James

010101110101010001000110

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:45:34 GMT

http://numerical19.tripod.com/islam_binary_code.htm <-- found via my referer logs.

Peace be upon me for the shitty binary translator page that I wrote years ago now receives tens of thousands of hits a month and has contributed in proving the undeniable mathematical proof of Allah.

What's new on the site that has proved this? "47, 38 and 92 -- Are these numbers controlled by the Prophet (saw) or somebody else?" ... be sure to check out the blog too!

Topical quiz: compared to the people in America who think they see the image of the Jesus in a peice of toast, how awesomely crazy is this?

a) moreso
2) not as much
d) radiator

LOST fans:

Wed, 17 May 2006 22:41:46 GMT

redkhr8euewmrckslfu3rmdoghqld
pmcoiw04kjmsmkdlwitmsetmvnhdm
fkfei5defjsodejslotycngkdhdks
lgoruwka0023jfmsafcgjkjrywdiw

Quick, unrelated, disjointed ramblings.

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 06:29:27 GMT

For my birthday I received a watch (to replace my old broken one), the latest Red Dwarf DVD release to add to my collection, a £30 cheque and the promise of a new chair. Overall, this pleases me.

*

Mini hacking idea: LJ is now giving me a shedload of storage (10GB) with unlimited bandwidth, but only for images - one could write a script to add png headers to a file with a basic image and store binary data commented out within it. Another simple script on the receiving end to strip out the superfulous image stuff and we've got a nice way of surreptitiously distributing mp3s, movies, etc. over a fast server with easy controls by way of LJ friends groups to optionally limit it to certain people.

I think that could be quite nifty... Does anyone know if JavaScript can manipulate binary stuff? - it'd be wicked cool if you could just point a webpage at an LJ-hosted image and it prompts you to download the embedded movie or whatever.

*

Things I need to do over the next couple of days: sort out my sleeping patterns; buy xmas presents; rectify my weird brain activity; eat properly; become my normal self again.

*

I really want to learn how to properly fly a plane. Like, really want to do this. Does anyone know how I go about it? I want to do it in something more than a "novelty present for dad" kind of way - something more serious (not that I wouldn't it as a present, mind ;)). Money is a limiting factor, of course. I am a student. But I'd be willing to spend a considerable chunk of my expendible dosh on it.

I've been daydreaming a lot lately of quitting my course and training to become a pilot. When I've mentioned this to people they've been saying it's something I should actively persue, at least in part. I agree with them. I'm still young in the grand scheme of things, I'm not overly unintelligent, I should be viewing my future as a blank slate. The sky is still my limit, I should be shooting for it.

The simple fact of the matter is that I can think of fewer things worse than being sat infront of a computer all day every day debugging code. I like the creative side of programming, but I don't think it's going to be the career for me. Plus, I am becoming bored of the overly broad "Computer Science" course at an alarming rate. Everything is pointing for me to change things and change things dramatically.

*

How are things with you?

Starting my 9th prime year

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:15:43 GMT

Merry birthday to me!

First picture on a Google Image Search for 22:

yup.

Now, if you'll excuse me. I'm going to the pub for a few hours.

p.s. thank you all who have mentioned my birthday in entries today, it was very nice and quite unexpected :)

Baxter, you know I don't speak Spanish! In English please.

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:43:23 GMT

I've missed handing in my Java coursework because I'm a retard who leaves things to the last minute. 15% of an important module down the drain for no reason other than my unmatched laziness. It wasn't even that hard. I'm going to have to absolutely pwn the exam to make that up.

Arses. I wanted to do well this year and all.

I received this email yesterday, but my single language brain cannot parse it. It's probably wanting something relating to simple text<->binary rubbish (I get this sort of stuff all the time).


hola,
  estoy buscando un traductor de texto a binario, y viceversa, pero no lo encontre
en HTML, me gustaria que me colaboraras, pues, la mayoria de la red no son
ejeculables solitos.
   
  gracias.

Can someone please give me the general jist? and also the Spanish translation of "Sorry, I don't speak Spanish, but thank you for your interest in whatever it is you're talking about. I'd send you my monthly newsletter, but I don't have one. Peace out."

Incidentally, That binary translator thing I made all those years ago gets an immense amount of traffic. 44,000 hits last month alone. For something so trivial (you can translate an ASCII string into binary with a few lines of ugly JavaScript) people sure do like it... Advice for people who want traffic to their website: poorly code a gimicky piece of junk and post it to LJ. You'll be crashing servers in no time!

