I love watching the show, and think a lot of people deserve to be there as they are clearly good in their own field, but a lot of people just don’t and I’m truely amazed at how many people think they are good at whatever they choose to do, some of the singers were utterly appauling, infact, every “class” of people had it’s utter poor, poor performance.  I don’t understand how they delude theirselves into thinking they are somehow good or in most cases “outstanding”.  I know I can’t sing for shit, do you see me going up infront of those 3 praising myself?  Noes.

Anyhoo, enough moaning for tonight.