Thursday, 9th March, 2006

Rip Off

photo transformation

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Look what I found while I was going through some stuff

What can I say? I was young and naive

"Young" is relative — I was three weeks off turning thirty, but seeing as that was my little Epiphical Trannie Moment™, I'd consider myself to be 'new born'

Anyway Envérité, I'm still young thankyouverymuch

Woah — interesting moment of "Comment added in the middle of emailed post" weirdness there

/me attempts to fix...

(Sorry about that)

LOL Susan — I'd not noticed that before I think (IIRC) that the "Just For You" thing was what they called the "Changeaway".

Still a bloody ripoff.

Trapped

telly eyetv

Excitement, anticipation and expectancy in the Curran household today

This is, hopefully, the end of my little EyeTV saga ... it starts off with the pain of waiting over a month for it to be delivered, followed by the joy, excitement, and over-enthusiastic way I've been telling everyone about it.

Then, of course, there's the wonder of three weeks or so of TV Heaven (the other sort) and the tragic disapointment of it suddenly not working any more.

Actually, I must just say that the moment when it stopped working was a particular earth-shattering occasion for me, coming right on the heels of my "lose phone in ditch" experience.

But still, a few tech-support emails later, a phonecall to the Apple Store and a replacement was winging its way to me from, um, wherever it is that they come from.

But, if you recall, the euphoria was short-lived, with me missing the TNT van by a matter of seconds.

No matter, at some point today, he's coming back, and at last I'll be able to watch telly again

...

It's really odd not having a TV I kinda like it (I feel all self-satisfied and smug that I've not got that 20th Century distraction to take me away from the more important things in life — like, er, writing a pile of shite and generally flouncing around in nighties), but at the same time I could do with a bit of mindless brain-suck to stem the tide of frustration that comes when you have a million and one things to do, but can't actually figure out where to start.

As a result, anyway, I'm stuck in the house all day. I'll be buggered if I'm going to miss the van again.

Normally, being stuck in the house involves Large Dresses™ (more about those later ), but, for obvious reasons, today is restricted to jeans and a jumper

...

There's only one thing that I've really, actually, totally watched recently as a result of all this — only because M has a telly in her flat in Harrogate — and that's Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.

I'm not normally one for Foodie programmes (especially anything that could potentially have the Fat Tongued Mockney in it), but I'm really enjoying that one.

Last Tuesday, for example, we were treated to the delights of a Blackpool chef's argumenting technique — which basically amounted to him sticking his tongue in his lower lip and doing a Joey

...

Sidenote #1 : You'd be surprised just how many pages on the Internet have Jamie Oliver and Joey Deacon together on them. Or maybe you wouldn't

Sidenote #2 : I've just had to give directions to my house to the TNT guys. If only there were things that sorta looked like aerial photographs, but much more simplified — maybe with lines where the roads are, and labels on the roads to say which ones they were...

Yeah, see, I was kinda thinking something more 'map-like' Tina

Official Blogging Instructions

photo blogs

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Every now and again, I go on random wanders through other people's weblogs. Usually they're just full of cupcakes and "mom-stuff" (whatever a "mom" is...), but sometimes I find odd little gems of weirdness — in this case, pompous-weirdness

What I love about this is the "Subscribe to my RSS feed [...] Check back frequently for more updates!"

Surely one or the other, but not both?

Heh M and I were thinking it might be rather fun to go on a weekly trip to whichever restaurant had been the subject of Mr Ramsay's wrath the week before. I'll look forward to next week's with recommended glee then Steph

...

Back to other people's blogs though...

About a year ago, you see, I was trying to push this thing into new teritories, and one of the things I tried out was a little link-exchange called Blog Explosion.

I really don't like it much — apart from the stuff you get bombarded with, there was something indecent to my mind about forcing people to read your stuff. And, let's face it, there's traffic, and there good traffic — and I know exactly which category I'd put Blog Explosion into.

("Doesn't stop you putting your referrer link in there above does it Siobhan..?")

It's a vaguely simple idea — you start reading a blog, as a timer counts down from 30 to zero at the top of the screen. When it gets to zero, you click on a link and it takes you to another blog. For ever two blogs you read, you get a credit — which basically amounts to your blog appearing for thirty seconds while someone else is doing exactly the same thing.

Nobody actually reads things — they just wait for the clock to count down, notching up more readers for themselves in the process.

Sometimes I've seen the odd comment left by someone doing this — it's usually some variation on "Hi, just popped in on BE! Come visit my blog!".

In the same way that not all traffic is good traffic, not all comments are interesting comments

I do still have a dander around these (mostly right-wing lunatic) blogs every once in a while — partly because of bordom, partly for the sheer fun of knowing that some random American right-winged nutjob has to stare at the words "crossdressing adventure" for thirty seconds — and it never ceases to amaze me just how banal much of the internet is.

