Archive for October, 2007



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The Best Song ever

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Through much thought and deliberation, I’ve finally decided on the best song ever created. It’s a big call, and no one man should be allowed to make it, or mutter the words for that matter, but I’ll do it anyway. The fact of the matter is, its impossible to make such a call, as noone has exactly the same tastes, and those who do will most probably not like exactly the same thing anyway. But this is a blog, my blog, works streamed from my head, so I call the shots.

Disclaimer: I must say, if you don’t agree with me, and have another suggestion then I’m all ears so please comment.

I’m not an ageist, my criteria for the choice of song means it didn’t have to be brand new. This one has been floating around for a while, and it really gets my Juices flowing.

Scan to 2:11 for the best bit

It’s Dash Berlin – Til the Sky Falls Down. I most recently heard this in Leon Boiler – Intuition Recordings @ Amsterdam Dance Event 18/10/2007.

It forms an elite group (of what must be about a thousand songs) which all rate in my BTMOAT listings, featuring such classics as:

  • Bedrock – Heaven Scent
  • Sarah McLachlan – Fear
  • Sarah McLachlan – Fallen
  • Karen Overton – Your Loving Arms
  • Gustavo Santaolalla – The Wings
  • Holden & Thompson – Come to Me
  • 4 Strings – Sunrise
  • John O’Callaghan – Big Sky

What’s your favourite song ever? Cut me down..

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Wine Show – Islington

Monday, October 29th, 2007

This weekend we went to the UK Wine Show at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London. For the price of only £8 each you get 7 hours of free wine, port and cognac tastings, as well a heap of cheese, crackers and other buscuits. Like a kid in a candy store, this was a great oppurtunity to indulge, and indulge we did. There was wine from all over the world and we tried wine from Australia (of course), France, Spain, Italy, Greece, California, Argentina, Chile and various other places I can’t remember

As one would guess, unlimited wine samples rapidly leeds to a messy crowd, and I was rapidly heading toward TMD status. The highlights of the actual evening were some nice French Champagne, a busty red from Greece, one of the nicer Penfolds Bin’s, some Tawny Port and Remy Martin Cognac. The Wines of Australia stand had some old delights from home that I’d missed, like Xanadu and Madfish, so it was good to have them again.

They had the most delicious food as well, Cath had roast duck breast, and I had Caramelised Shallot, and Goats Cheese tart with heaps of vege’s on the side.

After leaving the show, we walked straight down the road to the Walkabout pub which is always a classy affair, and this was no different. Several pints and a few shots (this crazy South African bought me three shots of tequila at the bar for taking a photo of him and his girlfriend), and the night was almost over. Not before trying some horrible nasty shots in test tubes bought from Test tube girl:

I’ve included a blanked out photo to protect anonymity:

 

 

And then destroyed it, who needs anonymity anyway

 

Had the biggest sleep on the train on the way home, which was totally excellent. Pretty good night all up.

 

 

Heeeey!!!

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My BeerBelly™

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Writings been a little slow this last three or so days, I haven’t felt the creative juices flow, and quite frankly I couldn’t think of anything to write. This lack of imagination, creativity and motivation toward the cause has left me in despair, a serious need to speak my mind, which contains nothing. In the immortal words of Peter (yes, that one), “Wait! Wait! (I’m just thinking up another story)”

To cure the drought, and appease my ever increasing Google guests I shall fill in this gap. Shock horror, I’m now at almost 50 hits a day, and my pagerank is about as high as Michael Jackson is beautiful, Google, MSN, and BBC.com watch out, because HD911′s coming right at ya. Now if only I had a pull, or witty attraction like I can has Cheezburgers cats.

 

 

The Camelbak , bush survival, or just convenient beer?

Anyway, I introduce to you the beer belly. The greatest invention since the Camelbak, perhaps even better as it serves two purposes, two allow rehydration with no hands required, neither to drink, or carry it, and it show’s off one of mans greatest acheivements. The BeerBelly. And for the similiar minded female (or weirdly perverse male), there’s the WineRack, a drink holder that when full will turn your flat chest into C Cups, or your D’s into G’s. The beauty about the whole idea of course? You’re replacing two fatty organs, with a fat-inducing liquid of your choice, though it should be beer. If not beer, then Tucker Max Death Mix (great site, the mans a comedian), consisting of “750 ml Everclear® alcohol, 32 oz Gatorade® energy drink and 2 cans Red Bull® energy drink“.

This otherwise petite lady is packing so much punch, she’s bursting at the seams. “Thanks WineRack”, shouts one reader

Whilst suprisingly unflattering in the flesh, under a shirt or wife beater, you’ll be guaranteed to look the goods.

Now, considering how narky airlines are about the 100ml rule, and about packages strapped to chests and stomach, I will give £100 to the first person who can prove they wore one, filled with the liquid of their choice, through customs. Just for trying, your more then welcome to reap the benefits of your crime on the plane ride over.

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Freelance – A new journey through DotNet Hell (Possibly)

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I’ve recently got my foot in with a London based photography firm who need a few error fixes done to their web site and the application behind it.  I’ve always wanted to start getting a little bit of work on the side, and this might be a good oppurtunity to knuckle down and start doing it.  At the moment its only twenty or so hours work, but it should help with rent and bills moving into the new house and Christmas coming up as well.

