So, I just went to register for a SeeSaw invite, I entered my usual e-mail address, which is iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk, and got told it was not a valid e-mail address... erm, yes it is, I use it rather a lot, dammit! So, I changed the localpart from iDunno to one of my less used aliases, and that it accepted... this means that they're checking the localpart and rejecting things with a localpart of idunno, I don't know what other localparts they're rejecting, but that seemed a little harsh...

Ah well, now I'll wait for the invite then I can test :)

Update: Apparently if you put the e-mail address in all lowercase it accepts it fine. sigh.

So, I've (only just) got round to watching most of Tru Calling, I'm nearly at the end of season one, and then I looked at the number of DVDs left and went "erm, err, what happened with season two, then?"... This appears to happen rather often with anything shown by Fox... The other show that I really liked but didn't see till a long time after they'd cancelled it was Firefly. Why do Fox do this?! Annoying gits! Of course, the other show that I'm waiting for on DVD/Blu-Ray is Dollhouse Season 2, after which we get no more of that either (go Fox!) - I've also just finished The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 2... which I believe has also been cancelled...

Mutter - it just all mostly sucks. With that and the stupid schedule that Disney PIXAR are releasing things, I'm sure that the entertainment industry is just out to piss me off, there's no way that they needed so many months between the US premier of Up and it coming to the UK (OK, so when it did come out here, I didn't go and see it in the cinema, but that's mostly cos I was still pissed off with the release scheduling, and that I'll have it on DVD/Blu-ray as soon as it's released here on that... I own the rest of the Disney PIXAR movies, so meh).

So, I mostly missed Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles when it was shown on TV, so I bought the first season on blu-ray to watch... I'm about half way through now, and I'm really quite enjoying it. Might have to see if I can find season 2... Appears that the series has had the usual Fox treatment though... "Oh, people like it, we'll ditch it!" sigh.

So, this blog entry is purely about my life experience and my gut feelings... but, basically, here's the rub - pro-choice are all about being able to kill a child up to 24 weeks old, my nephew wasn't far past that, and he's a fucking fantastic child, he's now 8 - and absolutely fucking brilliant - so yeah - pro-choice - I'm not going to fuck up my life, but I'm going to mince a child that might or might not have feelings because I can... argh - for fuck sake - given that most abortions are through consensual sex - for fuck sake - either take the choice that you're going to be pregnant and live with that or don't have sex - it's not a hard choice - and that is what I see as pro-choice - you have the choice to have sex, or not. If it wasn't a consensual agreement, take the damn after morning pill, not a hell of a lot is going to survive that, and you're within a week, barely noticeable.

What pisses me off is the "pro-choice" vs "pro-life" battle - you're both wrong, anything after 2 weeks and I'm with the pro-lifers, any thing before that, yeah - the pro-choicers are fine...

Another thing that pisses me off is people deciding that they know best about how the government should go - what they haven't yet realised is that the entire government is there to tax us so that the pro-life and pro-choicers can have their bitter dispute, no matter who is in power. Shortly followed by screwing over either students or workers, depending on who's in power. It doesn't really matter - whoever is in power, some one is going to get screwed.

So, was supposed to end up in Hector's House playing pool with various people that I know, but all of 'em were out last night (erm, half of 'em with me) and didn't quite manage to make it... So after an hour of waiting for people to turn up I gave up and considered going back to my "local" (the hop poles) to have a swift beer or three... instead, it being a wednesday, and knowing that Band Aids was on at the Pav Tav, I wandered there... managed to get there before the first band played - they were Vier and were absolutely bloody fantastic. Stayed and watched/danced to the other 3 bands and all was well with the world.

Now it's time for the sleep and the getting everything else ready for the big move on Friday (yay for working Good Friday... or something!)

It's been a long long time since I last posted anything at all, so this is a post to warn of impending doom. I've switched from a static html website (well, it was statically generated when I edited source files I then ran a bash script that fired off a perl script several times...) to a fully dynamic, django 1.0 backed website - this might mean that I manage to update things more often!