Beer Festival tonight!

Edit: And whilst I have the attention of potential translators, can you someone English-ify this page for me? — Seems like some sort of Hungarian (?) news site featured my page!

The Beeb comment game

Wed, 26 Oct 2005 13:31:17 GMT

Ladies, Gentlemen, I have made it to the top page of the recommended comments for the proposed ban on smoking without once referring to smoking. Not to mention my bad punctuation and misspelling "irreparable".

On a scale of 8 to 10, how much do you want me? Feel free to go up to 11 if the need presents itself.

If you have a BBC account, vote for common sense, vote for Adcott's comment in 2005!

edit: I should note that I am a non-smoker. Always have been, always will be. I don't like it when people smoke around me and would much more enjoy non-smoking pubs. However, I believe it's a government's responsibility to remain as transparent as possible. Banning everything under the sun they don't explicitly like just goes against the most basic principles of freedom and liberty.

It's establishments themselves that should be setting the rules on smoking on their premises, not national government. If there is a demand for non-smoking pubs landlords should take note and make their pub non-smoking. They'd make a killing.

More whinging.

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:43:53 GMT

It's only just really occured to me that I'll be the last surviving male "Adcott". At least I think I am. My dad has a brother but I don't even know if he has kids or not... I'm undecided on whether I care though, the world may prove to be a better place without even more little Adcotts running around. (getting a bit ahead of myself here)

In other news, a member of my family, Phoebe Adcott, has successfully broken into modelling. She's a seriously attractive bitch.

... and wearing nothing but an exotic dog collar and a "come hither" look. Rowr!

P.S. Time has melded into one continuous depressingly boring stream of greyish brown sludge recently. I can't sleep because of pain, I can't go out, and I can't sit at the computer for very long at all. It sucks ass. Unwashed ass. Whine whine whine.

WB Me

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 10:38:00 GMT

Back home in Manchester. Spine still broken:

I have compression fractures on C6 (the second from bottom green one) and L1 (the top purple one). I did it jumping off a huge cliff into water and landing badly on my arse. Video proof of this in the form of a looping animated gif shall be posted within the next few days :)

Apart from the crippling pain curtosy of the broken back, the last month in Canada has proven to be absolutely awesome. From stunts in a float plane over remote lakes to strippers and crack dealers in Montréal, every day has brought something new and interesting.

I can't quite remember all that has happened at the moment. And even if I could, I'm not fit to articulate it due to being severely jetlagged. I may get inspired to document it in full when random video/pictures are posted, but the chances of that aren't too high. The important point is that it rocked.

I've come home to find that I have failed miserably (31%) in one of my many maths courses, the ingeniously named "Mathematics for Computer Science" and have consequently not passed the year. I'll have to be returning to Cardiff early to retake stuffage. Not overly arsed.

I'm not even going to attempt to read a month's worth of friends pageness. If anything interesting happened while I was away, I'd be very appreciative if someone could comment with it.

Canada update

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 00:05:04 GMT

Hello everyone.

Instead of coming home yesterday as planned I am now staying in Canada until the 20th. The reason for this is that I have fractured my spine (I'm fine - it's a non-serious, non-paralysing fracture).

Proper update when I get back.

Hope everyone is having a good summer :)

A "recommend me music" post.

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 08:05:06 GMT

Back up in Manchester now and cooped up in the house with absolutely nothing to do...

The other night I really felt like posting the music I have on my computer so I could ask people to recommend something new to me, so I went on and did the 'Generate HTML Playlist' thing on WinAmp.

But I wasn't really satisfied with the results - nobody is going to be prepared to look at each and every song... What would be cool is if the list was presented in a hierarchical manner: artist > album > track, that way people could just scroll through the artists and only view the ones that they had any interest in.

(if you're not interested in mild computery geekery, skip to the end of this post now)

So I searched for a WinAmp plugin - nothing, I searched the WinAmp forums - still nothing. I was going to have to make it myself. "It shouldn't be too hard." I thought, as in my searching I had discovered a nice plugin that makes interfacing with the WinAmp library easy. "And after all, it's essentially only three nested loops":

foreach artist in collection {
  echo artist;
  foreach album in artist {
    echo album;
    foreach song in album {
      echo song;
    }
  }
}

12 hours and 10k of disgusting VBScript later, it was painfully obvious that I had seriously underestimated how tedious writing this would be. Still, I've got something resembling what I set out to make, so I'm pleased enough. There are only a few things left to do:

After sorting albums by year, sort the albums that occur on a specific year by name. This fixes the issue where CD#2 of a 2 cd set sometimes occurs before CD#1.
~~When sorting artists, treat names like "The ______" as "______, the". This makes for more intuitive ordering.~~
Optimisation. It's really processor heavy at the moment and takes about 5 seconds to run.
Fix the JS that IE complains about.
Escape ampersands properly so it validates as XHTML Strict.