Having started on the work tonight and getting a good look at the inner workings of the site, I was shocked to see that I’d possibly just landed work which suffered from the same few issues that I’ve been battling for the last six months at my job.  It’s much, make that loads, better than the original state of the work at the office, and I’m thankful for that, but the spaghetti mess (albeit a neat mess) is not my best idea of a good code base to work around, and build upon.  I’ve got to get involved in a big enterprisey application at some stage and really learn something, that would be a good move toward improving my work/career.

Baby steps Shannon, baby steps.

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Twickenham – The Move, a distinct possiblity now

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

Twickenham

It’s semi official, we’re moving! We found this great little place almost in the center of Twickenham, about 5 minutes walk (if that) from the train station and bus stops, and about 15 minute walk to Richmond. So yes, my only worry about moving to Twickenham, that which I’d be way too far away from the Train station is soon to be err…. quashed. The place is a 3-storey attached town house with about 10 pubs (including one 50m away which sells Cornish Tribute Ale), at least 10 restaurants, a hospital, and supermarket all within the radius of about 150 metres. It has two large double/king size bedrooms, a smaller double guest room, huge bathroom, great kitchen and biggish living & dining rooms. Then a great big outdoor area as well, with decking which should be good for sunny afternoons and the occasional shindig.

A tribute to a fantastic ale

This is great, as I firstly hated the thought of a 20-30 minute walk to the train station in the wet/hail/snow/etc, and didn’t want to be further than a short walking distance away from food, people, ameneties, etc. As I’ve said before, I didn’t move to London to not be 100m away from the nearest pub, and as long as we get the place, this will be a perfect compromise between those who love built up, close to city living (me), and outer, less noise living (them).

We looked at another place on Saturday morning which was cheap as hell (cheaper than the place we’re putting the deposit on), and fantastic inside, huge decked out kitchen, nice rooms upstairs, lovely big back yard, but it was just too damn far away from town. To walk from where we are moving (1min from Twickenham High St) to the place we looked at on Saturday would have been close to 30-40 minutes walk. Not good enough, without horses, cars or a swift segway.

Back on the topic of beer again (I know, I know), the BEST thing about Twickenham is that all the pubs appear to have a wide range of beers on sale, I’ve been into 5 pubs, and so far they’ve all had 10+ tap beers/ciders each all with different beers in each. Compare that to the pubs in Hounslow, as well as the few pubs I’ve been to in Mayfair/Piccadilly Circus where they’ve only got two ales and the usual Guiness, Stella and Carling or similar and its a huge change.

Bring on the new house, new area, new beer, shall we drink to it on many occasion.

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Mayfair… Mayfair

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

I’ve got basically nothing in interesting (or internet worthy, though is any of this?) going on at the moment, so I thought I’d share another story of the suburb I work. Walking down the road whilst getting some food at lunch and smelt the relatively unfamilar smell of ganja wafting down the road in front of me. 11am on a Monday morning, two guys in suits were walking down the street in an apparently upmarket suburb smoking a joint. Enough said?? WTF?

And then on Thursday morning, I was walking the other way to get coffee, and a guy in his suit talking to someone on his phone lent down toward the wall, and threw up all over the ground.. twice. The whole time he was still casually talking on his phone, afterwards, stood up composed himself and walked off. That was gross, his spew was green, I think he was an alien.

 

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Ubuntu 7.10 – The Install

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Enter... The Dragon

“Gutsy” the Gibbon

People pondered about issues with the release of Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon, it’s been going on for months now. Some said they’d gone against the cause of Ubuntu and tried to cram too much, too quickly into this release, and that this move could be a disaster, creating bugs, and instability and put a stamp of disapproval on it’s name.

Some were wrong…

I’m a manual man, manual transmissions (yes, I’ve had mostly Auto’s, this doesn’t matter), manual labour (err), manual sex, manual manual, etc. I’m a manual, get your hands dirty kind of guy when it comes to linux too. I’m well seasoned with the fact that there’s a bunch of stuff that hasn’t worked automatically in the past, and chances are won’t be perfect in the future.

The Fight of Linux

 

The fight… No more

Upon installing the latest instalment of Ubuntu, I completely expected to have to:

  • Spend an hour installing, configuring and automating wpasupplicant and my wireless drivers, so that the wireless would just work, when and where I needed it.
  • Trawl through countless google pages and config settings to setup dual monitors just perfectly.
  • Stuff around with different video card drivers until I found one which compiz (the flavor of 6 months ago, with effects similar & better than Vista’s Aero or MacOSX’s visuals) would function correctly, then spend more time setting up and getting compiz right.
  • and so on…

That’s the way its been for me for at least the last few years, and I was prepared for the worst. To my surprise, Everything just worked, no more manual configuration on Wireless, its finally up to a level of Windows XP or there abouts where you select the network you’d like to connect to, supply a password and bam, your on, all the time. No problems.