I've also taken the opportunity to convert the previous content in to ReST, so it's actually easier to edit too. There's still work to do - but it's now "good enough" to be used, and I'll split the code out in to better chunks later on.

So, anyways - that's what I've done with my day - so I expect all the aggregators to now break on the new feeds...

Been watching the snooker - Selby was playing really quite well yesterday, and started the early session this morning looking promising, he seems to have lost it this evening though, which is a shame - and at 12 to 4 down starting tomorrow, he's got a hell of a lot to make up tomorrow.

Higgins isn't playing to his best, but he's being more consistent than Selby, it'll be a hell of a final if they both dig in tomorrow.

That is all.

Happy birthday David, you old git you ;)

We're at 5 minutes to midnight, and it appears that Joost is the new TV - it appears to be getting some reaonable coverage at the moment, but looks far too much like another closed app using proprietary protocols - the world has gone DRM crazy - someone stop it, I want to get off. DRM is a myth, if you can play it, you can copy it (not neccessarily easily, but it's still possible). The NewScientist article is quite interesting in the claim of "piracy-proof"... if you can play the video, you can capture it, if you can listen to music you can record it, when is the media industry going to realise that DRM is a very dumb idea that shouldn't have been allowed to get this far - pirates can (and always will) find a way, how about going back to trusting your users rather than tarring them all with the "you're a pirate" brush. The Register's article appears to have a typo in it... well, unless you really do need a 500mbps line in order to use Joost - seems unlikely, I think they meant 500kbps. Anyways - nice idea, not sure that it's better than anything else though, I'll continue buying DVDs that let me play back when I have no interweb connection.

Back to being at 5 minutes to midnight, eeep! We're all going to die! Maybe it's the introduction of DRM that's led to so much terrorism, or maybe just that the media industry appears to be out to shaft everyone. Bah.

Only one other article has caught my attention this morning, it's another look at the Apple iPhone, it appears that no one is actually getting a reasonable amount of time to play and review this device, and it brings up a number of my issues with the iPhone.

So, yes, that's the morning covered - maybe more this evening.

Just finally got round to watching cars (bought it earlier in the week, just watched it, damned glad I bought it). I'm a pixar film fan, so when cars was announced as the last film last year before moving to another distributor I was a little pessamistic as to what the quality of the film was going to be, I must say, I'm still very happy with pixar - now, let's see what happens now that they're owned by the evil giant that is Disney - hopefully they'll still leave the pixar team as is and we'll get lots more quality films with lots of imagination behind them. (Yes, OK - I'm a big kid, and I also like most of the stuff that comes out of dreamworks studios, though they tend to have less story line - shrek is rather good though).

So, yeah - just thought I'd post to say... If you haven't seen Cars, go get a copy, watch it, it's fun :)

In case I totally avoid mentioning it tomorrow (quite likely), Merry Christmas peeps. Have a good one, don't drink too much :)

Fantastic beginning to the weekend - was in Norwich from Thursday, saw the Dave and the Becca on thursday night - many many thanks to them for floor space thurs and fri and for generally just being fantastic people (with tea and coffee, no less - and a silly beepy tivo box for even more fun - and for introducing me to the american chopper type show thingummy - and for letting me watch the a-team!)

Then, serious amounts of thanks to Noodles and Kathy (who I appear to not be able to find a link for :( ) for inviting me to the wedding and the reception - was fantastic - you're both such absolutely lovely people! Pictures so far appear to be available from Dave and Becca's Gallery, Burly's Gallery and Steve McIntyre's Gallery - hopefully more soon... specially from Dave Noble (can't find him bah he needs more google juice the damned slacker ;) which should be cool! Saturday was absolutely brilliant - including talking about atmosperic physics, failing a-levels, and random universities doing questions (hey, I can't entirely remembere - someone bought a half barrel of nero and some port, and lots of red wine... I wasn't entirely sober ;).