Anyway, without further ado,

My Music Collection - are there any glaring omissions in your opinion? is there anything that you'd like to recommend to me? do you want to rip the piss out of me for having rubbish like Limp Bizkit and Kylie in there? comments plz!

this is the point where somebody points out that there's a much easier way of doing this...

food, music and canadialand

Fri, 03 Jun 2005 21:54:19 GMT

I was having a conversation with my awesome Chinese flatmate (Fei) today about what kinds of food he's eaten. He was listing stuff like dogs, frogs, insects, etc. I mentioned I once had a Kangaroo burger and he said "Kangaroo?! that's distgusting!"

Chinese people are weird, yo. They eat soup with chopsticks.

You know how some people say that you should try to do at least one new thing every day? — well, last night I went to a hip-hop/drum & bass night at a local club. "Roni Size" was playing... he's "good" apparently.

You know how some people say that drum & bass is the shittest "music" known to man? — It's true. It is.

The moment it kicked in for the first time was reasonably enjoyable because the croud went mental and it was all very Ibiza-style. However, 30 seconds later I started finding it rather repetitive. 3 hours later I felt as though my brain had been replaced by a small clump of greasy fudge. It was the music equivelent of being rhythmically thumped in the crotch.

Coming out of the club there were a bunch of shirtless 17 years olds hanging out of fiestas with 4ft spoilers on them, blasting more drum & bass and claiming it was "wicked".

It was at that moment I felt the lowest I have ever felt. I'd voluntarily gone to one of these events. Let us never speak of last night again.

On the upside, I'm in the process of booking a ticket to Canada for a few days. Should everything go according to plan I should be spending between the 20th June and 1st July in and around one of the little lakes above Toronto (not sure what the name of the lake is, but it's close to Haliburton)

A confession

Mon, 23 May 2005 00:51:20 GMT

I have a nasty habit - I write LiveJournal entries but never post them.

In fact, I probably write an entry every time I sit at the computer, but rarely do I hit 'submit'. When I do post something, it's not because it has passed my internal craposity filter (I think recent crap entries disprove that.) it's because I'm caught in a brief moment of abandonment.

The vast majority of the entries I write are lost to the ether when I turn my computer off, but I do save the occasional one as I think I may want to post it in the future (this never happens). Looking back on the recent entries I've saved but never posted I've got:

An anecdote from when I met my first mormon (pleasent American fellow) and he gave me a coupon for a free book of mormon. I never got round to ordering that.
An anecdote from when I met the real-life equivelent of Mickey from the film Snatch (i.e. an incomprehensible gypsy) and his interesting aromas.
An entry asking people what camera I should buy (i've been entertaining the idea for a while)
A geeky entry on the game Su Doku, pondering about the algorithm to create a solvable puzzle and so on.
An entry about Synaesthesia and my take on it.
An appeal for people to recommend music. I'm in a musical rut at the moment.
An entry about how I've changed my course to a more specialised one. "Computer Science with Distributed and Mobile Systems"
And most recently, an entry where I could not find the correct word for how I was feeling, so I made one up: "fackleshar"

There have also been numerous boring entries catching up with general events in my life as well as a bunch of stuff to communities, etc.

You will never amount to anything; nobody could ever like you; ...

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 18:56:58 GMT

People are conditioned to be too nice, so I've devised a little competition:

I want you people to insult me in a comment with as much hateful vigour that you can muster. No holds barred. The only limitation is that you must only insult me, not anyone I know, etc.
I shall award the person that hurts my feelings the most with a 6 month LJ paid account (or something of equal value). Seriously.
This competition is open to friends and non-friends alike, but if I know you an like you it your words could upset me a lot more and consequently weight the competition in your favour.
I will not try to defend myself or insult you back or anything like that. I will only rate your attempt and possibly agree with you.
If you want, you may insult me anonymously. But this means you wont be eligible for the prize for obvious reasons. IPs are always logged here, but I wont bother checking who you are - I promise.
Competiton closes ~~3 days from today~~ 24 hours from this post (I don't think I want 3 days of this). Late entries will not be counted.

update: Everything's been pretty crap so far so I'll have to make a rule ammendment:

If I fail to be offended at anything that has been submitted, no prize shall be awarded

here's some stuff to get you riled up a bit: I don't think FireFox is the best browser, I didn't think fox hunting should have been banned and sometimes I can't help but dislike America.