(She says, trying desperately not to use the word "blogosphere")

I've seen some truly amazingly awful excuses for weblogs in my little travels — gawdy pieces of eye-numbing shit, graphics-heavy (even on Broadband) and javascript-bloated things that take longer than thirty seconds to load (ha! free credit!), incessant bitching and infighting between Instapundit and Dailykos wannabes — to the point where sometimes I question the whole point of it all.

Sometimes the sheer futility of a lot of the stuff that goes on is overwhelming.

...

One of my favourite things about them though — and perhaps the one thing that makes me keep going back to read them — is the strange concept of 'personal publishing' that some authors seem to have. Too much Taking Yourself Seriously™ when they shouldn't, and too much Not Taking Yourself Seriously™ when they should.

I've started collecting, for example, the little snippets that people write about themselves — and sometimes the tag-lines as well — because some of them are priceless.

I was going to start publishing lists of them, but I thought that that might be mean — and to do it without attribution would be a Bad Thing™

So, instead, (a) I thought I might start linking to them, ironically you understand, and (b) I'd just share one — which I can't attribute, because I've lost the link...

I often speak in short burst of creativity. From things I see, I feel, and try to recreate those moments into a page; one page from someone's story

Brilliant You do that love. Me, I just get drunk and wear dresses — it amounts to the same thing really.

I feel this is important because, if I've got it right, you need at least two (one to watch and one to record something else at the same time). Is this the case?

Yep, you're absolutely right. It has one digibox-tuner in it, and if you want to record one thing while watching another, then yep, you need two of them.

I was quite disappointed with this when I first got it, and a little narked when I'd be watching something and it would switch to whatever I'd got scheduled for recording.

I suppose it depends how you use it — personally, I've been wanting to use it to record and archive stuff, for watching back later. Ideally, I'd either have two — or I'd just use a bog-standard digibox to watch telly live.

Although that isn't really ideal is it?

Then again, Ive got a bloody satelite and a Sky+ box that I haven't even turned on for months...

No wait — how would that work? The tuner can only send one channel at a time to the Mac, regardless of how many copies of the software is running.

One thing it can do, however, is split multichannel channels and show them all at once ... BBC News 24, for example, has several channel feeds all coming through one channel — I can watch them all at once

Decisions And Social Pariahness

random

Part of me is sitting here, thinking maybe I should try and relieve the tedium that today has turned into by inviting every single person I know in Lancaster round to my house for a drink.

The other part is thinking "Nah, just don a frock and have a quiet night in"

Yet another part of me is thinking "Don't use words in your titles before you look them up on dictionary.com" — I thought pariah meant the exact opposite

God, I'm bored tonight. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's fuck-all on telly, all my RSS feeds have dried up, and the day's task that I set myself earlier is lying scattered around the floor in little A5 pieces of paper with scribbles on them.

I sometimes, at moments like these, get myself terribly down and start to internally lament about How My Life Sucks And Is Devoid Of Interesting Things™ ... and then, then I kick myself around the head a bit and remind myself that I'm going to the cinema tomorrow night, a birthday party on Saturday, and a dinner party on Wednesday.

There is no reason for this post BTW — I just felt the need to type

Dear Yorkshire Building Society,

advert homophobia

Know what? I don't really care if you're the "Lender of The Year". I don't care what rates you give and how good your mortgages are. Because that's not really what's important. What's important, is that in the year 2006, you tack a piece of pointless homophobia on the end of your advert.

I thought that sort of thing had finished with Muller Light

Ack, but 'cmon

I'm trying to picture the marketing meeting ...

"OK Guys, we've got our message across: Our mortgages are so great that members of the public want to snog us. It's good, it's trendy, it's sexy. Now. All we need is a little edge at the end — to wrap it up with tasteful humour..."

"Hey, hows about we get some guy who looks bit like Mr Humphries to come in at the end and make eyes at the bloke selling mortgages? The public will love that. They'll all laugh at the idea of a guy wanting to snog another guy!"

People get paid a shit-load more than me for coming out with crap like that.

having a television may lead to increased levels of ranting

You're probably right Selina — I'm watching a "Sheila's Wheels" advert and I feel insulted...

Having said that though, I'm really annoyed with Stupidly Obvious Programme Titles™ that basically give away the whol epoint of the show before you've got gripped.

An example: I'm watching something on Channel Five right now — about how a mother has a different DNA as her children ... how could that be? HOW?!

The programme is called "The Twin Inside Me"

Oh right. That'll be it.

I may as well stop watching now.

Yeah, it's getting tired isn't it? I just get around it by escaping one of the 'B's ...

B\BC

I'll get rid of it when I do actually finish this redesign — along with the (embarassingly outdated) The Guardian thing as well