Saturday morning was a bit of a blur - I remember watching the A-Team and then food in the Glass House with Dave and Becca (thanks guys, you rock!) then I wandered to the Fat Cat and met with Eli and Dave Noble, a while later Rob and James and Kaz arrived and we played Munchkin, which was a very very silly game but quite fun (thanks James and Kaz - you're both mildly insane - but it's always fun when you come to the pub!).

Went home with Eli, tried to escape because of the annoying giggly evil students from hell, started wandering back towards the train station and a random bench to sleep on, then got emotional black mail and ended up back at Eli's - ho hum.

Went to catch train at around 10am Sunday morning - discovered trains from Norwich weren't running - replacement bus service from Norwich to Diss left Norwich at around 10:25am, got to Diss, had a 10 to 15 minute wait there (mmmmm, bacon roll and a coffee!) then straight to Liverpool Street, wandered straight off to the underground and got the circle line to Victoria, got to Victoria around 13:40 ish, wandered to look at the boards and saw a 14:17 from Victoria round half the planet to Brighton - thought to myself "not in any rush" and wandered off and found food and then wandered round the WHSmith in Victoria station.... got out of there, glanced at the board again, Victoria to Brighton train had been cancelled - wondered what to do - announcement over the tannoy that to get to Brighton the best idea was to travel to East Croyden and the train would meet us there. So, grabbed that train, got to East Croyden, jumped on the train (first 8 carriages Brighton, back four Plymouth... so, jumped on somewhere around the 7th carriage from what I thought was the front - turned out to be the back - wasn't entirely sure what was going on so when it stopped at Gatwick wandered further to the front of the train a lot, found an empty pair of seats and sat down. Got to Three Bridges and there was a delay, it was announced on the train as "We're waiting for the conductor, he's missed a train and is currently in a taxi, there's at least a 10 minute delay before he gets here", so a load of us bundled out of the train on the basis that that was very much long enough for a cigarette break - just as we were finishing the conductor turned up, so we all got back on the train for the "scenic" route to Brighton (yay for going round the coast), finally got in to Brighton at 17:05, so wasn't too bad, only about 6 and a half hours for a 3 and a half or 4 hour train journey ;). Grabbed chinese on the way home, watched some Morse - all was well with the world.

Lots of beeping this morning around 8.30am, ignored it, finally re-woke up at about 10:30am (ish) - watched some more Morse, grabbed some lunch and then watched more Morse until going to the pub quiz tonight.

Charly, Julius and Pieter turned up for a quick drink and then all left me to fend for my self at the quiz - I came in my usual place - very last (by over 20 points, no less ;) - but had fun, so who cares :)

Anyways - it's now tuesday morning, so probably time for some good ol' fashioned sleep type stuff... might put on the next episode of Morse for the hell of it (might even manage to stay awake through it!).

Tomorrow is probably more Morse, some work on the django packages (just got the first bug report in for those) and possibly applying some of the patches to the scrobbler packages to close some of those bug reports too. It appears that upstream for xmms-scrobbler has disappeared a bit, so might have to look at that a lot closer over the next few months - have some time off work soon - last day this year being the 15th (also happens to be when work are planning the "christmas do").

Wow - that was a ridiculously longer post than I though it was going to be! Night all!

1. I'm not attractive (OK - so less learned, more reaffirmed)

2. Not all hills lead back to the flat

3. See 2. (OK - so I left $club which I can't remember thinking "tired, home time", wished people good byes, and looked for a hill, usually any going up are back to the flat... wandered up the hill, carried on wandering, discovered pizza shop that I normally order from, said "Oh bollocks" and started heading in the right direction, down the hill, across the road, back up the other hill. Sucks to be on the wrong side of London Road.)

4. Sleep is good. That's what I'm just about to do.So, what have I learned today?

EDIT: OK - writing an entry in vim at nearly 3am when you've been to a club results in the unfortunate side effect of somehow managing to put several copies of the post in the entry - BAH!

It's all gone, I have not beard... bring it back!

There are photos.