A few links

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 00:35:17 GMT

because I'm not in a sane enough state of mind to write about me...

A little bit of irony to spice up an otherwise dull Saturday evening - boring article, but 4th paragraph from bottom:

UKIP's disability spokesman, Quentin Williamson, said: "A general election is not the most appropriate platform to raise a single issue."

Because UKIP is anything but a single-issue party... they wouldn't dream about harping on about the same thing constantly to a small core of voters.

I've been reading the BNP manifesto (PDF). Very interesting. Believe it or not, they actually share some policies with the Lib Dems of all people:

Education: for the abolishment student fees.
Environment: surprisingly green.
Transport: reduce congestion in cities by funding quality, envorinmentally friendly public transport. Not building more roads.
Health: massively in favour of the NHS.

They even have a Jamie Oliver-esque bit about proper school dinners.

Food for thought? - even the Crazy Racist Party saying something mildly rational? (of course, reading each point in a larger context tends to revert back to oppressing the darkies)

Drew Barrymore (NOT the Pope): "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

Sometimes I really don't miss television. At all. - I know that if I were at home I know I would be stragnely compelled to watch the little girl from ET taking a dump.

meme

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 15:51:56 GMT

50 38 random things about me.

These are supposed to be concise facts, but I've elaborated on them a wee bit, so really it's more like 38 random paragraphs about me.