A simple task, but being missing/broken for so long

In fact, since installing it three hours ago, in which the whole process took at most 30 minutes, I’ve been sitting here ever since twiddling my thumbs wondering what I can break just so there is actually something for me to do.

At this rate, I might actually get stuck into some of this work I have to do….

As I said in my previous post, this version is a keeper, when I installed Feisty, nothing really jumped out on me, it was up to date, and had a few more features, but still had the same problems as the last few years where not everything worked, quite as well as it should. This is definitely proof of a move in the right direction, stabilty, integration and ease of use and install are paramount in allowing non-savvy users to be able to use and enjoy it if they so please.

Now, if only I still had access to a Gentoo Box…

Too much time..

Those Spanish?! have far too much time on their hands!

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The move to Twickenham (Living it up in London)

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

We’re in the process of finding a place at the moment in Twickenham, to move out with our two American friends. This has advantages for all as, firstly we get to move out of Hounslow, they pay less rent and council tax, and we get to live it up, the London way. Shared living!

Hounslow to Twickenham

But why Twickenham? After all, our new house is going to be at most 4 or 5 miles away from our current house, which seems like a bit of a waste when you consider the need to buy furniture, pay bond, pay 6 weeks rent, get Sky/Interent & Phone line installed, and the list goes on. It’s all about the location though, Twickenham has pubs, restaurants, and upmarket food supermarkets, Hounslow has a discount mall, and a shed load of transport links to London. This is London though, there’s supposed to be a pub (a good pub, that is) on every street corner. Thus the move to Twickenham must happen, ideally though, I’d like to be closer to the city, and somewhere on the tube line, but I’ll go with the flow.

Bring it on!

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Ubuntu 7.10 Launch – 1 Day Left

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

Ubuntu

 

This will probably not interest a lot of people, so I won’t keep you for long, but the guys at Canonical have almost completed the next installment of Ubuntu ver 7.10 (yes, that’s October ’07), codenamed Gutsy Gibbon. This follows on from the previous (and equally odd named) releases that were Feisty Fawn, Edgy Eft, and more. What this means for those who don’t know, don’t care, is that the world renowned Ubuntu Linux distribution has just reached its next major release point, an LTS (Long Term Support) release, with a full support schedule for desktop (< 18 months), and server (<2 years), I think anyway. Who’s going to be using the same peice of hardware in 2 years that they’re using now, you may ask, and I have no answer. It baffles me too, however, like that old Telemarketing ad on Late night TV (No, not Timothy Tony Robbins), just “Set it, and forget it”, remember that old gem? In some way the same logic can be used here, in that you can set up a system like a file/web/mail server, or a home theatre PC, and with occasional maintenance, it should work as is until support stops, and a new version comes out to start the process over again.

Of course, the crucial difference is, we’re talking about a computer, not a rack of lamb, but seriously, its the same thing. Think of it as a really slow cooked lamb, that cooks away nicely after you’ve forgotten about it for 18 months, and then without a thought, dissapears, and a whole new lamb takes its place… Mmmm.. Slow roast lamb.

After 120 minutes, the sheep was looking nice, not so after 24 hours. Unrecognisable after a year.

However, jokes (yes, for a split second I thought it was funny, no I could not find a picture of a burnt sheep) aside for any linux/Ubuntu users out there, this release should be a good one to get your mits on, due to release of new Gnome/KDE and better integrated Aero/MacOS style graphics bliss, that being Compiz/Fusion, as well as large improvements (once again) in hardware support in the kernel itself.

Exciting stuff, for some at least.

I just remembered this weird joke I used to find hilarious as a kid:

A teacher asked her class to write an essay for homework on the topic of Agnostic Apathy, to her surprise a student came back with one line stating: “I don’t know, and I don’t care”.

What the hell?? Was I a tree hugging hippy? I’ll admit its amusing, clever at best, but no where near the comic genius I once gave it credit for.

Times change Shannon, times change.

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Train and the Pushy woman

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

Me!

This morning I was on the tube, and two seats clear up in front of me, so I sat down in one of them, and all of a sudden, I heard, “Excuse me, that’s my seat!”. Said a lady as she climbed passed about 4 or 5 people to get to seat next to me.. Without hesitation she proceeded to sit down and continue reading her magazine. Now from my point of view, this lady wasn’t old, she wasn’t disabled, she wasn’t obese and she didn’t appear pregnant. She would have been at most a 27 or 28 year old slim woman who just seemed to want the seat and believe it was hers.

Which got me to thinking, at what stage do I get to the age where I can start assuming a seat on the train is mine? When does it get to the point where I don’t have to worry about others who are standing around me and just sit, whilst the five 14 year olds chatter loudly whilst seated on the other side of the carriage? Not just that, and I’m going to get flamed for this, when is a pregnant woman, pregnant in the eyes of the public? If somene told me they were pregnant, I’d give up my seat anyway, but this shouldn’t be a free card, just because your a woman, and you can tell a white lie. Ya hear me?

I propose ACROD stickers for all people of priority on public transport. That’ll solve the issue.

 

Wear it proudly, you deserve it!

As it is, unless your old, disabled or pregnant you ain’t getting a seat from me unless you ask, but the nerve of some people on the train amazes me.


Update: This would brighten my day

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