It's been an odd week at work, and I've started doing rather more Sudoku puzzles than most sane people - I've found that currently the guardian Sudoku puzzle takes me the longest to get through, though I'm slowly getting better at it... I might actually start being able to see the patterns more quickly soon!

Anyways - in other news JD resigned on Tuesday, so we've only got him at work for another few weeks before he disappears in to the ether (well, not so much in to the ether, but I won't be working with him anymore, eeeeep - this means more work for me!), which also prompted a pay rise (hooray!). Now just to keep up with the good work!

Oh, and on Monday we won the Hop Poles pub quiz! Yay! Where in this case "we" is me, a guy that I'd met in the pub a couple of Mondays before and some of his friends. Was much fun! Tomorrow being Monday again I'll be back in the pub for the quiz and see who turns up this time :)

So, today was "interesting", but aside from the working part of the day, I was in a pub... Now, this isn't a new experience for me, as most people will know... but anyways - the subject came up about "religion" (kinda), as I don't actually believe that anyone exists, but do believe in the fact that I find myself in this environment that I can't actually prove does or doesn't exist, and that I then deal with that on a day by day basis of "shit, it's time to go to work..." my view on the world may be "a little" skewed by other people's standards...

So, anyways - it came to a point where someone was saying that "animals" don't do "xyz" and so they can't be as intelligent as us... now my view on this is that animals may have already done xyz and decided that "survival" in this environment is the key to sucess, ergo basic instinct assuming that they all know mortality (which if they didn't the wouldn't reproduce) is that the only thing in this world that actually matters for any given species is survival of the species.

Now, that being the case, and the general case being survival of the fittest, why on earth did we invent this medium (the internet) for talking to each other - do we really need to know what's happing several thousand miles away? If we ditched the technology and went back to our roots, what seperates us from the thousands of other species on the planet?

Isn't it possible that other species have already been through the stages that we are still going through, come out the other end and worked out that, actually, on balance, it's better to hunt/gather and survive than mess with the delicate balance of nature?

So, get out the way the messy politics, the correctness, the complete stupidity that is current human nature and go back to the basics - eat, sleep, hunt/gather... we've ended up making the world a much more complicated place than it actually needs to be... and, at the end of the day, what do we actually gain from this?

Anyways - just a random brain dump after a potentially stupidly long chat in an establishment that is setup purely to intoxicate it's customers...

Night peeps.

Brett.

That was a fantastic evening out, went to the beach around 7ish, met people around 7.30ish (Matt, Sarah and Charly), watched the world go by whilst waiting for Chris, then had a fantastic picnic courtesy of Sarah - that was really nice... Back to Matt and Sarah's when it started to get "a bit chilly" on the beach, then poker! What more could you want from an evening out? Was absolutely fantastic - many thanks to Matt and Sarah who both went to bed before the Poker had finished (incidently, I won, so... err... Matt, you owe me a tenner ;)

Now there's talk of setting up a semi-regular poker night - should be fantastic fun :)

bounce

(now I think it's time to collapse in a heap, maybe after a cool shower though - it's just too damned hot!)

I wish when people made critisism they made it constructive rather than destructive.

So, that was Saturday then... I managed to get nothing at all done, but I did manage to watch some snooker, Taxi, Taxi 2 and Taxi 3... So maybe it wasn't wasted?

Apparently it's St Georges' day tomorrow... Hmm... I think that means that I shall find a pub sometime after lunchish and have a few celebratory pints for the old, somewhat dead, bloke!

Some people don't like opinions. Especially ones that might actually finally get us somewhere near a standards compliant web. Oh well, never mind, their loss. (Oh, and I really do not advocate the use of line breaking, either you're in a paragraph, or you're not - why do you need a manual line break? Is it because you can't write?).

But whatever. Thanks huggie for your frank opinion and whining about me.

I've just finished reading Excession - started slowly, got good in the middle, then sort of dropped off a bit at the end, which was a shame. Enjoyed it though :)

Next to read is A Song of Stone

Then there's a list of other books that I'll be working through... one step at a time, eh? ;)