I cannot stand loud music or loudness in general. In my opinion, the loudest music needs to be played is so that the lyrics can be heard easily. If I'm amongst other people I prefer music to be at a level that normal speech is audible over the music. If I'm at the computer I like to be able to hear the sound of my fingers on the keyboard.
My mother's side of my family has some rather interesting mental traits (ranging from mild quirkiness to full blown batshit insane-iness). As such, I'm quite sure my mind doesn't operate in ways that other people would find normal.
Language doesn't come naturally to me at all. I find it very hard to put words together in the correct order and am quite incapable of speaking or writing without thinking very hard about it. Consequently, I tend to be very uncommunicative around people. And when I do talk, my speech is very slow and deliberate. When I'm in a situation where I have to speak quickly what comes out is more often than not nonsensical. The only people I can talk to naturally are those that I'm completely comfortable with, which really only consists of my family and Lauren.
People tend to say that I am very well spoken and articulate, but in reality that's just a consequence of the previous point, I am actually quite the opposite.
Having said that, I am very good at comprehension. I am very fast at reading (I think an active LJ friends page has helped that) and I can easily understand thick accents with the possible exception of Glaswegian, but I'm pretty sure they don't even know what they're saying most of the time.
Apart from my computers and my iPod I live quite a minimalist existence. I have no decoration in my room, I only ever wear one pair of shoes, a few pairs of pants, etc. Thinking about it, I can only see a few possessions I have that aren't a) immeditately computer-related, b) media or c) necessities.
I hate money, but I have quite a bit of it. I don't spend much, so it slowly accumulates over time. I am the only student I know to have actually gained money since being at university.
I have developed an incredibly diverse taste in music. it used to aggrivate me when people said they liked all kinds of music taking that to mean they listened to and liked whatever rubbish is in the charts. I am not like that - I like good examples of all types of music, popular and otherwise.
I have a weird thing about the sound of heartbeats, more specifically the sound of your own heartbeat when you lie on your ear in a funny way (I assume other people have that?). Weird, I know, and I don't think I can explain much further than that. It makes me slightly uncomfortable. It reminds me of people walking in unison.
On a related topic, my mind sometimes adds heartbeat-like sounds to repetitively moving images. Again, very weird. This happens most when I'm tired, in a silent environment and with animated GIFs on websites that have a smooth animation and cycle about once a second. Hearing this sound stops once I realise I'm hearing it... so hard to explain.
The right side of my body is a few months older than the left... Well, obviously not really, but it certain seems that way judging by the hair growth on my upper body. When first started growing hair on my face it only happened on the right side - looking underneath my chin there was a distinctive right-left border. It's evened out now, though.
Speaking about my chin, it has a small bald patch. When I was starting puberty and those thin proto-hairs started appearing on my chin instead of shaving them off I stood in front of the mirror and slowly pulled the ones on my chin out individually, roots and all. Now noting grows on that little patch. To be honest, I wish I'd done it all over my face. I hate shaving - if it weren't for the little bald patch I would grow a beard.
And speaking of bizarre, boredom-induced, mild self-mutilation around that age, I now have heavily scarred fingertips. You know how sometimes the skin peels on your fingerprints a bit? Well when i was young I'd peel that skin obsessively and then using the difference in skin layering caused by that peel the healthy skin next to that. Thinking back, it used to be quite painful, I don't know why I did it so much. I wish I hadn't though, they're overly sensitive now - I can't touch anything hot.
Despite being able to program computers I am absolutely awful at using them. I cannot for the life of my use simple applications Word, Excel or anything like that without getting very confused. It's really quite embarrassing when people ask me to fix their computers, etc. If it were feasible I'd do all my word processing in XHTML.
The reason I chose computer science as a degree is because I love programming, it's something that comes very naturally to me. I am quite awful at (but still interested with) the mathematical and systems modelling aspects of it, though. I guess I just enjoy implementing logic.
I don't remember people by their face or the sound of their name, but by the rough shape their name would make written down. Generally equating to the number of letters in the word. For this reason, I sometimes get confused between people with what I view as similarly shaped names, for example 'Nick' and 'Mike'.
I can read backwards or upside down nearly as fast as I can normally. I'm also pretty good at reversing words in my head: 'James' -> 'Semaj', 'Thinkpad' -> 'DapKniht', etc.
I'm very good at spatial awareness type things, like revolving 3-dimensional shapes in my head, etc. Sometimes I dream of nothing but complex shapes rotating on different ~~axises~~ axes (thank you, emmavescence). If there's ever a set of questions like this in an IQ test or something I breeze through them.
With the exception of incredibly bitter things like coffee and dark chocolate, I love strong flavours. I practically live on things like hot curry and strong ale.
I absolutely hate foods that are gooey but not viscous, stuff like marshmallows. It doesn't matter how good it tastes, if it has that texture it makes me retch.
This is very hard to explain, but I don't like the idea of looking at lots of different objects of the same colour that are moving past so fast that you cannot discern their shape. Very very occasionally when I'm half asleep, I have a split-second mental image of something like this and it makes me feel rather sickly. I can't actively imagine it, though; my brain can't seem to create a mental image that it cannot cope with... I really don't know what that's all about.
Religion is a completely alien concept to me. Nobody in my family is remotely religious so I was never really personally exposed to it growing up, though I was taught from an early age in school that a lot of people believe such things and to respect that. To be honest, I can't really fathom the idea that a higher power could be controlling the world. I can be quite superstitious, though.
I come from a very affluent background, but it's only recently hit me to what extent - it's completely transparent to you when you're growing up. My parents gained their wealth during the course of my early childhood and I think they made an effort not to spoil their children. But still, I went to an insanely posh private school and spent my teens living in a massive house with a jacuzzi, pool table, 47" rear projection TV and stuff. Thing is, that's just all it is to me now, "stuff" - linking back to points 6 and 7, I make no effort to acquire it.
I'm quite scared of horses. This is something that has come on rather recently and I can think of two instances that may have caused it:
First was when I was in my mid-teens I went on an anti-capitalist march (yeah, yeah. I know. Shut up), we strayed from the designated route and the police took exception to this, penning a small group of us against a wall with police horses. They didn't let us out for over an hour.
The second also involves a police horse, I was walking over a bridge one day and a mounted policeman approaching me from behind, (what an innuendo!) for some reason that horse did not want to walk past me. After a while of being stubborn it started to buck as the policeman tried to force it to move forward - I was scared shitless the thing was going to trample me and being on a bridge there was nowhere to escape to. I just had to keep walking. Eventually it threw the policeman from itself and ran off back towards the police station. The officer picked himself up, dusted himself off and went after it, not saying a word to me.
I don't like porn much at all. Don't get me wrong, I like looking at attractive women, especially naked attractive women, I just don't like how completely unrealistic it is. If we're made to believe that these people are having spontaneous sex there should be some element of passion involved, what is shown is merely stuffing body parts into one another coupled with far too much fake moaning. Plus, there's the fact that at the end the bloke always, and I mean always, empties himself onto the woman's face... I just don't find that attractive.
My ears don't match :)
I'm generally shit with people, so my luck with meeting women in particular is really bad. I feel like I want to say "give me a chance, once I get less to be nervous I'll be quite interesting", but that's just stupid. Ugh, this is an area of my life I really hate at the moment.
I have an immense amount of civic pride - I love Manchester and everything about it. Cardiff pales in comparison and you couldn't pay me to live in London. I've heard good things about Edinburgh, but I've never been there so for me Manchester is the greatest city in the UK, if not the world :P
I'm quite a lightweight computer user. The only apps I ever really use are text editors (Metapad or Textpad depending on the task), WinAmp, Opera and Minesweeper (on which my high score is currently 152 seconds, but I think I could get it down to <140).
My project for this summer is to build a home cinema system for my new house. I've already picked out most of the parts for the projector, the only thing stopping me from starting is being unsure about the controller card. Chances are this project will never get off the ground, much like 95% of everything else I plan.
I strongly dislike political correctness. sameyeam</lj> posted a quote by Billy Connolly recently, "White heterosexual men are the only animal on the face of the earth you can pick on now" - could not be more correct. True equality means we should be taking the piss out of anyone and everything equally, not putting certain harmless things off-limits. A true liberal society does not put stops on what can and cannot be said.
There are a lot of issues that I dislike purely because of the civil liberties aspect of them. For example, I was against the ban on fox hunting, not because I didn't thin it was unnecessarily cruel and pointless but because I think government should not be outlawing what some people choose to do. Same goes for the proposed ban on smoking in pubs, I'd much rather go to a pub that wasn't filled with smoke, but I don't think it's the government's responsibility to force establishments to go non-smoking.
I could never imagine ever being angry with a woman; I hold them in much higher regard than myself and have endless patience with them. With the exception of my sisters, any female could quite easily take advantage of how forgiving I am with them. I'm strangely comfortable with that fact.
I'm overly skinny like wo. I'm 6'3" and weigh 10 stone 4 (which is 144lbs for you 'mericans, 65.3kg for you 'peans). I have never met another fully grown man with wrists as thin as mine. I don't like this.
Deispite being built like a toothpick, I have a surprisingly high tolerence to alcohol. - for example, my first night in Cardiff I casually drank 10 pints of smooth to the amazement of my flatmates. At the 2 day Uni beer festival I sampled each of the 70+ ales and ciders, most of which in the first night.
Electrical devices, things that give off a high electro-magnetic field, envoke a slightly uncomforatble feeling in me... Ever slept with your head near a plug socket? I find it feels like how an on-but-not-displaying-anything tv sounds, tolerable but not pleasant. Part of why the outdoors is so inherently relaxing is because of this, I think.
I'm still unsure of who to vote for. I'm very marginal between Lib Dem (who I mostly agree with ideologically) and Labour (who I think would be best at running the country). But it's almost certain that Labour are going to win anyway, so It's 51% likely I'll go with the Lib Dems and help them out with trying to win Cardiff Central... or I could go for a minority party... I don't know.
I can't think of anything else at the moment and reading back this makes me seem like a complete loon. I'm still going to post it, just so I didn't write ~12.5kb of text for nothing. I wonder if anyone will actually bother reading it.

3 weeks to go.

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 13:33:45 GMT

Who should I vote for?

Your outcome:

Labour 0
Conservative -41
	Liberal Democrat 72
UK Independence Party -2
	Green 28

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

The section listing for whom I shall be voting has been removed, but I'm definitely not as decisive and single-sided as these results might suggest.

One of the questions should definitely have been "Would you like the people running your country to act like proper grown-ups?" but I'm not sure what party an answer of "yes" would lean towards...

Cardiff central, the constituency in which I'll be voting, is one of the most hotly contested seats in the country, with the difference between Labour and the Lib Dems being only a handful of votes. However, the election material I have received consists of:

Labour: A very nicely presented leaflet with a big photo of Michael howard sporting a demon-like expression with the general gist being "This man is the spawn of satan, FEAR FEAR FEAR!"
Lib Dem: A piece of cheap paper printed in monotone and made in MS Publisher, consisting of "We opposed the war! Student fees! We opposed the war! We only need n votes to win!" in Comic Sans MS font.
Conservative</dd>: Nicely preseneted with the general gist being "Tony Blair is a failure! we will lower taxes so much that we'll be actually be paying you money! We do maths good."
Plaid Cymru: Nothing. They don't like English people and don't want my vote, apparently.

How could I possibly choose? they're all so good!

Procrastination & Talking To Myself

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 21:18:34 GMT

Someone stop me, I keep buying DVDs, (or as they're known in this house, 'Davids') instead of doing my first year project.

In the past week I've bought Red Dwarf VI (I suppose I'll have to buy VII and VIII when they come out just to complete my collection), Spaced Collectors Edition, Brass Eye, ¡Three Amigos! and Bio-Dome (I thought it was funny!)

I'm so rediculously behind on my work it's a joke. I need to have a fully functional eBay-style auction site to demonstrate in less than 7 days and I haven't even decided on the database table structure yet... Not to mention my Java and Systems Modelling courseworks, both in for next week.

And yet I still sit here, spend all my money on DVDs/music, play with Javascript and post to LiveJournal... Get to it, James. You need this done to pass the year.

Herein lies the reason, methinks.

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 21:51:37 GMT

Last night I was complaining because I have absolutely zero luck with the opposite sex.

Tonight I have turned on all my babe-luring charm and sat silently in the uni's Unix labs downloading the leaked new Dr. Who episode... How pant-wettingly hot am I?

I think I do it to myself.

Seriously though, people always say the best way is to just 'be yourself', but when yourself is an unattractive, anti-social computer nerd with the conversational skills of dead houseplant it really doesn't work.

I need to practice being someone else.

Edit: That new Dr. Who was surprisingly enjoyable.

Why I hate living in student accomodation

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 16:13:49 GMT

I was doing my laundry at 3:30 last night. Like you do. Stuck my washing in and went home whilst it did its thing.

I come back 40 minutes later to find that somebody had stolen my 16 remaining detergent tabs that I'd inadvertently left on the side. At 4am. From a locked student laundry room... WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT?!

Well yeah, I know who does that - drunk students. But why the hell would they think that's amusing? What kind of young man thinks to himself, "well that was a good night out, what shall we do now? go to one of the numerous parties? smoke a bong in my room? No! lets go to the laundry room, put random things in the dryers and steal detergent!".

Laundry tablets aren't like road signs, shopping trolleys or traffic cones. You can't sit in a small block of detergent and have your mates push you round in circles in it, or hang it on your wall the following day as a testament to a good night out. It's soap. What on earth were these people thinking?

The bizarre thing is that they didn't even take the box, they left it. So somewhere in Cardiff some lad's waking up with a splitting headache finding that his pockets are crammed with Bold 2-in-1 'Ocean Wave' tablets.

Somehow that thought makes the whole experience slightly less irritating.

Edit: Amazing front page scoop from the BBC!!

Holy shit! Waving? ... from a window?! I'm going to have to lie down.

b33r

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 12:32:53 GMT

I had an exam frist thing this morning - Discrete Mathematics. I walked out early, I just wasn't in the mood.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4181109.stm

Nowadays 22-year-olds are drinking flavours no more challenging than what they were drinking at 12, it's alcoholic fruit juice...

Beer is food, it is nutritional. A lot of what people drink today is muck.

Damn right! Over the past few years I've grown to love Real Ale, I grown so accostomed to it that I'd now rather drink water than the gnat's piss lager I was drinking in my early teens. Every time I'm at a pub and group of lads order 8 pints of Carling I feel like shaking them, shouting "What the fuck are you doing?! This tastes like shite!" and then pouring a pint of Spitfire or Abbot down their throats so they know what they're missing. (I don't actually do this because I prefer my legs and thumbs to be unbroken.)

Proper cask ales are a part of British heratige</tory>, but we are fast approaching the point where new those trendy "super-pubs" aren't even serving them.

To any British reading this who've never tried Real Ale, next time you buy a drink please consider it. In most cases it's cheaper than lager, it doesn't get watered down, it tastes nicer and it's not filled with chemicals. It even compliments good food well. Go onnnn...

To any Americans, I'm aware of what you are forced to drink over there. You have my sympathies.

Roll on May

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 14:05:01 GMT

hmm... the political section of my brain is ticking over here.

Mr Bush seems to be itching to invade Iran now (quelle surprise!) and British general elections are looming.

Many people are reluctant to vote for Labour because they see Tony Blair backing America at every turn, even when it's blatantly the wrong decision (amongst other things, obviously), but if Tony were to loudly oppose an American invasion of Iran there's a possibility of it swinging enough of the disillusioned back to ensure a re-election.

The conservative party are being generally shit as usual. They've stupidly sided with the government on so many issues (Iraq, compulsary ID cards, etc.) that they can't really be classified as opposition any more. Their latest promise of "significantly lowering taxes, but increasing spending" is just fucking nonsensical and reeking of the dark days under Mrs. Thatcher. Plus Michael Howard is a confirmed twat.

The Lib Dems are doing very well, but being the third party they've got a lot more ground to cover. There's no question that they're going to get a lot of the votes this year (LJ_UK's recent poll has them with nearly nearly twice the number of votes as Labour and the Tories combined) but will it be enough to make any difference?

UKIP look to take a small chunk of votes from the top two parties, but less so from the Lib Dems... in a way giving the advantage to the most pro-European offering. The opposite of what they want.

Personally, saving soming drastic happening I'll probably be going for the Lib Dems along with most of the people my age, though I wont be completely devistated if Labour stay in charge.

The next few months are going to be interesting...

Breaking news

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 09:36:58 GMT

wait... there's a chemical to make people catch the gay?

I don't really see how it would be "demoralising", though. A bunch of dirty, sweaty, very aroused guys who've all of a sudden turned gay - sounds like a party to me. Albeit a totally gay one.

In otter (hehe, I mean 'other' but I'm going to keep that typo) news, I'm using phrases like "a little too communist" and "dirty hippy" to describe music file sharers in my uni coursework - It's the ass crack of dawn and this has got to be in at noon, I don't have the time or the energy to be eloquent.

And whilst I'm on the subject of illegal file sharing, the first person to send me Aim's Cold Water Music album in 192 kbps MP3 format gets a 2 month LJ paid account. HMV are wanting £15 for it (!) and it isn't availiable on allofmp3.com.

Why couldn't it be the other way round?

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 05:22:04 GMT

Not happy about this.

Six Apart, the evil, baby-eating company behind Movable Type and TypePad is reportedly to buy LiveJournal... This doesn't look like a hoax, folks (unless my "in-the-loop" friends are just having a laugh.)

I don't think I'm going to like the new, corporate LiveJournal... there's going to be middle managers and TPS reports and... they'll get us all wearing suits or something... It's supposed to be a personal project maintained by volunteers, damnit!

Damn the man!

Oh no, I've just realised... They're going to change all the colours to inoffensive pastels, aren't they?! :'(

James plays catch-up

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 20:15:57 GMT

Isn't Garden State a fantastic film? I'm a bit late in watching it, but I'm very impressed. There's been some good comedies coming out of Hollywood over the past year. Maybe all hope is not lost.

This holiday I went from barely listening to any music at all to it taking up a large chunk of my time. I'm really not musically inclined, but the fact that I had no CDs in Cardiff and only a minimal amount of songs on my computer had me itching for something to listen to by the time I made the trip back up to Manchester.

So, over the past few weeks I've ripped over 100 of my old CDs to MP3 and have had allofmp3.com on a continual monetary drip (1.3gigs of legally download music and rising, thank $deity it's not as expensive as iTunes). For Christmas I received a set of 5.1 surround speakers for my desktop and a nice set of headphones for my ThinkPad. And to finish it all off, I'll be purchasing a 40gig iPod on Wednesday. Hence the fancy new icon ;)

Yet despite of all this, I am finding myself stuck on starting my winter coursework, an essay entitled "Computing in the Music Industry". Yeah, I suck. It needs to be done in little over a week and I've got 5 exams to revise for in that time as well. It's not fair, I'm too pretty to be put under this kind of pressure!

What else has happened over the last 8 weeks I've been absent? oh yeah, I turned 21 on December 15th which was somewhat of an anticlimax in that it was a complete non-event. Apart from going out for dinner and eating a lobster curry (how very Dave Lister) it turned out to be a pretty normal day. I didn't want anything in the way of presents, so I didn't get any. Thank you to the people that wished me a happy birthday, though. 'Twas a pleasent surprise.

Christmas was Christmas, we sat around, ate food, extended family came over, people embarrassed themselves, they went home.

New Year was another spent with Lauren (we are still split up, in case anyone is wondering). But instead of sitting in and watching the telly, we decided to be daring and sit in the pub instead. Midnight passed without us noticing - there was no countdown or anything like that, people were too busy drinking, I suppose ... and then we went home and watched the telly! If that's not "livin' it large", I don't know what is!

And... I don't really want to carry on and review the entire year as it will all end up like the above three paragraphs; Stuff has happened, but it's been in the least interesting way possible.

See? this is why I don't update. I'm perpetually boring.

...

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:29:29 GMT

... 'sup?

Note: it is my New Year's Resolution™ to become more active on LJ. If this pledge fails to materialise, e-smack me.